Posted on 04/06/2012 8:59:05 AM PDT by Fennie
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has ratcheted up his regime's militaristic rhetoric as Pyongyang threatened to retaliate against any country that intercepts a North Korean rocket booster or collects the rocket debris.
The North has vowed to launch a rocket sometime between April 12 and 16 to put an earth observation satellite into orbit, a move widely seen as a pretext to disguise a banned test of its ballistic missile technology.
The Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of Korea in Pyongyang warned that interception of the satellite would be "an act of war" and would cause a tremendous catastrophe.
(Excerpt) Read more at koreatimes.co.kr ...
There is a Boomer in the North Pacific at all times, on alert.
Most Emergency Action Messages are drills for nuking North Korea. The contingency plans are for a massive strike of every city and every military installation simultaneously. Very, very little of North Korea would remain.
One little hitch in your statement, the current occupant of the White Hut.
North Korea is being as clear as a bell with this. A few days ago, 3 or 4 Nork submarines, left their bases, almost certainly along the route the ballistic missile is intended to take, likely also with orders that if a ship fires on the missile, to attack it.
http://mainichi.jp/english/english/newsselect/news/20120405p2g00m0in095000c.html
Additional information:
At 370 tons submerged, the Sang-O class submarine has two 533mm torpedo tubes fitted with Russian 53-65KE torpedoes, and is capable of mine laying.
The 53-65 torpedo family are Russian made, wake-homing torpedoes designed to destroy surface ships. The 53-65KE is the exported version.
Instead of using active or passive homing as other torpedoes do, the 53-65 torpedoes use wake homing, which, upon finding the wake of a ship, turns to follow the wake to guide itself to the ship. The torpedoes have no way of telling which way the target ship is headed when they reach the wake, so they aren’t as effective as other means of homing.
To date, there have been no reports of a countermeasure that can confuse these torpedoes, making them very successful when they do home on to a ship.
Thus, I highly recommend to the US Navy that their guided missile ships in position to shoot down the Nork missile must have anti-sub assets available, and if they intend to shoot at the missile, to blow the Nork submarine out of the water FIRST.
Any and every Nork submarine at sea should be considered imminently hostile right now and subject to attack without notice.
No chit. I don’t even think they still carry around the football.
Check this out
http://www.airforce-technology.com/projects/abl/
The policy used to be we will not retaliate in kind meaning if you use any weapon of mass destruction we could respond with the same or with nukes. The nuke threat was enough to keep the average knuckleheads in check. I'm not really sure what policy is now.
In the last two decades, our military has not had to deal with a traditional military opponent; we've been dealing with an insurgency and/or tribal warfare where we could buy allies or get a reputation as honest brokers by simply acting the way America always has acted by helping people improve their own lives rather than trying to be a colonial empire. The first Gulf War wasn't really a contest between traditional military forces; even before the collapse of the Iraqi military following the invasion of Kuwait, the Iraqi regular army and Republican Guard were mismanaged at best by a civilian, Saddam Hussein, who terrified his generals and didn't understand much about military strategy.
A serious shooting war with North Korea would not be a minor problem. They have one of the world's largest armies, and their training is at such a vicious level that our technological sophistication isn't necessarily as much of a problem for them as would be the case, for example, in a war with China or Russia.
Even if the North Koreans completely fell apart after a few weeks or months of fighting, we would be dealing with hundreds of thousands and quite likely millions of casualties not just in North Korea but also in Seoul, huge evacuations or refugee flights likely to exceed ten million people, massive worldwide economic disturbances (imagine the effect if Samsung, Hyundai, Kia, and similar companies were unable to fulfill orders for just a few months, let alone if they ceased to exist), and the very real possibility that China would decide to start doing very bad things by threatening to cause even more destruction to the American economy if we didn't settle things in Korea according to their liking.
