We don’t rebuild any more – we just do regime change so we can exploit new resources and markets.
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I think the South Koreans are of the mind right now that they don’t want the hassle of trying to integrate the Norks into their country. Think German Re-unification issues on steroids. (At least East Germany was the crown jewel of the Iron Curtain).
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History isn’t on your side. After D-Day, the Allies were reluctant to take casualties (which I think was absolutely the correct thing to do*) and the invasion was slowed. NK has had a lot longer to dig in than did Germany. We left the Russians to die in large numbers destroying the Nazi empire**.
An invasion of North Korea would, basically, be Stalingrad on an enormous scale. And the Germans lost Stalingrad despite having numerically much stronger forces. The usual military advice on how to storm a really well dug in, long established defence that has been training for it for years is “Don’t”.
*Edit - though the reckless use of HE wasn’t much fun for the French.
**And then wondered why they might want a really big buffer zone between them and Germany.
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Except the Germans ultimately were not as well equipped and their mechanized strength was cut by terrain, poor logistics, and being overextended.
In the Pacific, the US overcame dug in forces and established defenses over and over again successfully. Against forces willing to use suicide attacks and place civilians directly into the line of fire.
In the Korean War, the UN forces faced a numerical and technical inferiority at the beginning and overcame it by mobilizing fast and with superior logistics. Ultimately the Chinese intervention failed at its aims of wiping the UN forces out and were held back.
Most importantly, it serves nobody’s interest to have an actual war. Mischief has always served North Korea in the absence of a regime shaking conflict.
After the ceasefire, Kim Il Sung used to generate income and keep himself occupied by being a state sponsored gangster and occasional terrorist. Flooding the rest of Asia with drugs, counterfeit cash and guns, blowing up airliners, sending saboteur teams into the South, or abducting Japanese schoolgirls.
Kim Jong Il added to his father’s list of anti-social activities, missile launches over Japan, poorly performing atomic tests and mooning over the uranium enrichment efforts at Youngbyon nuclear power plant. Most of his efforts netted him blackmail money from Japan, US and South Korea.
Kim Jong Un seems to be following in his father’s footsteps of trying to play the nuclear blackmail game. The big problem being on our end. Cheeto doesn’t seem to realize much of this is just a bluff on the Nork’s end. The guy is that dangerous combination of clueless and impulsive which leads to trouble.
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That was why they ultimately lost the war, sure. That and Hitler’s mad obsession with Stalingrad which caused him to overlook the Soviet encirclement buildup. We could go on about this, and on and on. I would suggest that every historian has his own Stalingrad, just as Hastings said that every soldier involved had his own.
However, the fact is that they were made to pay very heavily for every metre of ground at Stalingrad, and the situation is perhaps rather different from a recently occupied Pacific island. But I’m no expert on the Pacific war and I wouldn’t want to argue about that one.
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What? I’m North Korea?!
Just as a counterpoint, the Nazis made the Soviets pay very heavily for every meter of ground in Berlin. Two weeks of fighting produced nearly half a million casualties total for both sides. The defenders still lost, but it was the capper of a brutal war.
The Pacific War had its own version of Stalingrad in Manila and one can make a case for Iwo Jima or Okinawa. But all three battles were on much smaller scales in terms of forces employed. However the Battle of Manila produced ridiculously high casualties among the civilian population.
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Eh.
To maximize casualties on small nuclear weapons, you detonate them in the air instead of the surface. The goal is to maximize the size of the pressure wave to collapse buildings since this will kill the most people. This creates near zero fallout as no dirt is kicked up to irradiate.
That’s why you can walk through Hiroshima today. In fact, you could have walked through it the day after the bomb was dropped with no ill effects.
But even if they did do a surface detonation, the biggest nuclear weapon they’ve ever tested caps out at 30 kt. That’s not large enough to spread dangerous levels of fallout to Japan from nukes targeting Seoul.
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military commanders when they’re right, they’re geniuses; when they’re wrong they’re idiots. but it seems neither they nor anyone knows in advance if what they’re actually saying and doing is right. ( 20/20 hindsight is an amazing thing. )
maybe if some statistics were brought to bear?
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But the people who never get enough love are the ones in logistics who make it all happen. The side which can move its people and stuff most easily is the one which usually wins.
My favorite example is the Libyan/Chad War.
Qaddafi’s mechanized modern military was defeated by guys in Toyota pickup trucks who were able to move faster and had more dependable vehicles in the climate/terrain
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Does anyone know why we would send a nuclear submarine to dock in South Korea?
Submarines, in their natural habitat, can be unnervingly sneaky, difficult to locate; and are effectively immune to the usual measures targeted at strategic nuclear delivery systems(hence the enthusiasm among nation states of a certain class for having a few skulking around as often as they can); but a submarine at the docks is trivial to find, rather delicate; and generally of little use.
Is it just stocking up on fresh supplies?
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For the same reason NK ran a live-fire artillery exercise – dick measuring. (Tho more along the classic military one-upsmanship line of “you show a little bit of ankle, we’ll show a little bit of leg.”)
Letting the Michigan be seen also invites speculation of what can’t be seen…maybe there’s an escorting attack sub or two out there. (So nobody ::koff::China:: should get too interested in trying to put a tail on the SSGN.) And it’s a great opportunity/calculated risk to shake up China’s detection command: “Did you even know we were in the neighborhood? And 4 hours after it sails, will you have any idea where it is? Be seeing you…”
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oh sure. blame the proletariat 
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50+ comments and no HFRO meme? For shame.
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More like Molly Hatchet.
I’m travelin’ down the road and I’m flirtin’ with disaster
I’ve got the pedal to the floor, my life is running faster
I’m out of money, out of hope, it looks like self-destruction
Well, how much more can we take with all of this corruption
We’re flirtin’ with disaster, y’all know what I mean
And the way we run our lives, it makes no sense to me
I don’t know about yourself or what you want to be, yeah
When we gamble with our time, we choose our destiny
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Another way of looking at it is:
- The UK won the naval war[1]
- The US won the air war[2]
- The USSR won the ground war[3]
[1] the US could have done that eventually. The USSR could not.
[2] the UK could maybe have done that, in a different way. The USSR could not.
[3] the UK could not have done that. The US might have been able to. Together they probably could - especially after winning the air and naval war - but it would have taken years longer.
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Dr. Strangelove: Of course, the whole point of a Doomsday Machine is lost, if you keep it a secret! Why didn’t you tell the world, EH?
The football is managed and carried by the military, not the Secret Service.
Assuming NK indeed has a missile capable of A) reaching the USA, even Alaska or Hawaii, and A) a nuclear weapon sufficiently advanced to be missile-deliverable (I rate both of these assumption as unlikely), shouldn’t we also factor in the defensive capabilities of the USA?
Unless all the radar and early warning systems are pointed north only (to catch missiles and bombers from coming over the North Pole), I think a NK missile heading for the US west coast has a very small chance of getting there.
I know “very small chance” is not zero chance. But it’s gotta be awfully small.
This seems to be the first cogent comment on the situation. NK is a “wicked problem” in military terms, no good strategy in any of the five domains (air, land, sea, space, cyber).
Unfortunately that never seems to be much of an actual solution. At best it produces very short term quiet periods and at worst it just pisses off the Chinese leadership.
I’ve got a former USMC family member who turned out to be a logistics genius. Saw real early how computerized route planning and GPS would help get the job done.
