![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
♠
The furor over Kim Jong Il’s missile tests and nuclear brinksmanship obscures the real threat: the prospect of North Korea’s catastrophic collapse. How the regime ends could determine the balance of power in Asia for decades. The likely winner? China
-- Robert D. Kaplan for The Atlantic
Thus Mr. Kaplan prefaces his extensive backgrounder on the North Korean question. I haven't read the second half of the article myself, save for a quick-skimming now, but I thought it was worth a heads-up. I'm including a colorful excerpt on how Kaplan sees the fallout of a North Korean attack on the south, even though it is considered highly unlikely.
___ ___ ___
But what if rather than simply unraveling, the North launched a surprise attack on the South? This is probably less likely to happen now than it was, say, two decades ago, when Kim Il Sung commanded a stronger state and the South Korean armed forces were less mature. But Colonel Maxwell and others are preparing for this possibility.
Simply driving through Seoul, one of the world’s great and congested megacities, makes it clear that a conventional infantry attack on South Korea’s capital is something that not even a fool would contemplate. So if the North were to attack, it would likely resort instead to a low-grade demonstration of “shock and awe,” using its 13,000 artillery pieces and multiple-rocket launchers to fire more than 300,000 shells per hour on the South Korean capital, where close to half the nation’s 49 million people live. The widespread havoc this would cause would be amplified by North Korean special-operations forces, which would infiltrate the South to sabotage water plants and train and bus terminals. Meanwhile, the North Korean People’s Army would march on the city of Uijongbu, north of Seoul, from which it could cross over the Han River and bypass Seoul from the east.
But this strategy would fail. While American A-10 Warthogs, F-16 Vipers, and other aircraft would destroy enemy missile batteries and kill many North Korean troops inside South Korea, submarine-launched missiles and B-2 Spirit bombers sent from Guam and Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri would take out strategic assets inside North Korea. In the meantime, the South Korean army would quickly occupy the transport hubs, while unleashing its own divisions and special-operations forces on the marauding People’s Army. The KFR knows this; thus any such invasion would have to be the act of a regime in the latter phases of disintegration. North Korea’s lone hope would be that the hourly carnage it could produce—in the time between the first artillery barrage on Seoul and the beginning of a robust military response by South Korea and the United States—would lead the South Korean left, abetted by the United Nations and elements of the global media, to cry out for diplomacy and a negotiated settlement as an alternative to violence.
And there is no question: the violence would be horrific. Iraq and Afghanistan would look clean by comparison. A South Korea filled with North Korean troops would be (in military parlance) a “target-rich environment,” in which the good guys and the bad guys would always be close to each other. “Gnarly chaos,” is how one F-16 Viper pilot described it to me. “The ultimate fog of war.” The battlefield would be made more confusing by the serious language barrier that exists between American pilots and South Korean JTACs, or Joint Tactical Air Controllers, who would have to guide the Americans to many of their targets. A-10 and F-16 pilots in South Korea have complained to me that this weak link in the bilateral military relationship would drive up the instances of friendly-fire and collateral civilian deaths—on which the media undoubtedly would then concentrate. As part of a deal to halt the bloodbath, members of the KFR might be able to negotiate their own post-regime survival.
-- Robert D. Kaplan
xXx
The furor over Kim Jong Il’s missile tests and nuclear brinksmanship obscures the real threat: the prospect of North Korea’s catastrophic collapse. How the regime ends could determine the balance of power in Asia for decades. The likely winner? China
-- Robert D. Kaplan for The Atlantic
Thus Mr. Kaplan prefaces his extensive backgrounder on the North Korean question. I haven't read the second half of the article myself, save for a quick-skimming now, but I thought it was worth a heads-up. I'm including a colorful excerpt on how Kaplan sees the fallout of a North Korean attack on the south, even though it is considered highly unlikely.
___ ___ ___
But what if rather than simply unraveling, the North launched a surprise attack on the South? This is probably less likely to happen now than it was, say, two decades ago, when Kim Il Sung commanded a stronger state and the South Korean armed forces were less mature. But Colonel Maxwell and others are preparing for this possibility.
Simply driving through Seoul, one of the world’s great and congested megacities, makes it clear that a conventional infantry attack on South Korea’s capital is something that not even a fool would contemplate. So if the North were to attack, it would likely resort instead to a low-grade demonstration of “shock and awe,” using its 13,000 artillery pieces and multiple-rocket launchers to fire more than 300,000 shells per hour on the South Korean capital, where close to half the nation’s 49 million people live. The widespread havoc this would cause would be amplified by North Korean special-operations forces, which would infiltrate the South to sabotage water plants and train and bus terminals. Meanwhile, the North Korean People’s Army would march on the city of Uijongbu, north of Seoul, from which it could cross over the Han River and bypass Seoul from the east.
But this strategy would fail. While American A-10 Warthogs, F-16 Vipers, and other aircraft would destroy enemy missile batteries and kill many North Korean troops inside South Korea, submarine-launched missiles and B-2 Spirit bombers sent from Guam and Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri would take out strategic assets inside North Korea. In the meantime, the South Korean army would quickly occupy the transport hubs, while unleashing its own divisions and special-operations forces on the marauding People’s Army. The KFR knows this; thus any such invasion would have to be the act of a regime in the latter phases of disintegration. North Korea’s lone hope would be that the hourly carnage it could produce—in the time between the first artillery barrage on Seoul and the beginning of a robust military response by South Korea and the United States—would lead the South Korean left, abetted by the United Nations and elements of the global media, to cry out for diplomacy and a negotiated settlement as an alternative to violence.
And there is no question: the violence would be horrific. Iraq and Afghanistan would look clean by comparison. A South Korea filled with North Korean troops would be (in military parlance) a “target-rich environment,” in which the good guys and the bad guys would always be close to each other. “Gnarly chaos,” is how one F-16 Viper pilot described it to me. “The ultimate fog of war.” The battlefield would be made more confusing by the serious language barrier that exists between American pilots and South Korean JTACs, or Joint Tactical Air Controllers, who would have to guide the Americans to many of their targets. A-10 and F-16 pilots in South Korea have complained to me that this weak link in the bilateral military relationship would drive up the instances of friendly-fire and collateral civilian deaths—on which the media undoubtedly would then concentrate. As part of a deal to halt the bloodbath, members of the KFR might be able to negotiate their own post-regime survival.
-- Robert D. Kaplan
