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Comment by AcerbicZero | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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