See, people like Shodan assume that North Korea is just a broken version of us, and that their military is a part of their broken-down country, and so its capabilities are proportionate to the state of the country.
That’s not how North Korea works. In the USA, or the UK, France, even Russia or wherever, the army exists to protect the state. In North Korea, the state exists to feed the army.
The article that says things like
Emphasis added.
[QUOTE=RickJay]
In North Korea, the state exists to feed the army.
[/QUOTE]
And they have been doing such a peachy job of that -
Regards,
Shodan
“Sinking of a naval vessel” + “murder of two Marines and two civilians” =/= “I’m not touching you.”
Century after century ? I didn’t know Koreans were tight with the Iroquois. Ignorance fought 
I guess they subscribe to that Bering Sea land bridge theory.
Again you’re cherry picking parts of the article you like while ignoring the conclusion (emphasis added):
We were not discussing - or at least Marley23 and I were not talking about - a pre-emptive strike against the North. We were discussing what would happen if North Korea strikes first. My opinion is that they would die, horribly and quickly.
Which is why they won’t do it unless they have nothing to lose. Because whether they use nukes or simply launch an invasion of South Korea, North Korea would cease to exist, either politically or physically, in a rather short time.
Regards,
Shodan
It would really suck to be one of the marines holding down the fort over there, though.
Pre-emptively attacking North Korea would be like smacking around the neighborhood retard because he called you names.
If we don’t want to have a drone blow up the podium he’s on the next time he makes offensive comments, how about the equivalent of putting a horse’s head in his bed?
Maybe take out the palace guards’ barracks or drop leaflets explaining to the population just where their rice is coming from?
Maybe dye the rice going there blue? Let the boss man explain that!
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Someone posted this on another forum.
Drones aren’t worth a damn in contested air space. And even if they were, attacking him or his country would be an act or war. Dropping leaflets ain’t so easy in contested air space, either.
Dyeing the rice is worthless as a propaganda tool when the government controls almost all of the information available to the general population. He can pass it off as anything from a religious event to an additive to make the people stronger and/or able to consume less rice per meal.
In my opinion, it would be impossible to launch a pre-emptive strike against North Korea. They’ve already shelled an island and killed people with their artillery, and sunk at least one ship with their navy. Any military action we would carry out against them would specifically list those and other reasons for why we are going to war. North Korea has, time and time again, actually killed other Koreans, who are our allies who we are sworn to protect, and it’s an embarrassing shame on the rest of the world that we allow NK to do these things time after time. I mean, it’s only a handful of people they are killing, right? It’s only a ship or two they are sinking? So what’s the big deal? I guess that’s the logic here??? I guess if they nuke just one city, that’ll be ok too, huh? Why go to war over just one nuke if we didn’t go to war over shelling just one island or sinking just one ship?
Fuck them. Seriously. And fuck the rest of the world for letting them KILL PEOPLE OUTSIDE OF THEIR OWN BORDERS without any real repercussions.
Forget all the “saber rattling” and whatnot. That’s all meaningless, honestly. Sure, threats should be taken seriously if there is any reason to believe that they should be. That’s just icing on the cake though. There are plenty of reasons we could cite to justify a war with North Korea, and the fact that we let them carry on and that we (the rest of the world) also keep feeding their army is an atrocious mistake.
I do agree that before we do anything though, China has to be fully on board. At the very least, cut off ALL aid and let them starve and collapse. I frankly wonder sometimes if the world leaders like having North Korea around as a bogeyman to feel better about themselves in comparison.
Pretty much this.
drew: You might want to remember that the reason North Korea gets away with what they do is because China will react militarily if any country attacks–even in response–North Korea.
No, that’s al-Qaeda’s job. (Or at least it was, during the previous administration.)
Which will certainly end, once NK starts lobbing nukes at the West. China’s guilty of diplomatic posturing as much as NK, but they know which side their bread is buttered on.
Why would we go on the offensive against a country that will never seriously attack us? As long as the Juche ideology and the dynastic Kim family rules North Korea they’re going to be belligerent. They’ll take pot shots at things, shell islands, do missile tests, and even further develop their nuclear program.
What they won’t do is shell Seoul into oblivion or use nuclear weapons on anyone. I find North Korea easier to understand than Iran, because I think many of the hardliners in Iran are genuine religious fanatics. North Korea is more like an absolute monarchy I tend to distinguish monarchies from dictatorships based on the fact dictatorships must rule through a self-created power structure and has to repress all internal resistance; monarchs rule because of passive acceptance of their right to rule based on their birthright and lineage…after the most recent transition it appears the Kims are more monarchical as there does not seem to be any questioning the right of a young relatively inexperienced guy to take over the machinery of government solely based on who his father was.
Monarchs are easy to understand. They want to be happy and they want to stay on the throne. They’re actions will be designed to perpetuate that state of affairs. If I was ruling North Korea, I basically see three substantial ways in which I could lose power.
One is a “palace coup” probably executed by the military leadership. I think in the case of North Korea, while it is a very closed country that few know anything about, it appears the Kims have done a good job in structuring the military so that no independent power bases have built up and no military leaders have emerged that can seriously threaten the regime. So they’ve got that covered.
Two, is a popular uprising. If enough of the population rises up against you it becomes very difficult to reign even if you have the military on your side. If you have to butcher half your people you’re going to be so weak afterward it’s questionable how well you could hold on, not to mention the reality of most extremely large popular uprisings in history is members of the military tend to join them. The Kims have done several things to prevent the risk of popular uprisings.
