North Korea Mega Thread

[AN63093]

Glad to see these threads are now consolidated.. it was getting a little annoying trying to follow all the respective NK threads out there.  Also, VirginiaModerate, I've been enjoying reading your contributions to this subject.  I'm also a veteran, Army not Navy, and my branch/MOS was.. shall we say, very much support, and quite a bit far from the operational side of things.  So my perspective might be a bit more academic/ivory tower-ish than yours on this subject, but nonetheless, here's my take on things.  By the way, I've never been on exercises in Korea, though I've always wanted to be stationed there.  I've got lots of former 2ID, 8th Army buddies... would've loved to have been in Yongsan.  Camp Casey... eh.. not so much.  Then again, I got my OCONUS tour before I ETSd, a real hardship one in Germany, so I'm not complaining.

Anyways, while tensions are at the highest they've been in some time on the peninsula, I think people are being a little dramatic about it.  I see what is happening as an advanced form of saber-rattling, but that's about it.  Reason being, and this is not anything that anyone ever admits out in public, but it's actually sorta in everyone's interest to maintain the status quo and not disturb the current geo-political situation.

--for the US, obviously we rather enjoy our strategic position in South Korea, not so much to keep an eye out on NK, but rather China.  If Korea re-unified, there's a real question as to how long they would tolerate a US presence, which is not particularly popular among certain demographics and the Left.  I'm not saying there would be an immediate Gaullist style eviction from South Korea like there was in France in the 60s, but it's certainly a concern.  Along those lines, there is no guarantee that a unified Korea would align itself more with the US than with China in the long-term.  NK then serves a pretty useful purpose as the boogeyman that guarantees our forward presence.

--for South Korea, re-unification is something that may sound nice on paper, but practically speaking, the disruption is not something that many people would welcome, particularly for younger generations that "care" quite a bit less than older generations that lived through the Korean War and dealt with splitting families and so on.  Not just because Seoul would be ground zero, but even beyond that, SK was one of the fastest growing countries in the past 50 years and now is one of the richest countries in the world.  If you're a young, upwardly mobile professional in Seoul, pretty much the last thing you want is anything to disturb your economic situation, when you got everything you need right now.  Consider that re-unification in this instance would be 100x more problematic than Germany was.

--for China, NK serves as a useful buffer state, and while re-unification may lead to a Korea that's more aligned with China in the long-term, there's still no guarantee of that and in the short-term, there'll be a US presence that's way too close for comfort.  Not to mention, there's the refugee issue.

--for North Korea, obviously this goes without saying, you'd want to stay in power (I'm speaking about the regime in this case, not the people, who obviously would benefit from a regime change).

--for Japan, NK is also a useful boogeyman in the same way it is for the US.  Interestingly, though this isn't commented upon much by mainstream sources, although Japan has been very reluctant to deploy any forces to worldwide operations and the numbers have been minuscule, and despite Article 9 and their supposed constitutional prohibition on a military, Japan has sorta quietly re-armed while nobody was looking, under the guise of being called, "self defense forces."  If you're Japan, like the US, you also can't be guaranteed that a re-unified Korea wouldn't be more aligned with China, as opposed to the US.  And if that's a problem for the US, it's even more so for Japan, given historical reasons, proximity, and so on.


So given all this, I think we're in a situation where it's not really in anyone's national self-interest to rock the boat; the big wild card here is Kim, and whether he'd be foolish enough to cross a red-line.  I think the answer is obviously no; he's not stupid, and he knows that at some point he'll cross a line that makes war inevitable, and it's curtains for him when that happens.  I think the bigger problem and the bigger risk is miscalculation.  Kim wants to tiptoe as close as he can to the red-line without going over, and the big risk is that he may not know exactly where that line is or believe he can push it a little more than he really can.

If a war breaks out, then it's over for the regime, it's just a matter of how long and how many casualties.  There's no doubt that the casualties would be significant, quite a bit more than the US Armed Forces is used to seeing since at least Vietnam, or even the prior Korean War.  But the US would certainly prevail.  I can't remember the source precisely, but while NK has a large number of forces, artillery pieces, and so on, a big problem for them is logistics; talking about supply, food, fuel, ammo, etc.  Their logistics capability is very unsophisticated compared to either the US or South Korea, and I recall reading that current estimates place NK's ability to sustain full operations for a shockingly low period of time.  I can't remember the exact amount, but it was like days or something like that.  NK just simply can't sustain total war for more than a short period before it basically has to revert to guerrilla tactics.

