PYONGYANG POURS MORE THAN ONE-THIRD OF ITS GDP INTO DEFENSE, BUT ITS EQUIPMENT IS A FAR CRY FROM SEOUL’S SOPHISTICATED TECHNOLOGICAL CAPABILITIES
It’s barely two months into 2024 and the year has already been marked by provocative missile tests from North Korea and anxious, rigid condemnation from its southern neighbor.
Pyongyang has been walking a path of increasingly truculent rhetoric, not just against Seoul but South Korea’s ally, the U.S., and a Japan deeply concerned for its own national security.
But the steady stream of inflammatory statements released by North Korea’s state media have come handin-hand with a flurry of ballistic missile tests, putting numerous countries on edge. Both Korean nations have pledged to drive up military spending. The spike in tensions, at a time when the U.S. and its allies are dealing with conflicts in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, with one eye on Beijing’s actions around Taiwan, have prompted experts to ask whether Pyongyang’s leader, Kim Jong Un, could prove wrong the long-standing belief that North Korea would not attack South Korea, and what an outbreak of new conflict would look like.
A NUMBERS GAME?
North Korea is one of the world’s most militarized countries, with “one of the world’s largest conventional militaries that directly threatens South Korea,” the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) said in a 2021 report.
Figures released by data gathering and visualization company Statista show that North Korean military spending may have reached one-third of the country’s GDP in 2022, a marked increase from previous years, when North Korea dedicated just under one-quarter of its GDP to the military. That places second—after Ukraine—for percentage of GDP allocated to defense.
For 2022, South Korea’s defense spending accounted for about 2.5 percent of its GDP, Statista said. This is far closer to typical defense expenditure for NATO countries and close allies.
In broad strokes, North Korea has more than twice as many military forces as the Republic of Korea to the south, as Statista phrased its conclusion of data published in June 2023.
North Korea has “superior manpower,” and the advantage has always been with Pyongyang in terms of sheer numbers, said Andrew Yeo, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Center for East Asia Policy Studies and a professor at the Washington, D.C.-based Catholic University of America.
At the start of 2023, North Korea had about 1,280,000 active personnel in its armed forces, with another 600,000 in reserve, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a London-based defense think tank. South Korea had about 555,000 active personnel (pictured below), with more than 3 million in reserve.
By other conventional markers, too, Pyongyang surpasses Seoul. It has 71 submarines to
