Why Do Western Nations Nerf Their Military Responses?

[OzzyKP]

I prefer short term pain over long term. We've waited 50 years for a miracle and the north has done nothing but become more brazen over that time. The 'wait them out' approach is clearly a failure.

There are very different orders of magnitude of pain here. NK may sink a boat and kill 100 people every 10-20 years vs. a war where tens of thousands die on either side and that's not even considering whether NK gets a chance to lob a nuke on a major city or not.

Dealing with a small problem just for the sake of dealing with it is criminally foolish if you don't consider the consequences of war.

[Wezil]

Estimates of North Korean dead from famines over the years range as high as in the millions.

Don't they count?

[Wezil]

The annual North Korean flower festival, celebrating today's birthday of founder Kim Il Sung, began this week in Pyongyang. Given the theme-"President Kim Il Sung, the sun of humankind, is immortal along with the flower of the sun"-no wonder money is apparently no object. The festival organizing committee supplied tissue culture-bred seedlings to greenhouses around the country to boost the growing of Kimilsungia, a hybrid orchid named after Kim Il Sung. According to the Pyongyang Times, cultivators "have ensured the right temperature in day and at night and prevented damage from blights . . . despite climate change and the low percentage of sunshine this year."

What is particularly outrageous about this year's festival is that it comes at the same time that bad weather, compounded by the state's economic mismanagement and ineffective collective farming methods, is causing a failure of the overall agriculture sector. Experts in the United Nations' World Food Program are warning that this year North Koreans may face the worst food shortage since a famine claimed a million lives in the 1990s. Mid-April also happens to be when the so-called choongoong, or spring poverty, season begins. This is when North Korea runs out of the last bits of the previous year's fall harvest but before summer crops can be harvested.

In a still largely command economy, many North Koreans are left without a safety net against starvation. Disastrous monetary "reform" last November effectively wiped out the savings of many North Koreans, stripping them of purchasing power that could be used to buy food. Hoarding and barter trade are once again prevalent. Periodic crackdowns on private-market activities certainly haven't helped either.

As severe hunger looms, the question for donors is whether to resume food aid to North Korea and, if so, how to ensure the assistance reaches the people most in need and is not diverted to the military. Proper monitoring is essential. Some critics think it would be impossible to monitor food deliveries, as the North Korean government would simply reject such a condition, fearing foreigners would learn too much about the world's most secretive state.

But there is some precedent for meaningful, if not optimal, monitoring of food aid. For instance, the United Nations' World Food Program conducted an average of 388 monitoring visits a month in 2005, and 440 a month in 2004. For much of these two years, U.N. employees had access to 160 of the country's 203 counties and districts. More than half of the World Food Program's international staff, numbering 32 at the end of 2005, were directly engaged in food aid monitoring during the year, and some of them spoke Korean. Such monitoring meant at least some of the young children, the elderly, the disabled, and pregnant and nursing women received food aid.

The North Korean government can hardly afford another period of severe nation-wide hunger. The country's leaders know that at some point a social explosion is possible as people become desperate. During the years of the famine in the 1990s, North Koreans were still so brainwashed by government propaganda that they died in massive numbers at home, waiting for rations that never came, not letting go of their faith in Pyongyang to save them. North Koreans are now better informed about the outside world, and know whom to blame for their hunger. The survivors have learned that it is foolish, even dangerous, to blindly depend on the government to deliver food.

This means renewed massive hunger could pose a risk to the continuity of the North Korean government. As the Dear Leader, Kim Jong Il, works to ensure another leadership succession to his youngest son, Kim Jong Un, he should consider that North Koreans may not endure another epoch of massive hunger as quietly as they did the last one.

