North Korea’s military “uses tactics based on former Soviet or current Russian doctrine, Chinese developments, lessons learned, and observation of recent military actions,” according to a new US Army manual on the subject.
“While North Korea maintains large amounts of military equipment, much of it is outdated making it quantitatively superior to most armies but qualitatively inferior,” the new manual said. See North Korean Tactics, Army Techniques Publication (ATP) 7-100.2, 24 July 2020.
But North Korea has proved resourceful in other areas, including offensive cyber warfare.
“The primary organization responsible for computer warfare in North Korea is Bureau 121, which fielded at least 1,000 elite hackers in 2010 who focused on other countries’ computer systems. This number is likely much higher now” and includes “cyberspace teams [deployed] in foreign countries.”
And not least of all, “The country’s possession of a nuclear arsenal and its pursuit of missile technology are attempts to ensure that external powers do not interfere with its internal affairs for fear of a nuclear reprisal,” the Army manual said.
“North Korea is constantly adapting and evolving its capabilities,” the Army said.
Using the NIST as an example, the Radiation Physics Building (still without the funding to complete its renovation) is crucial to national security and the medical community. If it were to go down (or away), every medical device in the United States that uses radiation would be decertified within 6 months, creating a significant single point of failure that cannot be quickly mitigated.
The federal government can support more proactive, efficient, and cost-effective resiliency planning by certifying predictive models to validate and publicly indicate their quality.
We need a new agency that specializes in uncovering funding opportunities that were overlooked elsewhere. Judging from the history of scientific breakthroughs, the benefits could be quite substantial.
The cost of inaction is not merely economic; it is measured in preventable illness, deaths and diminished livelihoods.