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.
Do you think they would commit aircraft?
I’m not sure why you think they wouldn’t commit troops though. I don’t think they’d like to see North Korea absorbed by the South.
China played an important role there before. I’m not convinced China isn’t helping NK out there now either.
The nuclear mines on the corridor will impede the invasion
Thanks for the comments. I appreciate the info.
We don’t have to shift anything if we nuke them.
SK would fight.
Thanks for your honest assessment.
They could dump a ton of artillery on the capital in a day, I doubt they’d take the capital that fast. Its a long walk.
May be true. The question is whether or not they could challenge the airspace any. The airpower of today could make that exceedingly expensive.
Didn’t Biden say that Obama would be tested, AND that many would consider his response a failure....
Something like that, wasn’t it???
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Oh really? Know how many troops are on the ground in Panmunjun? Fewer than 600 Battalion Scouts (Light Infantry). These troops are nothing but a speed bump and they know it.
Drive south from the DMZ some time, every half mile to mile (iirc)is a fall-back position (berm with a gap). Every bridge over those gaps is wired to come down. Dragons teeth litter the fields in front of the berms.
The entire northern part of South Korea is designed to be given up but at a cost.
“The question is whether or not they could challenge the airspace any.”
No question about it, we own the air over SK. A lot of anti-air over NK would make it tight but their air power is minimal.
Too bad they don’t have these guys on today. I’ll bet if I looked around on all the cable channels I have, I could find them somewhere.
That and we don't have a whole lot of troops on the ground there.
There is no possibility that Obama OR the Congress will fight in Korea.
But that's OK, because the war is here.
No more Task Force Charlie?
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