That political imperative may force Pyongyang to act sooner, rather than later. Given that, the foreign-aid community can-and should-insist that aid workers be allowed to properly monitor aid distribution according to standard international protocols for transparency and accountability. The North Korean government must also pledge to end discrimination in government distribution of food in favor of ruling party officials, the military, the intelligence services and the police-and against the "hostile" classes deemed politically disloyal to the government. Otherwise, most donors will remain reluctant to give food aid to North Korea. And that would be a tragedy, on a truly massive scale.

http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2010/04/14/handling-next-north-korean-famine

[KrazyHorse]

Where's Sikander's quote about the UN assassination agency when you need it?

[Guynemer]

This is a lose-lose situation in just about every calculation. One can only hope that we achieve a cultural victory over the next 50 or so turns.

[MrFun]

That depends - how many libraries, temples, theaters are being built?

[KrazyHorse]

It's a stock, not a flow.

[Al B. Sure!]

Dave:

USS Liberty. June 8, 1967. 34 American servicemen killed by Israel.

Dean Rusk, U.S. Secretary of State at the time of the incident, wrote:
I was never satisfied with the Israeli explanation. Their sustained attack to disable and sink Liberty precluded an assault by accident or some trigger-happy local commander. Through diplomatic channels we refused to accept their explanations. I didn't believe them then, and I don't believe them to this day. The attack was outrageous

In 2002, Captain Ward Boston, JAGC, U.S. Navy, senior counsel for the Court of Inquiry, claimed that the Court of Inquiry's findings were intended to cover up what was a deliberate attack by Israel on a ship it knew to be American. In 2004, in response to the publication of Jay Cristol’s book The Liberty Incident, which Boston claimed was an "insidious attempt to whitewash the facts" he prepared and signed an affidavit[46] in which he claimed that Admiral Kidd had told him that the government ordered Kidd to falsely report that the attack was a mistake, and that he and Kidd both believed the attack was deliberate. On the issue Boston wrote, in part:
The evidence was clear. Both Admiral Kidd and I believed with certainty that this attack, which killed 34 American sailors and injured 172 others, was a deliberate effort to sink an American ship and murder its entire crew. Each evening, after hearing testimony all day, we often spoke our private thoughts concerning what we had seen and heard. I recall Admiral Kidd repeatedly referring to the Israeli forces responsible for the attack as 'murderous bastards.' It was our shared belief, based on the documentary evidence and testimony we received first hand, that the Israeli attack was planned and deliberate, and could not possibly have been an accident.

I guess the US government have been pussies too.

[David Floyd]

I'm pretty sure this was already addressed in the thread, but I agree - my response would have been to use US 6th Fleet to sink every ship in the Israeli Navy.

[Al B. Sure!]

[Wezil]

This is a lose-lose situation in just about every calculation.

An interesting read:

The opening battle of the next Korean War will be fought on the streets of Seoul, the world's 10th-largest city.

Just an hour's drive south of the lush green wilderness of the Demilitarized Zone, where snow-white Siberian cranes soar among hazy hills and a million soldiers glare at each other across the world's most heavily fortified frontier, Seoul is targeted in the crosshairs of 13,000 North Korean field artillery guns and multiple rocket launchers.

A symbol of South Korea's success, with ancient palaces and sleek new skyscrapers, it is one of Asia's most dynamic cities and its metropolitan area contains 22 million people or 45% of South Korea's population.

Yet, after 57 years of an uneasy armistice, if another war breaks out on the Korean peninsula, Seoul will be obliterated and millions will die.

After participating in a computer-simulated Korean war game in 2003, three years before North Korea exploded its first nuclear bomb, Kurt Campbell, the current U.S. assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, described the early days of any new Korean conflict as "a horrific symphony of death."

"We will win the war," he said. "But it will not be an easy war to fight."

Ever since the first Korean War ground to a halt in 1953, with a cease-fire instead of a peace treaty, soldiers on both sides of the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) have been planning and preparing to resume fighting. As a result, decades of war games, military exercises and analytical reports have produced a nightmarish picture of what a Second Korean War will look like.

During a 1994 diplomatic crisis over North Korea's nuclear ambitions, South Korea's Defence Minister, Lee Yang Ho, said one computer simulation of a potential war projected a million dead, including thousands of U.S. troops.

