[geetrue]

What does this look like to you?:






Kim Jong Un inspects “new” military technology made by unit 1501 of the Korean People’s Army

The photo at the top of this page helps to make my point, but first a bit of background.
It is true that the North Korean military is very big, one of the world’s largest standing armies: 1.1 million troops! 4,200 tanks! 820 fighter jets! It’s also, by virtue of Pyongyang’s “military first” policies, perhaps the most privileged and best funded arm of the state, maybe outside of Kim Jong Un’s personal piggy banks.
Even the military’s size and political backing, though, can’t make up for North Korea’s isolation and impoverishment. Most of those fighter jets, for example, will never take off because the regime can’t afford enough fuel to fill them up. Even if they could somehow procure enough jet fuel, the fighters “would have been shot out of the sky in the first few hours of a conflict,” Dartmouth professor and North Korea-watcher Jennifer Lind told NPR recently. The tanks, likewise, are old and inferior.
North Korean propaganda frequently tries to make the case that, not only is their national army fearless and enormous, but it’s also breathtakingly advanced. This propaganda is for domestic consumption, of course, but seeing it from the outside is a nice reminder of the wide technological gap between North Korea and its neighbors South Korea and Japan, not to mention the United States.
Take the above photo, just released by North Korean state media from leader Kim Jong Un’s big trip to visit Unit 1501 of the Korean People’s Army, which is reportedly developing new and exciting military technology.