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SEOUL, South Korea — It may have been tactically inept, but it was visually impressive – and it gave North Korean leader Kim Jong Un the latest opportunity to hone his martial image.
As the South Korean Spring War games moved into their fifth day, North Korea on Thursday conducted a mass firing by mobile howitzers and tactical rocket batteries into the Yellow Sea.
The drills underway south of the DMZ are serious business. By contrast, military analysts in South Korea largely scoffed at Pyongyang’s latest firepower demonstration, saying it delivered propaganda, not war-fighting, value.
“Freedom Shield,” the first tranche of this year’s series of war games conducted by South Korea, the United States and their allies, began this week and runs through March 11. As in the past, the drills anger North Korea, which considers them invasion preparation.
Pyongyang customarily responds with bellicose rhetoric, missile test firings and its own drills, including the response detailed March 7.
“The drill started with the power demonstration firing of the long-range artillery sub-units near the border [which] have put the enemy’s capital in their striking range and fulfilled important military missions for war deterrence,” the North’s state-run media, monitored in Seoul, reported.
That is a reference to the North’s formidable armory of long-range tactical gunnery, which was dug into mountain tunnels near the city of Kaesong and trained in Seoul, the South Korean capital located just 35 miles south of the two Koreas.
But the North’s latest “military mission” showed a line of self-propelled 175mm armored howitzers firing a barrage out to sea. Another image displayed on state media depicted a line of multiple-launch rocket systems doing the same.
“It is necessary … that all the artillery sub-units can take the initiative with merciless and rapid strikes at the moment of their entry into an actual war,” Mr. Kim was quoted as saying.
Experts in the South were unimpressed.
None of the weapons depicted were camouflaged, dug in or dispersed. In an actual war, any such deployment would likely be vulnerable to air strikes and counter-battery fire.
The North Korean demonstration, according to the skeptics, was more of a parade drill than a tactical exercise.
“There is no value-added in doing this, this was a propaganda demo,” said Steve Tharp, a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel. “It is just silliness to line up a bunch of cannons and shoot them into the ocean.”
The ocean target zone was nowhere near South Korea. The firings took place off Nampo – the port serving Pyongyang – some 56 miles from the DMZ and far from South Korea’s vulnerable frontline islands.
“They usually do this as a demonstration,” added Chun In-bum, a retired South Korean major general. “It has little tactical value.”
However, for a military that suffers perennial fuel shortages and — given that is believed to have dispatched 3 million rounds of artillery and rocket munitions to Russia — may be suffering ammunition shortfalls as well, there may have been some pluses in Mr. Kim’s eyes.
“There is training value: moving weapons, aiming, shooting,” said Mr. Chun.
All this means the artillery drill was probably aimed at awing an impressionable public rather than upgrading combat skills.
Boosting a persona
The North Korean response also offered Mr. Kim another chance to enhance his warlord persona.
State media images on Thursday showed Mr. Kim, in black leather jacket, aiming a Kalashnikov during a visit to an army unit, and overseeing infantry in trenches shooting. A day later, he was shown wearing the same outfit, this time with cigarette in fist, overseeing the artillery.
On both days, he was surrounded by tough-looking officers in modern digital camouflage uniforms rather than the old-school brown serge uniforms commonly worn by the North Korean army.
Mr. Kim is not alone in leveraging a military image: Both Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping are equally partial to martial machismo.
But unlike his Chinese and Russian counterparts, Mr. Kim has an actual military record, graduating from Kim Il Sung Military Academy, named for his grandfather. Andrei Lankov, a North Korea expert at Seoul’s Kookmin University, reckons the younger Mr. Kim was “not a regular cadet”—but he nevertheless attended.
Building a strongman image is particularly essential for Mr. Kim, experts say. Mr. Lankov noted that in his first year in office, Mr. Kim conducted sweeping purges of the civil and military leadership. Now, with his economy hammered by dire agricultural conditions, global sanctions and the long border closure due to COVID, he has few economic gifts to offer his people.
Last month Mr. Kim made a public apology, saying he was “ashamed and sorry” for neglecting the nation’s economy beyond the capital, Pyongyang.
As a result, “he has no choice but to emphasize military force,” Mr. Lankov said. “And it is always good to show the military that he is one of them.”
• Andrew Salmon can be reached at asalmon@washingtontimes.com.
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