The Pentagon estimates that without warning and without moving a single artillery piece, North Korea can now fire 500,000 artillery rounds an hour into South Korea for several hours without interruption.

Almost all its artillery is protected in hardened bunkers dug into the mountains along the DMZ, which are nearly impossible to destroy, even with sophisticated, satellite-guided precision weapons.

A North Korean attack could include chemical and biological weapons as well as high explosives.

In 2006, South Korea's Ministry of Defence estimated North Korea possessed 2,500 to 5,000 metric tonnes of biological agents, including anthrax, smallpox, cholera and plague.

South Korean civil defence planners predict 50 North Korean missiles carrying nerve gas could kill up to 38% of Seoul's inhabitants--more than eight million people.

Since October 2006, North Korea has had nuclear weapons. It is rushing to perfect its long-range missile technology so it can threaten the continental United States in the hope of deterring or defeating a possible U.S. attack.

Bruce Blair, president of the Center for Defence Information, estimates, "A single 15-kiloton plutonium bomb exploded by North Korea about one quarter mile above Seoul would almost certainly kill 150,000, severely injure another 80,000 and inflict significant injuries to another 200,000 city-dwellers."

North Korean society is designed for war and little else. One of the world's poorest nations, with only 22 million people, it has the world's third-largest army and fifth-biggest armed forces. It spends about 30% of its gross domestic product on defence and 40% of its people belong to a military or paramilitary formation.

Pyongyang's military doctrine still calls for the overthrow of the South Korean government and the imposition of a communist system across the Korean peninsula. As a result, 70% of North Korea's military manpower is stationed in offensive positions within 100 kilometres of the DMZ.

If North Korea did decide to attack or felt provoked or threatened by U.S. or South Korean actions, its military plans call for a blitzkrieg-style assault across the DMZ.

"A surprise attack on South Korea is possible at any time without a prior redeployment of its units. A war could explode after a warning of only a few hours or days, not weeks," said John Pike of GlobalSecurity.org,a research group devoted to defence issues. North Korea would first unleash a devastating barrage of artillery and rocket fire on U.S. and South Korean positions. Then its troops would pour across the border in a combined infantry and armoured assault. Because of the peninsula's mountainous terrain, this could duplicate the original Korean War, with armies advancing down the Kaesong-Munsan, Kumwa, and Chorwon corridors.

An alternative assault, suggested by John Collins, a retired U.S. Army colonel and former military specialist with the U.S. Congressional Research Service, could see North Korea explode a nuclear weapon in one of its undiscovered invasion tunnels beneath the DMZ.

South Korea has already discovered four such tunnels -- each large enough to accommodate the secret transfer of up to 10,000 soldiers an hour into South Korea. There may be 15 similar but still undiscovered tunnels under the DMZ.

North Korea might also try to disrupt U.S. reinforcement plans by trying to explode a nuclear device on board a ship or in a truck in the port of Pusan.

"The basic goal of a North Korean southern offensive is destruction of allied defences either before South Korea can fully mobilize its national power or before significant reinforcement from the United States can arrive and be deployed," explained Mr. Pike.

In any invasion, North Korea will have three strategic objectives: to penetrate defences along the DMZ; to seize and hold Seoul; and to control the peninsula before the United States can rush in reinforcements.

As part of an assault, it will launch ballistic missile attacks against high-level military command posts, seaports, air bases and communications and transportation centres.

Its army of 120,000 special force commandoes, the largest in the world, would also slip behind enemy lines to assassinate political leaders and sabotage sensitive targets.

Some analysts have speculated North Korea might preface an invasion by releasing massive walls of water from its dams above the DMZ.

