South Korea: North building up special forces

[marmar]

Hyung-Jin Kim
Associated Press


SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA—North Korea has faster, more powerful tanks prowling the world’s most heavily armed border and 200,000 special forces poised to carry out assassinations and cause havoc in South Korea, a major military review said Thursday.

Seoul’s Defence Ministry report, released every two years, signals that the North’s military threat has expanded. It comes as President Lee Myung-bak’s administration scrambles to respond to criticism that it was unprepared for a Nov. 23 North Korean artillery attack on a front-line island that killed four people.

That attack, along with an alleged North Korean torpedoing of a warship in March, has prompted South Korea to define the North in the defence document as its “enemy,” a stronger description — and one that will likely be noticed by Pyongyang — than in 2008, when the North was only called a “direct and serious threat.”

The new document says the North intends to rely on its nuclear program, special forces, long-range artillery, submarines and cyber warfare forces as a counterweight to South Korea’s high-tech conventional military. ..........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.thestar.com/news/world/article/913519--south-korea-north-building-up-special-forces?bn=1

[soryang]

1. Korea is not tank country

Tanks are pretty much sitting ducks in Korea. The terrain is not amenable to tank maneuvers. The North has no fuel anyway. No food, no fuel, no trucks. What a threat.

The thing that makes the North a national security problem is China.