SEOUL, July 31 (AJP) - North Korea declared Friday that armed conflict on the Korean Peninsula is no longer a question of whether but of when, denouncing a personnel buildup at the US military command in Japan as proof that Washington is preparing for war in the region.
The statement came days after Lt. Gen. Stephen Jost, commander of US Forces Japan, disclosed in an interview with Japan's Asahi Shimbun published Saturday that his headquarters had added 215 personnel over the past year. The increase is part of a multiphase restructuring, launched in 2025 and scheduled to conclude in spring 2028, that is turning the command from an alliance management body into what US officials describe as a warfighting headquarters.
Pyongyang's official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said in a commentary that the buildup shows the command "is transforming into a 'war command' in both name and substance." The state-operated news agency said the reorganization's "sinister intention lies in using Japan's 'Self-Defense Forces' as shock troops and a core combat force for an all-out war in the Asia-Pacific region in a contingency."
The commentary argued that North Korea itself would be the command's first objective. "Given that US Forces Japan is the core reinforcement the United States would send to South Korea first in a contingency on the Korean Peninsula, it is an undeniable fact that the primary target of this 'war command' is none other than our republic," it said.
KCNA then delivered its starkest line. "As the enemies themselves have admitted, a physical clash on the Korean Peninsula today has clearly been defined not as a question of possibility, of whether it will happen or not, but as a question of time, of when it will happen," the commentary said.
The wording echoed Jost's own remarks in the same Asahi Shimbun interview, in which he said the region must prepare "on the premise of not whether a crisis will occur, but when."
The commentary also aimed recent allied military activity. It cited the Combined Joint Sustainment Training exercise conducted by the South Korea-US Combined Forces Command from July 13 to 16, using the epithet "South Korean puppet military gangsters" to describe the South's armed forces. It further pointed to an agreement by the top military officers of South Korea, the United States and Japan to continue the trilateral Freedom Edge exercises and deepen three-way security cooperation.
North Korea cast those moves as justification for expanding its nuclear arsenal. "The desperate military adventurist acts of the United States are once again leading us to the irreversible conclusion that we must devote ourselves further to the ceaseless development and evolution of our self-defensive nuclear war deterrent," KCNA said.
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