July 8, 2020
Does North Korea Really Have 200,000 Special Forces?
You'd better believe it.
by Kyle Mizokami
Key Point: Pyongyang doesn't have a good military, but it does have nuclear weapons. It also has a lot of aysmmetric forces to threaten its enemies.
One of the most vital parts of North Korea’s war machine is one that relies the most on so-called “soldier power†skills. North Korea has likely the largest special-forces organization in the world, numbering two hundred thousand men—and women—trained in unconventional warfare. Pyongyang’s commandos are trained to operate throughout the Korean Peninsula, and possibly beyond, to present an asymmetric threat to its enemies.
For decades North Korea maintained an impressive all-arms force of everything from tanks to mechanized infantry, artillery, airborne forces and special forces. The country’s conventional forces, facing a long slide after the end of the Cold War, have faced equipment obsolescence and supply shortages—for example, North Korea has very few tanks based on the 1970s Soviet T-72, and most are still derivatives of the 1960s-era T-62. The rest of Pyongyang’s armored corps are in a similar predicament, making them decidedly inferior to U.S. and South Korean forces.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/reboot/does-north-korea-really-have-200000-special-forces-164319
