[SandRat]

They did it on At 4 a.m. June 25, 1950. Why should the Chia Pet behave any differntly this time.

[SandRat]

FR NEWS!

News You'll Hear Nowhere Else!

All the News the MSM refuses to use!

[unkus]

What is the from launch to impact time of our sub-based nuke missles?

[Dog Gone]

They could clearly launch an attack, but they couldn't resupply an invasionary force. 50 year old tanks that are out of gas won't last long.

[misterrob]

He could only do it with China's blessing. Without China's help an attack would stall out and the supply lines would be gutted. While everyone rightly fears NK's might, SK is no slouch and with US air and sea power available they could put up a formidable defense.

China has a trading relationship with SK while NK is a drain on their resources. NK is useful to China as a surrogate army but having SK go under due to a NK attack would wreak havoc with the Chinese economy.

[DugwayDuke]

"Equipment and sustainment are the main problems with the North Korean army. Even with receiving an inordinate share of the country’s economy, the North Korean army is still cash-starved, driving antiquated equipment and unable to supply itself, Smith said. “They might be able to launch an attack, but they couldn’t sustain it,” Smith said."

By some accounts only the NK SOF are given adequate rations. An interesting concept would bombard NK columns as they advance with MREs. Would the NK continue to advance or would their columns lose all semblance of order?

[Jet Jaguar]

ping.

[Strategerist]

They did it on At 4 a.m. June 25, 1950. Why should the Chia Pet behave any differntly this time.

They did it in 1950 with an army filled with veterans who had fought alongside the Chinese Communists in the Chinese Civil War, against a weak and untrained ROK force.

Not a soul in the current DPRK army has an ounce of large-scale conventional combat experience and the ROK army is infinitely larger and better equipped today than in 1950.

[fso301]

South Korea’s military has 680,000 servicemembers toting state-of-the-art equipment. North Korea fields Soviet-era T-54 and T-55 tanks, some now 50 years old. These are no match for M-1A2 Abrams tanks that the South Koreans deploy, but the North does field almost 4,000 of them.

Where will the fuel come from? Is it a long downhill slope from the 38th Parallel to the Korean Straight? If not, how do the North Koreans plan to move those tanks? Push them?

[El Gato]

Soviet pilots manned many of the MiG-17 fighters that defended North Korea in 1950.

They were MiG-15, NATO code name Fagot, not MiG-17 Fresco. (Heh, I don't make up the names, NATO did, back in the non PC days of the late '40s in case of the Fagot).

MiG-15

Mig-17

[El Gato]

We have just over 200,000 U.S. military in the Gulf region right now,” he said. “We have 2.4 million Americans -- active, Guard and reserve -- right now defending 300 million of our fellow citizens. My Marine math tells me that leaves us more than 2 million U.S. servicemembers who are not currently involved in the Gulf war

That's a little deceiving. If we have 200,000 in theater, there are at least another 200,000, maybe as many as 400,000 who are training for the next deployment, or reconstituting from the previous one. Plus there are some numbers that are not in theater, but are nonetheless supporting the effort. Add to those the people who aren't really available for deployment. R&D, logistics types at depots, the whole uniformed staff at the Pentagon, and so forth. Probably more like 1.5 to 1.8 million available.

But all those could not be deployed to Northeast Asia. Ballistic missile crews and maintainers, in both the Air Force and Navy for example. OTOH, they might contribute to any war there if things went all to snot quickly.