Today I attended the funeral for Kevin Kim’s mother, in Alexandria, Virginia. I’ve been to many funerals and, as they go, this one went extremely well. Sad at her loss, but celebrating her spectacular ability to help family and friends, this was one to remember. Rest in peace.

Joseph Bermudez, author of several books on North Korea’s military and intelligence services, has launched a new journal focusing on the Korea People’s Army (KPA), KPA Journal. It will be online later this year, but the first iteration can be found at NK Econ Watch.

First of all, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to Richardson and to the readers of the blog.

My wife and I recently received a Christmas gift of sorts from my wife’s, shall we say, less than mature brother. He travels frequently to Asia and lived in Japan for many years (he is one of these Midwesterners who saw the TV mini-series Shogun one time too many and took off for Asia as soon as he graduated from college).

His gift to us was an Air Koryo t-shirt. That’s right — a t-shirt from the national airline of North Korea.

I have known my BIL for at least 15 years. During that time I have marveled at his distressing inability to grow up and assume responsibilities of a grown man, but this “gift,” which I am pretty sure was some sort of an attempt of a joke, just stunned me. I hate to engage in what one pundit calls reductio ad hitlerum, but this is rather like handing a Jew a Luftwaffe shirt from the Wehrmacht era as a Hannukah gift.

Yes, I know Air Koryo is the nominally civil aviation arm of North Korea. It is nonetheless an arm of the reviled North Korean regime — any dollar spent on it is a dollar contributed to this loathsome monstrosity, which also happened to have killed and abducted my own family members, the fate of some of whom is unknown even today.

I suppose growing up in a culture, in which wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt is “kinda cool,” this might be considered some sort of an eclectic gift. I did not and found it in very bad taste to say the least.

I am for the moment at a loss as to what to do with this item. Throw it in a trash? Burn it? Maybe I will keep it in a special place until I see my brother-in-law, at which point I might drop him with an elbow to his face, put a carotid choke (what Brazilians call mata leon) on him and then stuff his gasping mouth with the said t-shirt. That might make me feel much better about this gift — although I might be in the dog house with my in-laws for about 20 years.

The Firearms Blog reports that the ROK Army unit being deployed to Afghanistan will be armed with the K11 airburst assault rifle (follow the link for more information including picture and video of the rifle).

This rifle is derived from an American experimental project that was abandoned for good reasons.

While I applaud South Korea’s effort to modernize its armed forces, I find that its endeavors are often fixated on shiny, gold-plated hardware like this rifle. The prophet of military transformation and the author of the now much discussed and misunderstood OODA loop, John Boyd, once said that the priority of America’s military should be “people first, ideas second, hardware third” but that the Pentagon worked in reverse.

Instead of spending money on F-15K’s or airburst rifles, South Korea ought to spend more money on improving the professional quality of its military personnel, abandoning the conscript system in favor of a long-service professional force of a smaller size, improved readiness and training and etc.

If the conflict in Aghanistan and Iraq have demonstrated anything about infantry combat, it is that well-trained riflemen with “outdated” rifles, including M14’s (provided they have good quality optics), perform magnificently against poorly trained fighters no matter what types of weapons the latter possess.

The Israelis have long demonstrated a well-trained, highly motivated force operating with a superior doctrine can work wonders even with obsolescent weaponry (on the other hand, despite the vast improvements in technology, the IDF has done relatively poorly of late in conflicts due to decline in morale and motivation of its fighting personnel as well as poor higher-level leadership).

It is about time that both the political and military leadership of South Korea understand that operational readiness and combat power are not derived primarily from sexy weaponry. Next time North Koreans insert their vaunted special operations force on South Korea’s soil, the best counter would be a superbly trained force of South Korean riflemen with high readiness, motivation and tactical proficiency, not panicky conscripts armed with futuristic weapons.

The last time the North and South Korean navies clashed seriously in 2002, the latter came off badly.

The ROK Navy seems to have been better prepared this time:

According to South Korean officials, fighting erupted when a 215-ton North Korean vessel ventured across the so-called Northern Limit Line, a sea border drawn by the United Nations at the end of the war. The North has never accepted the border, and there were deadly naval clashes in 1999 and 2002. Those moves were seen variously as an attempt to grab American attention or as a bargaining ploy to win food aid from the South.

Two 130-ton South Korean navy boats issued five warning broadcasts, then fired warning shots when they were ignored, officials said.

“It was then that the North Korean patrol boat attacked our high-speed patrol boat,” said Lee Ki-shik, a South Korean military spokesman.

The North Korean vessel then fired 50 rounds at a South Korean patrol boat about two miles away, causing light damage, Mr. Lee said.

The two South Korean vessels responded with 200 shots, officials said.

Apparently, the damaged North Korean vessel then retreated. I am heartened to see that the ROK military is back to using the Chicago Way (perhaps in honor of President Obama who is about to visit Seoul — although, contrary to the practice of the political left, one is supposed to use the Chicago Way against foreign enemies and the Marquess of Queensberry rules against domestic enemies, but I digress).

The lack of recent posts will continue for an unknown period of time as I’ve been busy at work, and engaged in other projects at home. I do plan on resuming daily posting at some unknown point in the future. I also still monitor all things North Korea daily and likely will post something related to more significant developments. I’ll also be doing some housecleaning with links on the front page and North Korea Links page.

