Thunder Run to Seoul: Assessing North Korea’s War Plan | Hacker News Reader

Thunder Run to Seoul: Assessing North Korea’s War Plan

realcleardefense.com

65 pointsprotomyth120 comments

The assessment predicts: "Tens or hundreds of thousands could become casualties" ... in the event of an all-out DRPK/(US+ROK) conflict.

One factor to consider here is what happens if no conflict occurs? In that case, there are ... still likely tens of thousands of civilian deaths happening as the status quo in North Korean labor camps[1]. Allowing the regime to continue to exist also has a major cost in human lives. I'm not saying war is clearly a superior option - I'm saying this whole situation is mostly losses.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisons_in_North_Korea

I think one of the major reasons no one does anything about it, ignoring the buffer China enjoys from the US (via proxy), is the humanitarian crisis from the entire NK population after the war is over. Who is going to help them? China? SK?

> Who is going to help them? China? SK?

Most likely? The US taxpayers.

Doubtful. If Iraq is any indication, US reconstruction money is as likely to be stolen by the contractors, as it is not.

South Korea already has plans in place for that. I can't find the article at the moment, but they feel super bad for and about North Korea and really want to help if they could

Everything I've read about a postwar reconstruction of North Korea says that the costs would be much, much greater than the integration of East and West Germany.

Not only assuming that a hot war would have serious consequences to the economy of South Korea.

I spent some time in South Korea working with several churches there - they are in tears over the situation in the North every day praying for them. I'm sure if/when it happens there will be a staggeringly huge amount of money poured in from the churches, and other religious people around the world (on top of everything the governments put in...)

Not a very literate and informed reply I'm having here, but just from friendly conversations with a few South Koreans, what I'm getting is that the current generation, many of which haven't grown up in an active war situation, have a much smaller appetite for reunification than their elders may have had. And while they have plans in place (there's a Ministry of Unification) I doubt it that South Korea has money set aside for the real cost of unification (since those amounts would be so tremendous that it'd probably be economically and politically irresponsible to withdraw that much money from the active economy for this long). But then, I'm as little an economic expert as I am an expert on Korea's reunification...

"Allowing the regime to continue to exist" is a backwards way of looking at things that serves to legitimate invasions. The US is a superpower, but that doesn't mean that other nation-states exist because we deign to suffer their existence—that's a very colonialist way of looking at the world. Invading the north (or provoking it with special operations) would be a positive action for which the US would be responsible. North Korea is a bad state, and bad for its people, but the unspeakable carnage that would result from major ground warfare on the Korean peninsula is something else entirely.

The flip side of your argument is it accepts the Kims' ownership over North Korea's land and population. The concept of legitimacy is fuzzy. There is gray area between defense and colonialist conquest.

It's implicit in your statement that the moral repugnancy of the Kim regime makes any acceptance of its existence intolerable. But that clearly implies we should remove the Kim regime; but invading countries is also generally immoral and the consequences of Korean War II are also morally repugnant.

> that clearly implies we should remove the Kim regime

No, it just means we can discuss it without moral censure. There have been lots of multilateral and unilateral interventions, covert and overt, since World War II. Global stability is built on great powers not warring with each other.

That's a subjective value call. It depends on how many North Koreans are being brutalized/dying right now. We don't have that number, but it's likely that tens of thousands of the hundreds of thousands of political prisoners will die of starvation or execution within a few years. So unspeakable carnage is already the default state, and we already have a situation here that is comparable to Khmer Rouge or Stalinist Russia levels of human-rights violations.

Regardless, the colonial past of Western powers is not relevant here. I am not suggesting a policy of Imperialism. I am just pointing out that North Korea's very existence comes with a serious cost in human life. This might be something we should at least factor in when weighing the heavy costs of destroying the Kim regime.

I don't want to minimize the North Korean regime, but you're talking about some of the world's largest armies engaged in a total war to the death in an area half the size of California with twice the population. You're talking about rocket artillery bombardment of a city of 30 million people, major tank warfare in population centers, and a serious risk of the use of nuclear weapons. This is warfare at a scale we haven't seen in generations.

"Allowing it to exist" is a negative action (in that we don't have to do anything for it to happen), whereas invading North Korea is a positive action. Framing "allowing it to exist" as a positive action makes it seem like a choice between two positive actions, which makes invasion seem more palatable. I'm sure there's a trolley problem about this, but people tend to view the ethics of positive actions more seriously than negative actions.

Oh, here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/doing-allowing/

Are you trying to argue that there is a moral difference between action and inaction, or just a political difference? It's certainly something that historic philosophers have spent a lot of time discussing, but that doesn't mean their moral confusion needs to be taken seriously.

Any use of power against other people is necessarily both a moral and a political question. I wouldn't take someone seriously who ~hasn't~ thought hard about the moral question involved.

Wars are very rarely (read as never) fought as total wars to the death. Nobody can predict what exactly would happen if the conflict turns violent. The range of outcomes is huge. The regime may not be able to sustain itself if a war breaks out. There could be mass surrender/defections. Certainly it's hard to see how NK can sustain a war for any length of time given the state of its economy and the resources it has. The worst case scenario is indeed very ugly but IMO not very likely. As crazy as the regime appears to be, self preservation must be one of its objectives.

>The US is a superpower, but that doesn't mean that other nation-states exist because we deign to suffer their existence—that's a very colonialist way of looking at the world.

This is a question of international consensus, not US will. Under the definition of sovereignty agreed upon by the international community, DPRK has forfeited its' right to sovereignty by repeated human rights abuses, WMD development, and aggression toward it's neighbors. Essentially, if a state fails to uphold it's responsibility to its' citizens, sovereignty is forfeited. Admittedly this is a hard thing to judge, but a line must be drawn somewhere.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contingent_sovereignty

It is Trump making the decision now, not the international community. I'll also remind you, that the only country in the entire world that has extensively used WMDs is the US. The US has used Nukes (WWII), and is also responsible for the most extensive use of chemical weapons of any county (Vietnam). NK has never used a WMD.

