You’re either kidding or haven’t read much about the Korean War. The Korean People’s Army of 1950 was an extremely tough force which gave severe problems to both ROKA and US Army when it came to close in fighting where the UN side could not bring to bear the great superiority in air and artillery firepower it quickly established in the opening weeks of the war (before which the KPA simply carried everything before it). The KPA would often bypass and neutralize these advantages with its infiltration and night attack tactics. The ROKA was simply not ready for the war, but the US Army suffered a number of embarrassing defeats to the North Koreans that were not expected. The UN force which stalled the KPA outside the Pusan Perimeter, then cut off its main line of supply with the Inchon landing, was over twice as numerous just in ground forces not including the powerful air and naval contingents the North Korean by that time almost completely lacked.
Now is not 1950, and besides great material changes there’s been enough time for great social and political change. It’s just unknown at this point how fiercely or well the KPA would fight, the human factors that is aside from its material strengths and obvious material weaknesses. But the hope would be that it wasn’t as fiercely motivated a force as in 1950.
Assuming that NK started the hostilities, I think they would lose, probably within a week. China and Russia would likely stay out of it. Kim Jong Un would almost certainly give the order to launch his nukes. Whether the people who do the actual launching would actually follow the order or not, I have no idea. Either way, it will probably go very badly for the people of Seoul, but probably far worse for NK. My guess is that if Seoul or Tokyo were successfully nuked, we would probably retaliate by essentially nuking the entire country of NK. If the NK nukes are somehow disabled before getting launched, I imagine that the SK forces, and likely American and Japanese as well, will have occupied Pyongyang within a few days at the most.
If the US starts the hostilities, it would likely mean WWIII with China and Russia joining in on the NK side. That would obviously be far worse, probably billions of people dead worldwide and no winners in the end.
This. North Korea has a big military, but they are an impoverished country with half the population of South Korea. And I imagine their military suffers from the same level of incompetence and corruption as Iraq or any other third world dictator’s army. South Korea spends over 3x as much on military per year than North Korea so it’s reasonable to assume they have much better training and equipment and are better fed. Much of North Korea’s equipment is out of date as well.
Not just the Kalashnikov - the various Mosin-Nagant rifles are pretty much indestructable too (there are quite literally millions of them floating about; they were practically free in the US a few years ago). Nagant revolvers, Tokarev and Makarov pistols - all solidly built as well.
They (particularly the Nagant and Tokarev designs) were basically intended to be given to a conscripted farmhand, easy to use, and still workable even if said conscript didn’t clean them for whatever reason.
The Maxim M1910 was basically the Vickers Gun in 7.62x54R, and that was a design so reliable it once had five million rounds put through it in a week and was still functional afterwards.
Admittedly I know more about small arms than I do about artillery, but based on the examples I’ve seen in museums I see no reason to think Soviet artillery wasn’t similarly capable of simply being wheeled into a cave (or warehouse) and left there for years in case the Germans or the Japanese or the Americans came back, wheeled out, given a wipe, loaded, and fired.
The part about incompetence and any comparison to Arab armies in regard to human factors is questionable IMO. The KPA has a battle history as an extremely formidable foe in infantry combat not comparable to any Arab army in modern times, particularly the Iraqi’s*. The North Koreans don’t do a society and economy well at all, but whether that means the KPA is no longer the formidable foe it was in infantry fighting across difficult terrain is IMO much harder to say.
The part about material factors is true but the initial mobilization of North Korea is greater, its army is not smaller than the ROK’s in manpower to start. And much richer countries may also produce armies of softer soldiers. The typical US soldier of the Korean War could not compete with his KPA and CPV counterparts in enduring hardship. The ROKA was a very green army then but its raw material was men also more accustomed to physical hardship as part of daily life. Now the ROKA is a well organized and trained force with confidence in its own tradition, but draws its human resources from a now rich society. That can be somewhat of an offset to the greater resources the rich society can bring to bear in terms of quantity and quality weaponry, which was again a clear lesson of the 1950-53 war.
It’s one thing to say the KPA is now incapable of the kind of breakthrough it easily made against the ROKA in late June 1950, which it very likely is. How costly it would be to completely defeat it or at least end its damaging BM, artillery and commando raids against all the high value targets now in ROK is a lot harder to predict. Maybe it would turn out a paper tiger from inner rot, but it’s not to be relied on IMO.
*long before the 1991 war Trevor Dupuy’s analysis of the 1973 Mideast War in “Numbers, Predictions and War”, put the Iraqi’s (who fought on the Golan front in that war) as by a considerable margin the least effective of the four Arab armies (Syrians, Egyptians and Jordanians were in rising order more effective). He found the Iraqi’s less than a 1/3 as effective man for man as the Israeli’s, the Jordanians more than 1/2 as effective.
