After concerns about a security vacuum in South Korea were kindled by a flight of North Korean drones that penetrated all the way to Seoul, the North Korean military has identified the drones’ incursion into South Korea as one of their main achievements in a report about the military’s winter exercises this past December.
A high-ranking source in North Korea told Daily NK on Monday that an interim report on the military’s winter exercises, which began Dec. 1, described the drone incursion as a success and claimed that the operation had thrown the “enemy stronghold” into panic. The report was drafted by the Operations Bureau of the General Staff Department on Dec. 27, the day after the drone incursion.
In addition to the drone provocation, the report also detailed the status of exercises following the reorganization of the military and evaluated drones that have been deployed for action, the source said.
The Operations Bureau report also claimed that a total of twelve drones had infiltrated South Korea, but that enemy military had only been able to detect five of them.
According to the report, the twelve drones had been dispatched together on Dec. 26 and all flew south of the Military Demarcation Line, but the seven drones with a shorter range only made it to the northern section of South Korea’s Gyeonggi Province before returning to North Korea.
Daily NK was unable to confirm whether the number of drones sent by North Korea was twelve or only five, or whether North Korea falsely inflated the figure to promote unity inside the military and promote the superiority of the regime.
However, it seems unlikely that North Korea would have included drones with too short a range to carry out their mission, deliberately sending them to the vicinity of the Military Demarcation Line only to have them return to North Korean territory.
If the twelve drones were launched simultaneously as the North Korean military report claims, the seven drones that were not detected in South Korean airspace may well have crashed before crossing the Military Demarcation Line. There is a strong possibility, therefore, that the military authorities included falsehoods in the report so as to play up the achievements of the winter exercises.
Nevertheless, the North Korean military appears likely to advertise the drone incursion and the South Korean military’s failure to detect the drones in advance or shoot them down in political propaganda distributed to military cadres with the goal of boosting morale inside the military.
In fact, high-ranking cadres in the North Korean military who had assumed that the South Korean air force was far superior to North Korea’s in terms of weaponry and detection technology said the drone incursion seems to have shown that the two sides’ technology is at a similar level.
That seems to mark a departure from the self-deprecatory tone adopted by North Korean cadres who admitted that North Korean satellite technology is still just getting off the ground compared to South Korean technology.
On Dec. 22, the South Korean government responded to satellite imagery of Seoul published by North Korea by releasing its own high-resolution color photography of Pyongyang taken by “land satellite No. 1.”
But the North Korean government will probably not distribute material about the drone incursion to the entire military or officially acknowledge the provocation, since that would open it up to criticism from the international community and demands that it take responsibility.
As of Monday, North Korean media outlets such as the Rodong Sinmun and the Korean Central News Agency have not made any mention of the drone incursion.
Please direct any comments or questions about this article to dailynkenglish@uni-media.net.