"It is Trump making the decision now, not the international community."

It may not be "the international community", but it is certainly not just Trump. South Korea, China, and lately Japan all have an interest and are actively attempting to steer results.

I mean, I'd bet if you consult your model of Trump that you think is acting it will tell you that being a crazy madman unconstrained by rationality or morality he unilaterally nuked Pyongyang last month. That model applied consistently, instead of piecemeal whenever cynically convenient, is clearly not predictive. (If that is not your personal model, timthelion, I am sure this message reaches many people for whom that is their unexamined model, so still not a waste.)

Let's add some context.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki: 129-226k dead

Nazi Holocaust: 4.9-11m dead

Soviet Holodomor: 1.8-7.5m dead

Cambodian Genocide: 1.7-3m dead

Armenian Genocide: 800k-1.5m dead

Vietnam War (all deaths, US period): 1-3m dead

In terms of human death, WMDs have historically been the least of conflict-affected people's worries, compared to starvation and drawn out total war.

Lots of countries had widespread Chemical weapons usage.

Iraq used chemical weapons in the Iran-Iraq war: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraqi_chemical_weapons_program

Israel used white phosphorous till 2013: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-22310544

the Soviet Union was accused of using chemical weapons in afghanistan: http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/afghan/report.pdf

The UN stated that Cuban units used VX as well as Sarin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_warfare#Angola

even the vietnamese used chemical weapons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_border_raids_in_Tha...

None of these examples include the use of chemical weapons in WWII or WWI. During these wars most major european countries used chemical weapons of some kind.

these instances don't excuse their usage, But I don't believe much is gained by pretending the rest of the world is blameless.

My point was, that OP was saying that countries that have and use WMDs are not legitimate. I agree. I don't think most governments are legit. But it seems NK is rather mild when it comes to WMDs. The US has far far more of them than NK and actually uses them.

What does it matter who is responsible if many 100s of thousands of lives can be saved. Blame is just a social construct, death is a bit more permanent. NK is killing thousands in labor camps and will continue to do so. This is all without consider what happens if they get a nuke on missile into civilized cities.

Blame doesn't matter if stops a nuke in downtown Seoul or other Major city.

This almost always goes unsaid so thanks for saying it.

The general conditions of North Korean population is staggeringly bad. Eating grass and bark soup [1], iterant cannibalism [2] etc... When you consider the Prison situation without sounding glib, it's near holocaust levels of horrors [3].

[1] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2010/07/starving-nort...

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/02/05...

[3] http://www.ohchr.org/EN/HRBodies/HRC/CoIDPRK/Pages/Reportoft...

Say what you will about international relations, pre-emptive war etc... but if the moral argument for entering WW-II for the purpose of liberating those in the concentration camps is universal then there is certainly a case to be made for North Korean conflict.

It's admittedly 1000x more complex of course.

> but if the moral argument for entering WW-II for the purpose of liberating those in the concentration camps

Hugh? Sorry, but who told you that someone entered the WW2 to liberate someone from the concentration camps ? Liberating the camps was a consequence of the end of the war not the reason any country entered in the conflict.

To be clear - I'm not making the point that the US entered WW-II predominantly for the humanitarian reason of liberating the camps. In fact we didn't know much about them when we entered in 1941.

Rather, one of the strongest used moral cases for WWII (post facto) was the liberation.

We have even stronger evidence of this same moral case in Korea, than we did in WWII, so if we're consistent then there is a good case to be made here.

One could argue however that this post facto moral back patting in WWII is just how we justify it. So if that's the case you're making then I got nothin for ya.

Waging foreign policy based on morality over tangible interests has a poor track record. Korea isn't Germany. We could count on West Germany bouncing back on its people and industry. North Korea would involve cultural engineering on a scale and at a depth without precedent. Cost estimates regularly wander into trillions of dollars, and that's just for the first few years.

Oh, god help us if it actually escalates to that point. I'm more than intimately aware of the ramifications, as I was an intelligence officer in the pacific and heavily involved in NK issues.

It's probably the biggest can of worms out there right now quite frankly.

"One factor to consider here is what happens if no conflict occurs?"

Another angle is the threat North Korea wields is not static. 20 years ago we were worried "What if NK starts shelling Seoul?" Now we're worried "What if NK nukes Seoul or maybe Japan?" We're either at or just a year or two away from "What if NK nukes Hawaii?" with rapid progress towards "What if NK nukes the United States?" Give it another twenty years and it'll be "What if NK launches all of its couple hundred nukes at once?" and "What if NK deploys its bioweapons?" or even "What if NK simply accidentally mishandles its bioweapons and something it is developing gets out into the world?"

I'm not advocating for any particular solution here, not least of which is because at least at the moment I haven't got any skin in this game... at least, for another year or two, until NK can indeed reach me with a nuke-tipped missile, and even then, the odds they'd pick where I live is very, very low.[1] I don't know exactly how to analyze this case in game theory. But I at least recognize there is an element of this setup where even though at any given moment the locally rational thing to do is not to attack or provoke North Korea, the globally rational thing to do is probably not to keep choosing that choice indefinitely. One way or another, eventually North Korea is going to have to offer the international community another choice, whether it likes it or not.

