No need to rely on implications in 10-year old books to assess their current capabilities, SK bought the ARTHUR counter-battery radar system in 2007.
On the subject of north vs south, Iraq had far more troops than the US but because the US is better trained and has better technology we destroyed the Iraqi conventional military in a matter of weeks on two separate occasions (1991 gulf war and 2003 Iraq war) despite only having about 1/10th as many soldiers. I think Iraq had 1-2 million soldiers, the US had a hundred thousand.
North Korea is even poorer than Iraq, I’ve heard they don’t even have fuel to do military training of tanks or planes. My impression the only trump cards NK has are its ability to inflict civilian casualties in Seoul and maybe Japan by artillery, chemical/biological wmd, nuclear weapons and a special forces force that is about 100k strong. So the north can inflict a lot of property and human damage but their actual military and ability to defend against a southern invasion shouldn’t last long against the south. Is that the consensus on North vs South Korean militaries?
I suppose one of the questions that we might be asking is how long can North Korea maintain a military or even a civilization without complete internal collapse. If the military is the only real force available during such a scenario where they believe that their control would be compromised, it is likely they would wish to go out in a blaze of glory, so to speak. So, that may well be why we have been offering food and oil in exchange for dismantling their nuclear facilities.
But, assuming that North Korea had to completely go it alone, with no assistance from anyone including China, then how many weeks or months would it be before they would be forced to invade South Korea?
Stalin decimated his officer corps because he was paranoid which left his military fairly disorganized, a big part of why the USSR won was because of a German invasion in winter (I might be confusing that with Napoleon) and they had huge numbers (the soviets took far more casualties than anyone else so that can probably speak to how effective their military was). Hitler overruled his generals because he was a megalomaniac, which put Germany at a disadvantage. The Soviets couldn’t even beat Finland in the 30s, according to wikipedia the death/wounded ratio of Finland to the USSR was 1:5.
I think he has a point, a dictatorship’s military is probably a lot more corrupt, poorly managed and run by people selected for loyalty and nepotism rather than competence. Plus the ground soldiers may rebel if they disagree with the dictatorship and think they have an opportunity to defect. This doesn’t always happen, but it can.
Identifying the location of the gun is not the same as disabling the gun. Against dug in artillery, even if you know where to shoot, it’s going to take time to silence the weapon. During that time, it’s going to keep shooting and wreaking havoc. Multiply that time by the number of guns shooting. This isn’t a video game, where someone has a God’s eye view of the battlefield, and perfect intel about what is happening, where, and when. The targets are not pixels that blink out of existence with colorful but clean little graphic displays.
That’s may have been true in the 1950’s; but there’s a reason that modern military forces no longer used entrenched artillery positions. Explosives are much more powerful these days, whereas concrete and dirt are still concrete and dirt.
Am I the only one who would be surprised if SK has not spent years using new satellite technology to scour every inch of the border areas for these artillery pieces, and at this point know exactly where they are?
The dug-in artillery positions are fixed and might have been more or less comprehensively identified by now. The artillery pieces are shuffled around constantly from one position to the next, more often than not through tunnels and the like. Precious few ways to find where each of them is *before *they start belching death.
As for after, well, over time, probably… but still much too late to matter.
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North Korea is even poorer than Iraq, I’ve heard they don’t even have fuel to do military training of tanks or planes. My impression the only trump cards NK has are its ability to inflict civilian casualties in Seoul and maybe Japan by artillery, chemical/biological wmd, nuclear weapons and a special forces force that is about 100k strong. So the north can inflict a lot of property and human damage but their actual military and ability to defend against a southern invasion shouldn’t last long against the south. Is that the consensus on North vs South Korean militaries?
[/QUOTE]
Iraqi troops were moving around in an open and (for the most part) relatively flat desert. NK is extremely mountainous country, somewhat jungle-y also, and is positively riddled with reinforced tunnels. Don’t think Desert Storm, think Iwo Jima. All the air superiority, tank doctrines, smart bombage and operational mobility in the world won’t help cleaning out a maze of twisty passages, all alike.
You are confused about quite a number of things, nobody is stupid enough to invade Russia in winter. That hasn’t stopped the French or the Germans from invading in summer and imagining they could beat them by the time winter rolled around. If you look back at your wiki entry, you’ll also notice that Finland lost the Winter War with the USSR, I don’t know why you think the Soviets couldn’t even beat them. That’d be news to the residents of Karelia; Finland was forced to cede 10% of its territory containing 20% of its industry to the USSR and over 400,000 Finns were made refugees. You might also want to look into who was putting a red flag over the Reichstag in May 1945. Finally, I’ll just note that Hitler and Napoleon were both dictators.
So again, on what basis do “The armies of military dictatorships usually perform terribly”?
If you can see it, you can hit it. If you can hit it, you can kill it. - US Air Force
I wouldn’t be surprised if a significant portion of SK’s anti-artillery capacity isn’t already aimed at the most likely points with the alternatives no more than a button press away. NK gets off an average of 2-3 rounds per gun before there ain’t no more guns…
So, it looks like the main question is answered - the South Korean army could mop the floor with the North Korean army.
