spifflog,
So, do you believe Trump will get into a military conflict with N. Korea?
Crane
The fact that Jong Un is constantly shaking up, demoting and killing people is more a sign of a weak leader who is afraid of his underlings. I don’t recall his father or grandfather behaving like that.
Kim Jong Il was middle aged when he took over, and he had been in government for 20 years at that point. Jong Un was barely 30 and had virtually no government experience when he took over. Korean culture tends to respect elders, so having a 30 year old with no experience run a country supposedly had some cultural pushback.
I have no idea what the future holds for NK. But I think Kim is dealing with credibility issues by constantly shaking up his underlings.
No I don’t. Certainly not in some nefarious, shell game way to manipulate the news.
But . . .
It’s not like we’re talking about going to war with Canada. Our allies in the Pacific are nervous about NK. So Trump trying to take a hard line there isn’t way out of the box.
Plus his options are limited. Obama took the route of covert cyber espionage against North Korea’s missile program, which worked to a point supposedly, but the NK’s are still on point to develop a real intercontinental missile that can hit the west coast at some point. His options are basically to continue the same thing (which I doubt…it was Obama’s program and he seems to dislike continuing anything Obama did), ramping up the missile defense options like THAAD and similar things in the region as well as here at home, or some sort of first strike which supposedly Obama also looked into but rejected (wisely IMHO) since the risk far outweighs the reward. Regardless, I’m not seeing anyone, not even Trump et al being so stupid as to starting a war to try and get better ratings…not one likely to cost millions of lives and trillions in damage (a large non-zero part of which would directly affect him personally wrt the money aspect).
They behaved exactly the same way. Seriously, you didn’t know that Kimmy v1.0 and 2.0 had lots of folks executed, including top officials? :eek:
Xt et al,
Reason says you are correct, but reason does not seem to be the controlling factor in US conflicts since WW2. I am a Korean War vet (non-combat). Our involvement was controversial then because we weren’t attacked and no war was declared - it was just politics.
Viet Nam, Grenada, Iraq didn’t make sense either. Trump will need and excuse to increase military spending by $54 billion. N. Korea may be it.
Crane
Crane
Eh, I don’t think this is a correct view of the strategic reality. We don’t think that North Korea has very many missiles, and we’re unsure if they have any nuclear warheads that can be delivered via missile. Almost certainly those stealth bombers that absolutely could bomb North Korea before they knew what happened would be used in a first strike, and it would hit NK C&C, NK nuclear facilities and any visible missile launch infrastructure. These expensive bombers have largely been a waste of money versus what we’ve been bombing (primarily countries that can’t reliably shoot down ordinary planes), but they’d be well suited for this task. Shortly after the stealth bombers have done that large scale cruise missile strikes would follow. They wouldn’t go first because their launch would be impossible to conceal, but with the first wave doing serious damage to NK’s response capacity in the ~15 minutes before area cruise missiles start slamming into NK’s anti-aircraft and conventional military infrastructure they’ll probably still be recovering from a very devastating set of bombing attacks from stealth bombers.
After that the U.S. can do its normal thing where it has absolute air superiority because it’s destroyed NK’s AA and just start bombing any large scale groupings of NK military force, at some point during all this Kim is probably killed and displaced in a coup.
I’m pretty sure my military summation is about accurate, the reason no American President has done this is:
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We can’t know how China will respond. If I had to put money on the table I’d say China doesn’t outright declare war on the United States, but it might take aggressive hostile actions, like issue force-backed ultimatums that could then escalate into a shooting war if we didn’t back down pretty quickly.
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The strategy I outlined above will almost certainly work “pretty well”, and I think a lot of NK’s ability to strike Japan with missiles will be wiped out. Tokyo never would have needed to be evacuated anyway, North Korea lacks any credible “destroy Tokyo” functionality. What it has is conventional missiles it could launch at Tokyo, but it’d do limited damage. It’d definitely kill people though. America would hope that most of these missile launch sites or vehicles would be destroyed before they could launch, but again, these are conventional missiles. Saddam launched several into Israel during Gulf War I, it sucked but it didn’t destroy any cities anymore than me firing an artillery shell into downtown NYC would destroy NYC.
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The question of how much damage the huge conventional artillery batteries aimed at Seoul would do before they could be destroyed is an open one, with wildly varying theories. There would almost certainly be enough shelling that we’d need a goodly number of body bags.
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The final thing is we can’t know for sure NK won’t get a nuke off. I’m reasonably sure it lacks the ability to launch one in a missile, but I could be wrong. That means that their options for detonating one would probably be a bomber, probably one that takes off real quick in the night and flies over Seoul and drops the bomb–this could happen even after a very successful first strike generally puts a fuck-ton of hurt on NK’s C&C, nuclear facilities and missile launch facilities. We can’t prevent the North from getting a plane in the air and dropping a bomb, at least we can’t guarantee we can prevent it. More exotic possibilities is NK might keep a warhead on a submarine or something and just order the crew to sail into some major Asian port and detonate it.
