The U.S. Eighth Army’s ATACMS is launched on the east coast on July 29, 2017, as South Korea and the United States conduct a joint missile exercise in response to North Korea’s firing of yet another intercontinental ballistic missile the previous day, in this photo released by South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff. The ATACMS, or the Army Tactical Missile System, is a surface-to-surface missile that has a range of 300 km. (Yonhap)

It is pretty clear that the Kim regime is signaling to the US that they can launch an ICBM at any time and any place of their choosing with the midnight launch of their latest ICBM:

North Korea’s state-run television on Saturday disclosed edited footage of its test-fire of an intercontinental range ballistic missile conducted the previous night.

According to the video footage that runs 2 1/2 minutes, the Hwasong-14 missile was moved on a transport erector launcher, known as a TEL, before being fired from a ground-based launch pad.

The method of launch was similar to one disclosed in separate TV footage released on July 5 following North Korea’s first intercontinental range ballistic missile launch.

Earlier, Pyongyang’s official KCNA claimed that the North successfully launched another intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) Friday night following its first test in early July, noting that the missile flew 998 kilometers for about 47 minutes into the East Sea after reaching a maximum altitude of 3,724.9 km.

In the footage unveiled by Korean Central Television, a TEL with eight wheels on each side drove slowly to the launch pad in Mupyong-ri in the country’s northern province of Jagang, carrying the Hwasong-14 missile aboard.

The missile was then placed upon the ground-based launcher and erected to an upright position.  [Yonhap]

You can read more at the link and below is a Youtube video showing the launch of Hwasong 14:

A US admiral makes a point about the US military being under civilian control of the military and of course the media runs with sensational headlines such as “If Trump Asked, We’d Nuke China Next Week,’ Says U.S. Navy Fleet Commander”.  The Pacific Fleet Commander probably should have been more careful in his wording considering the pathetically poor state of journalism in the United States currently:

But the head of the largest fleet in the U.S. Navy, Admiral Scott Swift, was quick to swear his loyalty to the commander-in-chief Thursday, to the point that the admiral said he would hypothetically follow the president’s orders to launch a nuclear missile at China.

“The answer would be: yes,” said Swift, the commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, when asked a question during an Australian National University security conference in the Australian capital, Canberra, the AP reported.

Swift made no suggestion that any such order had been given, but seemed to make the remark in the context of underscoring the U.S. military’s oath of allegiance to whoever holds the office of the president of the United States.  [Newsweek]

Really Newsweek do you have to add the statement “Swift made no suggestion that any such order had been given…”  I would think we would be at a state of war with China before any order to nuke the country was given.  Reading the various media articles on this topic almost seems like the media wanted Admiral Swift to say he would not follow President Trump’s orders

I tend to slightly disagree with the USFK commander here.  I think the Kim regime wants to create a wedge in the US-ROK alliance which in turn creates a wedge between the ROK and Japan.  These are both goals I think Russia and China are fully supportive of and why they continue to support the Kim regime:

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un is attempting to deter unity between South Korea, the U.S., China, Russia and Japan with a string of belligerent acts, the top American military commander here said Thursday.

Gen. Vincent K. Brooks, who commands U.S. Forces Korea (USFK), pointed out that the communist regime’s nearly weekly missile tests have become “the new normal.”

The North test-fired 28 ballistic missiles in 2016 alone, followed by 10 others this year, including what is believed to be an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM).

It’s also reportedly preparing for another missile launch in the coming days, although there was no report of a launch on Thursday, the 64th anniversary of the Korean War Armistice Agreement.

“His actions intend to sow friction and fissures among the five in order to prevent them from coming together as a cohesive block,” Brooks said, addressing a forum under way in Nebraska, a U.S. state, according to the USFK’s website.

The two-day symposium on deterrence is being hosted by the U.S. Strategic Command.

“He’s trying to prevent the creation of a closed fist against him,” the commander said, showing the five fingers of his hand to refer to the five countries involved in the now-suspended denuclearization talks with Pyongyang.  [Yonhap]

You can read more at the link.

