A Look at North Korea’s Ground Forces

Stijn Mitzer and Joost Oliemans’s The Armed Forces of North Korea Vol I, Part I is an ambitious attempt to provide information about the North Korean armed forces, particularly the ground forces in this first monograph of the series, with more expected. Not merely the infantry units are front and center but also their strategy and relative organization.

Stijn Mitzer and Joost Oliemans open source-based collaboration was first known as The Armed Forces of North Korea: On the Path of Songun. This edition is an enhanced, excerpted version now picked up by the “Asia at War Series” published in A4 format by Helion & Company. They have also written another book in the same series for Helion about North Korea’s armor and artillery, with more pending. As such, it contains a number of color plates along with the usual black & white and many color photos covering the subject. As is typical with “Asia at War” books, the font is small, presumably to keep to a page limit and therefore pinch the text into the space. There are six brief chapters which address topics like organization, strategy and infantry along with two set aside for armored personnel carriers and fire support vehicles. There are also sections for abbreviations and acronyms, bibliography and chapter endnotes.

Any attempt to chronicle the Hermit Kingdom is bound to run into problems, and certainly the authors knew that going into this effort. Thus what they had to say is mostly based on open, credible sources and less about speculation. That said, the entire text should be viewed within the lens of providing a relatively modest glimpse into a thoroughly locked away country and, for that matter, a military hidden behind mirrors and smoke so much that any attempt to discuss them could do no better. This book therefore is an attempt to cut through some of the murk, but it only succeeds to a point.

The Korean Peoples’s Army (KPA), which acts as an umbrella term for North Korean armed forces, is on paper a vast force, although the exact numbers are disputed. As the authors point out, “having inherited a generally technologically outdated, vastly oversized military apparatus,” Kim Jong Un faces a major challenge in terms of balancing modernization, advanced weapons systems and staying relevant in the turbulence of modern affairs. [p. 8] Kim’s vast armed forces consist overwhelmingly of infantry, as frontline troops, reservists and militia, which far outnumber any of the other components. These can collectively be referred to as the KPAGF (Korean People’s Army Ground Forces), for simplicity. [p. 2] Conversely, due to security concerns, there exists a large effort to oversee these same units for potential loyalty issues, which means a portion of the KPA spends its time closely watching their own troops, a leftover of Stalinist dictatorial logic but owing to their peculiar geography a necessary diversion of resources as Pyongyang sees it. [pp. 8-9]

North Korea employs a strategy of reuniting the two Koreas while simultaneously protecting the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’s regime. [p. 15] This strategy falls under the “Songun” policy (“military first”) promulgated conceptually by Kim Il Sung but formalized under Kim Jong Il which focused on the military or KPA as the driving force, elevated above the party. Kim Il Sung fought against the Japanese and spoke about juche (self-reliance), but it was the need for a strong military that eventually permeated North Korean thinking. It was the military that would serve as the vanguard and protect the revolution going forward. [p. 15]

North Korea’s infantry of the KPAGF is the focus of this short book and just covering them is a challenging task. The images presented and color plates of their weapons tell a story of a numerous foe with a wide range of kit; essentially anything from the Korean War to the present could be in their hands. There is an excellent pair of colored plates on pages 42-43 that nicely lumps together a number of assault rifles, sniper rifles, machineguns, RPGs, shoulder-fired SAMs, anti-tank weapons and other weapons into one accessible spot. There are also many color images of either equipment alone or North Korean troops or even Kim Jong Un using various weapons or other kit from pistols to air defense artillery, militiamen, rocket forces or parades which many would find interesting. This book is not about armored vehicles per se, although such vehicles associated with infantry are included in the images such as the “323” APC (based on the Chinese Type 63, an array of 8-wheeled BTR- like vehicles and much more like the armored box-truck NLOS missile vehicles). Thankfully years of attention-seeking parades make that research easier. [pp. 45-53]

In this volume Mitzer and Oliemans attempt to cover a difficult subject and, while any Western treatment of it would suffer from limited authoritative sources, they do an effective job of presenting what is known with some discussion of what might be. However, this book will by default appeal to a narrower crowd than some such monographs, although those interested in the vast array of equipment will certainly find something to like much as those hoping to get a peek inside the North Korean enigma.

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Our Reviewer: Professor Schultz (Luzerne CC) has taught history and political science to community college undergraduates for over 20 years. Specializing in military history, particularly World War II and the Cold War-era, he has presented papers at the McMullen Naval History Symposium, the Society for Military History Annual Meetings, the Midwestern History Conference, and other venues. He contributed Chapter 12 “The Reich Strikes Back: German Victory in the Dodecanese, October-November 1943” to On Contested Shores: The Evolving Role of Amphibious Operations in the History of Warfare, edited by Timothy Heck and B.A. Friedman (2020). His previous reviews for us include Warrior Spirit: The Story of Native American Patriotism and Heroism, Home Run: Allied Escape and Evasion in World War II, The Spanish Blue Division on the Eastern Front, 1941-1945, The ‘Blue Squadrons’: The Spanish in the Luftwaffe, Malta’s Savior: Operation Pedestal, Flawed Commanders and Strategy in the Battles for Italy, Lawrence of Arabia on War, Dogwood: A National Guard Unit's War in Iraq, and German Breakthrough in Greece: The 1941 Battle of the Pineios Gorge.

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