Despite Beet's comments on this on a previous page, I think the risk of a greater strategic nuclear exchange with China is quite low in all scenarios, and comments suggesting such are a little over dramatic.  I don't think the conditions are quite right for sparking a great powder keg in the WW1 sense.. I've already typed long enough in this thread, so I won't go on that tangent, but suffice to say, the conditions are vastly different.  More likely, I think, is that China would get involved on the side of the US, so they could control as much of the North as possible and guarantee a seat at the table when hostilities die down, preferably with an eye towards installing a new client state in the North under Chinese control.  Sort of similar then, to the end of WW2 when the US and USSR were kinda/sorta allies, but not really, and we both had competing interests in how to divide up Germany.

[AN63093]

Thanks for the extensive and thoughtful reply Beet.  I look forward to continuing this discussion.

When I said Kim was a "wild card," I didn't mean in the sense that his intent and motivations are completely unpredictable and like a roll of the dice.  What I meant is that Kim is sorta in the driver's seat in the current situation- it is in every other party's interest (including NK, for that matter) to maintain the status quo, and their actions will start from that premise; i.e. not rocking the boat and just letting things continue as they are, perhaps even indefinitely.  If there is a person that sparks this tinderbox, it will be Kim.

And it won't be because we don't know Kim's motivations- the reason why he is so intent on developing a nuclear ICBM is not exactly hard to deduce.  But what makes him a wild card, and the most unpredictable actor in this situation, is because, at the risk of repeating myself from the last page, he wants to tip-toe as close as he can to the red-line, without going completely over.  He knows if he actually crosses a real red-line, it's curtains for his regime and his power is history.  The biggest problem is that he may miscalculate where that red-line is, and that's what makes him the "wild card" in this situation.  That miscalculation is the most likely way war starts in Korea, in my opinion.

I agree with your paragraph about how NK won't abandon its nuclear program- the two outcomes out of this situation are either: a) the reluctant acceptance that NK is going to have at least some nuclear weapons; or b) regime change.  To be honest, I don't think the US (by US, I mean mainstream national security analysts) are necessarily so worried about NK having nuclear weapons per se, it's more about range (ICBMs) or second strike capability (SLBMs).  After all, they already have, and have had for some time now, nuclear weapons.

I agree with your point about saving face, and I would add that it's not just a cultural Korean thing, but in autocratic societies, the ruler's position is always somewhat precarious.  Now in this sense, Kim has actually done a pretty decent job of consolidating power (more than I had expected when he first came into power, to be honest), but I would still characterize his position as inherently an unstable one.  I get what you're saying by giving Kim an out.  Let's say the newest round of sanctions pushes him to the bargaining table in a serious way- the problem is, what "out" can we give him?  An end to joint exercises?  A withdrawal of our position in SK?  I mean, these are just not realistic options.  Whether it would be a good idea to end these things, is not the point.  The US will never agree to them, they are just non-starters.  So what can we realistically offer him in exchange for, let's say, an end to ICBM development?

Yes Kim is sort of cornered, but keep in mind he did this to himself.  It was Kim that started toeing close to the red-line in the first place when he knew the US would find an ICBM that could reach the US unacceptable.  Maybe that was the easiest way for him to hold on to power, sure.. but I have to believe there was also a "Deng Xiaoping" option if he wanted to take his regime in a different direction.

Let's say you were the president, what would you do?  You say "diplomacy," but what specifically, do you mean by that?  What are you prepared to give up, and what are your demands?  I'm not asking this to be patronizing or anything, I'm asking seriously, as a thought experiment.

There is a point of no return, where war may become inevitable.  For example, in WW1, that point was almost certainly before 1914, and if the spark wasn't Franz Ferdinand, it would've been something else.  Have we passed the point of no return in NK?  I'd like to believe we haven't, but it's possible, frightful as it might sound, that we have.

[AN63093]

Beet, this is in response to your first post.

I agree, I don't think Kim will go so far as to launch an actual ICBM at the US.  I think the much bigger risk is the red-line miscalculation, which I've already gone into above.

I would agree that our red-line has been a bit of a moving target right now, and Trump's tweeting on it hasn't been helpful in that regard, but I don't think that's the root cause of the problem, nor why you see comments like the one Dunford made, that you pointed out.  I think the root cause is simply that there isn't a consensus in the US right now on what exactly the red-line should be, and what our response to a violated red-line should be.

There is a pretty robust debate going on in foreign policy circles right now in what the exact response should be- from airstrikes, to more surgical SOF operations, to full-scale, all-out deploying BCTs invasion-style, and everything in between.  At least from my perspective, I don't know that one course of action has really won the day over another yet.  I know McMaster was talking yesterday about how 'preventive war' is on the table, but the devil is in the details, and what that 'preventive war' would look like is another question entirely, and I'm not sure one option has more support currently than any other.

