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U.S. Marines with 13th Marine Expeditionary Unit, and Republic of Korea Marines simulate an amphibious assault for Ssang Yong 23 exercise. (U.S. Marine Corps Staff Sgt. Kevin Rivas)
SYDNEY — As the US and South Korea conduct their largest joint military exercise since 2018, North Korea has ramped up its launches of medium and intercontinental range ballistic missiles. It’s a classic North Korean response to US-ROK military maneuverers, but one that is open to interpretation.
Exercise Ssang Yong, which kicked off this week and will go through April 3, was clearly on North Korea’s radar. The US Marines and South Korean troops practiced an amphibious landing for the first time since 2018 on Monday, supported by USS Makin Island bearing F-35Bs and Ospreys, and seven South Korean navy ships, all while the USS Nimitz Carrier Strike Group arrived earlier in the week and was operating somewhere near the South Korean coast.
For its part, North Korea fired two short-range ballistic missiles that flew approximately 230 miles on Monday.
Those were the seventh series of missile launches this month, putting the total at 11 for this year. The week before North Korea executed a three-day exercise that the Hermit Kingdom said simulated nuclear attacks on South Korean targets. On top of that, the north also claimed to have tested a nuclear-capable underwater drone supposedly designed to set off a “radioactive tsunami.”
Given North Korea’s history, it’s not unusual that they would react with some military bombast. But, two analysts say, the relatively intense pace of weapons being tossed into the sea — again, over half the missile launches of the year just in the past month — is notable.
“North Korea has been adamantly protesting the ongoing, back-to-back, large-scale, live-fire military exercises that the US and South Korea have been conducting. Pyongyang has warned several times that if the US and ROK keep exercising in this manner and frequency that North Korea would also up their game, describing such potential actions as using the East Sea as ‘target practice,’” Jenny Town, a respected Korean analyst at the Stimson Center in Washington, wrote in an email. “It is important to keep in mind that while the US and ROK certainly have the right to conduct drills as they see fit, what they have been doing is NOT business as usual.”
Leonid Petrov, a Korean expert at the Australian National University in Canberra, said Kim Jong Il is ordering these tests to maintain the terrible sense of perpetual crisis in the peninsula and to keep his country on a war footing.
“They need the war, they need instability and they need a great leader,” he said. “So if it’s a war they need to demonstrate the image of the victorious leader and the self-proclaimed nuclear power which is definitely not going to lose, and may even prevail over the enemy,” Petrov said. “Yeah, the North Koreans keep demonstrating, developing, demonstrating, testing, showcasing and now even giving the weapons to Russia in exchange for food and electricity and other basic needs.”
The latest tests, Petrov assesses, may well constitute sales pitches for a Russia increasingly hungry for ammunition and replacement weapons because “Russians in Ukraine badly need sophisticated weapons. North Korea’s showcasing what they have.”
Towns, however, sees the choice of weapons as being more about “demonstrating the ability to strike both regional and long-range targets, all part of North Korea’s deterrence messaging,” she said.
“They are framing several of these launches as their own operational and deployment drills — equivalent to what the US and ROK and doing, although technically the North Koreans are prohibited from these activities under UN Security Council resolutions. It is clear they are working to demonstrate a credible ICBM capability, which will also help advance their satellite launch capabilities as well, and reinforce the notion that their forces are diverse, mobile and nuclear capable if needed.”
Topics: ballistic missiles, Indo-Pacific, North Korea, North Korean missile tests, south korea
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