Soldato
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North Korea
- Thread starter terley
- Start date
The US should have dealt with NK years ago. It would have been over in a few days. Unlike Afghanistan, they would only need to remove the leadership and their country would crumble. Theres no factions or indipendent warlords to worry about.
Soon they will be able to fling a missile around the world and who knows where it will land, it's not like they have hit their targets before. They are just as likely to hit Mexico as they are the US.
Soon they will be able to fling a missile around the world and who knows where it will land, it's not like they have hit their targets before. They are just as likely to hit Mexico as they are the US.
When I say us, I mean the west and east (SK, Japan etc), everyone who might face an ICBM threat, the easiest way to solve this would be China and maybe Russia stepping in, if not won't "we" have to act? "We" are safer the sooner "we" take action aren't we?
It would take far more than just a few days to deal with the population crisis. There are millions of North Koreans who have no food or education. It'll be an enormous crisis far above the scale we've seen before except maybe for the mass refugee exodus from Syria and Iraq.
You will have China and South Korea jostling for who gets to install the new government. China doesn't want an American ally on its borders.
Soldato
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Whilst I agree with most of hat you've put, hasn't China technically got the US on its door step because they're helping South Korea?
They have North Korea as a buffer state currently.
I think people are perhaps over estimating the usefulness of a large standing army in this day and age, I mean how useful is a large standing army against a few dozen B-52's carpet bombing? Or vastly superior Armour and Infantry. The British Army once fought China in the Korean War, our losses numbered less than 200, they lost over 10,000. It's now 2017.
More to the point, any invader will have to be prepared for massive casualties on both sides...
Do not forget, we now live in a world where a soldier can be charged with Murder because he shot a mortally wounded and dying enemy combatant.
I doubt if we will have the collective stomach for a War that would almost inevitably result in hundreds of thousands or even millions of NK dead with little discrimination between military and civilian personal.
(And that is quite apart from the possibility that NK might actually have developed "Neutron Bombs" for defensive battlefield use)
I do not see any invasion on NK any time soon!
Soldato
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Its not for the NK, it is a show for the South. US flashes some strong arming, NK replies with similar and SK feel like they need US presence and so US-SK long term military agreements are signed so that the US get to have a nice big base in the east near China and Russia, while SK gets to feel a little safer.
There has been a number of NK who have fled and have been public about their time in NK, as well as journalists and photographers that dont exactly abide by the rules NK put in place to foreigners.
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All the talk when we went into Iraq was how the Elite Republican Guard were going to kick our ass, they didn't. I think we give to much credence to how brain washed the average Nk person is, I'm sure they know it's bull, just there's no easy way out or to protest so they just try to live as best they can. If it actually kicked off I'd bet most wouldn't put up much of a fight.
The size of NK's army is pretty irrelevant. The US would cripple them from the air long before ground troops were sent in to mop up. The NK army isn't exactly fighting fit either, they are under-fed, poorly trained and run on a shoestring budget, using 40-50 year old tech.
At this point though its going to do little to reassure anyone with NK's actions increasingly pushing the requirements for actual action - ostensibly they aren't far off being able to hit Japan with NBC devices.
There is a key difference between Iraq and NK even against modern air capabilities the terrain in NK is strongly in favour of the defender - unlike Iraq which was mostly open desert and exposed fortifications, etc. and supposedly NK has spent several decades digging in. The NK army is largely fairly well trained and drilled what they lack is actual combat experience.
Their air defences may be old but they are using the same kind of upgraded radar that has previously had some limited success with detecting stealth planes and enough volume of it that it would require systematic taking apart in a long and complex operation.
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Sounds like the last Korean war or Vietnam all over. If a ground war kicked off then we aren't used to wars anymore where mass casualties occur. The US/SK would not roll over NK that easily even with air superiority. NK wouldn't just sit there and be bombed - they would invade the south forcing an engagement. Once the numbers of dead increased enough the US public would want out. No amount of fancy planes and bombs is going to prevent that
Sounds nothing like the last one.
An invasion of the South would be somewhat a blessing in disguise - it would force them to commit a lot of troops into action against pre-sighted, more sophisticated, hardware in either open terrain trying to deal with minefields or bottlenecked through tunnels. Plus the resulting probable humanitarian crisis would force the world to act rather than just be a US-SK, NK with China on the fringes thing.
Trying to deal with semi-autonomous massed clusters of troops acting defensively in the kind of terrain that makes up NK would be very costly to deal with either in terms of money or lives.
Trying to deal with semi-autonomous massed clusters of troops acting defensively in the kind of terrain that makes up NK would be very costly to deal with either in terms of money or lives.
Which bit the ground invasion from NK into the south causing near defeat of SK and US/UN forces? think that's what I wrote in post
Soldato
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People were saying this for thousands of years.
The ground invasion by nk occurred when there were basically no us or un forces present. Woefully under equipped us forces were then deployed to counter it. They didn't even have antitank weapons for example.
When the US entered properly they then pushed right back to the Chinese border with relatively light losses. It's only when China and Russia then stepped in that the situation you allude to occurred. Even then Chinese losses were insane. As has been said 10k for the loss of 200 British lives.
I don't doubt the Chinese losses were high but the UN(US) casualties were also the sorts of numbers we wouldn't put up with in this day and age.
US Troops Statistics:
Source: Dept. of Defense
US Deaths:
Hostile: 33,739
Non-Hostile: 2,835
Total In-Theatre: 36,574
US Wounded in Action - 103,284