(My personal suspicion is that China really is moving to constrain them and we see a good chance of perhaps-surprising cooperation, even if a Kabuki show is put on about the details, because it was all fun and games for China when what NK has was artillery pointed at a foreign city they didn't much care about, or had some scary weapons pointed at them. Even a couple of small nukes that can't reach China's really important assets might not concern them. But unless North Korea's posture has 100% been a carefully calculated act by otherwise ruthlessly logical individuals, which I'd suggest is not where the evidence points us, an actual nuclear power North Korea that has dozens of missiles that can reach anywhere in the world becomes a true threat to China as well, not only directly, but in that it might give other regional powers Ideas about how to "more effectively" leverage their nuclear arsenals to extract concessions from China, which I'd expect NK to immediately move to do as their only refuge at this point would be in audacity. As the NK threat continues to ramp up they become a threat to even more actors. Even for the US, the NK has been more "thorn in our side" than actual threat.)

[1]: Though that probably doesn't apply to all readers here. If I were North Korea and I was looking for ways to hurt the US, Washington DC would be my target #1... but Silicon Valley would be on my very, very short list, as not only hurting the US financially, but also symbolically. Personally I think I'd put Hollywood above it, then maybe New York, but Silicon Valley makes a pretty plausible 4th, as a way of striking the industry where the US is arguably most clearly leading the world in one relatively small place. So, you know, this discussion is IMHO getting rapidly less theoretical than some of us may like.

Per my understanding of game theory, games can be run for different amounts of time. Additional rounds just naturally balloon the possibility space. But your logic seems sound for "We play the NK game out over the next 30 years, making a decision every 5 years."

They've made technological progress. They will continue to make technological progress. Therefore, the status quo for 30 years leads to an untenable situation. And the options then are worse than the options now.

Also, NK's political system makes Iran look like Switzerland.

I agree that the Chinese are going to determine in a large way how this plays out. Since the US government seems to publicly be expressing a hard line, the Chinese are going to have to pick a side.

Which is probably what the assassination of Kim's half brother was all about: given that regime replacement with a moderate (who would agree to suspend development in exchange for guarantees of sovereignity) by the Chinese would have been the obvious first option.

My expectation is that the Chinese are going to attempt regime change with the US's tacit agreement. The US, Japan, and China all don't lose if a Chinese proxy is allowed to continue to exist there.

All other options end with a NK-controlled peninsula (unlikely, and unacceptable by China-suspicious regional powers) or a SK-controlled peninsula (unacceptable by China).

Not to mention China could use an outlet for their bloated construction industry. "We will rebuild North Korea for humanitarian reasons!" would obviously play well.

The conflict between Russia and Ukraine has made it clear to everyone what guarantees of sovereignty, in exchange for giving up nuclear weapons are worth.

Nothing.

Not saying you're wrong, but the same argument was used to justify the "liberation" of Iraq.

It's an interesting read if you're into the nuts and bolts of modern warfare. The key assumption is that the DPRK actually has any ambition of attacking the ROK though. They'll scream and carry on until they get their sanctions lifted and, in their minds, come out of the whole thing a nuclear power.

Now those running tomorrow's senate briefing on the other hand...

Edit: it's also worth noting that they're playing a somewhat "smart" long game here. They won't likely do much until they're confident that they can convince the world they have ICBM capabilities. At that point, they no longer have to just menace the ROK or Japan but can realistically extort anyone they want.

I don't think DPRK really wants to nuke anyone. They just look at countries in the last 30 years and look at their options:

Libya: Gave up their WMDs, Libya government gone.

Ukraine: Gave up their nukes, Russia invaded (I admit this is a bit contrived)

Iraq: Didn't have nukes, Iraqi government gone.

Pakistan: Has nukes, is incredibly unstable, still there!

That's pretty much my point. Short range nukes = a few countries forced to cooperate. Long range nukes = all countries forced to cooperate.

Edit: interesting comparison with the noted countries BTW.

There is a Twitter account from a right leaning Westerner(as in he occasionally favors a military solution to NK politics, writes policy papers for a think tank) in Seoul who speaks and reads Korean, reads all of the North Korean press releases, he claims that the NK government is the sanest government around. They want to stay in power. Everything they do, in their mind, furthers this goal. They don't want to be regime-changed! I'll see if I can find his URL again.

You can also look at places like South African. Where the government gave up nukes, transitioned to a different government, and everything was fine (internationally)

So same outcome, just less violent and voluntarily vs military intervention? I don't think that's the outcome the leadership of NK are looking for.

The end of apartheid was... Not entirely, but mostly orthogonal to South Africa's nuclear ambitions.

local breakthroughs on the major routes towards Seoul—their first operational objective.

Playing devil's advocate: How do we know Seoul is the operational objective? It seems obvious (capital city located near the border) but what if DPRK went for something not so obvious? i.e. "Attack him where he is unprepared, appear where you are not expected" (classic Sun/Mao approach)

Also, what if Pyongyang tries to draw in a sympathetic third party that would also give the US/ROK pause? China is the obvious choice, but there is also Russia ...

An interesting feature of this war is that since both sides look and speak more or less alike, covert insertion and operation is easier for each side—but especially so for North Korean agents who may move freely within South Korea’s open society.

In the 1990s I remember reading an account of North Korean special forces landing by submarine and trying to infiltrate ... and immediately being tripped up by unfamiliarity with modern technology. One of the captured agents had no idea every farmhouse had a phone, and was therefore surprised that the alarm was raised as soon as they were spotted.

There is still a huge technology divide, not to mention social giveaways relating to accents and other behavior. Sure, they can be trained, but it won't make them impervious to detection.

>Playing devil's advocate: How do we know Seoul is the operational objective? It seems obvious (capital city located near the border) but what if DPRK went for something not so obvious?

Such as what? Taking control of Seoul under the element of surprise is the only conceivable endgame for a DPRK invasion. Anything else would end in a protracted fight where US air superiority would absolutely demolish them.

>In the 1990s I remember reading an account of North Korean special forces landing by submarine and trying to infiltrate ... and immediately being tripped up by unfamiliarity with modern technology. One of the captured agents had no idea every farmhouse had a phone, and was therefore surprised that the alarm was raised as soon as they were spotted.

This sounds like propaganda. North Koreans are not stupid.

