Kim Jong-un Oversees Simulated Attack on South Korean Airfield

North Korean state media on Friday described dictator Kim Jong-un supervising a live-fire artillery drill that simulated an attack on a South Korean airfield.

Kim reportedly told his troops to get ready to “overwhelmingly respond to and contain” the “frantic war preparation moves” of South Korea and the United States.

South Korean intelligence reported that Kim’s artillery drill included at least six short-range missile launches into the Yellow Sea. One launch was confirmed by South Korean observers from the North’s port city of Nampho. 

North Korea’s KCNA news service said Kim “stressed the need to always stay alert for all sorts of more frantic war preparation moves being committed by the enemy recently and maintain and steadily train the powerful capability to overwhelmingly respond to and contain them all the time so as to thoroughly deter the danger of a military clash on the Korean Peninsula.”

The dictator told his troops they would be “steadily intensifying various simulated drills for real war in a diverse way in different situations.”

Photos published by KCNA showed Kim supervising the exercise in the company of his roughly ten-year-old daughter Ju-ae, who made her public debut in November at the test launch of a new intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM).

Ju-ae has been seen with her father on several subsequent militaristic occasions, fueling speculation that she is being groomed as his successor. North Korean state media usually refers to the child with reverential terms like “respected” and “beloved” that are typically used for Communist personality cults.

North Korea’s dictators have been exclusively male so far, but Kim’s sister Kim Yo-jong is unusually prominent and powerful, suggesting that some weird tyrannical version of “breaking the glass ceiling” might be in Ju-ae’s future. The major reason cited for skepticism is that Kim Jong-un’s secretive family is rumored to include a male child older than Ju-ae.

The North Koreans probably simulated an attack on an airfield because this week, the U.S. and South Korea practiced speed-launching their aircraft in a drill that was intended to show Pyongyang that it cannot destroy airfields fast enough to keep the alliance from launching its planes. The North Koreans complained this drill was provocative and fired at least 30 rounds of artillery near the border to express their anger.

North Korea’s hyperventilation about “frantic war preparations” by its enemies was likely a reference to Freedom Shield and War Shield, a pair of major joint U.S.-South Korean exercises that will begin on Monday. 

The exercises are meant to demonstrate the “high level of readiness” maintained by American and South Korean forces. North Korea routinely accuses the U.S. of using such exercises to rehearse an invasion, or perhaps even launch one under the guise of conducting a drill.

Pyongyang may also be irritated by predictions that the United States will use an informal meeting of the U.N. Security Council next week to highlight human rights abuses in North Korea. 

The U.S. and Albania, an elected Security Council member that is co-hosting the meeting, circulated a note teasing that the meeting would discuss how North Korea’s human rights violations are “directly linked to the country’s unlawful weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missile programs.”

“The DPRK [North Korean] government has increased efforts to suppress fundamental freedoms and the free flow of information, with reports of thousands of new arrests and harsh imprisonments. Today, a total of 80,000 to 120,000 political prisoners are reported to be in prison in the DPRK,” the note said.