The North Korea Thread

The US has carrier strike groups positioned around the world, basically so that they can do exactly this. A single aircraft carrier can project an absurdly immense amount of conventional force.

To be honest, that kind of force wouldn’t matter NEARLY as much once the war began, because assumptions are that North Korea would take the early lead in a land war, and we don’t have nearly the capacity to bring to bear quickly to address that. It would require mostly South Korean forces and our assistance would be limited for weeks.

On the flip side, naval superiority, check. Quickly.
Air superiority, check. Moderately quick.
Land superiority, no, and it would be in metropolitan areas, severely limiting what we could do with the two checks above.

All of that assuming it would not be like Iraq, where their forces give up quickly.

I think that we’ve seen in prior conflicts that:
Air superiority == land superiority

If you have air superiority, you can basically destroy all conventional land forces at will.

Air superiority won’t help you win an asymetric conflict… but in terms of conventional engagements, the air superiority of the US has directly resulted in an almost immediate and total collapse of the enemy’s ground forces.

I would tend to agree with you, but that article lays out why that isn’t the case. North Korea would push down into South Korea, in major metro areas. What do you bomb at that point? How do you target them without killing some of our allies?

In any case, South Korea would lose many people. Heaven forbid that happen, I have coworkers there and work for a company based there. It would be chaos.

Let’s hope this doesn’t come to pass.

Sure, but this is exactly the problem I’m talking about. Air power isn’t enough to do what we say we want to do in terms of affecting decisions on the ground or in the halls of power. Air power can, in some cases, destroy stuff, but unless that destruction insures political compliance it’s not that useful in terms of policy.

I also suspect that our carrier air wings would suffer more losses than we might want, or many suspect, in any large-scale attack on North Korea. And to actually use the air wings effectively, you’d have to prep the battlefield with a fair amount of SEAD and what not, which in turn expands the scope dramatically. Relying solely on the resources at sea would quickly exhaust the stores of smart ordnance I suspect as well, and then there’s the question of whether the target sets would even match up with what the Navy has available on the carriers, which have to be sort of general purpose tools by design.

It’s all in the set up, though. In the context of a general war with North Korea, our command of the air would be a decisive factor in the medium to long term, no doubt. In the short term, air power can’t stop most of what NK could do that would be very bad for South Korea. Mitigate, yes, but stop, no. And it’s just my opinion but I feel strongly that only actual occupation by ground forces would be sufficient to really change the behavior of the North Koreans.

North Korea doesn’t really have the ability to just steamroll down into major metropolitan areas before getting crushed by airpower. I mean, there is an actual defense on the ground there.

I would expect most casualties to come from artillery, not NK actually advancing down into SK.

But you’ve got the timeline backwards.

You only need occupation in the long term… not the short term. In the short term, you just need to destroy their shit. And airpower can do that extremely fast. See Iraq’s conventional military force in Desert Storm as an example. It was basically obliterated in a matter of days, and it was WAY bigger than NK’s, over a much larger area.

One carrier can dump a ton of pain onto a ton of targets.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying it’ll be a walk in the park. It won’t.

I’m just saying that there is one thing that the US military can do that is absolutely unparalleled by anything in human history, and that’s project destruction onto our enemies.

Interesting article. And why we need professionals in the State Department.

No argument there. The problem is, destruction is only effective if it destroys the stuff that matters. Can our air power destroy North Korea’s nuclear program? Pretty much everything I’ve heard or read about such things indicates the answer is no; the best prognosis is that it could severely damage some aspects of the program, but too much of it is buried too deeply and is either redundant enough or general enough (i.e., knowledge vice facilities) that any reasonable bombing campaign would be ineffective.

Likewise with the general military situation. As powerful as our stuff is, and it’s pretty damn whup-ass for sure, the North Koreans are not stupid. They’ve had fifty years to dig stuff in, hide it, buff it, you name it. No one doubts that in the long run they’d lose, but the I am skeptical of the idea that a brief but intense air campaign could actually effect the changes we want (that is, eliminate the nuclear threat). I’d love to be wrong (well, actually, I hope there isn’t any campaign, because the consequences I fear would be widespread and bad) but in the event the shit hits the fan, I sure hope you’re right.

https://twitter.com/ExumAM/status/895068894372737025

Oh, you’d almost certainly not be able to destroy the core of that program by some sort of targeted bombing, like Israel did to Iran’s nuke plants.

The bombing’s purpose would be total destruction of their conventional military, paving the way for SK to just occupy the nation.

Bigger in what sense? Manpower, or something else? Wikipedia (take with obligatory grain of salt) says NK has 1.19 million active duty personnel as of 2012, whereas high estimate for Iraqi army in 1990 was 1 million, lower estimates around 500k.

At the time, Iraq was considered the 3rd largest military force in the world. I’m not sure “active duty personnel” for NK really means that much. I doubt they actually have modern, maintained equipment to outfit that many people.

Iraq had large air and ground forces, 9 armored divisions, etc., but ultimately everyone overestimated their strength.

I think that what we saw then would be similar in NK… we’d see that the estimated strength of NK was dramatically overblown, and that its military was hilariously outmatched by the US’s modern force.

One thing to keep in mind is that Iraq was in the desert, it was ideal terrain for both our airpower and our tanks. North Korea is mountainous. It’s much less favorable for us and benefits the defender.

Yeah, seriously. Have you never played Civ or a wargame? Jeez…

Sure, so they say. Until it happens, it won’t really be known how different it is. In the 90’s NATO bombed the shit out of the Serbs in heavily mountainous terrain. I think we lost like 3 planes, and had 2 guys die in a non-combat crash of a helicopter. We killed or wounded thousands and destroyed tons of artillery, aircraft, and ground vehicles.

I’m just always skeptical when I hear folks talk about how “it’s gonna be much harder THIS time”.

The problem is that Trump is -3/-3 leader and since 1 always miss. That pretty much gives all of our attack 20% chance of failing. The war in Korea is only a sure thing if we lock Trump in a secure undisclosed location and take away the nuclear football and his cell phone.

Ya, like I said, Trump’s incompetence in all things pretty much makes this way worse than it should be… which is already bad.

On some very real level, the optics alone are gonna make it a mess. It’ll be very similar to Clinton bombing the serbs, right after the lewinsky fiasco, where it looked (and perhaps to some degree was) as though the miltiary engagement was just meant to distract from his scandals.