Kim Jong Un, the “supreme leader” of North Korea leads “an incredibly weak” country, but plays its “weak hand very well,” according to Richard A. Lacquement Jr., dean, School of Strategic Landpower at the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle Barracks, Pa.
The U.S. Army War College advises the President and prepares selected military, civilian, and international leaders for the responsibilities of strategic leadership and educates current and future leaders on the development and employment of landpower. Its mission statement says it also is “to act as a ‘Think Factory’ for commanders and civilian leaders at the strategic level worldwide and routinely engage in discourse and debate on ground forces’ role in achieving national security objectives.”
A retired colonel from the U.S. Army, Dr. Lacquement embodies the college’s traits perfectly with a mix of combat experience and academic training having earned several post graduate degrees from both the Army and Naval War Colleges as well as Princeton University. He also was past director of military strategy.
He spoke in Atlanta on Nov. 16 at a monthly luncheon of the Atlanta Council on International Relations about U.S. security concerns with North Korea.
Although prior to his retirement from the Army in 2013, he was the chief of plans for U.S. Forces Korea, which oversees the combined ground, air, naval, marine and special operations forces for the Korean peninsula, he stressed that his luncheon presentation represented only his personal opinions and not necessarily those of the Army.
Before his Korean assignment, he was a Cold War strategist and had been preoccupied with policies aimed at containing the Soviet Union. A basic tenet of a strategist, he said, is “to know your enemy and to know who you are.”
Well aware of his personal values, he found the situation in Korea a different situation from that of the Soviet Union. And he said he wondered why North Korea still was communist while communist systems had collapsed around the world. “Why did they survive and all of the others except Cuba fail?” he asked himself.
He found part of the answer in the book, The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag by Kang Choi-hwan, about the author’s 10-year incarceration from age 9 in the
Kwan-li-so penal labor colony located 60 miles north of Pyongyang, North Korea’s capital.
Dr. Lacquement compared it to the prison accounts of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler, which describe the incarceration practices of the Soviets.
The difference between the Soviet and North Korean systems which impressed him, he said, is that in the Soviet cases the retribution was on individuals. But Kang Choi Hwan was imprisoned as a child because of the alleged anti-regime opinions of his grandfather.
Dr. Lacquement’s called the system “Confucian” due to its family-centered retribution. While totally innocent, Kang suffered from the practices of brutal teachers, forced work gangs of young and old and poor diets. He also witnessed public executions of those who tried to escape.
Once his grandfather died, Kang’s “re-educated” family was released from prison and sent to a farming village when he was 19 years old.
The Kim dynasty has controlled the government since the rule of Kim Il Sung from 1948 until his death in 1994. He was followed by Kim Jong Il, who ruled as “supreme leader” from 1994 when his son Kim Jong Un succeeded him upon his death in 2011.
The dynasty, Dr. Lacquement said, had managed to remain in control of the country through “circles of influence” with about one third of the country’s 25 million population involved in the country’s security sector with 1.2 million active soldiers, 200,000 trained paramilitary and 7.7 million in reserve.
“They make sure to take care of those who are protecting the family,” he said. “And the rest they don’t care about, even if they starve.”
Despite the large size of the army, Dr. Lacquement called the country “incredibly weak.”
“But they are playing a weak hand very well,” he added.
By developing nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles and by fomenting fear of being a destabilizing factor in the region and the world more generally are the means, he said, by which they have transformed their “weak hand” into a strong one.
With missiles that can reach as far away as Alaska, and the possibility of attaching nuclear warheads to them poses enormous concerns for not only the U.S. Army but their immediate neighbors including China, Japan, Russia and South Korea, among others.
He stressed that as a dominant power in the region, China has the most influence over North Korea, and should it wish to, could exert more pressure on the Kim regime.
It hesitates to do so, he added, because if the regime collapses, chaos could ensue with hundreds of thousands of refugees pouring across its borders.
“China doesn’t want the regime to collapse,” he said. “Yes they do have the power, more than anyone else to undermine the regime.” But economic collapse also could lead to war on the peninsula, he said, with unknown consequences.
It is difficult to comprehend today but North Korea had a similar gross domestic product in comparison to South Korea until the mid-1970s when the South Korean economy took off.
The collapse of the Soviet Union profoundly hurt North Korea’s economy since the Soviets had been its principle source of support.Today South Korea’s ranks as the 14th largest in the world and its economy is some 50 times larger than that of North Korea.
In keeping with its strategy of holding its best cards in a weak hand, North Korea is aware, Dr. Lacquement said, that the more successful South Korea’s economy, the greater the concern of its government about instability and the prospects of a collapsed North Korea.
Meanwhile, the U.S. retains a strong hand, according to Dr. Lacquement, but also is troubled by the consequences of instability in the region.
As North Korea conducts rocket launches, missile firings and cyber attacks, the U.S. has countered by increasing the number of radar and ground-based interceptors in Alaska and California. North Korea, however, also has developed mobile launches which it tested from a submarine.
To counter these threats the U.S. has sent stealth aircraft from Japan to South Korea and moved B-52 bombers to a U.S. naval base in the Indian Ocean.
Despite the U.S. deterrence capabilities, in which he has a lot of confidence, Dr. Lacquement as a strategist has had to contemplate the worst possible case of a North Korean attack.
Given the proliferation of arms and the mythology of Kim Il Sung’s resistance in the mountains to the Japanese, he admitted that it remains unclear what exactly would be the aftermath with the prospects of widespread resistance a possibility.
Given the uncertainties, he said it is understandable that the South Koreans would be extremely concerned of North Korea’s future actions and the strength of the U.S. resolve to support its ally in the face of aggression.
The U.S. maintains 28,500 troops in South Korea and has extensive commercial investments there, but the South Koreans also recall, Dr. Lacquement said, when the U.S. failed to support its ally.
He cited the the role of President Theodore Roosevelt in negotiating the Treaty of Portsmouth in 1905 that marked Japan’s emergence as the pre-eminent power in East Asia and eventually lead to Japan’s assuming control of the Korean peninsula.
He also pointed to the U.S.’s refusing Korea’s claims of self-determination as espoused by President Woodrow Wilson. In addition, he said that in the view of many South Koreans the 38th parallel, which was established after World War II to separate North and South Korea, favored the North.
Also by pulling out U.S. troops from South Korea in 1948, he added, South Korea considered its vulnerability to Chinese invasion was enhanced, which proved to be the case with the onset of the
Korean War.
Nevertheless, the alliance between the U.S. and South Korea remains solid today particularly in view of the North Korean threat to destabilizing the region.
And Dr. Lacquement repeatedly emphasized the importance of the region to U.S. security and commercial interests, which he defined from Beijing to Shanghai and Vladivostok, Russia, to Tokyo an area equivalent in size to the distance from Kansas City, Mo., to Boston and from Boston to Atlanta.
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