DNI Releases Annual Threat Assessment
And it’s more bad news for the usual suspects — David Albright, Selig Harrison, and Mike Chinoy:
After denying a highly enriched uranium program since 2003, North Korea announced in April 2009 that it was developing uranium enrichment capability to produce fuel for a planned light water reactor (such reactors use low enriched uranium); in September it claimed its enrichment research had “entered into the completion phase”. The exact intent of these announcements is unclear, and they do not speak definitively to the technical status of the uranium enrichment program. The Intelligence Community continues to assess with high confidence North Korea has pursued a uranium enrichment capability in the past, which we assess was for weapons.
The report concludes that North Korea want to be recognized as a nuclear power, but states, “It remains our policy that we will not accept North Korea as a nuclear weapons state ….” And by “we will not accept,” we really mean, “we will do almost nothing about.”
The report concludes that the North Korean conventional army is, for the most part, a paper tiger.
The KPA’s capabilities are limited by an aging weapons inventory, low production of military combat systems, deteriorating physical condition of soldiers, reduced training, and increasing diversion of the military to infrastructure support. Inflexible leadership, corruption, low morale, obsolescent weapons, a weak logistical system, and problems with command and control also constrain the KPA capabilities and readiness.
Each of those factors weakens North Korea’s army as a conventional force, but they weaken it especially as a potential counterinsurgent force, a kind of warfare for which the KPA is ill-suited structurally. Suppressing an insurgency requires an army to have good officers and NCO’s who can operate in small units, think and act independently, and win over the population. Brutality and intimidation can’t crush a determined insurgency. It didn’t work for the Russians in Afghanistan, or for the SS Police units that fought partisans in Russia.
Hat tip and thanks to a reader and friend. You can read the full Threat Assessment Report from the Directory of National Intelligence here.