The ancillary question of how much damage is done to Seoul in such a victory is producing some disquieting responses.
Even at “2 or 3 rounds per gun”, that’s still tens of thousands of shells hitting one of the most populated and one of the most densely populated cities of the world. More than anything else, it reminds me of that scene in “Dr Strangelove” when Gen. Ripper is discussing “acceptable” American civilian casualties in the tens of millions.
If NK was about to attack, what would be the likelihood that China would swoop in and take over the place in a coup? Would that even be possible? I’m not sure diplomacy by the Chinese would have any effect on the North Koreans these days.
In regards to an actual war, it wouldn’t surprise me if the nutcase North Koreans lob a few attacks at Japan as well (can they reach Japan?) and use whatever nukes they have on SK.
Unlikely. The Chinese don’t want to step into a 3rd world quagmire that would require billions to fix. It’s not the 19th century anymore. Developed countries don’t need more real estate if it comes at too high a price.
If they’re going to lose their buffer state, they might as well hold onto the border they’ve already reinforced, rather than the mess they’d inherit. Also, they’re already worried about the possibility of a massive refugee incursion from NK. Why invade a country to take those refugees on?
Doubt it. They’ve got missiles capable of it, but their aim is wonky. There’s hardly a guarantee they’d hit any populated area, much less do any appreciable damage to the Japanese mainland.
Aren’t we all forgetting the lurking shadow of NK possibly having a nuke?
Finland’s military was far smaller, yet they held the USSR off. They didn’t lose the war, there was a treaty. A loss would’ve involved an invasion of Finland which was the soviet original goal. Part of why the Germans invaded the USSR was because they saw that the Soviets couldn’t even defeat a much smaller nation like Finland.
Again, Hitler overruled his generals and Stalin decimated his officer corps. Iraqi soldiers defected and gave up by the thousands, and the NK military is so poorly managed that they don’t even have fuel to engage in training exercises. Plus due to food shortages a lot of officers steal food from enlisted soldiers, I have heard stories of soldiers in NK so weak they couldn’t even carry their rifles, they just dragged them on the ground behind them.
The nepotism, corruption, lack of a functioning economic system, human rights abuses, etc all seem like they will make a dictatorships military less effective than it could be otherwise. It doesn’t mean it is totally defective, but less effective than their counterparts which have functioning economies, militaries run based on merit, transparency, or soldiers who aren’t looking for an opportunity to defect.
Since the thread is about SK vs NK, the fact that the South has a military that has an honest understanding of their own nation and the outside world (rather than a brainwashed ones like the NK, who knows how they will react to finding out what the world is really like. They might not mind, they might defect, they might turn their guns on their officers. Who knows what happens in NK if the soldiers on the ground find out what their government and the outside world are actually like. I know intense rage is usually one of the stages a lot of NK refugees in China seem to go through when they find out how evil their government really is because they finally have access to honest media), a functioning economy, a military run on merit, they are going to have the advantage over the north.
No we’re not most of North Korea’s artillery doesn’t have the range to target Seoul, so there’s only likely to be about 700 guns in total when the shelling starts.:
Here’s a link toRoger Cavazos’ full paper which basically covers the Seoul barrage issue. Appendix B shows how he arrived at his figures.
Central Seoul is about 600 square kilometres, with a metro area several times that (the Seoul Ring Expressway encompasses about 1,200 square kilometres). Even if we limit ourselves to the central city that’s only about 1.1 guns per square kilometre. If for some reason the South Korean counter battery efforts aren’t that effective and each gun gets off 10 rounds that’s 110 shells per square kilometre of central city.
If we’re generous and say each shell has a lethal radius of 100 metres* then those 110 shells blanket 34,557 square metres. There are 1,000,000 square metres in a square kilometre, so only 3.4 % of the total area of that square kilometre would be lethal. Or to put it another way, a person standing in the open during the entire barrage has a 96.6% likelihood of being completely unharmed.
*I’m being very generous here Cavazos gives a lethal radius of 16 metres for North Korea’s largest gun, I’m also assuming that all the shells are evenly distributed and their blast areas don’t overlap. Here’s Cavazos’ worst case scenario for the first minute:
His more realistic figure is about 2,811 fatalities in the first minute.
I’ve long said that upon invasion by North Korea, the people of the south should simply start cooking, and have as much food on hand for the invaders as possible.
Ample Food + Seeing the wealth of the south = “Holy Shit! What were we fighting for?”
Tomahawks. Lots of them. The USN is in the vicinity, so it would not take long for a rain of precisely targeted cruise missiles to destroy every important piece of infrastructure in North Korea. Remember the destruction Iraq’s key infrastructure caused by the US Navy and US Air Force during Gulf II. Imagine how much better at that job they have become since then. New weapons. New sensors. Improved tactics. Current, real world experience.
This would be in addition to what the South Koreans would do to NK. I think the greatest fear is not the artillery barrage on Seoul, but the likely, if not assured use of chemical weapons on SK’s civilian population.
Chimera:
Better latrines, according to one episode of MAS*H.
Mmmm, bulgogi.