Finally, on your point about Chinese escalation, I did read your reasoning, but I just don't find it that realistic.  You are right that China is not a perfect analogue of the USSR in WW2- that was a bit of a rough analogy, admittedly.  But I think it would also be incorrect to state China's involvement would be similar to that of the Korean War as well.  Consider that the US and China have a completely different relationship now than they did in the 50s, not to mention economic ties, trade, corporate entanglements, diplomatic relations, etc.

Yes, our respective armed forces would have fundamentally opposite interests.  That is true, but then again, so did the US/USSR in WW2, and that's why I brought that up as an example.  The war hadn't even ended yet by the time it had started to become clear that we were not going to agree on much when it came to how Germany was going to look going forward, and yet there was no confrontation over it (notwithstanding, of course, Patton's famous suggestion to the contrary, which by the way, he was not alone in his opinions at the time).

Of course, there is always the risk of an accident, you are right about that, but I think in the case of US/China, cooler heads would prevail.  We aren't friends, true, but we aren't enemies either.  We are kinda/sorta friends that tolerate each other because we have to, is maybe the best way to say it.  I think if there is a nuclear weapon used in Korea, the most likely scenario is that it is from Kim himself, perhaps as a retaliatory strike upon Seoul if he is attacked, or maybe as a 'last gasp' of his regime if he's about to lose the crown.

[AN63093]

Given that the last three US administrations have all taken rather hard-line approaches toward North Korea, I've been wondering: if another candidate (Hillary, Sanders, Cruz, Kasich, Rubio, Carson, or Jeb) had won in 2016, would that person have taken an approach any different from Trump's current approach, and would the outcome have been any different?

Probably not.  I don't know that the phrase "fire and fury" would be used, and whoever was president would be less schizophrenic in the tweeting, but the basic geo-political picture would be about the same.

There are some long posts of mine in a back-and-forth with Beet on pg 4/5 in this thread, but we'd almost certainly be in the same position as we are today.  Kim's desire to accelerate the ICBM program pre-date the current administration and have little to do with who is in the White House.  Our response, likewise, has little to do with Trump, but rather, before this current round of increased tensions, our national interest was in mostly keeping the status quo while maintaining a forward presence in SK (this is actually preferred to re-unified Korea, and in fact, it was in every party's interest to maintain the status quo, I go into more detail why that was, on page 4 I think).

Since the tensions have gone up, however, and NK steps closer and closer to having a real delivery mechanism, our red-line has been somewhat vague, and our response as well, and that is because there isn't concensus right now among foreign policy analysts as to what it should be.  I posted a good article from the Atlantic on the main forum (in the "what happened if we bomb NK" thread), and it goes into all the current options.  There have been a lot of articles over the past few months on this same issue from the usual suspects (Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, etc.).  There are lots of options, from airstrikes, to surgical SOF operations in a 'decapitation' strike, to going all-out deploying BCTs full invasion style.  

To what degree we let NK continue in their ICBM development before launching a pre-emptive strike, and then what that strike consists of, are two things that do not have real consensus yet.

Of all the other candidates listed, I don't think we'd be in much a different place, except maybe with Sanders and Paul.  Consider that of all the candidates, Trump was arguably the least "interventionist."  Some of the other approaches Beet was suggesting on the previous pages in our debate (withdrawing our position in SK, ending exercises, offering security guarantees, treaties, etc), regardless if we think they are a good idea or not, I don't see any other candidate really doing them, since there'd be simply too much push back from the national security circles who consider those options unacceptable.  Maybe Paul would push the most, I dunno.

The tweeting probably wouldn't have happened, that may be true, but I don't put a whole lot into those tweets, to be honest.  McMaster, Mattis and Dunford are going to be primarily responsible for crafting the strategy and they'll be the most relevant people in Trump's ear in regards to this.  Especially since, before elected, I'm not sure Trump had much of an opinion about what to do with NK (other than perhaps, believing them getting an ICBM is not a good idea), and he almost certainly didn't have that sophisticated of a military course of action thought up in his mind, just because he doesn't have a background in national security.  But that's what McMaster, Mattis, and Dunford are for.

[AN63093]

For all we know, someone could be feeding them technology. But the public doesn't know. We can only speculate. All we have to go by is the end result.

Well, feeding technology, I have no idea.  But we do know that most of their missile designs are either copies of, or derived from, Soviet missile designs.  In particular the Scud missile and the R-27 Zyb.

[AN63093]

Could everyone please take a deep breath and calm down?  The world is not on the brink of nuclear war.  Yes, sabers are being rattled.  That's happened many times before, and it's a long way from actual warfare.  We've been much, much closer to the brink than this.

(FWIW: I remember air raid drills in school during the Cuban Missile Crisis; my school actually had its own shelter.)

This.

Thankfully, somebody understands.