Look at NorKo at night from Google Earth. No lights ANYWHERE except for the Capital. Would be very easy for a team of Seals (or several) to do a HALO jump undetected. If this General is not busted and charged with treason then Zero authorized it.
"South Korea is bright, North Korea is dark. This amazing image is included in the standard US Department of Defense briefings on North Korea. It was mentioned in a news briefing on 23 December 2002 by Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, who stated that "If you look at a picture from the sky of the Korean Peninsula at night, South Korea is filled with lights and energy and vitality and a booming economy; North Korea is dark."
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/dprk/dprk-dark.htm
>Would be very easy for a team of Seals (or several) to do a HALO jump undetected.
Except for the fact that HALO is rarely done as it is in no way “easy.”
It is dangerous, takes a LOT of prep work and I consider it an absolutely last resort.
Infiltrating NK with Americans would be unbelievably stupid - on the order of total insanity.
The many risks and downsides would be enormous & the upside far too limited
Perhaps. But, unless this is a suicide mission, how do you extract the troops once they completed their task? A parachute jump is a one-way path.
Any such action, if discovered - or even if admitted to - would be an act of war even if no shots were fired. NK is anxious to get a casus belli on their side. NK is currently (as usual) in bad shape, with drought reported. Kim-in-Charge may run out of his own people in a few years, so he may want to attack someone, anyone, just because otherwise he'd be all alone in North Korea, surrounded by dead bodies and ideas of Juche.
People posted night maps of NK. It is indeed dark. However this doesn't tell anything about the radars and other ways of watching the skies and the land. In fact, light on the ground is not helping you at all. Those HALO jumpers may be jumping right into a prison camp and they wouldn't know it. You cannot see a weak light, such as a kerosene lantern, from a weather satellite. Bright light spots on the ground are cities - places where megawatts of power are burned. Night lighting of a military base can be all under 100W. Infrared lighting of security zones, along with night vision goggles, is the way to go.
My personal opinion is that no jumps were done; if there are reconnaissance missions afoot, they are conducted in a smarter way. For example, $10 passed to a local man can do more than a platoon of US soldiers. Foreign soldiers would be very hard to mistake for North Koreans - at least because they are not fainting from hunger, let alone their language, skin color, and other differences.