Might be off topic,but I’m curious as to why the about face from NK…
For New Years KJE makes a speech which seems like its promoting peace/reunification with SK…then Google higher ups go for a tourist/business trip there and tell him he needs Internet…then things were quiet for a while until this recent hulaboo about missiles…what happened? Did he get his hands on The Videogame Homefront (or the movie based on it, Red Dawn 2012) or something?
As to the OP,I woundnt be concerned about the artilerry of NK considering that SK fighters could take it out before a majority of it is launced (or at least some of the positions) also the 8.2 Mil NK counts as its reserved force is a lot of men and women over 18…who are ordinary citizens who due to recent rocket launches have barely eaten a full meal in a very long time…
American jets over Pyongyang and missiles slamming into the few critical locations are going to tell the average North Koreans pretty quickly that “Hey, we’re getting our asses handed to us!”
Wrong. NK has thousands of dug in artillery units in range of Seoul. SK and the US combined can’t take out enough of it to matter in time to save the city. Seoul would pretty much be a smoldering ruin long before U.S. fighters from Japan could even join the fight. Factor in NK has some degree of air defense capability. Factor in that those dug in artillery units might use chemical and/or biological weapons.
Here is an article (also linked in the other thread about NK) with what I consider to be a pretty good assessment of the situation
One assumes the South Koreans have had continuity-of-government plans in place for decades which take the near-destruction of Seoul as a given. In the event that war were imminent, I’d expect the president and most of the senior staff to be evacuated out of the range of artillery to a bunker somewhere.
So?
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So the North Koreans are very likely to lose a war with South Korea, badly. South Korea spends three times as much, with an economy that is four times larger and immeasurably better organized and efficient.
But “what they have” isn’t worth the powder to blow it to hell. Their economy doesn’t work, their agriculture doesn’t work, their infrastructure doesn’t work, their command and control doesn’t work. What makes you think that their military is going to work any better?
You can’t make chicken salad out of chicken shit, no matter how much chicken shit you dedicate to the task.
I don’t think people who have been malnourished since childhood make very good conscripts.
True. Therefore, the North Koreans would be attacking a prepared position. Guess who holds the advantage in that situation?
With their second-rate equipment, outmoded tanks, suffering from shortages of fuel, spare parts, etc.
No, it really isn’t. Especially since the US is not likely to be sitting on their hands. You do realize that the Korean peninsula can be reached by aircraft based in Japan and that the US maintains a naval presence (to say the least) in the area.
Step 1: North Korea kills a few million people and wrecks the greater part of Seoul.
Step 2: North Korea gets flogged by US and SK.
Step 3: ??? Depends on what China does.
North Korea is unlikely to even manage a few million murders. South Korea has spent every year since their war turning their country into a fortress.
Aside from which, all that North Korea artillery isn’t going to level Seoul, although it’s likely to do a lot of damage. Seoul is a huge, spread-out city and artillery takes a lot of time to really do that much damage. Will it be bad? Very much so. But Seoul will survive. North Korea will not. It doesn’t mean they won’t do a lot of damage going down, but given SK’s strategic strength, NK is toast.
Guns that have been there for 30 years, have never been fired, and are probably maintained as well as everything else in NK. I’d be surprised if 1 in 10 will actually work when they need them.
I can see China intervening once NK starts really getting their asses handed to them. They will “broker” a cease-fire, using whatever leverage they have over Kim von Nutball IV, and we’ll be back to Square One, with several hundreds of thousands of casualties.
The “best-case” scenario in a war would be, unfortunately, the obliteration of NK after an attack on the south, with no Chinese interference. Still going to involve lots of people dying, and decades of rebuilding.
I agree. Its so plainly obvious that China would gain if the Koreas united and became a functioning democracy. Worrying about having troops at your border, indeed having a buffer zone at all, when you’re as big as China, in this age of technology when missiles can streak from thousands of miles away to your capital city in minutes, makes so sense. So what if US troops were at your border? They could easy be off your coast in aircraft carriers, or in the sky parachuting in, at the first hint of trouble.