The Iraqi army had far more combat experience than the North Koreans, who haven’t fought a war since the fifties. Iraq’s military had more funding, newer equipment, and didn’t have a malnourished population. They were spending a much smaller percent of their GDP on their military as well as a less corrupt society. I’m not sure which dimension you put the NKs as being superior.
Correct. My understanding is the gun (A Vickers Gun, not a Maxim M1910, but they were basically the same gun) was continuously fired, except for brief pauses to change the barrels and connect new ammunition belts.
Please let this be true. One of my biggest fears is Trump starting a war. If he lets the generals run things, that is less likely to happen (even if the generals are hawkish, they aren’t dumb and easy to provoke like Trump).
My understanding is that South Korea has anti-artillery missles, which can shoot down artillery shells in the air. Also South Korea has the ability to trace an artillery shell back to where it was fired, which would let them destroy an artillery piece within a few minutes of its first firing.
However, North Korea could load up shells with chemical or biological weapons. That could do a lot of damage.
Although the only major war North Korea has ever fought is the 1950-53 one in Korea*, they showed themselves in that war highly formidable in human factors of war, motivation, determination and skill in the style of warfare they emphasized. The Iraqi Army has always shown itself poorly in human factors of war, only showing up somewhat comparable to another poor adversary, the Iranians. Against the Israeli’s (note my cite) and later US led Coalitions, the Iraqi’s were extremely ineffective.
When for example did Iraqi units ever administer defeats against US units (or other well thought of armies) comparable to the actions against the 24th Infantry Division in early to mid July 1950 (I don’t recall any US division commanders captured by the Iraqi’s).
So the Iraqi’s have been military failures or mediocrities for a long time after the last time the North Koreans committed their army to major combat, but the tradition of the KPA is still one of toughness and relative effectiveness compared to its material means. There is no evidence they suffer from the leadership problems that often have made modern Arab armies ineffective, so no reason to make that comparison, albeit nobody knows the exact combat capability of the current KPA.
A lot of the rest refers to material factors which is not what I’m talking about. And there isn’t actually a reason to believe the KPA itself is malnourished, or even that most of North Korean society is now (as opposed to 20 yrs ago). It’s not fed like ROK society, but again being a rich society is not entirely an advantage in generating tough soldiers, though it is in bringing to bear more and better weapons.
Also on the same theme as ‘lately’ the ROKA hasn’t fought in a long time either*.
I would continue to maintain, since it’s a clear historical fact, that the KPA could be very tough customers in the 1950-53 war, which no first rate adversary ever accused the Iraqi Army of being. And I would also still maintain it’s difficult to determine if that has fundamentally changed because of the failure of the NK economic system since then. Again, the fact that NK has limited economic resources, which is obvious, is not what I’m talking about. War is not all about that, as again study of the history of the 50-53 war so clearly shows.
*some NK air units are documented to have fought in the Vietnam War but not ground units, also excepting various commando operations v South Korea since 1953. Also one advantage the KPA had in 1950 was some of it units had cadres of Korean Communist veterans of the Chinese Civil War.
**the ROKA did deploy ground forces to Vietnam but that’s still a long time ago and they weren’t tested the way they were in the KW or might be in a new all out war.
Neither the ROK or any other country has the ability to shoot down large barrages of artillery shells and artillery rockets such as would be fired by the North Koreans. Such systems have been developed, but it’s matter of scale. The Israeli’s with Iron Dome for example are operating against a much lower rate of fire (mainly shooting down artillery rockets rather than shells per se, but the general scale limitation is the point).
The ROKA has counter battery radars like every other modern army, in fact such radars were used in the 1950-53 Korean War: they’re hardly new though better now. However the question there is lethality of counterbattery fire given how well dug in a lot of the NK guns would be, and again how numerous they’d be. The radars are also not immue themselves; they obviously must actively emit and therefore to some degree broadcast their own positions.
In line with a lot of aspects of this debates it’s unclear how realistically the North Koreans have planned to counter likely South Korean countermeasures against an all out attack. It could indeed be that their military has become a complete Potemkin Village. Or maybe not as much as we’d hope.
The MOAB is not thermobaric and does not suck the air up. It’s an airblast munition. Detonated slightly above the ground, the overpressure from the shock wave crushed the cell walls in any meat puppets standing too close. The pressure wave will detonate mines and IEDs in the vicinity of the explosion. The pressure wave also travels down tunnels fine. It’s use in Afghanistan was because of the specific conditions at the target. The explosive is H6; consists of TNT, RDX and Aluminum powder. A thermobaric weapon contains/disperses a fuel that mixes with the air (provides oxygen) then after a programmed delay, ignites the now explosive mixture of fuel and air. For reference, lookup Fuel-Air explosive.
There has been some experimental weapons that can target a small number of incoming projectiles. When you get to hundreds and thousands of incoming, you’re in the realm of science fiction.