Military Failing to Gather Intelligence on North

Surveillance equipment in both the Geumgang and Baedu projects, which play a pivotal role in gathering intelligence on North Korea, is not functioning properly. It has been collecting mostly useless “spam” information, according to military experts.

Therefore, the military cannot help but rely heavily on the U.S. forces in Korea to collect intelligence on North Korea, such as signs of developing nuclear weapons and patterns of troop mobilization. Military experts also point out that once the ROK-U.S. Combined Forces Command (CFC) is dismantled in 2012, South Korea is likely to have loopholes in gathering intelligence on North Korea.

An enormous amount of money has been injected into the two projects to maintain and repair the equipment since the two projects were introduced five years ago. Experts believe that the projects, which caused controversy from the beginning over suspicions of lobbying, will additionally require hundreds of millions of dollars to improve performance.

The Geumgang project was launched to capture visual information up to Pyongyang (80 kilometers from the military demarcation line).

However, although the military claimed, “Once the project is completed, objects the size of a soccer ball size will be able to be recognized,” in reality, only objects bigger than five-meters can be identified, multiple military sources said.

The performance of the Geumgang project has been very poor because at first it introduced the wrong aircraft to mount its surveillance equipment on. The surveillance devices of the Geumgang project should be loaded onto reconnaissance planes flying at high speed and high altitude. However, the Hawker 800XP, which was used, can fly only at a low speed and a low altitude.

Ahead of introducing the Baekdu project aiming to collect sound information, the special evaluation team of the military pointed out that the performance of its surveillance equipment does not meet requirements in 12 out of 23 items the military requested. However, there has been no improvement on 12 items so far, according to a military source.

The transmission of data from the reconnaissance aircraft to operational units is frequently disconnected, and it is hard to figure out the exact location of signals, as the accuracy in detecting their direction is low.

Moreover, some of the four reconnaissance airplanes of the Baekdu project have had problems in carrying out missions since the project was launched in 2002, sources said.

Therefore, although reconnaissance flights had been scheduled 24 hours a day, only one reconnaissance airplane goes out on surveys four hours a day.

According to a military source, $68 million was spent in 2002, the first year of the projects, for repairs, and an additional $70 million dollars was spent to build a repair garage since 2003.

The source also added that if all the maintenance and repair costs of the two projects are added up, it would be similar to the budget spent on initiating the Baekdu project ($230 million).

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