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> page 1-12 is...generous.

The sentence you are criticizing is, itself, a direct acknowledgement of the fact that simply "overwhelming" an adversary with technology and firepower is not sufficient for victory. The full sentence reads "Due to the United States’ ability to overwhelm almost any opponent with technology and firepower, the KPA emphasizes asymmetric warfare in conjunction with large numbers of SOF units"--much like the tactics employed by the U.S.'s adversaries in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Vietnam

You skipped the end of that first sentence:

> Due to the United States’ ability to overwhelm almost any opponent with technology and firepower, the KPA emphasizes asymmetric warfare in conjunction with large numbers of SOF units. [emphasis mine]

Which seems to imply that NK is, indeed, preparing for something more like Vietnam, Afghanistan, or the second Iraq war, or at least whoever prepared this believes they are.

> with the exception of Iraq, afghanistan, korea, cuba, and vietnam at no real point in these battles was our technological sophistication or "firepower" a decisive capability that led to a victory.

So? In Iraq, at least, it led to the rapid collapse of the Iraqi government and military and execution of its leaders. North Korea doesn't care if the US ultimately succeeds in meeting its goals, it cares if the North Korean state is defeated.

> the Taliban had a blackhawk helicopter over the city as a command presence in less than a day.

So? The real question is: is it still flying?

IIRC, the US backed government of Afghanistan had trouble keeping its own aircraft flying without support from Western maintenance contractors. I highly doubt the Taliban will do better, especially since it's cut off from a supply of spare parts.

> the US never formally declared any end of hostility to North Korea.

There’s no reason they should. The US never declared any hostilities with North Korea, and North Korea never declared any hostilities formally with anyone either. US forces were the major participant in a United Nations mandated intervention, in response to North Korean forces crossing the border, so the US as a nation was technically never directly a participant in the conflict.

If anyone was going to declare anything in that regard, it would be the United Nations. The armistice agreement was signed by two US generals, true, but they did so on behalf of the United Nations Command, not the United States.

>with the exception of Iraq, afghanistan, korea, cuba, and vietnam at no real point in these battles was our technological sophistication or "firepower" a decisive capability that led to a victory.

It led to plenty of victories. The NSA straight up hacked into a European telco Gemalto (the world’s largest sim card manufacturer) to steal their encryption keys in order to spy on people in the middle east and the entire world in real time. They most certainly used this data to drone strike people and for espionage.

NK has some decent hacking groups but is certainly no match for US and EU nation-state backed hackers. In fact, I would not be surprised if the US and other world governments have 24/7 satellite surveillance on NK and the few devices/computers that are there are infected with their malware in supplychain intercept attacks.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/feb/19/nsa-gchq-sim...

with the exception of Iraq, afghanistan, korea, cuba, and vietnam at no real point in these battles was our technological sophistication or "firepower" a decisive capability that led to a victory.

I'd say this makes a strong case that the US is exceptional at state to state warfare but struggles with prolonged counter-insurgencies, "nation building" and covert ops. All but Cuba had their acting governments' conventional forces beat down fairly effectively with little ability to inflict major damage on US forces.

If the criteria for success is "a stable state with high security for all citizens" then any conventional military is a necessary but insufficient tool for the job.

Communist doctrine said it best: military-political aims can only be solved by a fusion of military and political effort.

Failure to allocate equally prioritized effort, by ensuring all leaders of both efforts appreciate the duality, results in an inability to achieve desired outcomes.

And based on historical outcomes of multiple alternatives... I'm not convinced that forcefully-catalyzed political regime change and state rebuilding can be successfully accomplished without (distastefully severe) political indoctrination.

You have to change a lot of minds to do so, including some that don't want to be changed, in less than a generation.

Ability and Political Will are two different things.

Those are all examples of the US military’s ability to overwhelm virtually any enemy in a traditional sense. Air superiority, battlefield control, logistics, etc.

There seem to be a few misconceptions or oversights here:

The US military can essentially break almost any government instantly, insurgency is a different beast. That's no mystery.

North Korean ICBMs can theoretically reach America in the same way that I can theoretically walk into the Kremlin and choke Putin to death with my bare hands.

In practice, it's unlikely. There are preventive measures in place.

As for the Taliban getting ahold of an ancient helicopter, I don't think it's a major concern. You may have seen that anything of real value was first destroyed, as is standard practice.

The US is not going to declare an end to hostility with North Korea and has no reason to and many reasons not to.

> The US military can essentially break almost any government instantly, insurgency is a different beast. That's no mystery.

I'd like to add that I have strong doubts that a North Korean insurgency is a likely outcome of a war, unless occupation and reintegration is botched on an utterly comical scale - an order of magnitude more than it was botched in Iraq. [1]

Claiming that the threat of a NK insurgency is real, on the other hand, is a great way to secure more funding for the DoD.

[1] Which may well had coalesced into a stable state, if it weren't for the occupation purging every Ba'ath-adjacent political and security functionary they could get their hands on. Instead of being included in the post-Saddam state, all those people who lost their jobs went into the hills and started building IEDs and firing mortars at US Army bases.

Agreed. I think it's underappreciated just how inefficient and undercapitalized the North Korean state is, and by extension how low their people's expectations are.

Unlike Iraq and Afghanistan, South Korea would be logistically and economically able to flood the North with what would seem to be impossibly plentiful consumer goods and staples.

And politics have a way of dissolving in the face of consumption...

The US had the military might to extract total submission from the populations of those countries. Anytime someone attacks your troops, kill them and their family and raze their neighborhood/town. But that would obviously be at odds with long term and broader goals.

The method of harsh reprisals and collective punishment, besides being morally bankrupt, actually has a pretty bad track record. The Nazi's in occupied Yugoslavia, among other places, had a policy of executing 100 random civilians for every German soldier killed. But this had the exact opposite impact on the resistance movement, actually increasing resistance sentiment.

Would be interesting to compare the nazi methodology with the Russian way of war in chechnya. Russia seemed to get submission through not very nice means.

They both tended to use locals to do their dirty work. For example in Chechnya they didn’t use many “Slavic” Russians but mostly Allies from Chechnya or ex-republics of the CCCP. The nazis also recruited locals.

TIL: you should use CCCP only if abbreviating using Cyrillic. In the Latin alphabet, you should use SSSR or, in English, USSR.

I mean the Allied waged total war on Germany including bombing cities into rubble and it turns out pretty well? Same with Japan?