First, they have insured that the military won’t join a popular uprising because all members of the military are given good treatment in terms of food and living conditions as compared to civilians. So many of the ills civilians suffer, the military is protected from. This makes the military extremely loyal to the regime and makes them unlikely to sympathize or identify with the problems of the civilians.
Second, based on every Western traveler who has been to North Korea for one of the highly guided tours, it appears the Kims have done an amazingly effective job of creating a sort of religious devotion to the Kim dynasty. Many people in North Korea appear to genuinely love and almost worship the Kim family.
Third, the regime has a highly effective and large security apparatus. Just like East Germany, people are cautious about what they say in private conversations for fear anyone could be an informant for the internal police. The North Koreans who aren’t in the military, and who don’t buy into the Kim worship, must either keep their heads down or take serious risks in getting caught. This makes it very hard to organize the nucleus of a popular uprising. North Korea has large prison camps for the people it catches doing things, and they’re apparently pretty effective and getting rid of the people who might be inclined to resistance. So that basically means the only people inclined to resistance who aren’t in prison camps are the ones who are not inclined to talk openly about it or organize, for fear of reprisal.
So the final threat to the Kim’s rule is an outside power, and that’s the most immediate threat. A palace coup or a popular uprising, if you’re an effective ruler, you can plan for and manage those threats over time. But the simple reality is a coalition of Western powers, the United States alone, China, etc could knock the Kim’s off their throne in short order. That’s just fact, and thus that is the most immediate and frightening threat to a Kim Jong Un.
North Korea has thus adopted what I’ll call the “porcupine strategy” for some time. They are very hardened along the border with South Korea, I believe the DMZ is the world’s largest minefield. Any invasion over that route will suffer casualties in large numbers. They have heavily dug-in artillery in large numbers that have Seoul pre-sighted and are ready to start firing relatively quickly. This could not stop an invasion by any of the forces already mentioned, but it would destroy basically all of Seoul before the invasion succeeded in silencing them. They also have nuclear weapons, probably a very small number, but the reality is if invaded they would use them. Probably not on Seoul, as they can destroy it without nuclear weapons, but there are other ripe targets. I don’t know if they’d risk their shaky rocket technology at present with a launch against Japan, but they theoretically could try to nuke Tokyo, for example. They could just hold onto the nukes and use them on any large concentrations of military forces as they break over the border, they could try using them against naval groups etc. Some day their missile technology will get better and it’d probably be realistic for them to just nuke Tokyo and maybe some day the west coast of the United States.
So North Korea’s goal is to basically be like a porcupine, small and weak, but really painful to eat. (Not the perfect analogy as porcupines have a soft underbelly that savvy predators can take advantage of without being pricked.) If you’re a bear, there are good reason to not eat a porcupine, you could, and the porcupine could not have any hope of stopping you from killing it if it really wanted. But you make it painful and that is a strong disincentive. To be a porcupine, North Korea has to make its quills well known, and that is the purpose of nuclear tests.
North Korea preemptively attacking anyone on a large scale (with, for example, a nuclear attack or a barrage on Seoul) undermines the entire strategy of the Kim dynasty and immediately puts an end to their rule. It just doesn’t make sense. It’s like with the Civil War, for years the North kow towed to the South on various issues to avoid secession. Once the South actually seceded and forced us to fight a very bloody war, any desire to say, be compromising on the issue of slavery or black rights evaporated. The South had done the worst it could possibly do, so now it was going to pay. Same with North Korea, if they actually nuke someone, then that’s the worst thing they can do. At that point, you’ve already been stuck by all the quills, so you might as well kill the porcupine.
Even China would not raise a finger in defense of North Korea if they did something insane like nuke the United States. In fact, under a response doctrine I believe any modern U.S. President would follow, if China in any way tried to prevent a nuclear retaliation on North Korea in response to North Korea nuking us, I think China would quickly be drawn into a nuclear exchange with the United States in an upward spiral of brinksmanship that could only end in China also being nuked and then that leads to bad times for the whole world. China realizes this, and would never engage in such an effort. Not to mention with NORAD and our immediate response capability, if we see a North Korean nuke coming towards us, the reality is North Korea will have ICBMs and SLBMs being launched against it before the missile hits the United States, so there will be no time for China to intervene and it will thus be left deciding how to respond to the United States nuclear retaliation on North Korea.
This discussion is fanciful because all parties (including the Kims) know this. It’s like why don’t I go to Fort Knox with a machine gun tomorrow to try and steal a bunch of gold? Because I know I’ll be shot and killed. Yes, I could probably kill some people with me, but I’ll be shot and killed. I don’t want to be shot and killed. Kim doesn’t want to be killed, nor does he want to lose his control of North Korea. The most likely and certain way for those things to happen is attacking some random country, especially with a nuclear weapon.
Thus, any possibility of a North Korean attack on anyone is remote to non-existent, thus there is no reason at all to even consider a pre-emptive strike on them.
Let’s see if China follows through with their promise. North Korea successfully conducts third nuclear test.
Sanctions aren’t doing a damn thing. I’d say cut off all their supply lines, but I’m not sure that would have much of an effect either. They’d probably start cannibalizing the population to make more butter for the leadership.
Or they’re getting desperate and acting up to try to convince everybody to drop the sanctions. I think that may be what’s going on here.