It was this incident:

http://www.newsweek.com/reds-rocks-178000

Other accounts did mention the agent was surprised that farmers would have a telephone.

He also did not or could not hide his North Korean accent, as the article states.

North Korea has conducted plenty of special operations against its neighbors. I'm most familiar with the kidnapping of Japanese citizens by submarine. http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/north-koreas-abducti... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korean_abductions_of_Jap...

I would not plan on North Korean special forces being so witless.

> Playing devil's advocate: How do we know Seoul is the operational objective? It seems obvious (capital city located near the border) but what if DPRK went for something not so obvious?

There just isn't that much else in the border zone that would make for an attractive target. East of Seoul is Gangwon province, which is relatively mountainous and sparsely populated. Mountains are hard for an army to move through, especially an army with tanks, and the sparse population (around 1.5 million people, compared to 10 million in Seoul itself and 15 million more elsewhere in the capital region) means that there aren't a lot of targets of high economic value there.

About the only military value of a move towards Gangwon instead of Seoul would be strategic surprise -- an attempt to shock the allied forces by appearing from a direction where they aren't expected, the way the Germans shocked the French and British in 1940 by driving into France through the (generally considered impassable to tanks) Ardennes Forest instead of via the open plains of Belgium (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Sedan_(1940)). But that kind of surprise would be much harder to pull off in an age of high-resolution satellite reconnaissance and instant electronic communication, and it would mean forgoing the hammer blow on South Korean morale that the loss or destruction of Seoul would cause. So it would be quixotic at best.

Seoul is required primarily due to the way the SK road network is setup. An argument could be made for pushing to the west of Seoul, crossing the Han, and trying to end around through Inchon, but that would almost certainly be a one way trip.

The eastern side of Korea has lots of issues for an attacking army to overcome, especially an army which would be depending so heavily on a quick operational breakthrough.

Russia has a short border with North Korea (http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=11/42.3129/130.6686 ). They've been moving forces there, in case something happens and people try to flee into Russia. I don't think they are an especially willing ally.

> In the 1990s I remember reading an account of North Korean special forces landing by submarine and trying to infiltrate ... and immediately being tripped up by unfamiliarity with modern technology.

Actually, most of them weren't special forces. It was a North Korean submarine that was doing its routine(?) spying activity when the submarine was stuck in the shore. They had to abandon the ship, and most of them were navy soldiers with (I assume) no training in spying activity. Besides, you cannot exactly hide a submarine stuck in the shore, so of course a national emergency was declared and the South Korean military went full alert mode.

Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1996_Gangneung_submarine_infil...

In an ordinary situation, a North Korean spy agent would act much less conspicuously and have much more time to prepare for life in South Korea. (Personally, though, I don't believe they would make much difference in a full-scale war.)

This reporter, who grew up in Korea but doesn't read Korean, and was given honorary citizenship by a city in South Korea, writes that ordinary South Korean citizens think the military threat of North Korea is really a North Korea versus United States thing, and not really a conflict between North Korea and South Korea.

South Koreans are more focused on what sort of government will be in power after elections on May 9th, after the craziness of the most recent government.

https://www.thenation.com/article/in-south-korea-war-hysteri...

The key thing here is the geography. Seoul is only 20 miles from the border with North Korea. It's within artillery range, and North Korea has the necessary artillery. If there's a war, Seoul gets clobbered in the first minutes.

Few countries have their capital that close to a hostile border. Syria does. Look where Damascus is.

> If there's a war, Seoul gets clobbered in the first minutes.

Alternatively, that artillery gets clobbered in the first minutes.

The artillery pieces aren't sitting around in the open waiting to be bombed; they're deeply dug in, inside fortifications the North has been building on its side of the border for decades. It would be very difficult to neutralize it from the air before it could do real damage without resort to something like nuclear weapons.

Remember that MOAB the other day? Who do you think that message was aimed at?

The artillery threat is well known so I can only assume that they have some cruise missile/counter-battery forces sighted in to destroy the current installations immediately. That just leaves lighter mobile artillery which can still be destroyed via radar counter-battery, albeit more slowly.

Here's a decent analysis of the artillery situation https://www.stratfor.com/analysis/how-north-korea-would-reta...

TL;DR; DPRK can probably get off at least one good barrage, not enough to level Seoul but it would hurt.

There are also reports that Seoul has actively attempted to purchase the Israeli 'Iron Dome' anti-rocket system. Clearly, this would be ineffective against an all-our artillery attack by NK (which I've read could send >7000 artillery rounds a minute into SK) - but it might be useful to mitigate the effects of mobile artillery once known, non-mobile artillery installations are destroyed.

This is a common misconception.

1) Artillery isn't actually that good at 'clobbering' a city. 2) North Korea doesn't have THAT much artillery, and even less of it is working, nor do they have the supply lines to keep them constantly resupplied 3) Seoul has quite a bit in the way of bomb shelters

Seoul has has 10 million people in it, and most experts think that at most 30k or so would die if NK was able to shell them.

That's certainly(!) nothing to scoff at, but it's not really being clobbered. The media likes to portray it as NK being able to completely level Seoul, which just isn't reality.

http://atlanticsentinel.com/2012/06/north-korea-cant-really-... is a pretty good article on this.

In addition, long range artillery is not agile. It is easy to locate and to be destroyed by airstrike or counter-battery fire.

It's been talked about numerous times in the Korean parliament, with the most recent concrete steps taken a few years ago to move some government agencies to Sejong[1], 100 miles further south.

As with most forced urban planning efforts, the city is struggling to attract residents who aren't civil servants. The city is expensive to build, expensive to maintain, and due to budget cuts there is (still) no planned high-speed rail[2], although it seems they are at least connected to at least one existing "normal passenger rail" line that takes 90 minutes with trains leaving every 30mins[3].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sejong_City

[2] https://www.ft.com/content/ba9646f6-4dc6-11e3-8fa5-00144feab...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sejong_City#Transportation

I used to think that North Korea could easily flatten Seoul, but it turns out that this really isn't the case.

