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The South Korean military’s failure to identify a small wooden boat carrying four North Korean defectors to Sokcho Port in Gangwon Province on Tuesday until a fisher reported the vessel has been lambasted as a failure of security operations.

This criticism is valid in that the military was unable to accurately identify both when the boat crossed the Northern Limit Line (NLL) in the East Sea and the route it took, and Army radar only picked up the boat’s location after the boat reached 34 kilometers south of the NLL.

Military officials explained that given the operational environment in the East Sea and the Navy and Army’s maritime and coastal alert system, a “watertight perimeter” is something impossible to achieve.

On account of its many isles, the waters to the west of the peninsula can be closely guarded and monitored by troops and equipment dispatched on those islands, but the eastern coast has almost no isles, and the NLL is around 404 kilometers long.

Their claim is that this environment would make it difficult for the military to detect a small, 7.5-meter-long vessel after it goes out to further waters only to come back in to cross the NLL.

The military also has argued that with limited surveillance assets, they must select and focus on targets that pose a real threat to the coast.

In response, Democratic Party lawmaker Kim Byung-joo, a former Army general, criticized the claims as “ridiculous” in an interview on the MBC radio program “Kim Jong-bae’s Focus” on Wednesday. “This was a failure of security operations and a failure of joint [air, land and naval] operations,” he went on.

The controversy regarding the failure of surveillance is a case of the Yoon administration being hoisted by its own petard.

Since its inauguration in May 2022, the Yoon administration has accused its predecessor, the Moon Jae-in administration, of dismantling the government’s alert system towards North Korea, while boasting that the current administration is maintaining a “firm combat position” which enables Seoul to “immediately respond to any threat” from North Korea.

The idea of responding to every threat from North Korea at a hundred percent corresponds to the concept of “absolute national security” whereby security is achieved through overwhelming superiority of force. But this is an unrealistic goal.

However, the Yoon administration has raised the expectations of the public in its PR war against Moon, ultimately leading to this eruption of controversy over a lack of vigilance.

It is also worth noting the process of reporting the journey of the North Korean defectors. The first report came from the Chosun Ilbo at 8:30 am on Tuesday. A fisher spotted the North Korean fishing boat and reported it to the Coast Guard at around 7:10 am, and the military and Coast Guard responded and secured the four North Koreans around 8 am.

Sensitive information was sent to the Chosun Ilbo in almost real time. Among the reporters covering the story, there was speculation that the administration saw the defection of a family of North Koreans by sea as a sign that the North Korean regime was faltering, and tried to create discourse focusing on the instability of the North Korean regime by leaking it directly to the Chosun Ilbo.

However, the public and media coverage instead turned their attention to the security failure that the story represented. Far from exposing the supposed fragility of the North Korean system, this failure of alertness has blown up in the Yoon administration’s face.

Concerns about the politicization of security have grown so much that reporters at the Ministry of National Defense are joking that it wasn’t the military’s alert system that failed, but the presidential office’s public relations system.

By Kwon Hyuk-chul, staff reporter

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]