Publication of the 2022 Defense White Paper New Moon
In the first defense white paper of the Yoon Seok-yeol administration, which will be published next month, the expression defining the North Korean regime and the North Korean military as ‘enemies’ will be revived for the first time in six years.
According to officials from the Ministry of National Defense on the 6th, the draft of the ‘2022 Defense White Paper’ contained the expression ‘the North Korean regime and the North Korean military are our enemies’. If this expression is finalized, it will revive the expression that defined the North Korean system as an enemy, just like the Lee Myung-bak and Park Geun-hye administrations. In the 2018 and 2020 defense white papers published by the Moon Jae-in administration, the expression ‘We consider forces that threaten and infringe on sovereignty, land, people, and property as our enemies’ has been replaced. The Defense White Paper is published every two years and contains major achievements in the defense sector and future policy directions.
It was already predicted by Yoon Seok-yeol’s Presidential Transition Committee that the expression “enemies” be included in the draft of the defense white paper. In the ‘110 State Affairs Tasks’ announced on May 3, the Transition Committee said, “We are reviewing a plan to specify it in the defense white paper so that we can clearly recognize that the North Korean regime and North Korean army are our enemies.” Since then, the military has distributed the contents of ‘the North Korean army and the North Korean regime are our enemies’ in the textbook for military personnel. The defense white paper also contains the same expression as the military mental force textbook.
The concept of the main enemy was stated in the 1995-1996 Defense White Paper at the time of the Kim Young-sam administration, “While North Korea does not give up its existing strategy against the South, it does not stop deploying offensive units, strengthening its military mobilization posture, and conducting operations against the South to form a united front. Considering the facts, North Korea is assumed as the main enemy.” This expression was changed to ‘direct military threat’ in the Defense White Paper in 2004, and ‘direct and serious threat’ was used in 2008, the first year of the Lee Myung-bak administration. However, from the 2010 Defense White Paper, the expression ‘the North Korean regime and the North Korean military are enemies’ appeared.
According to an official from the Ministry of National Defense, it has not yet been confirmed whether the 2022 defense white paper will express ‘North Korea as the main enemy’. President Yoon Seok-yeol also posted on social media that “the main enemy is North Korea” immediately after North Korea’s ballistic missile launch in early January, when he was a presidential candidate.
Meanwhile, the North Korean military intentionally violated the 9/19 inter-Korean military agreement by launching dozens of artillery shots into the East Sea maritime buffer zone on the same day following the previous day under the pretext of the ROK-US joint artillery shooting drill in Cheorwon-gun, Gangwon-do. A spokesman for the North Korean Army’s General Staff said on the same day, “Since yesterday (5th), the enemy has again fired multiple rocket launchers and howitzers in the vicinity of the frontline from around 9:15 today.” “I gave the order to open fire,” he claimed.
In response, the South Korean military refuted that “the ROK-US artillery firing drill is a normal multi-launch rocket and K9 firing drill unrelated to the inter-Korean agreement,” and announced that the drill was carried out as planned that day as well. This artillery fire by North Korea is the first in about a month since it fired about 80 rounds into the East Sea buffer zone in the area of Geumgang County, Gangwon Province on the 3rd of last month.
Correspondent Kang Guk-jin