The majority of NK's artillery is not long range and can't threaten the densest parts of Seoul; while those that are long range will be immediately targeted and destroyed once they begin firing. Then there are serious questions regarding the quality of NK's equipment and their troops, plus the fact that artillery on its own is not particularly lethal.

Finally, South Korean civilians in the part of Seoul most under threat are prepared for this attack and most every subway station can double as a bomb shelter.

Any NK artillery attack would definitely kill a substantial amount of civilians, but it wouldn't be 100,000s and it wouldn't destroy Seoul. The real wildcard is if NK uses chemical or nuclear weapons which changes everything.

There's a good summary of any potential NK attack on Seoul here: www.dailykos.com/story/2017/4/25/1656090/-North-Korean-artillery-and-the-concept-of-flattening-Seoul-a-breakdown

'Flattening Seoul' is a strawman. Prior to the recent articles on the topic I don't remember anyone actually claiming that the entire metropolitan area could be reduced to rubble, nor that it was necessary or that North Korea would even desire it.

However it's a useful deflection from the fact that since the USA retired its enhanced-radiation weapons ( 'neutron bombs' ) in the 1990s, there is no prompt-strike way to negate several thousand hardened artillery emplacements linked by tunnels. Not without either hitting each individual emplacement or by using mass-effect weapons that in turn threaten Seoul.

Given that, I think it's likely that the USA-SK war-plan is to decapitate the North Korean command structure so quickly that the artillery doesn't even receive the order to fire.

I think the key thing is history. The UK developed the nuclear bomb with no help from the USA. As a consequence the UK was not part of the Marshall Plan and as well as enduring a 'rebuild from nothing' there was also the phenomenal cost of Windscale and all of the rest of the infrastructure, a cost borne without the industrial base the USA had - ruins vs. vast and intact. The Manhattan Project was a similar cost to the moon landings. Sadly the UK invested in their own version of the former rather than the latter. But nobody else had the bomb apart from the USA and the USSR so having the bomb was the UK's ticket to being a world power rather than entirely under the sphere of influence of one superpower or the other, directly or by proxy.

The Kim family stepped in for Japanese Emperor as far as being divine father figure for the nation, at one level the 'world power' rationale is the same as what the UK had to play post WW2. Much like it has been in other parts of the world the enemy is the USA and it is quite clear that the goal of the North Korean programme is to be able to get some missile with some nuclear weapon at least as far as a big city in the continental USA.

I am no defender of the crazy kid, however, there is some serious stuff behind the attitude of North Korea. They do not want their culture to be Americanized, they do not want advertising and they do not want to be yet another consumer society. A whole smorgasbord of Western beliefs are just not wanted by them. There is also the matter of unification. Their idea is to have a federation, one country with two states, governed by their respective leaders and with the one seat for the federation at the UN. That is what they want and without any outside interference. So those nuclear weapons are pointing outside of the Korean peninsula and that would be the situation of a Korea united on the North's terms - 'without outside interference'. A unified Korea with weapons of the nuclear flavour would keep all the neighbours at bay on the MAD basis so a unified, federated Korea (which sounds reasonable to some in the South) is just not going to happen.

Seoul is not going to get annihilated by the North. Ignore the Kims for a moment and look at what the Koreans could achieve. A united Korea would be second on the stage after the USA in terms of GDP+population+trade+influence and if you add the nukes then they are totally deserving of taking the UK seat or anyone else's except the Americans in the security council. That might sound far fetched, but I believe that this is an obvious prize in Korea and destroying Seoul goes against that.

The UK received quite a lot of Marshall Plan money. Nearly $3.2b of it, in fact.

Yes, but blew most of it trying - and failing - to prop up the pound as the world's reserve currency.

UK SURVIVED NAZI threat because of Land Lease and eventually US pouring resources into beating back Nazi and Japanese threat.

The whole story of North Korean artillery turning Seoul into a sea of fire was a phrase coined by a North Korean general few decades ago to threaten S Korean. And that's what it is, a verbal threat.

N Korean army would be really idiotic to focus all their available artillery on Seoul and ignore all other military installations.

During the Battle of Britain, Luftwaffe nearly broke RAF when they concentrated on bombing the RAF bases. But when Nazi switched their focus to bombing London, RAF had a chance to recover and eventually beat back Luftwaffe.

And you can bet S Korean artillery units won't be sitting around when the balloon goes up.

A reasonable, if somewhat short, overview of the topic, although a bit generous when discussing the air power situation over Korea. Smashing older Russian SAM sites is almost an American pastime at this point, and I have serious doubts the KPAF would put up anything beyond token resistance in the air. The author also skims over the massive leaps in lethality on the modern battlefield. It's difficult to stress this enough, but T-54's and T-62's do not have a long life span under these conditions.

So the DPRK would need to achieve total surprise, fight ~20 miles to Seoul against an opponent who is equipped with mostly modern weapons, and who has planned for this very attack. They also need to do this with no air support, little to no armored support, and limited night fighting capabilities.

It's in many ways similar to the first Iraq War in the sense that all the old eastern-bloc equipment is specifically what the following generation of US equipment was precisely designed to destroy with great speed. The US was worried about Russian tanks rolling across Europe in greater numbers than their anti tank missiles could handle so they developed the A-10 and various other systems to stem the flow and support such operations (anti-radiation missiles, etc). 40 years later, the US still comes up against those systems with some regularity.

I agree. The only comparison I could come up with, when trying to explain the lethality of the modern battlefield was the "highway of death" situation during the Iraqi retreat from Kuwait. I'd expect this to turn out much the same, but worse, as that kind of destruction would occur during the attack, and then be continued during the inevitable rout.

