If you run this Google search, you’ll see that North Korean missiles suffered a monotonous series of misadventure over the last three years. In fact, you could even say that the one thing their missile tests had in common was failure. Today, thanks to the New York Times a Fifth Column and as the propaganda wing the the Obama Legacy Protection program we know why:

Three years ago, President Barack Obama ordered Pentagon officials to step up their cyber and electronic strikes against North Korea’s missile program in hopes of sabotaging test launches in their opening seconds.

Soon a large number of the North’s military rockets began to explode, veer off course, disintegrate in midair and plunge into the sea. Advocates of such efforts say they believe that targeted attacks have given American antimissile defenses a new edge and delayed by several years the day when North Korea will be able to threaten American cities with nuclear weapons launched atop intercontinental ballistic missiles.

This is insane. What possible good is served in publishing this? None. But we do get this self-serving bullsh**:

After discussions with the office of the director of national intelligence last year and in recent days with Mr. Trump’s national security team, The Times agreed to withhold details of those efforts to keep North Korea from learning how to defeat them. Last fall, Mr. Kim was widely reported to have ordered an investigation into whether the United States was sabotaging North Korea’s launches, and over the past week he has executed senior security officials.

So now, thanks to the New York Times, Kim has his answer. He no longer has to concern himself with executing and imprisoning engineers and plant managers for incompetence. He no longer has to execute security officials. He has his answer and developing the countermeasure is now merely an engineering problem.

How did this story originate? Well, let’s go to the source:

An examination of the Pentagon’s disruption effort, based on interviews with officials of the Obama and Trump administrations as well as a review of extensive but obscure public records, found that the United States still does not have the ability to effectively counter the North Korean nuclear and missile programs. Those threats are far more resilient than many experts thought, The New York Times’s reporting found, and pose such a danger that Mr. Obama, as he left office, warned President Trump that they were likely to be the most urgent problem he would confront.

The only “Trump administration official” that would have knowledge of this is James Mattis as the lower level Defense political appointee jobs are held either by Obama holdovers or civil service types. The odds of Mattis telling this to the New York Times approaches zero. The phrasing “officials of the Obama and Trump administrations” is telling because you the “and” means exactly that.

This is not an unknown problem:

Advisers to President Donald Trump are urging him to purge the government of former President Barack Obama’s political appointees and quickly install more people who are loyal to him, amid a cascade of damaging stories that have put his nascent administration in seemingly constant crisis-control mode.

A number of his advisers believe Obama officials are behind the leaks and are seeking to undermine his presidency, with just the latest example coming from reports that Attorney General Jeff Sessions met twice last year with the Russian ambassador to the U.S. and apparently misled senators about the interactions during his confirmation hearing.

The gist of this story is as follows:

Obama Inherited A Crap Sandwich From That Stupid War Criminal Bush

By the time Mr. Obama took office in January 2009, the North had deployed hundreds of short- and medium-range missiles that used Russian designs, and had made billions of dollars selling its Scud missiles to Egypt, Libya, Pakistan, Syria, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen. But it aspired to a new generation of missiles that could fire warheads over much longer distances.

Stupid War Criminal Bush’s Attempts To Thwart the Threat Were Stupid So Obama Used His Big Brain To Keep Us Safe

The decision to intensify the cyber and electronic strikes, in early 2014, came after Mr. Obama concluded that the $300 billion spent since the Eisenhower era on traditional antimissile systems, often compared to hitting “a bullet with a bullet,” had failed the core purpose of protecting the continental United States. Flight tests of interceptors based in Alaska and California had an overall failure rate of 56 percent, under near-perfect conditions. Privately, many experts warned the system would fare worse in real combat.

Obama Would Have Made the Gutsy Call To Go To War If This Had Not Worked

In the last year of his presidency, Mr. Obama often noted publicly that the North was learning from every nuclear and missile test — even the failures — and getting closer to its goal. In private, aides noticed he was increasingly disturbed by North Korea’s progress.

With only a few months left in office, he pushed aides for new approaches. At one meeting, he declared that he would have targeted the North Korean leadership and weapons sites if he thought it would work.

If Big Brain Obama Couldn’t Solve This What Chance Does Stupid Trump Have?

Mr. Trump’s aides say everything is on the table. China recently cut off coal imports from the North, but the United States is also looking at ways to freeze the Kim family’s assets, some of which are believed held in Chinese-controlled banks. The Chinese have already opposed the deployment of a high-altitude missile defense system known as Thaad in South Korea; the Trump team may call for even more such systems.

The White House is also looking at pre-emptive military strike options, a senior Trump administration official said, though the challenge is huge given the country’s mountainous terrain and deeply buried tunnels and bunkers. Placing American tactical nuclear weapons back into South Korea — they were withdrawn a quarter-century ago — is also under consideration, even if that step could accelerate an arms race with the North.

Mr. Trump’s “It won’t happen!” post on Twitter about the North’s ICBM threat suggests a larger confrontation could be looming.

“Regardless of Trump’s actual intentions,” James M. Acton, a nuclear analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace recently noted, “the tweet could come to be seen as a ‘red line’ and hence set up a potential test of his credibility.”

The whole agenda of this article is to make the case that Obama did everything humanly possible to keep North Korea under control and that anything that North Korea does in the future is totally on Trump because Obama did his part. And to protect Obama’s legacy the New York Times makes public something the North Koreans very probably did not know for certain until today.