U.S. Slaps New Sanctions on North Korea in Response to Sony Hack

I suggest you read on North Korean military equipment, supplies and operational readiness.

It is all about the details:

They have the largest submarine force in the world; but every one of them is an outdated diesel-electric.

They have a couple hundred fighter airplanes, but their trained pilots get 10-20 hours of practice every year.

And so on...

They aren't capable of a prolonged attack as they don't have enough food( literally ). At best they can defend for a long time and cause a lot of collateral damage with chemical weapons and short range nukes, which is enough to keep their enemies away.

No, you're just completely missing his point.

Winning a war is indeed easy for the US if it's willing to go all out. It's just not willing to go all out.

No, I attempted to be very, very specific in what I was claiming.

The US could win the "War on Terror" any time: kill vast quantities of people, as many as it takes, and or whatever it takes (up to and including destroying their culture, wiping out their identity; see: Tibet, or Japan, or what ancient empires did). That's how people were typically truly defeated historically. Whether we're talking about Alexander, the Romans, the Mongols, Nazi Germany, the USSR, etc. One of the few exceptions would be the British Empire, they did a lot less sheer mass murdering.

It is not a question of if the US can win, it's a question of: what is the US willing to do to win.

You can name the number of countries that could stop the US from bombing them perpetually, on one hand. I'm not over-estimating US superiority, I'm proclaiming that the US isn't willing to use any and all tactics to win.

Winning a war vs North Korea would be easy for the US: kill very large numbers of people indiscriminately with nukes, or stand-off and just bomb them very heavily and perpetually for a decade until nothing is left. After a very short amount of time, North Korea would be entirely incapable of shooting down high altitude bombers, the US would never have to put boots on the ground, just spend all the money on never-ending bombing raids.

It goes back to what I said: the issue is what the US would be willing to do to win. It's not acceptable to defeat enemies today in a manner in which truly large sums of civilians are killed (I'm talking about killing 1/4, 1/2 of the country, vaporizing them, mowing them down with unrelenting bombardment, and then with starvation).

The US could have easily won the Vietnam war, it won every major engagement. The US could have marched north with a million soldiers and run over the Vietcong, killing however many people were necessary in the process. However it would have required another level of extreme brutality, and potentially (likely?) would have ended in a direct war with Russia or China. The question for the US post WW2 has been what's acceptable to achieve victory in war, because against its adversaries that question has been the only limiting factor, not the ability to achieve victory itself.

As a side note, I consider that the US won the Korean war. Given how South Korea has turned out, I consider it a staggering victory. Especially considering how difficult it was to go into Asia and hold ground with China, Russia and North Korea trying to push you out in one form or another.