North Korean leader Kim Jong Un ordered his military to sharpen its war plans and signed off on expanding combat operations of frontline units, state media said Thursday, as the United States and South Korea prepare for a large-scale combined military exercise.
Condemning the allies’ expanding drills as invasion rehearsals, Kim has used them as a pretext to further accelerate his weapons demonstrations, which have included the testing-firings of more than 100 missiles since the start of 2022, driving tensions on the Korean Peninsula to their highest point in years.
Experts say Kim’s nuclear push is aimed at forcing the United States to accept the idea of the North as a nuclear power so he can eventually negotiate economic and security concessions from a position of strength.
Thursday’s meeting of the North Korean ruling Workers’ Party’s central military commission, which Kim controls as chairman, was to discuss advancing his military’s war readiness and establishing offensive countermeasure plans to deter his adversaries, which state media said were getting more blatant in their “reckless military confrontation” with the North.
After talks of boosting North Korean frontline units and stepping up war drills to incorporate new strategies and weapons, Kim signed an order to implement unspecified “important military measures,” Pyongyang’s official Korean Central News Agency said.
During the meeting, Kim stressed that the military must acquire “more powerful strike means” to bolster his nuclear deterrent and make speedier deployments of those weapons to combat units. He called for the country’s munitions industry to step up mass production of various weapons and systems, and for the military to actively conduct “actual war drills” to digest those systems and enhance its war-fighting capabilities, KCNA said.
Photos of the meeting published by state media showed Kim pointing to spots in a blurred map of the Korean Peninsula. The spots appeared to be the metropolitan region surrounding the South Korean capital of Seoul, where half of the country’s 51 million people live, and an area around the central city of Daejeon, the location of South Korea’s army headquarters.