According to GlobalSecurity.org,troops in South Korea will need to withstand a North Korean assault for up to 15 days, then hold the invaders to a standstill for another two to three weeks more before reinforcements arrive and mobilize for a counterattack that is designed to destroy North Korea's military and its dictatorship. A U. S.-South Korean counterattack will rely on a "shock and awe" use of air power never seen before in history. North Korea's geriatric air defences will be overwhelmed in a U.S. air assault that involves stealth aircraft with precision-guided bombs, tactical aircraft from air craft carrier battle groups and a storm of cruise missiles launched from submarines and surface fleets off the coast.

"North Korea is now probably the most watched country in the world by U.S. surveillance assets," said Stephen Baker, a retired U.S. rear admiral who studied Korean war scenarios for Washington's Center for Defence Information.

Every North Korean gun and tank emplacement along the DMZ, ammunition and supply depot, bridge and crossroad, resupply and reinforcement route, air field, naval facility, commando base, headquarters, command post, munitions factory, power station and important government building is on a target list.

"This strike would be devastatingly lethal and very intense," Adm. Baker said. "The goal would be to very quickly take away North Korea's will to fight and to stagger and isolate remaining [North Korean] formations, rendering them incapable of resisting."

James Woolsey, a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and Thomas McInerney, a retired U.S. Air Force lieutenant general, recently estimated the United States could stage 4,000 attack sorties a day against North Korea. That compares to just 800 sorties a day at the height of the "shock and awe" phase of the Iraq War.

In the long run, no one really expects North Korea to survive an all-out U.S.-led assault. It doesn't have the fuel, spare parts or air power to fight a sustained war. Its tanks and aircraft are obsolete.

In contrast to the 1950 invasion, North Korea, which just a few years ago was facing mass starvation, will be attacking prepared defences, manned by troops that have superior equipment and training.

The military imbalance between the two sides is so great qualitatively that U.S. and South Korean forces might be tempted to launch a pre-emptive attack on North Korea in the face of an extreme provocation, such as preparations for a nuclear attack or the sale of nuclear technology to terrorists.

A pre-emptive attack might promise to destroy or capture North Korea's weapons of mass destruction and could remove some of its ability to destroy Seoul. However, it is unlikely, simply because the risks to South Korea are still too huge.

Long-standing U.S. battle plans for Korea call for rushing up to 750,000 U.S. reinforcements to the peninsula for a counterattack. Two brigades' worth of equipment and ammunition is already stored in and near Korea so the U.S. Army and Marines can rapidly airlift troops into South Korea.

South Korean ground forces, with the support of the 28,000 U.S. troops permanently based in South Korea, will be obliged to stop an initial North Korean assault. But U.S. reinforcements of two full army division expect to launch a massive counteroffensive within two weeks of an outbreak of hostilities.

Part of that counterattack could include having U.S. Marines stage landings on both coasts of North Korea, seeking to cut the country in half at its narrow waist by capturing the east coast port of Wonsan and the North Korean capital Pyongyang.

"There is no doubt on the outcome," said Mr. Woolsey. "We judge that the U.S. and South Korea could defeat North Korea decisively in 30 to 60 days."

After 60 years of pugnacious provocations, sustained tensions between North and South Korea are probable and further military skirmishes are likely. But there is still a stabilizing sense of deterrence, said David Kang, director of Korean studies at the University of Southern California.

"Although the South Korean and U.S. militaries would clearly triumph in a war, the casualties and destruction on both sides of the peninsula would be horrific," he said.

In the end, no one knows anything for certain.

Christopher Griffin, a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, warned, "All scenario-based planning exercises carry an inherent flaw: No matter how imaginatively we guess the future, time always will take us by surprise.

"Even if the U.S. has developed hundreds of scenarios while war-gaming a North Korean regime collapse, for example, none of them can predict the chaos that will surround the eventual end of North Korea's communist regime."

http://www.nationalpost.com/news/world/rain+terror/3203733/story.html

[David Floyd]

The fact that North Korea can slaughter millions of civilians shouldn't allow them to get away with sinking South Koreanarships.

The Soviets had the same capability in the Cold War, but that doesn't mean we would have allowed them to sink a US warship with no retaliation.

[Wezil]

I wasn't arguing it should.