The artillery would be an early target but not the first, our first strike would have to utilize stealth bombers because that’s the strike we can deliver in which the first sign of it are things blowing up. The North would see cruise missiles coming and respond, albeit their operational competence probably is overrated and they wouldn’t respond as well as say, Cold War USSR/USA would’ve, they’d have time to react and would do so.
We only have so many stealth bombers (although they carry large payloads), initial targets would be our best guess as to where their nuclear weapons are, their nuclear facilities (so they can’t try to smuggle stuff out or etc), any suspected missile batteries and their C&C. Hitting important military centers and communications infrastructure creates chaos and makes it harder for North Korea to respond. They almost certainly have a set of processes in places for commanders in the field to act semi-independently in such situations, but more communication and information is always better in war, and the ability to strike at that early and hard is a huge advantage in any conflict.
If you strike the artillery first, then all the other components I mentioned have a better chance to be part of the response to the attack.
Like I said, Japan is relatively safe, they likely are out of range of current North Korean nuclear capacity unless NK literally flies a plane toward Japan, and I have decent belief given that much time for radar to pick it up and react it’d be shot down long before it delivered its payload. Even if NK launched a couple dozen missiles at Tokyo that’s bad, but probably not even as bad as say, the major 1999 earthquake in Turkey that killed ~15,000 people. That was a terrible catastrophe, but didn’t leave Turkey in ruins or anything. I also think there’s decent odds between a first strike targeting NK’s missile launch capacity and ABM systems in the theater Japan would have decent odds of coming away unscathed.
NK’s artillery has always been a much harder problem to solve, artillery is cheap and NK has a ton of it, and they’re well dug in. Sans some sort of theoretical tactical nuclear attack, which would be far beyond the realm of the insane in terms of behavior, there’s no way Seoul doesn’t get at least some artillery shells in it. Also nuclear weapons aren’t actually all that great at penetrating to depth, so it’s possible batteries underneath a small yield nuke could survive and keep fighting, depending on how they’re dug in.
FWIW I’m not suggesting a first strike is wise, the simple truth is we’ve never had good options on North Korea. Back in the early 90s when we knew they started their nuclear weapons program, we could’ve used force to put an end to it more definitively, with less risk to Seoul (albeit there still was significant risk); but the problem of China was still there. China really doesn’t want any sort of U.S. allied occupation of North Korea because that puts the U.S. on China’s doorstep, and it also doesn’t want the regime to collapse because that puts a lot of refugees on China’s doorstep. Once the North started detonating nukes, as a responsible country first strike basically went off the table.
I don’t think a war with North Korea is impossible, but despite all his stupidity and flaws I don’t think Trump will execute a first strike on North Korea. To me it’s more likely that if a war came it’d be because something finally convinced Kim he had to strike and he does something crazy like fire a missile that actually looks like it’ll hit Japan or the U.S. mainland, every doctrine of international affairs would basically require a significant military response to that, up to and including a nuclear one if said missile happens to have a nuclear warhead in it.
The obvious hope as to why that wouldn’t happen, is it’s unlikely Kim is insane enough to think he could actually launch an ICBM at the U.S. mainland and remain in power/alive for very long, the U.S. doesn’t want trouble with China but there’s no way China would (in the tens of minutes involved) try to stop a U.S. response to an ICBM launched at the homeland, it knows that no country is going to allow an ICBM to be launched at it without a military response so by getting in the way it’d just be saying “time for World War III”, which China has no interest in starting.
The long term hope is the less mentioned stuff about Kim ultimately undermines what North Korea is. Kim seems even more bellicose than his father, but he’s actually quietly (at least it’s covered in press yet) been opening up more and more of North Korea to outside economic activity, and there has been reported greater tolerance for black market activities. That’s dangerous for a regime like North Korea’s, which has largely only been sustainable because of its historic ability to enforce almost complete isolation from the rest of the world. Kim wants more foreign currency in North Korea to buy stuff with, and so he’s liberalized (liberalized by North Korean standards) and expanded the ability of outside investment (almost always through Chinese entities) and also let up a little bit on prohibitions against the black/gray market to facilitate more economic growth, but doing so also weakens the totalitarian nature of the regime in ways that could long term spiral out of control. That’s basically exactly what happened in the USSR, it never happened in China because China chose to do this in a very slow, controlled way always with regard to keeping the Communist Party in power. But China also accepted that part of this process would be more liberties for its people, it just managed the granting of those liberties. Kim’s struggle is the sort of power he wields is incompatible even with the “moderate” liberties of a semi-free country like China.
