N. Korea’s Ability to Sustain Military Surprises the U.S.

Over the last few years, the common assumption among U.S. defense officials was that North Korea’s million-strong army was deteriorating, a victim of the country’s dire economic plight.

Not so, it turns out.

To the surprise of U.S. officials, North Korea has in recent months carried out extensive military exercises--raising politically charged questions about how international food aid to the Communist regime in Pyongyang is being used.

Adm. Dennis Cutler Blair, the commander in chief of U.S. forces in the Pacific, said this week that “the North Korea armed forces have just finished the heaviest winter training cycle that we have seen in recent years.”

Other Pentagon officials say the new exercises show that famine-stricken North Korea is giving substantial amounts of food to the military, that its army is still a formidable force and that it can come up with the fuel, spare parts and other items the army needs.

The Clinton administration’s policy of engaging the isolationist regime in North Korea and providing it with food aid has been lambasted by Republicans for more than half a decade, and the new exercises have quickly rekindled the debate.

“We’ve been resuscitating a dying patient,” said Peter Brookes, a Republican staff member for the House International Relations Committee. “All of the aid we provide to North Korea is completely fungible. They must have gotten the fuel from somewhere, or the money for fuel from somewhere, to conduct these exercises.”

Brookes and other critics have argued that even if North Korea uses the food it gets from other countries to feed ordinary citizens, that food frees up money and resources for the military that might otherwise be used to combat famine.

The U.S. policy has been to require that none of the American food goes to the North Korean military, but U.S. officials have acknowledged that there are problems in enforcing this.

“I do believe that food is fungible,” former Defense Secretary William J. Perry, who led a review of administration policy toward North Korea, said last fall. “In other words, the 3 million or 3 1/2 million tons of grain that the North Koreans grow themselves go first of all to the elite and . . . to the military. And so, whether or not our food goes to the children, their elite and military are still being well fed.”

In 1995, after a series of heavy floods, North Korea began to suffer severe shortages of food, and famine began spreading across the nation.

Working through the World Food Program, the United States and several other nations began sending food supplies to North Korea. China has also provided extensive food aid to Pyongyang.

The U.S. food shipments alone have added up to at least half a million tons, worth close to $1 billion. And this week, Japan announced that it will resume rice shipments to North Korea, which Tokyo stopped after the Pyongyang regime fired a missile across Japanese airspace in 1998.

Clinton administration officials have explained that these food shipments are made for humanitarian reasons, as part of the broader policy of trying to engage the North Korean regime headed by Kim Jong Il.

Some supporters of the administration have maintained that Pyongyang is not diverting food aid for military uses.

“These [North Korean] people are going over the edge,” Rep. Tony P. Hall (D-Ohio) said in November. After a visit to North Korea, Hall told reporters that he saw no evidence, either directly or from talks with aid groups, that food from overseas was being diverted to the military or to the government.

But in a news conference at the Pentagon this week, Blair presented a different portrait.

As commander of Pacific forces, Blair is responsible for the 37,000 U.S. troops in South Korea who serve as a bulwark against North Korea, which maintains one of the world’s five largest armies. Despite its economic difficulties, the Pyongyang regime continues to deploy 600,000 troops within 60 miles of the demilitarized zone between North Korea and South Korea.

“[The North Koreans] seem to have stabilized economically at what we would consider an impossibly low level of production and consumption,” Blair said.

“They continue to divert a disproportionate part of their small national wealth to military programs and are able to wring a formidable military capability out of a busted economy because that’s in the interest of the ruling family there, and they maintain it by authoritarian means.”

Asked whether North Korea could keep on going amid its economic difficulties, the admiral replied, “Not forever.”

North Korea carries out winter training exercises each year. But after the food shortages, it seemed the exercises were being scaled back to save fuel and money.

This year’s exercises, one Pentagon official said, “suggest that [North Korea’s armed forces] are able to do more than we had anticipated. It means they can’t be taken lightly, that deterrence is still extremely important.”

Over the last seven years, the focus of the Clinton administration’s policy has been to stop North Korea from developing nuclear weapons or missiles. North Korea forced the administration’s hand, first by pressing forward with its nuclear program in 1993-94 and then by firing its new long-range Taepodong 1 missile over Japan four years later.

U.S. officials negotiated an agreement in 1994 by which Pyongyang agreed to freeze its nuclear program in exchange for two civilian light-water reactors. And the Clinton administration worked out a deal last year in which North Korea agreed to a temporary moratorium on firing missiles in exchange for Washington’s lifting of the 4-decade-old U.S. trade embargo against North Korea.

In a recent article for the Web site of the Berkeley-based Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainable Development, Joel Wit, a former Clinton administration official, argued that the administration’s policy has been “a good deal for the United States” because it stopped the nuclear program. Wit also contended that a future Republican president will find it hard to change the policy much because America’s allies in Japan and South Korea like Clinton’s approach.

Republican critics--including some of the top foreign-policy advisors in Texas Gov. George W. Bush’s presidential campaign--have argued that the Clinton administration has allowed North Korea to use its nuclear and missile programs as bargaining chips and has ignored the problems posed by the Communist country’s conventional armed forces.

“I think the governor [Bush] would feel much better about the current situation if the administration would turn immediately to the conventional threat and devote as much energy to bringing down the conventional threat to the Republic of [South] Korea as they did to the missile question,” Richard L. Armitage, a former Pentagon official in the Reagan administration, said last fall.