The Kim dynasty in North Korea is not only evil but quite possibly insane. We cannot assume they will act rationally, or that the senior officials have enough knowledge about the outside world to even understand what kind of risks they are taking — or to care.
The only good thing about a North Korean invasion is that I'm much more confident in the power of the South Korean military — in which I have several relatives now serving — to fight back in ways that we won't, especially if they're attacked first.
The South Korean Army trains to fight on their own soil, they have a level of technological sophistication equal to any other major Western military, they have a level of training intensity superior to virtually all pro-US military forces with the exception of the Israelis and the Turks, and especially in a shooting war on their own soil, they're willing to do things that we won't do.
Let's just say nobody in the North Korean military or political leadership wants to still be living if the South Koreans get their hands on them during a shooting war that kills hundreds of thousands if not millions of people in Seoul, Inchon, and other major South Korean cities. There are reasons why the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong feared the South Korean soldiers who fought with the Americans during the Vietnam War. It's not just the North Koreans who can be cruel and merciless.
That kinda depends on who has their finger on the trigger, doesn’t it?
war is heck, yes, we got it
Their military is crumbling due to a lack of proper maintenance, their soldiers are starving almost as badly as the populace, abusive treatment just means abused soldiers—not tough soldiers, and if you think Saddam’s generals were afraid of him, then you can’t even imagine how scared Kim’s generals are of his royal fatness.
It would be messy, but I don’t think it’s as dire as you believe it would be.
Don’t forget to mention that it might be a nice gesture to send back the USS Pueblo, in the same condition it was in before they shot it up.
In regards to my original points—irrelevant.
Sure. We can use those weapons the Chinese built with the fake parts. That’ll get us far.
Let me testify for my father who survived the Hadong Massacre a week before his 18th birthday.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadong_Ambush"
Them little buggars can fight, and they're all true believers.
We should never send another man on ground above the 38th parallel. We must tell China that if a war starts we will nuke North Korea with 250, 100+KT weapons in the first 15 minutes. And, we will follow with another 1,000 for anyone who intervenes.
Especially if you are bombing where the enemy isn't.
North Korea is the gift of Harry Truman. The man who ended WW II then fell to the wishes of the commies that controlled the FDR administration.
I've got family in Korea, some of them in South Korean military units likely to be among the first to take the brunt of an assault, and one of my relatives had been in a South Korean special forces unit whose mission, in the event of the invasion for which they regularly trained, included things which he knew full well would not be survivable. His mission basically was to make sure Korea still existed for his family, because everybody knew he'd never be coming back.
So yes, maybe my judgment is problematic. Many of yours would be too if we were talking about the ramp-up to World War II and you had relatives in Poland, Belgium or France (I don't add the Netherlands because the Dutch wrongly thought their neutrality would protect them, as it had in World War I, until Hitler actually invaded).
We can't be Neville Chamberlains, burying our heads in the sand about the North Korean threat, but we also can't act as if it would be a cakewalk. Please listen to Mariner. He's right... the North Korean military when his father was fighting in 1950 was far worse than its current condition, and they fought bitterly then with much less than they have today, and didn't have the “benefit” of six decades of Communist indoctrination to brainwash soldiers into obeying orders.
As Mariner said, “them little buggars can fight.” That's especially true if the North Korean sergeants and platoon leaders know that they'll suffer a far more painful death than an American bullet if they don't follow their orders to attack. We had lots of POWs and defectors from North Korea during the Korean War, caused largely by people who had lived under communism for only a few years — North Korean soldiers today have gone through three generations of communism and know nothing else.
Yes, I understand that a brutalized soldier does not mean a well-disciplined soldier, but what it does mean is that a soldier who is trained brutally will fight brutally — and the North Koreans have numbers of personnel and equipment unlike anything we've faced since Vietnam, and probably since the Korean War. Having American high tech weapons and a radio and GPS to call in American air strikes is great, but if you have a hundred half-crazed Norks running at you who (unlike most Iraqis) have been trained to aim their rifles well, what may count more than anything else is raw numbers.
