How North and South Korean Militaries Compare

Just weeks into 2024, the new year has 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 bellicose 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 hand-in-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, with more than 3 million in reserve.

By other conventional markers, too, Pyongyang surpasses Seoul. It has 71 submarines to Seoul’s 19. It has more than 3,500 main battle tanks compared with the 2,149 of the Republic of Korea. North Korea has tested nuclear bombs, while South Korea does not have nuclear weapons.

Yet it’s not the full story. Much of North Korea’s conventional equipment is older, Soviet-era gear and a far cry from the sophisticated technological capabilities wielded by Seoul, not least with its airpower, Yeo told Newsweek.

But in the event of a conventional war between the two states, “the assumption is that the South Koreans would be able to hold their own,” even without the U.S. alliance, Yeo said.

North Korea’s military, for all its volume, lacks the breadth of training experience South Korea has gained through military exercises with the likes of the U.S., Yeo said. Less than two weeks ago, the U.S. finished joint drills with South Korea and Japan featuring a U.S. carrier strike group, designed to “further build on our capabilities as a combined force,” the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command said.

“It’s really about not just the numbers, but the quality of the armaments and the capabilities,” Yeo said.

The ballistic missile tests are among the greatest sources of concern for Seoul, Washington and Tokyo. Kim has focused on building up Pyongyang’s conventional armed capabilities and forged ahead with nuclear testing and domestic missile development since he rose to power, the U.S. DIA has said.

Testing spiked in 2022, and continued, albeit at a reduced pace, in 2023, Yeo said.

The new year has proved no different, with the latest ballistic missile test showing “the destabilizing impact of the DPRK’s illicit weapons program,” the U.S. military said on January 14, referring to North Korea by its full title, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

Pyongyang is also upgrading its equipment, and may have Russian help to do so as it plugs away with advancing its weapons delivery systems—an area to which North Korea is paying particular attention, Yeo said.

North Korea carried out a test of an “underwater nuclear weapons system,” the country’s state media reported this month. The test of the purported nuclear naval drone was a response to the joint naval drills carried out by the U.S., South Korea and Japan, Pyongyang said.

In September, North Korea said it had debuted its first “tactical nuclear attack submarine,” able to carry and launch nuclear weapons. There is some doubt among Western analysts about the submarine’s true capabilities.

Pyongyang said in late 2023 it would “further accelerate war preparations” in the face of “unprecedented anti-DPRK [North Korea] confrontation maneuvers of the U.S. and its vassal forces.”

North Korea has also launched a spy satellite, and committed to putting several more into orbit this year.