The South Korean government is launching a PR offensive prior to any possible North Korean missile test:

A computer screen inside the lobby of the 121st Fighter Squadron of the Korean Air Force tracks every aircraft in the air over the Korean peninsula. Two yellow images flash over North Korea. Twenty or so green images show South Korean aircraft in flight, and another dozen blue images glimmer where American warplanes are flying.

South Korean pilots, averaging six or seven hours a week in the air, say their North Korean counterparts, flying older model MiGs, are lucky to fly once or twice a month.

“I scramble a lot,” says Cpt. Yang Jung Hwan, showing off his F16, perched in front of one of more than 100 revetements for aircraft here. “The North Koreans don’t fly a lot, but if they come close, we have to scramble.”

Captain Yang says he makes sure not to get too near the North Korean border, about 100 miles from here, and he’s never actually seen a North Korean plane. He’s supremely confident, though, of South Korea’s ability to discourage any designs the North might have of risking another shooting war.

As North Korean technicians load a long-range Taepodong-2 rocket onto the launching pad this week – in keeping with their plans to fire it between April 4 and April 8 – South Korean forces are putting on an extraordinary display of bravado.

The decision to provide a detailed tour of this normally closed, super-sensitive air base – and a separate look at South Korea’s largest naval base at the port of Pyongtaek, 30 miles up the coast – testifies to the South’s defiant response to a torrent of recent rhetoric.  [Christian Science Monitor]

Here is what I found most interesting about the article:

At the naval base, Lt. Cmdr. Kim Tae-ho says “the rules of engagement” have changed since North Koreans attacked South Korean vessels in the West, or Yellow, Sea in June 1999 and again in June 2002.

“We could not fire first at that time,” says Commander Kim. “Now we can fire a warning shot.”

On a slope at the naval base, looking over the West Sea, is a monument to the six sailors killed in the 2002 engagement.

Beneath the slope is the patrol boat that North Koreans fired on, the bullet holes circled in red to show the damage. Displaying the ship like a wounded hero, South Koreans say their forces sank a North Korean vessel, killing approximately 30 of the enemy, during the 25-minute battle.  (…..)

The pilots at this air base, the largest in South Korea, don’t worry about the Taepodong-2 missile, poised to fly east over Japan, but are on increased alert for a repetition of the 1999 and 2002 attacks.

It is good to see that the ROK Navy continues to honor the memory of those sailors killed by North Korean ambushes especially since the prior Korean governments treated these deceased sailors as if they were criminals for defending South Korean territory.  The persecution of these sailors memories was so bad that the wife of one deceased sailor fled to the US.

It is also good to see that the ROK military is taking the threat of a North Korean retaliation in response to anyone shooting down their missile very seriously, especially along the Northern Limit Line which is most obvious place the North Koreans may try to cause trouble at.