The
Korean People's Army (KPA) is North Korea's military organization.
The KPA has
1,106,000 active and
8,389,000 reserve and paramilitary troops, making it the
largest military institution in the world.
[157]
About 20 percent of men aged 17–54 serve in the regular armed forces,
[33] and approximately one in every 25 citizens is an enlisted soldier.
The KPA has five branches:
Ground Force,
Navy,
Air Force,
Special Operations Force, and
Rocket Force.
Of all KPA branches, the Ground Force is the largest. It has approximately one million personnel divided into 80 infantry
divisions,
30 artillery
brigades, 25 special warfare brigades, 20 mechanized brigades, 10 tank brigades and seven tank
regiments.
They are equipped with 3,700 tanks, 2,100
armoured personnel carriers and
infantry fighting vehicles,
[161] 17,900 artillery pieces,
11,000 anti-aircraft guns
[162] and some 10,000
MANPADS and
anti-tank guided missiles.
[163]
Other equipment includes 1,600 aircraft in the Air Force and 1,000 vessels in the Navy.
North Korea has the largest special forces and the largest submarine fleet in the world.
[165]
North Korea possesses nuclear weapons, but its arsenal remains limited.
Various estimates put its stockpile at less than 10
plutonium warheads
[166][167] and 12–27 nuclear weapon equivalents if
uranium warheads are considered.
Delivery capabilities are provided by the Rocket Force, which has some 1,000
ballistic missiles with a range of up to 3,000 kilometres.
According to a 2004 South Korean assessment, North Korea possesses a stockpile of
chemical weapons estimated to amount to 2,500–5,000 tons,
including nerve, blister, blood, and vomiting agents, as well as the ability to cultivate and produce
biological weapons including
anthrax,
smallpox, and
cholera
Because of its nuclear and missile tests, North Korea has been
sanctioned under United Nations Security Council resolutions 1695 of July 2006,
1718 of October 2006,
1874 of June 2009, and
2087 of January 2013.
The military faces some issues limiting its conventional capabilities, including obsolete equipment,
insufficient fuel supplies and a shortage of digital
command and control assets.
To compensate for these deficiencies,
the KPA has deployed a wide range of
asymmetric warfare technologies like anti-personnel blinding lasers,
[173]
GPS jammers,
[174] midget submarines and
human torpedoes,
[175] stealth paint,
[176] electromagnetic pulse bombs,
[177] and
cyberwarfare units.
[178]
KPA units have attempted to jam South Korean
military satellites.
[179]
Much of the equipment is engineered and produced by
a domestic defense industry.
Weapons are manufactured in roughly 1,800 underground defense industry plants scattered throughout the country,
most of them located in
Chagang Province. The defense industry is capable of producing a full range of individual and crew-served weapons
artillery, armored vehicles, tanks, missiles, helicopters, surface combatants, submarines, landing and infiltration craft,
Yak-18 trainers and possibly co-production of jet aircraft.
[133]
According to official North Korean media, military expenditures for 2010 amount to 15.8 percent of the state budget.
(
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korea)