Anyways, does anyone kinda hope, just a little, that the whole situation would resolve soon and we’d get to see what happens in reality as opposed to all these war games? All this speculation on what would happen kind of excites me
With Seoul the obvious target and SK’s three times as big military budget, one would expect SK to have a ton of counter battery units along the border? These units can detect incoming artillery, get a very accurate fix on the location of the source, and direct fire down range to disable it.
With NK’s artillery being no secret, I can’t imagine SK having sufficient batteries to eliminate the hostile artillery after a few volleys?
Granted 1 volley from 10,000 guns is a terrible price alone, but war is hell, right?
Couldn’t SK use it’s own, or friendly spy satellites and see NK gearing up for a full invasion? You can’t mobilize 1 million troops over night. They have to be staged. Wouldn’t those same satellites have a fix on all those immobile, fixed, artillery pieces?
If and only if an invasion is deemed inevitable, a massive first strike on those artillery could reduce the amount of casualties in Seoul?
im reading a book ok North korea and one point a us intelligence agency said was retardation is rampant due to malnutrition. supposedly 25% of military conscripts were rejected due to it and even if nk was freed they may not be able to build a good economy because of it.
I wonder how long for nk to recover from the kims. physical and mental disability are rampant, infrastructure sucks, nobody trusts anyone. itd take 30 years after liberation minimum imo.
The artillery is dug in…meaning that it is located in places intended to make it hard to destroy. NK has the present ability to unleash Hell on Seoul in a matter of minutes. You are talking about several thousand artillery pieces. Even if you were able to kill every single gun before the gun has fired more than 10 times, you are talking about 50,000+ artillery rounds hitting a densely populated city.
As has been posted over and over in these threads, the U.S. and SK are not capable of saving Seoul from massive destruction with enormous numbers of casualties without using nukes. Even with nukes, if the wind is blowing the wrong way Seoul is going to be a bad place to be.
The book rogue regime implied the US and South Korea had the technology to trace artillery shells back to their source pretty rapidly, I think even after the first shell is fired. And that book is almost 10 years old now, so the technology is probably even better. I don’t know if they have the ability to disable, or reduce the destructiveness of artillery shells in midair.
How would an artillery barrage against Seoul compare to the barrages faced by large cities in Europe in WW2? I assume Berlin had it way worse than Seoul would.
It isn’t that easy to reduce a city to rubble using nothing but artillery; it simply can’t be done in a few hours or a few days. Yes, the city would be besieged, and there’d be massive damage and loss of life, but Seoul wouldn’t be leveled or even rendered non-functional. Most of North Korea’s artillery (and other equipment) is more than half a century old dating from the 50s and 60s, much of the ordnance is equally aged and unreliable, the troops are poorly trained, poorly fed and poorly housed, and most of North Korea’s armor and aircraft has been rendered unreliable or useless by lack of maintenance, lack of fuel, and lack of training for the crews.
North Korea’s barely functional economy means that a huge percentage of the North Korean army is underfed, spends its time confined to unheated barracks, and receives little effective training. This in turn means the ruling elite has profound doubts about the loyalty of the common soldier. For that matter, it is an open secret that many party big shots have planned their exits for themselves and their families when the manure hits the air circulation device. To put it bluntly, the corruption and repression of the North Korean state has produced an economy so feeble that it simply can’t support an effective military and endangered its own survival.
I don’t mean to suggest that war between North Korea and South Korea would be anything other than a catastrophe, but barring spectacular incompetence South Korea would win the war easily.
I was in the army almost 25 years ago, and this technology for targeting for counterbattery fire was commonly assumed at that time. It’s not hard, it’s basically just watching shells on radar and having a computer do some basic math.
On what do you base this? The armies of dictatorships from Rome to Stalin have performed quite well.
Regarding the OP, the military of South Korea is very large, well equipped and well trained and would almost certainly win a war against the North on its own. The problem isn’t winning; it’s the cost of doing so.