THE RISING EAST
N. Korea armed forces likely laden with bluff

By Richard Halloran

Lurking behind the resumption of negotiations with the North Koreans over their nuclear ambitions, scheduled for Beijing this week, are questions about North Korea's conventional armed forces: How good are they, and are they a real menace?

Answer: Not very good, and not as dangerous as North Korea would have the rest of the world believe. Pyongyang's virulent propaganda is likely laden with bluff, which should strengthen the hand of the Americans and others in Beijing who want to see this confrontation resolved without war.

Those negotiations — called the six-party talks as they include the two Koreas, China, Japan, Russia and the United States — are intended to persuade the North Koreans to give up nuclear weapons and the means to produce them.

In return, Pyongyang would get help for its devastated economy and diplomatic relations with the United States and other nations.

So far, the talks have been stalemated. Pyongyang's news agency, the Korean Central News Agency, summed up the hardened positions of the two sides last week, noting that the United States had demanded "complete, verifiable and irreversible nuclear dismantlement" by North Korea.

For its part, Pyongyang said, North Korea would insist on the total withdrawal of U.S. forces from South Korea and "complete, verifiable and irreversible assurances of security" in a peace treaty and diplomatic relations. The Korean War of 1950-53 ended with a truce, not a treaty.

The United States has disclosed that it will send 12,500 of its 37,000 troops in South Korea to Iraq shortly. It will move the remainder from positions between Seoul and the demilitarized zone separating North and South Korea and from Seoul itself to new posts to the south. The U.S. forces will assume a new mission, responding to contingencies outside of South Korea.

In this reduction, left unsaid was a U.S. belief that South Korea could defend itself with a minimum of help from the United States, mostly in air and sea power although the North Korean army, at an estimated 1.2 million troops, was considerably larger than South Korea's 680,000.

The North Korean news agency provides evidence that Pyongyang's army is less powerful than the numbers would suggest. It frequently reports that Kim Jong Il, the "Dear Leader," communist party general secretary, chairman of the National Defense Commission and supreme commander of the North Korean army, has visited a military unit to give "on-the-spot guidance."

Kim recently inspected army Unit 833 at a remote location where he expressed pleasure at a vegetable field the soldiers tended and barracks they had built "like a rest house." He praised the unit for "managing its economic life in a peculiar and tenacious manner."

Nothing was said about the soldiers going to the rifle range or maneuvering in platoon on the attack.

Similarly, Kim gave guidance to the Chongchongang Machinery Plant and exhorted the workers to apply "ideological education" as the army does and to build "modern welfare and supply facilities just as the army does."

On another occasion, Kim visited army Unit 952 and was pleased with the way the unit went about "the tending of forests." He praised demobilized soldiers for having "transported large quantities of timber without using oil," which presumably means they carried the timber themselves or with pack animals.

Only once in the past six weeks did the news agency report that Kim "watched a training of servicepersons of the unit." Professional soldiers the world over will attest that soldiers who don't train in peacetime will melt under fire in war, as the Iraqi army was overrun by well-trained American and allied forces in 2003.

Moreover, North Korea's tanks, while numerous, are mostly 40 to 50 years old and short of fuel. Their artillery is the same age, opening to question whether they have the range to reach Seoul as is so often speculated. Their jet fighters are the same vintage, with only 20 to 30 relatively new Russian MiG-29s, which would not remain in the sky for 24 hours up against modern South Korean and U.S. fighters. North Korean pilots are lucky if they get 20 flying hours a year; American pilots average 20 hours a month.

Frequent references to Iraq by Pyongyang's news agency suggest that North Korean military leaders are reasonably well-informed about what happened to the Iraqi army and are eager not to see that repeated on their peninsula.

In sum, the North Korean army cannot be ignored, but neither need it be taken as seriously as it has been in the recent past.

Richard Halloran is a former New York Times reporter in Asia.