While North Korea once nearly conquered the South in just a few weeks, today its military has no hope of defeating the much wealthier and more populous southern neighbor let alone do so while fighting off U.S. forces.
It is all about the nuclear weapons and artillery aimed at Seoul.
Key point: Pyongyang knows how to act scary and how to build nukes. Combine those two things and no one really would want to fight North Korea.
The Kim dynasty in North Korea has given its military a formidable task maintaining a threat posture towards it dramatically wealthier neighbor to the south, which also happens to be allied to the greatest military power on the planet. It’s estimated that North Korea spends only between six and ten billion dollars annually on a defense. That amount is over two orders of magnitude less than the United States does. But that spending amounts to roughly twenty five percent of North Korea’s GDP, compared to between 3.5 percent for the United States.