To be honest I’ve questioned the THAAD deployment myself. Obviously I don’t have the full specs of THAAD since they’re classified, but everything publicly known about THAAD is that it only works against medium range or long range missiles, in the terminal phase of a high altitude flight. The last publicized test it successfully shot down a medium range missile. My understanding is that short range missiles (North Korea doesn’t need even medium range missiles to hit South Korea, it barely needs more than a slingshot) simply fly at too low an altitude and too short a path for THAAD to be any use. Something like the Patriot style system or its variants has shot down missiles of this type occasionally (but is useless against the high altitude/velocity missiles THAAD is designed to hit), but at least in theater the Patriot had a lot of misses too. I think it had (and this is disputed) either zero successes in Gulf War I, or one or two disputed successes, and a handful of successes at various points in the Bush era Iraq war, but a lot more failures than successes.
So the THAAD deployments we have on Guam and Hawaii…make sense, since anything in their region would be the sort of missile THAAD is designed to kill. One would arguably make sense in Japan, maybe, but Japan hasn’t shown an interest in getting one.
But unless there’s something I don’t know about THAAD, it really does nothing to protect South Korea from North Korean missiles. What it does do is put a really freaking big and powerful radar array in Korea, that is so powerful it can actually track all the way into China. FWIW China hates this because it basically gives the U.S. a “leg up”, in a theoretical nuclear exchange because we have earlier detection capability than China does versus us now.
The odd thing is that China has made comparatively much less fuss about the United States selling Pave Paws to Taiwan, a radar system which sees far deeper into China than THAAD does.
Given that it is the largest metropolitan area in the world, and the immense role that it plays in Japan’s economy and the world’s, there’s an argument to be made that evacuating Tokyo would pose a greater cost than the price of absorbing a conventional North Korean missile strike, and with the logistics, it’s questionable as to whether evacuation of Tokyo-Yokohama is even possible or feasible.
I absolutely doubt it will be NK. NK is too far away, too close to China, and is an absoulte shit hole that Trump could make no money from after blowing up. Guys, its going to be Mexico. Think about it for a sec; Mexico is:
a) close, real close.
b) related to a hot button issue; illegal immigration - easy to stir up the otherism
c) currently suffering from cartel violence and the narcotics trade
d) not playing nice with trumps ridiculous wall idea
Mexico has:
e) a tiny army, no real navy or airforce or nukes
f) loads of corrupt politicians to parlay with
g) a lot of beautiful beaches to build trump towers on
Trump is:
h) exactly the kind of person to start a war to appear manly
i) thin skinned enough to take insults personally
j) a person with poor impulse control
k) the sort to think making the map of America YUUGER is the hallmark of a great leader
NK is too valuable a mouthpiece to blow up. I mean how else can a country prove how great its democracy is other than by whining about some distant craphole? Not going to happen. Mexico is on the BORDER.
No they didn’t. Kim Jong Un has supposedly demoted, transferred, arrested or executed up to half of the higher ups in North Korea in the last few years. That wasn’t happening under his father or grandfather.
Five defense ministers in five years while his father only had 3 (and two died of old age) in 17 years? It is not the same situation.
Poe’s Law…
Oh don’t get me wrong, I am aware of the absurd nature of the thread - but I thought as long as people are discussing absurd hypotheticals and being a bit silly in general I might as well put my best foot forward. Is this what you mean? I dont think Trump invades anywhere to be honest but if a few marbles do come loose they will roll south.
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North Korea may yet provide the distraction Trump so disparately needs.
Trump is beginning to claim that he alone can solve the Korean problem.
Crane
Yes. Absurd. You haven’t noticed that this president posts meaningless bullshit on a daily basis?
Agreed, and that is the danger. It’s like a small child with a large weapon.
Crane
Yes, they did. Your point seems to be that Jong Un has killed a lot more. I don’t dispute that. He has. But that’s not necessarily a sign of weakness in North Korea. You’d need to dig into WHY he’s purging more people, and I think it has to do with the fact that his daddy and his daddies cronies were in bed with a faction in China that has since been purged (for the most part) by Xi’s ‘corruption’ campaign. At this point, just about ALL of the Chinese advocate factions in North Korea are under the gun (literally), since relations are…strained.
Again, this isn’t an indication of weakness on lil’ Kimmy 3.0’s part…just the opposite. He is ABLE to do a wide-ranging purge without anyone basically telling him no. Your assertion would be like saying Stalin was weak in the 30’s because of the massive purges he did during that time.
Trump first tasted real power by ordering a military set piece strike on a Syrian target. The action was in response to something Trump saw on TV, not part of a consistent policy. Russia has responded with diplomatic tolerance.
As a result, Trump should get a positive bump in the polls - his first. When the effect quickly fades he will be looking for another target.
Crane