Interesting claim. Do you have anything to support it?
Nothing directly, but it's the logical inference from what we do know. Information is incredibly tightly controlled in North Korea. People are constantly bombarded with propaganda not just about how good Kim is and how evil we are, but also how strong they are and how pathetic and weak we are. Do a
google search and you can see some examples of the message the regime is trying to create. Or for an example I found particularly useful for illuminating the reality inversion that goes on, this
article claims that North Korea tells its people that food aid shipments are really reparations that the US sends to North Korea because we're
scared of them.
Totalitarian regimes always need to create a fictitious reality in order to survive. And in North Korea, being especially brutal, the official party line is especially removed from reality. Nothing is ever allowed to contradict that narrative. And an understanding of what we can actually do to them would most definitely contradict what they've always been told. Now, it's possible that soldiers suspect that we're much stronger than Kim says we are. Truth can leak in, often times merely under the suspicion that reality is the opposite of what is claimed.
So let's suppose that all the soldiers secretly suspect the truth (I'm sure some do, but I doubt it's all of them). That alone is likely to undermine morale significantly in the event of an actual conflict. But even if it didn't, the command and control issues remain. Because regardless of what soldiers actually know, nothing about the truth can be publicly acknowledged. Which means the military cannot train to deal with reality, because to train for it is to acknowledge it. And an army that doesn't train for how to act independently, an army that is instead always told to do exactly what your superiors tell you to do (because no totalitarian regime has ever run their army differently), won't be
able to act independently once those command structures are eliminated. Even if they know it's going to happen, that knowledge isn't enough to be effective. You need the training, you need the procedures in place, or as an organization it's all going to come apart at the seams.
