Since it was the first thing I heard when my radio alarm went off this morning, let’s get the blaring international news headline out of the way first… South Korea says it exchanged fire with North at border. (CNN)

In an escalation of the tense situation in the region, North and South Korea exchanged fire over their heavily fortified border on Thursday, the South Korean Defense Ministry said.

South Korea detected a projectile, assumed to be a small rocket, that was fired toward the western province of Gyeonggi, a South Korean Defense Ministry official told CNN.

The South Korean military responded by firing a few dozen shells at the area from which the North Korean projectile was fired, the official said.

So it’s technically true that the Koreans “exchanged fire” across the border. The reality is that the Norks lobbed one short range missile across the DMZ and the South fired off some artillery shells in the dark in the general direction of where the missile came from. And then it stopped. I’m not saying this is a good thing or that it’s not worth monitoring, but it’s also not quite on par with an actual invasion or the launch of some tactical weapons.

In reality, this is probably just more of the same grumbling and rumbling that’s been going on for weeks amid charges that the Norks have planted new land mines in the DMZ and as the North continues to complain about the joint military exercises between the South and the United States. (VICE News)

The US and South Korea launched a joint-military exercise on Monday, ignoring a string of threats from North Korea that the planned action would provoke the “strongest military counter-action.”

As the exercise began, however, North Korea did not hazard a military response — instead it began to play propaganda messages over high-decibel loudspeakers at the North-South border. South Korea had already started broadcasting similar messages last week.

Let’s be honest… if one short range shell which apparently landed nowhere near anything of value is their “strongest military counter-action” we might not have all that much to worry about. We’ve had plenty of military assessments of North Korea in recent years which show that they are, with two exceptions, largely a paper tiger. The exceptions are very real, of course. They have a more than one million man standing army which would make them something of a nightmare to invade in a conventional warfare situation. Plus, they do have some nukes of indeterminate quality and have been working on some long range missiles which may or may not make it out of view from the shoreline. Still, nukes are nukes and you can’t ignore that.

But the country is essentially broke and most of the bluster produced by their Dear Leader is strictly for domestic consumption. Their jets rarely if ever leave the ground because they don’t have any fuel. Their tanks are far out of date with limited firepower and insufficient armor. And as impressive as their army may be, it’s widely doubted that they could sustain the supply lines to take them anyplace or even keep them fed. As far as their technical capabilities, they may be best summed up in this 2013 report where the Wall Street Journal’s Tom Gara tweeted, “North Korea appears to have crossed a dangerous threshold and developed a fully-functioning calculator.”

So, yes… there were a couple of shots fired. Just as there were in 2010. But I don’t think it’s time to hit the panic button just yet.