I will wait to hear what the US military releases publicly about how successful the warhead for this ICBM was before I believe anything the Kim regime puts out:

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un said Saturday the second flight test of an intercontinental ballistic missile demonstrated his country can hit the U.S. mainland, hours after the launch left analysts concluding that a wide swath of the United States, including Los Angeles and Chicago, is now in range of North Korean weapons.

The Korean Central News Agency said that Kim expressed “great satisfaction” after the Hwasong-14 missile reached a maximum height of 3,725 kilometers (2,314 miles) and traveled 998 kilometers (620 miles) before accurately landing in waters off Japan. The agency said that the test was aimed at confirming the maximum range and other technical aspects of the missile it says was capable of delivering a “large-sized, heavy nuclear warhead.”

Analysts had estimated that the North’s first ICBM on July 4 could have reached Alaska, and said that the latest missile appeared to extend that range significantly.

Immediately after the launch, U.S. and South Korean forces conducted live-fire exercises. South Korean Defense Minister Song Young-moo called for the deployment of strategic U.S. military assets — which usually means stealth bombers and aircraft carriers — as well as additional launchers of an advanced U.S. anti-missile system.

Japanese government spokesman Yoshihide Suga said the missile, launched late Friday night, flew for about 45 minutes — about five minutes longer than the first. The missile was launched on very high trajectory, which limited the distance it traveled, and landed west of Japan’s island of Hokkaido.

The KCNA quoted Kim as saying that the launch reaffirmed the reliability of the country’s ICBM system and an ability to fire at “random regions and locations at random times” with the “entire” U.S. mainland now within range. The agency said that the test confirmed important features of the missile system, such as the proper separation of the warhead and controlling its movement and detonation after atmospheric re-entry.  [Associated Press]

You can read more at the link, but if the Moon administration is now asking for the deployment of the four additional THAAD launchers doesn’t this mean that the current delay is entirely political?  The supposed environmental concerns delaying the emplacement of the four launchers doesn’t just go away after North Korea tests an ICBM unless there was never any serious environmental concerns in the first place.

This @nknewsorg story seems a teeeeny bit premature: Five North Korean cities that could boom after unification https://t.co/beZ00a0A12 pic.twitter.com/8Th2cri6WF

— Anna Fifield (@annafifield) July 27, 2017

President Moon Jae-in (C), Korea Chamber of Commerce and Industry chief Park Yong-maan (6th from L), and other business leaders toast with beers during their meeting at the presidential office Cheong Wa Dae in Seoul on July 27, 2017. Moon promised to continue holding frequent discussions with the country’s top business leaders on issues that may affect their businesses. (Yonhap)

It will be interesting to see if any of these ex-aids of President Park were flipped to give evidence against her?  These sentences makes me think that if the prosecutors cannot get President Park on the Samsung corruption charges then maybe they will convict her for knowing about this “cultural blacklist” her aides were running:

A former top aide of ousted president Park Geun-hye was sentenced to three years in jail on Thursday for running a list of culture figures critical of the government that barred them from state support.

The Seoul Central District Court doled out the sentence to former presidential chief of staff Kim Ki-choon after finding him guilty of abuse of power and perjury.

But Cho Yoon-sun, who served as the culture minister under the Park administration, was acquitted of her charges related to the so-called cultural blacklist and was released from prison after the court gave her a one-year jail term suspended for two years. The court found her guilty only of lying before the parliament at a hearing on the blacklist scandal last year.

The special counsel team investigating the case demanded seven years in prison for Kim and six years for Cho in the final hearing on July 3.

Kim’s lawyers immediately vowed to appeal the ruling, calling it “unjust.”

The court also sentenced five other former ranking government officials to 18 months to two years in jail, with some on probation, for their involvement in creating and managing the blacklist.

Former culture minister Kim Jong-deok was sentenced to two years in prison, while former presidential education and culture senior secretary Kim Sang-ryul was handed an 18-month imprisonment. Former presidential culture and sports secretary Kim So-young was given 18 months in jail, suspended for two years.

Former vice culture minister Chung Kwan-joo and ex-presidential aide Shin Dong-churl were sentenced to one year and a half in jail each.