Obviously the DRPK stands no chance of tactical victory in any sense. But they have a very good chance of just saying "fuck it", and causing arbitrary damage and mass civilian casualties on the order of dozens of September 11 attacks. It's basically the nation-state scale equivalent of the fact that a single lone shooter can hurt a lot of people before the police take him out.

Indeed, all of those tanks will be pretty useless against an array of modern anti tank, see javelins https://youtu.be/wrhybKEzb-0

The primary concern is the use of artillery and multi barrel rocket launchers devastating any ROK ground forces. Russia demonstrated their long distance lethality in Ukraine.

I'm also curious at the quality of DPRKs SAMs. The new S400 ones definitely pose a problem even for modern American planes. I've heard even the 90s model S300 could still be a serious concern.

I remember hearing the War Nerd talk about a couple of war hawks who wrote a series of articles about intervention in Syria totally glossing over the real threat they pose. And these guys apparently had a lot of influence in Washington among the establishment neocons and Clinton types. These SAMs are apparently very underrated. We just assume America has the best tech but real world combat is quite different.

I've not heard of the DPRK possessing anything beyond S200/Buks (along with plenty of older Soviet SAMs) which shouldn't be discounted, but are not going to be capable of stopping the dedicated air defense suppression operations over the immediate combat area.

Ukraine did not have own artillery to counter nor airpower.

South Korea has plenty of artillery and MLRS to counter N Korean threats, not to mention counter-battery radar systems.

I read someone who quoted a South Korean army officer who said once S Korean K9 SPH started rolling off the factory, South Korean army gained the advantage over N Korean army.

And with my very amateur level knowledge, I agree.

Serbian S-125s were pretty effective against F117s during the war in Yugoslavia. They targeted the planes using long range radar.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_F-117A_shootdown

We may have different definitions for the word "effective".

I'm not disparaging what Colonel Dani was able to accomplish using outdated equipment, but it's important to note how little the Yugoslavian air defense was able to achieve as a whole.

This is a pretty reasoned article. One thing I have never understood: why can't China and the US join forces and militarily overrun DPRK? I know they fought each other in the Korean war, but the world has changed so drastically since then. From what I've read so far, DPRK is a source of dangerous instability for everyone involved. Wouldn't having a more stable regime on the Korean peninsula serve the interests of all neighboring countries?

China does not want the US building military bases a few miles south of their border. Additionally, in the event of a conflict with the US directly, the DPRK will almost certainly seize the opportunity to cause havoc on the peninsula and therefore divert US/NATO resources away from a Chinese/US conflict.

One could argue that the US wouldn't need to maintain bases on the peninsula after the fall of the DPRK, but with the situation in the South China Sea, we'd be stupid not to and even if we agreed with China that we wouldn't, they don't have a lot of reason to trust we'd hold up our end of the bargain given our history.

DPRK is a buffer state for China.

The United States lost its mind when communism established a foothold in Cuba. Russia did likewise when Ukraine began aligning towards NATO.

China would prefer to have a stable regime in DPRK - but it would also prefer to not have US military bases on the other side of the Yalu river. The last time that happened, the two countries went to war.

Also, arguably, the DPRK regime is extremely 'stable'. The same royal family has ruled it for what, seven decades, now?

It's stable right up until it is no longer stable just as much as a boat that has been afloat for 70 years can't sink.

The current leadership does not strike me as 'stable' in any way. But then again, that goes for more world leaders.

Should some of the stunts they have pulled during that time be considered when defining "stable?"

Well, unlike some other nuclear powers, they managed to restrain themselves from invading a few sovereign nations in the past few decades.

Will US withdraw troops from a unified Korea or will troops be stationed on the Chinese border?

The Russians withdrew from Central and Eastern Europe (save for Transnistria) yet US troops are still present in Germany and now in Europe (literally invited by the Baltic states, Poland and Romania), not to mention Japan, South Korea and Guam which is basically US territory. I highly doubt that the US would withdraw from a supposedly Unified Korea.

China certainly doesn't want a unified Korea, for economic and military reasons.

China-DPRK relations have only begun chilling over the last decade. China still has a lot of vested interest, both financial and political, in North Korea.

My understanding is that China has a very different relationship with North Korea and a very different perspective on foriegn policy. China tends to emphasize North Korea's stance as a reaction to US/South Korean provocations. China also has a significant population of Koreans and significant trade with North Korea, and fears the destabilizing effects of North Korean collapse more than the destabilizing effects of North Korean actions. Finally, China's policy is that countries should not peer to closely into the domestic affairs of foreign countries.

North Korea's strategy is to deter foreign aggression against itself. As this article reveals, it has been an effective strategy, because the costs of war on the Korean peninsula are so huge despite the North's technological deficit.

The problem is, if you topple the Kim regime, a unification with South Korea is imminent and bringing North Korea up to the development level of South Korea is would cost trillions of dollars. It might even trigger a worldwide economic recession as the capital markets completely dry up as all investment floods to Korea.

Seoul, where almost half of population of South Korea lives, is just 40 km from the border and North Korea have a long range artillery. The war is impossible unless you are good with hundreds of thousands civilian casualties.

After reading the article it seems that DPRK is a relatively tamed threat. If we invade, they will undoubtedly do something extreme, where as right now they just /might/ do something extreme.

It's not a question of whether either has the military power to overrun DPRK. Both could in a matter of hours a few days. A lot of it is economic.

What happens to the ~24 million DPRK citizens who are very low skilled? Whatever country takes them on is taking on a gigantic uncertainty and costs for literally millions of people. During famines, North Koreans have literally gone to the hillsides to get grasses to eat. Many are malnourished, roadways are poor outside of Pyongyang because they need travel permits to travel within country (so the roads are not used much). To make anything of the country would require huge infrastructure costs. Many of the roadways are also suspected to be rigged with explosives so if/when a land invasion occurs, US and South Korean troops are slowed down significantly.