My apologies to Richardson and the readers of this blog for months of silence (I will write an explanation at some point). But here is some good news from South Korea if you are a gun nut like I am:

South Korea’s defence ministry has announced plans to sell up to 86,000 M1 Garand rifles to gun enthusiasts and collectors in the United States. Along with a reported 22,000 M1 carbine rifles, the total value of firearms for sale exceeds $100 million.

Okay, so technically these are not a gift (in fact, we gave them to the Koreans a while back), but they are a gift in the sense that M1 Garand rifles in good condition are drying up fast in the U.S. and a fresh supply is always a gift to gun buyers interested in these historically significant firearms.

More on the details here. Oddly, the ROK military is keeping 640,000 M1 Carbines for the reserves. Now, M1 Carbines are nifty little guns: simple, easy to shoot, has low recoil and very handy. They are, however, a bit underpowered (they chamber an intermediate cartridge that is somewhere between a rifle and handgun in power). Surely, in this day of 6.8mm Rem when there is endless debate about whether the standard 5.56mm NATO cartridge is potent enough, M1 Carbines are a bit backward in addition to being archaic for military service.

The Clan Records: Five Stories of Korea. Kajiyama Toshiyuki. University of Hawaii Press, 1995 (translated).

The Clan Records is a collection of five short stories by a Japanese author who was born in Seoul (then called Keijo) in 1930, where his father was a civil engineer, and grew up there until he was repatriated to Japan in 1945. Kajiyama’s stories of colonial Korea mourn the even then quickly waning of traditional Korea and provide a glimpse of what was. A writer, he died in 1975 at the age of 45 and it is clear that his youth in Korea made a deep and lasting impression on his life. Kajiyama’s viewpoint is sympathetic to the land where he was born and critical of Japanese colonial policies, but without falling into the self-loathing, own-nation-hating apologist mindset that has become too common in contemporary academia.

The Clan Records, from which the book takes its name, is the story of a low-level Japanese office worker who took government work in Korea in 1940 to avoid being drafted into the military. His office had the task of convincing Koreans to take Japanese names, at first with describing it as a benefit (e.g. becoming Japanese!), but finally with threats and outright force. The story revolves around the office workers efforts to convince a Korean patriarch, with clan records going back 700 years, to change his name.

Seeking Life amidst Death: The Last Day of the War, where an “insolent, cheating [Japanese] student” skipped school on 15 August 1945, the last day of the war, and so gets the news late.

When the Hibiscus Blooms is the story of a Japanese school teacher who takes his first job after college in Seoul. He eventually stumbles upon previously unappreciated Celadon and other Korean pottery and in part created a market for it that saw much of those treasures sold cheaply in Korea and go to Japan.

The Remembered Shadow of the Yi Dynasty focuses on the obsession of a young Japanese artist, unworried about the draft due to bad eyes, to capture some fading Korean tradition by painting a beautiful kiseang.

A Crane on a Dunghill in Seoul in 1936 also involves a school teacher, one who falls for a kiseang who was the sister of a Korean freedom fighter.

Several themes replay throughout these stories – admiration for the beauty of Korea and Korean tradition; torment and seeing much of traditional Korea evaporate and knowing nothing could be done about it; and a good deal about drinking establishments and kiseang. Clearly kiseang made a deep and lasting impression upon the youth.

The Clan Records is a good read and, due to a quality translation, a quick one. There are mundane parts, but there are also a lot of little gems of knowledge about colonial Korea that make it well worth reading.

Highly Enriched Uranium (HEU) programs don’t pop-up overnight, especially in third-world backwaters like North Korea. Yet North Korea has announced via state-run media that it is capable of the “final stage of uranium enrichment.”

How shocking! There were no clues! There was no way to know this!

Well, not really. All we had to do was:

• Listen to our own envoy, James Kelly, in October 2002, and to what the State Department translator later clarified about that exchange.

• Listen to what Pakistan had to say in February 2007, and the entire A.Q. Khan trail on HEU-related transactions with North Korea.

• Get a little crazy and listen to what North Korea admitted about it after 2002, or even consider what South Korean intelligence had to say on the matter (they probably have an interest, huh?).

• Finally, we could consider the actual HEU particles found on documents submitted to the U.S. in an effort to prove how much plutonium they didn’t reprocess.

There’s more, but at what point does it become overkill?

This of course assumes, as OFK points out, that North Korea is telling the truth. Since all the evidnce has for years pointed in that direction, I do not doubt North Korea’s most recent admission is in fact the truth.

What’s the fallout? For North Korea, nothing tangible. Since the U.S. and the UN do not have the backbone to enact and enforce measures that could shape behavior, and China prefers the status quo (so far). Another option to change their behavior is military force, which is off the table. Completely isolating or blockading North Korea would have the same effect as force and so is also not on the table.

Agreed Framework reruns are pointless since North Korea reneges on all of these agreements, see above for why (we won’t enforce them). If the U.S. is foolish enough to offer good after bad, North Korea will take what it wants, and continue doing what it wants, at least based on our dealings with them on this topic since 1993 and logic.

North Korea knows all this, so North Korea knows it is free to do as it pleases. This is one of those issues where they will do as they please unless we force our will upon them, and no one is willing to do that, yet. That’s it, unless and until the U.S. goes back to the only sanctions that had any measurable effect on North Korea’s behavior.

For North Korean apologists, however, some fallout; David Albright, you can follow this link or this one to explain how foolish I was for previously insisting North Korea did in fact have an HEU program. Thanks.

Erik van Ingen Schenau of the China Motor Vehicle Documentation Centre has posted a collection of photos of vehicles manufactured in North Korea. A larger variety than I realized, and more than a few named Chollima (천리마).