Those kinds of numbers would not be feasible to engage in conventional war. China and North Korea would have s simple logistics exercise to keep supplied. South Korea and any helpers would be forced to operate from ships. A few nukes added to the fray would even the odds.
Al-Qaeda agents 'at large in Russia'
From correspondents in Moscow
October 06, 2004
AL-QAEDA terrorists are at large in Russia's volatile North Caucasus region, the chief of Russia's FSB state security service said in televised comments today.
"Al-Qaeda is not a myth, it really and truly is present on our territory," Nikolai Patrushev told NTV television, adding that some 10 al-Qaeda agents had been detected in the Caucasus region.
"We know them and we will take measures to neutralise their activity - either by destroying them, or detaining them and bringing them to justice," Mr Patrushev said.
Several separatist chiefs in the war-torn republic of Chechnya were al-Qaeda members, including Khattab, Abu al-Walid and Abu Khabs, Mr Patrushev said.
However, even though claiming that his secret service had prevented more than 500 terrorist acts this year alone, Mr Patrushev had to admit that "we do not work well enough to anticipate" terrorists, and "special services must work more effectively".
Russia was hit by a wave of horrifying extremist attacks in August and September that culminated in a mass hostage-taking at a primary school and left well over 400 people dead, many of them children.
Mr Patrushev also acknowledged that the FSB had not so far managed to lay hands on either Chechnya's separatist president Aslan Maskhadov nor the fearsome rebel warlord Shamil Basayev, both blamed by Moscow for numerous attacks.
Moscow branded Maskhadov a terrorist after the outbreak of the second Chechen war in October 1999, though he has regularly condemned terrorist actions against civilians in Russia and called for talks with Moscow.
Maskhadov also pledged to bring Basayev to justice after the warlord claimed responsibility for last month's school hostage crisis in the North Ossetian town of Beslan.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,10987966%255E1702,00.html
"A few nukes added to the fray would even the odds."
Exactly. Hence, World War IV.
Someone posted a Bodansky article (and a related comment by Gen. Myers) on the failure of imagination. Imagine this:
The 21st century Pearl Harbor was not 9/11.
The 21st century Pearl Harbor will be a coordinated nuclear strike designed to saturate any rudimentary missile defense.
Threatened simultaneous launches from China, North Korea, and Iran with missiles that have been covertly transferred (as the USSR did to Cuba in 1962).
Objective is the realization of territorial ambitions without U.S. intervention. That intervention is to be deterred by a missile and martyr capability built over a decade. Nuclear blackmail.
A coerced Korean reunification on North Korean terms. Chinese "reunification" with Taiwan by same method. And Iranian assertion as the dominant regional power by leading a pan-Islamic jihad against Israel beginning with intervention in southern Iraq. (As Khomeini used to say - -the road to Jerusalem - - "Tariq al-Qods" - - runs through Karbala.)
The chaos in Iraq has been engineered. It is the "preparation of the battlefield".
All these military conflicts coordinated and nearly simultaneous. And all three nations now have the theoretical ability to launch against the continental United States.
That has been my "imagined scenario" for the past decade.