Photo gallery shows how unprepared for war the North Koreans are.

A wood powered truck. Pen News.

The Herlad Sun has a photo gallery showing how woefully unprepared the North Korean military is for war. The gallery shows North Korean soldiers with fake guns, wood fired trucks and female soldiers wearing high heels. The pictures were taken on the East Coast near Wosan. The photographer has remained anonymous. He said that he was worried that the photos would be erased so he had a backup memory card but in the end the guards didn't even check it. 

My Comment:

Interesting photo gallery and one that shows that the conventional North Korean military isn't much a threat. Their technology is ancient and I have never even heard of a wood fired truck. I guess it makes sense as North Korea doesn't have much domestic oil production and is completely reliant on imports for gasoline. Using them would offer a measure of protection against sanctions and trade disruptions. Still, a wood fired vehicle has to be less reliable and efficient than a normal one.

I also have to note that all of the soldiers looked rather pathetic. Unlike the DMZ, these were normal North Korean soldiers who presumably don't get as much food as the DMZ guards who are probably the cream of the crop. Even the DMZ soldiers are a lot less impressive than the well fed and beefy South Korean and American soldiers stationed on the other side. 

The soldiers back from the DMZ shown in these photos though? They are weak and skinny. None of them look particularly healthy and none of them seem like they get enough food. Even the least impressive American soldier could take these guys without much problem in a hand to hand fight. 

I don't know how North Korea expects to win a war with this conventional army. Their technology is extremely outdated and their soldiers are weak and underfed. Their only strength is raw numbers and even that doesn't help much against the superior weapons and soldiers of the South and America. Their superior numbers would quickly evaporate under the superior firepower of the combined South Korean and American forces.  

This also helps explain why North Korea has been so demanding on their nuclear issue. They need nukes in order to assure that attacking them would be too high of a price to pay. Their conventional army isn't much of a threat and would fold quickly in a real war. Nukes, along with North Korea's expanding biological weapons program, gives them some credibility as a threat and may act as a deterrence. 

Of course the downside to that strategy is that they may provoke the war that they are trying to prevent. Nobody wants North Korea to have a credible nuclear weapons program and the missiles to deliver them. And they also don't want North Korea to have a dangerous biological weapons program. The relative increase of this threat is why there is so much saber rattling going on right now. 

Ironically enough, if North Korea had invested the millions of dollars they wasted on the nuclear weapons program into their military they might have had a conventional military that could work as deterrence and get rid of the main reason everyone wants regime change anyways. Investing in nuclear technology was a major mistake but they can't change strategy now. They have sunken too much money and prestige into their nuclear program and can't give it up now...