The artist blacklist is part of a massive corruption scandal that removed Park from office in March. Kim and Cho were indicted in February for masterminding the creation of a register of nearly 10,000 artists, writers and filmmakers deemed unfriendly to the conservative administration. Those on the list were denied state subsidies. The accused have maintained their innocence.  [Yonhap]

You can read more at the link.

US diplomat Tom Malinowski has a good read in Politico that is long but worth reading which includes a number of ideas I have advocated for over the years:

At my Senate confirmation hearing a few years ago, I made a promise to the panel deciding my fate: never to use the phrase “there are no good options.” After all, if there were obvious solutions to the hardest—and most interesting—problems we face in the world, they would already have been found. Our job in the U.S. government—I served in the State Department as an assistant secretary focused on human rights—was not to make excuses in such situations, but to use whatever inherently limited tools we had to try to make things better, and to avoid making them worse.

North Korea tests this proposition like nothing else. Since its latest provocative missile test, thoughtful observers have pointed out that neither sanctions nor diplomacy are likely to dissuade Kim Jong Un from deploying nuclear weapons that can reach the United States, that we cannot depend on China to stop him for us, but that the alternative of a military strike on North Korea could cause a war that would lay waste to our ally South Korea. When it comes to North Korea, the phrase “there are no good options” has become a mantra.  [Politico]

Here is the part I have been advocating for, for many years, to aggressively fight the information war within North Korea:

Flood the zone with information: In the last year of the Obama administration, we increased our funding for getting information to North Koreans. But the State Department still allocates less then $3 million for this effort, and the Trump administration’s first budget request did not mention it. Congress should work with the administration to create a well-funded, dedicated program. The State Department should also continue efforts we began under Obama to enlist like-minded allies in Europe and Asia to back these efforts, and tech companies to find creative ways for North Koreans to share information safely. More funding should also go to scholarships for North Korean defectors, so that they will be ready to help their people if the North opens up.

Many North Korean defectors have said that they decision to defect was influenced by defector radio stations.  Kang Chol-hwan who wrote the book Aquariums of Pyongyang is probably the most famous defector who said defector radio influenced his decision to leave North Korea.

The proliferation of USB and other media devices to bring in South Korean entertainment programming is another way the information war is being fought within North Korea.

Also as we have seen over the years nothing seems to infuriate the Kim regime more than the balloon launches from North Korean defectors.  This fury is a sign that the anti-regime information smuggled into North Korea via these balloon launches is having an effect.  The Kim regime even tried to assassinate the man behind the balloon launches to get them to stop.

Could you imagine what the regime’s reaction would be if cheap drones were developed that could beam down the Internet and television programming into North Korea?  Imagine the resources the Kim regime would have to dedicate to combat this threat?  That is why I think flooding the country with as much subversive information as possible will keep the regime on its heels and have to use many of its limited resources to combat it.

However the big question is if fighting the information war is enough to collapse the Kim regime?  There is no silver bullet to ending the Kim family’s rule of North Korea which is why I think fighting the information war is not something that can singularly collapse the regime.  It has to be part of a more comprehensive strategy which it seems no US administration has fully developed yet.

This shouldn’t come as any surprise considering the main reason for the Kim regime’s pursuit of nuclear weapons is to prevent regime change:

North Korea will launch a nuclear strike at the heart of the United States if Americans attempt a regime change in Pyongyang, the North’s state news agency said Tuesday in denunciation of recent remarks by the Central Intelligence Agency director.

In a forum last week, Mike Pompeo, the chief of the U.S. intelligence agency, alluded to the possibility of a regime change in North Korea by saying that the most important thing the U.S. can do is “separate (nuclear) capacity and someone who might well have (nuclear) intent and break those two apart.”

“Should the U.S. dare to show even the slightest sign of attempt to remove our supreme leadership, we will strike a merciless blow at the heart of the U.S. with our powerful nuclear hammer, honed and hardened over time,” the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said, quoting a spokesman of the North Korean foreign ministry.

The report said Pompeo’s remarks “have gone over the line, and it has now become clear that the ultimate aim of the Trump administration … is the regime change.”  [Yonhap]

You can read more at the link.