China doesn't want to do it because the buffer between the "US sock puppet" called South Korea is nice to have. They have had trade going with North Korea for years, and recently have gotten annoyed by the rhetoric and BS spewing from their buffer zone.

With Seoul very near the border, South Korea stands to lose many billions of dollars in assets from artillery once the invasion starts.

The transition itself would dramatically increase the dangerous instability which is reason enough to try to put it off. "The horse might learn to talk" and all that.

A lot also hinges on what sort of deal China could work out with SK and the US. Would US forces come all the way to China's borders? Would the US leave the peninsula entirely after the war? Maybe China could be bribed with a lease for a nice naval base on the Sea of Japan? I'd hope that there's been some discussion of all of this ahead of times given how the last Korean War went but who knows.

How about the U.S. agrees to help integrate Taiwan back into mainland China (similar to the British and Hong Kong) in exchange for China helping with the North Korea situation?

EDIT: changed 'we' to the U.S.

> One thing I have never understood: why can't China and the US join forces and militarily overrun DPRK?

I cannot think of a regime changing American military excursion in the last 60 years that resulted in the scenario that America wanted, with the possible exception of Grenada.

That's a good reason to not invade.

> why can't China and the US join forces and militarily overrun DPRK?

All sibling comments talking about things like buffer states are missing the forest for the trees. You don't invade North Korea mostly because they have nuclear weapons.

No sane US administration (sighs) is going to risk over a million dead civilians in Seoul, Osaka or Tokyo and the resulting global recession.

For China, despite all the missiles NK lobs toward Japan, the reality is that Beijing is closer to Pyongyang than Osaka and likely has worse missile defense. A Japan with nuclear ambitions isn't high on China's priority list either.

You can hand wave their shaky missile tech away as a threat to Japan and China but that's a lot of lives to gamble on and there's a real possibility they've smuggled weapons abroad as well (more likely chemical than nuclear but still bad).

This leaves out some issues such as likely targeting of Japan by DPRK, but otherwise a clear-headed analysis of the dark and sobering reality there.

North Korea, like the Sow jet Union, has fought a war that the US can not imagine. They fought a war in which they lost 10% of the population. If the US would lose 32 Million in a war maybe the US would lose the taste for war too.

Not going to judge their outdated equipment. But they will fight. This a not Arabic troops from tribal societies who will run as soon as they are given the chance. In fact, North Korea CAN NOT lose this war. They have not lost the last one, they won't lose the next. North Korea is too important for both, China and Russia as a buffer country. Both countries have moved a lot of troops recently near North Korea. If there is a conflict we may seem a regime change (supported but Russia and China). What we are not gong to see is a US occupied united Korea.

One risk with Trumps pressure is they it works two ways. North Korea could reasonably assume that they will loose most equipment if the US attacks. So why not attack first? Use it or lose it. The safest place for a rocket or artillery shell is still in the air....

North Korea DID lose the war in 1950, in a way. After Incheon Landing, the North Korean army never really recovered. The majority of fighting power for north side was from Chinese army.

The reason UN Forces got pushed back and couldn't advance was because of the human wave attacks from Chinese army.

Well, so it did definitely NOT lose. The same reason why it won't lose the next war. A Chinese/Russian brokered Regime change is still a possibility. But Kim is not an idiot. He had his brother killed just to eliminate one of the options for a regime change.

"The final element in the DPRK plan is an extensive deep battle across the entire South Korean depth using some one hundred thousand special operations forces (SOF). An interesting feature of this war is that since both sides look and speak more or less alike, covert insertion and operation is easier for each side—but especially so for North Korean agents who may move freely within South Korea’s open society. ... As with artillery strikes, fighting by SOF on objectives in Seoul will be aimed at heightening panic and demoralizing political leadership, and will be exploited by DPRK information warfare agencies to give the impression that the front has already reached the ROK capital."

This is an interesting point: every major terrorist attack of the Twitter age sees wild rumors flying. An actual DPRK invasion combined with cyberwarfare could yield a campaign of information warfare like nothing we've seen before.

I'm not sure that's still true based on the stories of malnutrition in NK, even for their own military. Considering the cultural differences, a few pop quiz questions might be enough as well.

I found this article to be an interesting read on what a war with NK might look like http://defconwarningsystem.com/2017/03/25/what-a-korean-war-... Essentially NK would use every weapon they can and China would be the only winner.

This and the OP both discount the small, but very real possibility of conflict escalation with China, completely unintended by both sides. If China enters militarily(big if, given recent statements) on the side of DPRK and the conflict has escalated to using nukes, it will be very hard for it to not spiral out of control into a full-on regional, if not worldwide, war.

It's important to note as well that Chinese intervention isn't a binary, fully-on or fully-off kind of thing; it's possible to imagine various degrees of intervention.

One that seems likely to me in this kind of scenario, for instance, would be for Chinese forces to move in to uphold the integrity of the pre-war border. Allied forces would be free to push the North Koreans out of South Korean territory; but if they tried to push beyond that towards Korean reunification or some kind of territorial gain at the North's expense, they'd have to fight Chinese troops to do it. This would let the Chinese get involved but still pose as a neutral arbitrator rather than a direct combatant or contributor to escalation, since their nominal goal would be resumption of the status quo ante bellum.

I think this is probably how the Chinese intervention, if they choose to intervene, would start, to restore the current DPRK/ROK border after a ROK/US incursion into the North. It seems likely that if that happens, DPRK would escalate with nukes in order to force China's hand into full intervention on their behalf, as USA's current doctrine, to the best of unclass knowledge, is to respond in kind to nuclear aggression. Once that happens all bets are off, unfortunately. I don't see how it ends well for anyone once China decides to get involved, given the current doctrines and state of military technology.

