Pentagon: North Korean threats will ‘achieve nothing’

Pyongyang upped the ante in its ongoing war of words with Washington on Monday, when North Korea ordered the country’s rocket and long-range artillery units to home in on U.S. and South Korean targets in the region, recent reports state. 

{mosads}Putting those forces on full alert is only the latest effort by North Korean leader Kim Jong Un to “raise tensions” with Seoul and United States, DOD press secretary George Little said Monday. 

North Korea has repeatedly violated United Nations sanctions and roiled the international community with its missile and nuclear tests.

“Their rhetoric has been too high,” Little said regarding the country’s recent sabre-rattling. “It doesn’t help anyone.”

That said, Monday’s aggressive attempt to possibly goad U.S. forces into a regional conflict is increasingly setting the stage to “go to a place where no one wants to go,” Little told reporters at the Pentagon. 

The regime’s arsenal of long-range rockets and artillery presents more of an immediate threat to U.S. and South Korean forces, given the maturity of those weapons compared to North Korea’s nuclear program, and their proximity to targets in and around Seoul. 

Little declined to comment on how tangible the rocket and mortar threat against potential targets inside U.S. Forces-Korea might be, saying the Pentagon’s concern over North Korean aggression extends across the “full range” of the country’s arsenal. 

That threat is only heightened by Kim’s decision earlier this month to terminate the 1953 armistice with South Korea that ended the Korean War.

In response, regional commanders with U.S. Forces-Korea have continued patrol flights of B-52 heavy bombers — which are capable of carrying nuclear and non-nuclear weapons — in the skies above South Korea, Little said. 

The most recent flight took place on Monday, with previous missions flown as part of as part of the annual Foal Eagle military exercise between American and South Korean forces in early March. 

Little declined to comment on whether the heavy bomber used during Monday’s flight was armed with either nuclear or conventional weapons. 

Washington and Seoul also recently inked a new “Counter-Provocation plan, which is designed to increase cooperation between the two militaries at the “strategic, operational and tactical” level, Little said. 

Outside of that plan, U.S. commanders in Korea are also working to improve the command and control operations within the South Korean military, presumably in preparation for the worst-case scenario of a regional conflict breaking out on the peninsula. 

Little would not go so far as to say those efforts constituted a full-fledged war plan for South Korea, but characterized the plans as another step in the “long standing collaborative effort” between both countries. 

“We take everything … [North Korea] does seriously,” Little said, adding that while Seoul might not have the authority to launch a preemptive strike against Pyongyang, it does have “an inherent right to self defense … if attacked.”