Posted on 05/28/2009 5:34:54 PM PDT by xzins
WASHIGTON – It would take the Army time to "shift gears" if it needed to fight against North Korea, Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey said Thursday.
Right now, the Army is focused on the counterinsurgency efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, but North Korea’s recent saber rattling has raised the prospect that the Army might be called upon to fight a conventional war.
"I have said publicly for some time that if we had to shift gears, it would probably take us about 90 days or so to shift our gears and to train the folks up that were preparing to go to Iraq and Afghanistan to go someplace else," Casey said after a speech at a Washington think tank.
That doesn’t mean that it would take at least 90 days to send reinforcements to U.S. troops in South Korea, Casey said.
"We would move forces as rapidly as we could get them prepared," he said.
Casey declined to say how fast the Army could mobilize to meet a threat from North Korea, but he stressed the Army is "combat seasoned" and can move quickly.
"The mechanical skills of artillery gunnery and tank gunnery come back very, very quickly," he said. "The harder part is the integration — that really brigade level and above of massing fires and effects in a very constricted period of time as opposed to what you do in a counterinsurgency over a much longer extended period of time."
Looking to the future, Casey said he expects conflicts this century to look a lot like the U.S.-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as the Israeli war with Hezbollah in 2006.
Regarding the latter, Casey noted that the key lesson the Israelis learned was that they were too focused on irregular warfare.
"They were working so much in the West Bank and conducting counterinsurgency-like operations that they lost their combined arms skills, the ability to integrate fires in air and tanks and artillery," he said.
The U.S. Army needs to be prepared for the "full spectrum" operations ranging from offensive, defensive and stability operations, he said.
Casey expressed confidence that the U.S. Army can fight and win a conventional war against North Korea given its experience in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"I’m not afraid of putting this force in the field against anybody," he said.
Does anyone know anything about the extensive artillery line the Norks have pointing south? Seem to recall there are many tens of thousands...
The North has little to no capability to fight a long war and China is very, very unlikely to send troops this time.
The North could shell Seoul, but a biological attack would invite a nuclear response.....
Crap, I forgot who POTUS is. Yea, the we're screwed.
Just about obsolete by today's standards.
nah...just nuke um to hell
call it good
Bull crap. Artillery and tank gunnery skills are very perishable and unfortunately, may have to be re-aquired via blood.
Yep!
I think that’s the problem. They would overrun the South before we could respond.
Who? Neither China or Russia would commit troops to defend North Korea.
They certainly have enough artillery to kill thousands of civilians...tens of thousands, if they use chemical weapons. They'd still lose the war to the South Koreans.
The North Koreans have old Soviet designed tanks. There is a corridor of flat ground that runs from the DMZ to Seoul, 70% of the Korean peninsula is mountainous. The Commies would send their armor down this corridor but the US and South Koreans know this so it would be a huge kill box from both ground and air attack although the question is would that be enough to stop the Commies from taking Seoul since its only 30 miles from the DMZ.
NK should have been nuked into submission in 51’
the infant PRC too
We didn’t take the shot and have been paying for it ever since.
If they think they can take on the world now , I say nuke them in to total unconditional surrender , or extinction , and that will end the matter forever. Let them take the first shot .
Then the world can’t blame us . Sorry about that Seoul .
Seoul is untenable, as it is bracketed by thousands of Nork artillery pieces with only one target: Seoul. Seoul would be blasted relentlessly.
They have the fifth-largest standing army in the world, and their backed by the Chinese who have the largest standing army in the world. If they invade the south, they’ll take massive casualties...but keep on coming. The regime doesn’t care how many of it’s men are chewed up by mines.
“What makes Casey think 2009 will be a repeat of 1951-1953? It might look more like August 1945.”
THANK YOU
Why do we have all these nuclear subs & B-2 bombers if we aren’t gonna use ‘em!!!
Army?
Who needs it we have Obama to talk them to death.
Why have nukes if aren’t gonna use them?
They have an ample supply of Soviet-era tracked vehicles including Type 82 tanks and assorted APCs. If they're in a functional state of repair is another question altogether. I'm not sure if we have a solid handle on what works and what doesn't.
But even if it all worked, I'm not sure they would abandon their defensive positions to engage in an offensive campaign. Let's face it, they're all about survival. They probably know that even if they take ground, they don't have the air superiority to keep it.
This has been war-gamed seven ways to Sunday, but my guess is they'd hit a confined piece of Seoul quickly with substantial artillery and rockets as a deterrent show of force. What happens after that, would really be up to the South Koreans. I'm guessing that they would cave after sustaining serious casualties. They have well-trained defensive forces, but I don't believe the South Korean people have the stomach for war anymore.
I really don't think it would escalate and we'd just be back to where we were before, only with 10-50K dead South Koreans to bury. It's just a bad situation with no good alternatives.
We have some amazing weapons these days. There’s one that I’ve seen, that can identify a number of targets on it’s own and take them out. They are fired in one missile, they disburse, and hit something like 20 to 40 targets.
Fire off a few thousand of those, and the North will look like Moe after Larry and Curly got through with him.
I’m sure the military is ready for this. It would be an interesting situation to monitor.
I don’t take lightly the danger to our men though.
Somebody needs to tell Uncle Kim that Cold War fighting is not allowed.
From what I'm reading, the SK's, who's children have been indoctrinated as badly as dumb American kids with commie BS, will have an experience similar to being tossed in a blender set to frappe. After NK blow's it's load in the first 10 minutes of combat, conditions will gradually improve from there.
However, a valuable lesson will have been learned by all...
Seriously, I hope it doesn't come down to that.
Prayers that it doesn't.
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