Perhaps the US might not act as NK regime tries to overrun SK. This would force China and Russsia to support SK to prevent unificAtion. The economic and political consequences of a unified Korea are contrary to its neighboors interests, but I don't think, despite widespread perception, the US need intervene.

The bottom-line seems to be there's a huge range of plausible outcomes, from a relatively contained, short war to multiple WMD strikes on cities (Seoul, Tokyo, NYC, etc..) with prolonged fighting for months (years?) to finally defeat all DPRK forces.

And this is why the situation persists. No sane person will risk the consequences of "the war is not going as well as we hoped it would"

Clearly North Korea's strategy here is deterrence of an invasion rather than an invasion. Looks like deterrence is effective.

A bit OT: does anyone have recommendations for textbooks or other resources that teach basic military strategy and tactics? Whenever any military discussion comes up that even touches technical aspects, I feel pretty lost. Similar to how with certain sports, I just can't see the movement patterns or how the plays develop.

Tom Clancy's old books (not the garbage that used his name recently). Start with Red Storm Rising and then go through the Jack Ryan series beginning with The Hunt For Red October. You'll find his political views slightly odd if you're younger, but his military knowledge is unparalleled.

Edit: for the HN crowd especially, his detailed descriptions of weapon systems and politics are pretty amazing. You can argue he predicted the Russian annexation of Crimea among other things.

His description of everything was, well, detailed, as I remember a credit card scene that had some length to it. Red Storm Rising[1] was effectively co-written with Larry Bond who is the game designer behind Harpoon. He has written his own books with one being Red Phoenix dealing with a Korean conflict.

> You'll find his political views slightly odd if you're younger

not so much with a lot of surveys dealing with conservatives and youth

1) It should be noted that Red Storm Rising occurred before the F-117 was actually revealed so the book has a description of the rumored F-19 in the chapter "The Frisbees of Dreamland" but the tactics were what was written about (kill other sides AWACS). Bill Sweetnam had some alternate views.

I guess everybody's supposed to read Clausewitz and play wargames. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_War http://www.consimworld.com/

A more accessible wargame simulator would be the recently released Hearts of Iron IV(http://store.steampowered.com/app/394360/), a very realistic WW2-era military grand strategy game. Playing a game or two and you will quickly realize how shallow basic analysis and games such as Civilization, in terms of warfighting, are.

This link https://www.usni.org/naval-institute-press/reading-lists has links to the US service branches reading lists - lot of leadership books but also strategy, tactics, and logistics books.

USMC MCDP 1, Warfighting, is a good read.[1] It's a bit philosophical, but far less so than Sun Tzu or Clausewitz.

For small-unit tactics, read the classic The Defense of Duffer's Drift to get a sense of the problem.[2] Then read some of the military how-to manuals.

Armchair generals talk strategy. Real generals talk logistics. Logistics cannot win wars, but it can easily lose them. If the troops at the sharp end run out of fuel, food, or ammo, they're dead. Eisenhower was a logistics guy. Gen. Gus Patronis's "Moving Mountains" describes the logistics for the Gulf War.

Overall American strategy from WWII has been 1) accumulate huge resources 2) hammer. This worked in WWII, failed in Vietnam, worked in the Gulf War, worked in the Iraq invasion, and failed in the aftermath of Iraq and Afghanistan. How to win today's diffused wars is much discussed in the military; there are endless papers in Parameters, the Army War College journal. There's no center to obliterate for victory. No way to force a decision.

Korea is a classic heavy force-on-force situation. If that happens, it will look like WWII, not Afghanistan. Massive casualties and flattened cities.

[1] http://www.marines.mil/Portals/59/Publications/MCDP%201%20Wa... [2] https://ia801000.us.archive.org/29/items/FMFRP1233TheDefense...

The article surprisingly leaves out Russia altogether. In essence, Russia is the "father" of DPRK and its hard to think that it would sit around quite when DPRK is losing.

Another big factor is that DPRK would have no qualms in attacking civilian population in Seoul using missiles and artillery and in fact that's what they would focus on in order to terrorize and put RPK+US on defensive. A single bomb can do much more damage in Seoul then in Pyongyang. Air supremacy is irrelevant more or less as the distances are small and war on ground would be much more deciding factor. They can probably use chemical weapon warheads as well. All these things RPK+US won't be at liberty to do to DPRK but even if they could the DPRK would care less about its civilian population perishing en-mass.

Finally, atomic threat is very real one for RPK. If everything is going in the ditch, they can try to transport one single warhead in to a city using even ground vehicles (if missiles aren't working yet). On the other hand, using nukes on DPRK by US would have almost no impact on its leaders mindset.

Well the USSR was the father of North Korea -- and the two had a falling out in the 1980's. North Korea was much closer to China for most of it's history.

Russia is the more friendly country than China according to DPRK's own assessment. Russia has very significant vested economic and political interests in DPRK remaining in place. China and Russia are the two major countries that do not technically participate in sanctions against DPRK (although they may agree on "paper") and which is why DPRK is able to survive at all. It would be hard to think of Russia just sitting quite when US is taking over one of the major sized country with tons of natural resources right on its border.

See http://thediplomat.com/2017/02/russias-love-affair-with-nort...

Yes, modern Russia has economic interest in NK (specifically providing energy in return for hard labor). But pretending Russia is the patron of North Korea is simply disingenuous. USSR/DPRK relations were broken after the USSR/China split, and then again after the USSR dissolved Russia cut all ties to NK.

Do you have a source for USSR providing military equipment to NK? I'm skeptical.

NK's nuclear arsenal is very heavily surveilled. They are very unlikely to be able to utilize any of their nuclear armament on SK's population centers.

Russia also wants nothing to do with NK when it comes to military support. Not sure why you think they would support them in the current political climate.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4428384/amp/Putin-se...

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