I understand that the North Korean dictatorship is not Nazi Germany. I also understand, after listening to many things my father-in-law told me about fighting as a South Korean soldier in the Korean War, just how vicious the North Korean Communists were. The civilians in my family have told me what it was like to have Communists enter their village and do the things Communists do.
But let's drop all that. Let's say the North Koreans attack, we don't send one single American soldier over there, and the South Koreans handle it all themselves after President Obama turns tail and orders all our military out as fast as they can flee.
Imagine the economic crisis. Korea is not what it was in 1950. South Korea is one of the world's larger economies, and it's a huge supplier of electronics not just to the United States but to the rest of the world.
The nation is quite affluent by world standards, even those of Europe. According to the CIA World Factbook, South Korea ranked just behind Japan in per-capita GDP, not far behind Canada, France, the UK, Germany and most of the Scandinavian countries. It is somewhat ahead of Israel, Spain, and Italy, and considerably ahead of a number of Eastern European countries such as the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, and the Baltic countries. In raw economic size, South Korea is the world's 12th largest economy, behind the United States, China, India, Japan, Germany, Russia, Brazil, the UK, France, India, and Mexico, but ahead of Spain, Canada, Indonesia, and all the rest of Europe.
So even in the best of situations with an entirely South Korean response that quickly knocks out North Korea in a few weeks or months, we're going to have one of the world's major industrialized economies basically eliminated as a consumer of American goods and as a producer of civilian goods for the rest of the world. North Korea will be far more difficult to reintegrate into a capitalist system than East Germany ever was, and there will be massive destruction of factories and cities on both sides of the border, with hundreds of thousands dead, millions displaced, and utter chaos for years.
Yes, the North Koreans are literally starving. Their equipment is falling apart. It's no match for top-scale American technology or South Korean technology, and many more of their soldiers will die.
But the battle will still be devastating to the civilian economy. Look what knocking out only two buildings of the World Trade Center and adjacent structures did to New York City's economy, and then imagine the consequences of hundreds of 1960s-era artillery shells landing on Seoul.
Economically, it doesn't make much difference if the North Korean military is wiped off the map if Seoul and Inchon are in flames from a major artillery barrage, with missiles hitting points farther south such as Taegu and maybe the industrial heartland of Pusan, with ten million people or more internally displaced. And that's all assuming none of the North Korean longer-range missiles manage to hit Tokyo or somewhere else in Japan.
Mutually assured destruction presumes that both parties are sane and rational, and don't want to see themselves destroyed. I'm not convinced we're dealing with rational people in North Korea, and they are militarily capable of doing tremendous damage.
I have no doubt that we will win a second Korean War if the Chinese don't intervene — although we would have won the first Korean War without the Chinese, too. More important, I have very little doubt that the South Koreans can take care of themselves if the United States government won't act.
But what will that do to the world economy? We have not had a full-scale war in an industrialized nation since the end of World War II, and having exported much of our manufacturing capacity to China, Korea, Japan, and Indonesia, I'm not naive about the damage that the loss of even South Korea manufacturing capacity and markets will do to our economy — and that's assuming China doesn't decide to do something to shut down our manufacturing plants in China or wreck the American economy through some other tactic.
Bottom line: North Korea is a serious threat. Yes, we'll win, but at what cost?
This saves a lot of disappointment on the Nork's part, and of course with every sixth satellite you get free eggroll...
> .... Zero certainly isn’t going to nuke anybody.
I think Zero would happily nuke North Korea or the right Muslim terror state given the right circumstances. He’d be a hero to middle America for his strong stand. The media would back him. His popularity would soar....
The man is a friend of Marxism, but he’s no friend of some other tyrant’s Marxist state. He’d be happy to dump on some unpopular, small, weak, thuggish nation if it’d serve his domestic political interests.
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