North Korean special forces

Kyle Mizokami at War is Boring has an interesting post up describing the new enlarged North Korean special forces as (possibly) an insurance policy for the regime, rather than forces designed to attack South Korea. The basic idea is that the spec ops forces are to be a ready-made insurgency just in case the US or ROK forces conquer the country. This would be a sensible idea, as there is no way for the DPRK forces to prevent a US/ROK combined takeover, assuming of course China does not intervene again.

The only problem with the thesis is that we have no evidence that the special forces are trained for that. All of the evidence points to them being trained for surreptitious crossing of the border and from there conduct traditional guerrilla warfare. On the other hand, Kyle reports them being trained in IEDs.

If nothing else, this should help to persuade US policy makers that force is not going to be very successful against the Kim regime.