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North Korea Case Study

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North Korea (NK) is the greatest Hybrid Threat (HT) to the United States (US) because of NK’s capability of employing missiles, cyber-attacks, criminal elements, Special Operations Forces (SOF), and conventional forces (CF) to create scalable challenges at the strategic, operational and tactical levels. Training Circular 7-100 defines HT as, “the diverse and dynamic combination of regular, irregular, and terrorist forces, criminal elements, or a combination of those forces and elements all unified to achieve mutually benefitting effects.” NK can create strategic diversions, challenges, and deterrence through the threat of development and/or use of its WMD/missile program. NK can use missile threats on US territories to provoke offensive …show more content…

Contrary to the US, NK would not be impacted by the loss of GPS. NK uses GLONASS (Russia) or Beidou (Chinese) positioning systems, which could pose as a jamming and or hacking challenge for the US. Because of the US’s military desiring to have interoperability between US military equipment and personnel, fighting in a hybrid threat environment could be an issue, due to connectivity issues. NK’s most effective time for conducting cyber-attack operations would be during an American offensive into NK. This would allow NK’s military to execute an element of surprise against the US’s CF. NK’s effectiveness of executing missile test and cyber-attacks, operationally combined with NK’s money counterfeit and laundering activities is a threat to the US’s financial and security infrastructures. Given 10 years unchecked, NK’s global money counterfeit and laundering activities have the potential of making US sanctions against missile proliferation irrelevant. Reporting indicates that “NK is the only government in the world known to run a counterfeit money operation as a matter of state policy.”9 SK’s intelligence analysts report that

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