September 29, 2020
North Korea's Ground Forces: A Bloated, Backward and Crippled Mess
The DPRK’s army consists of 1.2-1.3 million active personnel with around 6 million more reservists, 6,000 tanks, up to 15,000 artillery pieces and much more. However, this is one really old and backward military force.
by Mark Episkopos
North Korea’s defense budget occupies a staggering 23% of its GDP, by far the highest proportion of any 21st-century country. The DPRK’s massive military outlays have gone, in no small part, towards sustaining the fourth-largest standing army in the world. There is little question that North Korea’s prodigious ground forces are, and will be, the backbone of its capacity to wage conventional war on the Korean Peninsula. In the years following the Korean War, the North’s Korea People’s Army (KPA) was markedly smaller, but better-equipped and exponentially more modernized than its southern counterpart. These roles have all but flipped in the decades of North Korean military stagnation and economic neglect that accompanied the collapse of its Soviet benefactor.
A closer look at North Korea’s current ground forces paints the picture of a bloated army, crippled by technical backwardness and severe logistical deficits.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/korea-watch/north-koreas-ground-forces-bloated-backward-and-crippled-mess-169786
