North Korea has avoided large-scale combat since 1954, but portions of its capabilities are now being updated with techniques, technology and tactics gleaned from the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Among the top threats to the government in Seoul are North Korea’s 80,000 soldiers trained in special operations and recently schooled in the employment of enhanced improvised explosive devices (IEDs) whose use was refined in the Middle East.

Pyongyang has retrained its special forces based on lessons learned from the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, says Gen. Walter Sharp, the head of United Nations Command and U.S. Forces, Korea. Operating south of the demilitarized zone, these units have been designed to create chaos early in a conflict. Such troops would be unsupportable in the long term, but U.S. intelligence officials tell Aviation Week that the intention would be for a sharp strike—much of it focused on South Korean capital Seoul’s population center—followed by an immediate offer of peace negotiations before allied retaliation is in full swing.

“What they are focused on is not necessarily conventional attack,” says Sharp. “They realize they could not win. So what other things can they hold at risk to push through the gains that they want?” Key asymmetric capabilities such as a growing ballistic-missile arsenal, cyber-attacks and a budding nuclear-weapons program “are what [North Koreans] are pushing for,” he says.

“If they are putting money into anything consistently, it’s missile technology, continued development of a nuclear capability and their special operating forces,” Sharp notes. A single missile with a weapon-of-mass-destruction warhead “can hold a lot of people at bay,” he asserts.

“We worry about cyber,” he says. “[The North Koreans] have seen the benefits of cyber and what we rely on as far as [digital] network to command and operate. They would use that for provocations and limited attacks. That’s why the [South Koreans] are standing up a cyber-command.

“The rest of the military is very old. We’re trying to get a capability in place to defend against those [missiles]. We’re also starting to work very hard to make sure we’re learning the lessons out of Iraq and Afghanistan about IEDs and other types of devices that [the North Koreans] have learned from. I am confident that their enhanced [special operations forces] units will use those capabilities.”

The huge, antiquated and barely motorized North Korean army would be savaged by allied airpower, Sharp says. Therefore, it is not considered the most imminent threat to the peninsula.

U.S. military intelligence officials say North Korean attack plans rely on infantry traveling overland by foot until they can capture South Korean civilian and military vehicles. Moreover, the narrow road corridors leading from North Korea to the south are expected to be immediately choked into immobility. Intelligence officials contend that the North Korea military has logistics for perhaps 7-10 days of campaigning. Because of such structural limitations, Pyongyang’s army, navy and air force would play a minor role in any conflict compared with North Korea’s combat use of asymmetrical capabilities, which require less visible mobilization, the officials say.

Another, more worrisome concern for the U.S. and South Korea is instability within North Korea—perhaps triggered by the death of leader Kim Jung Il or complete economic collapse—that could produce a mass exodus of refugees and vicious internal fighting among factions vying for control, Sharp says.