|
Right, Mike -
Wars go bad when you misread the other side's
military capability as Sun Tzu stated more than 2,000 years ago.
One of the lessons NK learned from its
defeat in the Korean War was its inability to hit population centers in
Japan and the US. Kim Il Sung learned this lesson from his partisan days
when the Japanese systematically destroyed Korean villages and killed their
inhabitants to smoke out and starve his partisans.
Kim Il Sung said: "We will bomb their cities, if
they bomb ours; we will kill their civilians, if they kill ours.." and had
devoted much of his time and NK's resources on building and
stockpiling weapons to hit American and Japanese cities. Kim and his
generals had learned that to win war, they must destroy the enemy
population centers.
"To kill an enemy, kill his horse first" - an old
Japanese samurai dictum (sho-oh kurosawa, maju sono uma-oh udeh).
Isn't that a war crime? It is -
but everyone, even wild animals and plants, has been using this tactic
since the very beginning.
Now the big question is: Can NK hit American
cities? Osama bin laded sure could and did - can Kim Jong
Il?
Kim Jong Il's special forces are as fanatic as bin
laden's fellows.
ysk
Maury! I confess that until 1985 I--then an active duty USAF Major--shared your guess that if the NKs came across the DMZ again we'd stomp the snot out of them. Then the USAF sent me off to Intell School and we used real-world classified data for our paper staff exercises; data on North Korea. I graduated from the school a lot less confident of our capabilities against NK than when I went in. A high-tech military like ours is always at its best against a similar opponent. And, as we saw in SEA and in particular our failed efforts to choke off the Ho Chi Minh Trail, at our worst against low-tech opponents. In a lot of critical aspects, NK features low-tech (because they really don't have the money for high-tech) threats that can pose a real problem for the US military. And hard as it is for me to believe the quality is there, they really do have--at last count--nearly 100,000 special forces soldiers. I've come to believe that at least in terms of toughness and tactical prowess, most of these 100,000 are dangerous guys. And don't forget, all they really have to do--beyond taking the political heat--is take our airfields for a few weeks or perhaps even for only a few days; not even occupy them! , just stop traffic in/out. Don't want to try war-gaming the whole point here. Just trying to say that we might be unpleasantly surprised to have our hands full if they did come across the DMZ. The dummies really should have done it during the Clinton years, when there was a good chance we would have abandoned the SKs. Joe Bermudez is the real expert here. Maybe he'll weigh in to stir the pot:-) Col. Mike Haas, USAF, ret., author Apollo's Warriors: US Air Force Special Operations during the Cold War In the Devil's Shadow: UN Special Operations during the Korean War |