Why not let the South Koreans decide whether they want to retaliate or not?
We should encourage the Korean government to do so and provide support if necessary.
Pretenders to what?
Should we do that regardless of whether this was an accident or not? :eek: Even it it was a deliberate attack, I don’t see how egging the SK’s on (because they aren’t going to be too keen about attacking NK, even if this WAS a direct attack) would be beneficial either to the US or to South Korea. The best course at this point, IMHO and FWIW, is to basically wait the NK’s out…they are bound to collapse at some point. They have been teetering on the brink for decades now and it’s only a matter of time. Even this course is fraught with danger, since when they finally DO go tits up, the gods alone know what will happen then. Starting a war, however, is the least appetizing of the choices, IMHO.
-XT
Pretenders to the Korean Peninsula rejecting the legitimate government in Seoul.
I advocate doing this if and when it’s proven the Jucheists were behind this.
shrug I think that not only would this be incredibly unlikely (and would have been equally unlikely had this happened when Bush was in office, let alone Obama), but it would also not be a wise course regardless. YMMV, but then you don’t live on the Korean peninsula, so it’s a bit easier to be dispassionate about such things when it’s a much more academic question.
-XT
Look, SK and NK have been on bad terms ever since the war, but this is not a China-Taiwan situation where each claims sovereignty over the other.
Echo the other posters, sounds like the vette got tagged with a captor mine.
Declan
There is a risk North Korea will use their battery of 10,000+ artillery pieces pointed at Seoul. Some of them are armed with chemical and biological weapons. Seoul would look like Germany or Britain at the end of WW2 within a few hours.
South Korea also has a special forces team of about 100,000 soldiers trained in assassination, sabotage, terrorism, etc. that they can deploy overseas in a war. They would likely deploy them in South Korea, Japan and the United States. If 19 Al Qaeda members with box cutters can kill thousands and do hundreds of billions in damage, then I’m sure thousands of North Korean SF soldiers showing up onshore could do damage too. Maybe not as efficiently as Al Qaeda did 9/11 (because our guard would be up, and because they’d have less time here to plan), but they could still do some serious damage.
They also have missiles that can reach Japan. Their nuclear weapons are crap but they still have nuclear weapons.
Attacking North Korea wouldn’t be wise. If we could go back in time, it would’ve been best to conquer the whole peninsula back in the 50s and prevent the Kim regime from coming to power. But its too late to do that. However, you have to examine how much damage the NK regime can do to civilians and infrastructure in an all out war. They can probably kill millions and do tens of trillions in property and economic damage within a few weeks of all out war.
They’d definately lose an all out war (the NK military is outdated, underfunded, undertrained, etc) and the South Koreans would conquer the north. But only after suffering huge losses to civilians and property.
And if we went back to the thirties and sat in on a conversation with british and french politicians, discussing why invading germany would be bad thing, excepting the nukes ,I would think it would sound roughly similar to what you are saying.
Except a few scant years later , 50 million are dead. Sinking a corvette is not going to start a war, especially when its not yet proven that hostile fire sank it. But going with a passive response is not going to perserve peace if the norks think that they can get away with doing stuff like this , if its proven.
Declan
How would North Korea deploy hundreds, let alone a hundred thousand, onto the shores of Japan and the US? North Korea has used a handful of covert operatives in Japan in the past to kidnap various Japanese nationals, but that was in the 1960s and '70s.
We tried.
Yeah, I agree…not seeing that as being a realistic threat. The NK’s seem to take a bruit force approach to warfare. Any spec ops teams they have (and I have serious doubts they have that many teams…or, if they do have that many, that they are worth a shit or well equipped) would need to be used scouting, taking out key positions and generally making life hell in the backfield, which is the traditional role for spec ops. Sending them off to blow up some stuff in Japan or the US, while personally satisfying to Lil’ Kimmy, no doubt, wouldn’t really be helping push forward their critical military objectives.
At one point we had the NK’s pushed back to nearly the Chinese border and it looked like the war was over…until the Chinese launched over a million men at us in the dead of winter and caught us with our logistics strained and completely by surprise. It was a miracle (and a testament to the will of half trained and poorly equipped and lead US soldiers, and to the outnumbered and out gunned South Korean military forces that we held on as well as we did.
-XT
Ever heard of Chongryon?
My understanding is they have mini-subs. I don’t know how effective they’d be in getting to the US, but South Korea and possibly Japan seem like reasonable targets. I know they have sent mini subs with SF soldiers into South Korea before.
I was under the impression that Eisenhower wanted to pull out of Korea and did. I don’t know if staying would’ve given the US the ability to conquer the whole peninsula or not, but the goal of Eisenhower was to end the war.
Sure they do. They use them all the time, in fact, to insert covert ops guys behind the DMZ. They have used them in China as well to snatch Japanese citizens. However, there is a huge difference between landing a few platoons of spec ops guys behind enemy lines and figuring out how to land 2-3 army corp. It’s a matter of logistics and scale. They could (and probably would) send out a few teams…maybe even a several dozen or even hundred teams (even that is probably stretching it)…but there is no way in hell they could cut loose 100000 spec ops guys (even assuming they have them) to get across to Japan or the US.
I don’t think his goal was to pull out of Korea, and certainly he didn’t do so. We still have troops there today, after all. I think that he wanted peace though, so he could focus on other things, and he was willing to make concessions to get a permanent cease fire (instead of the full peace he wanted). The last thing the US needed was an escalation of tensions between the US, Russia and China.
-XT
Well, don’t let any facts get between you and a war.
You should really read The Guns of August, which describes how careless mistakes started a war that left 17 million people dead. Perhaps if you had even a little perspective on how wars start, you wouldn’t advocate a senseless, belligerent, and reckless military response.
I thought conventional wisdom was that the US military was already stretched fighting two wars against partisans and insurgents armed with RPGs and IEDs and you are spoiling for a brawl against a nuclear armed million strong army?
Stick to dollies tea-parties, and legislation against the decline of US morals. Questions with blood consequences are well outside your hegemonist fantasies, oh Black Knight of the SD.
They’re hardly soldiers, let alone “special forces” capable of significant wartime operations.
In addition, North Korea has a pretty crappy navy that is a green water navy at its very best. They do not have the logistics and capability to supply and re-supply an overseas force. Any large scale deployment of forces with the intention of landing in Japan or anywhere farther would be a one-way trip. Since Japan is unlikely to intervene militarily against North Korea except in a direct attack on the home islands, sending any forces outside of the Korean peninsula in the event of a conflict wouldn’t make any strategic sense, particularly since it would be a massive suicide mission.
Wait, I think I saw this movie. Wasn’t there a Rupert Murdoch-like character with a stealth boat?