[DoodleDawg]

bfl

[nathanbedford]

ping

[blam]

Why China 'Urgently' Recruiting Korean-Chinese Interpreters For Town Near North Korea

[RoosterRedux]

I have read that North Korea's harden bunkers holding artillery near the South Korean border are carved out of granite mountainsides.

The weapons themselves are "shoot and scoot" and can be rolled back into a behind steel doors within 75 seconds.

[ImJustAnotherOkie]

Sensor Fused weapons would put a quick halt ti that.

I would bet they have improved them since we wiped out 40+ tanks in one fell swoop in Iraq.

It’s one of those embarrassing too easy victory stories.

[Obadiah]

Just as an armchair general, if there is a first strike by the US to take out missile sites, I just don’t understand why we wouldn’t have flights lined up on the deck with afterburners on destroying the artillery batteries. They pop up, targeted by satellite and boom, gone by loitering aircraft/drones with Hellfires.

[RoosterRedux]

Ping to some good information.

[Doctor Freeze]

Shock & Awe, knock out Command & Control... North Korean army will fold like tents. Nothing a few MOABs and lots of Tomahawks can’t handle.

[Chainmail]

The author of this piece doesn't seem to have any actual artillery training and seems to be inventing terms on his/her own. "Counterforce" and "Countervalue" targets? How about just military and civilian targets? The North Koreans have a lot of artillery, both tube and rocket versions but none of them are precise. The author seems to think that the issues are primarily fuze function reliability and crew competence. The real issues are the imprecision of their long-range fires, their lousy fire direction means, and their primitive target acquisition systems.

Really long-range artillery is miserably imprecise, with Circle Error Probables (CEPs) somewhere around a mile or two at max range. With enough rounds, they can hit Seoul, somewhere - they just can't pick where. It's useless for attacking military targets at long range because they would have to fire way too many rounds to get any effect.

On the other hand, we are very good at finding them. We have counterfire radars that can locate where rounds were fired from very quickly and have a round go after them while their round is still in the air.

[2ndDivisionVet]

Most of these articles seem to forget that the ROK (”South Korean”) military is very large, capable and well-trained. It isn’t 1950 where a large Soviet equipped army is going to slice through a token force like a knife through butter. Ask the NVA and Viet Cong their opinion of the South Koreans.

[lacrew]

I was briefly stationed in South Korea in 1991.

The biggest threat at that time was thought to be rockets. The Soviets loved rockets, and seemed to develop their use more extensively than the U.S....and the Norks had lots and lots of rockets.

The thing with rockets, is one multiple rocket launcher can launch close to a dozen rockets in a matter of seconds, much faster than artillery.

And, I could be wrong, but I don't think counter-battery radar would be very effective against rockets, since they rely on the basic equations of motion for an object only subject to an initial force and gravity - don't know how they could really back-calculate the launching point of a fired rocket.

One other thing - a lot of the talk about counter-battery fire is pointless. Its not like we have artillery pieces in position and ready for a fire mission. The situation is usually that we have soldiers sleeping in barracks, with their vehicles tarped in the motor pool. We would practice alerts...and even without artillery and rockets raining down on us, it usually took an hour to get everything out of the motor pool.

One good thing Donald Rumsfeld did is reduce our force in Korea - because that force is essentially a target.

Anyway, if the Norks ever decided to launch a first strike, my prediction would be:

1. Soldiers in the actual DMZ are well within range of just about any artillery there is, so they would be devastated with artillery, rockets, and chemical weapons. Yes, 25% might fail, but the amount of ordinance would be huge.

2. Over the years, weapons have developed a range greater than that of the DMZ - these would be used to hit barracks and motor pools containing US artillery and tanks. Being further away, and requiring better aim, this would be scattershot, with a few barracks hit, most motor pools with at least a few shells landing...and the civilian areas that have developed around these encampments would be a mess, having also taken a beating from poorly aimed artillery and rockets.

3. For shock effect, the Norks would use their longest range weapons on Seoul. Damage would be done, but it would not be devastating.

4. The US response would include trying to get heavy equipment, including artillery, out of the motor pools and into pre-planned positions. This will be difficult, as the roads would immediately clogged with civilians fleeing south. Frankly, our planned route to our positions included driving through/over tin buildings, instead of trying the roads.

5. The most immediate and deadly US response would be by air. The carrier group is a nice show of force, but there are ground based A-10s and F-16s, with pilots on stand-bye. They would take to the air and hit a series of pre-planned targets - destroying much of the Nork's artillery, among other things. And that's it - the Norks would get one devastating volley. And the end result would be a lot of their own hardware in flames, and the US with a legitimate reason to start working on 'regime change', and possible re-unification. This is why the Norks, unless this guy is a raving lunatic in every way, would never launch a full scale attack.

[Hot Tabasco]

No information on the fact that SK likely has every NK artillery placement in their sites as well as all the airfields containing their antiquated '50s, 60's and 70's planes..and their missiles.......

You know darn well the U.S. Navy does.........

[IronJack]

Our air forces could very quickly identify any Nork artillery installations and take them out. If all they're relying on is cannons, they're fighting last century's war.

And if they want to put muzzle to muzzle, I suspect the South Koreans have their share of artillery too, and the Norks have no way to counter them.

Face it, any firefight with the Norks would be short, ugly, and pointless, and would result in the virtual destruction of that nation's ability to wage war. If you think we ripped through Iraq, you ain't seen nothin' yet.

[RushIsMyTeddyBear]

Bkmrk.

[SandRat]

Rest aaured, the South Korean Army is very well trained in counter Battery Fire.

[Democratic-Republican]

The North Korean military's most powerful tool is artillery. It cannot level Seoul as some reports have claimed, but it could do significant damage.

Talking about a strictly limited exchange as usual. Elevating Nork military commanders to the same rational status as the more civilized west. Problem is, neither Stratfor nor the Pentagon nor any think tank really knows who is calling the shots, and what these unknown persons would do if ordered by Dear Leader in a suicidal fit of insanity to vaporize Seoul.

This moderated talk of mild military exchanges is the work product of people paid to generate this exact work product. They stay in business because of their work product. It is exactly the same as the hoaxster "climate scientists" generating work product about fake warming leading to more cash to study more fake warming.

The sad truth is that for 60 years now our stationing at the DMZ and Seoul has become yet another local welfare program for the Koreans at USA taxpayer expense, and boy did they make out well. For six decades nothing has stopped them from a large scale relocation of the capitol away from Seoul to a defensible position not in range of artillery or frickin baseballs. Instead, they built the place up to Paris or London like proportions with more population and a key stock market hub to boot. Not a brain among them, or us for that matter as we keep sending our kids there to walk point and protect this "jewel" from the ( literal ) next-door neighbors.

Why everybody wants to assign sanity to the mini-me grandkid of Kim Il Sung is beyond my imagination. And just like with his father the western experts not only send them money each time they make fissioning noise, but they also intentionally dampen all concern over this threat with talk of shiney things, i.e., At least they don't have missiles to reach xxx. Literal shiney things. As if nukes have ever been delivered by ICBM's at all ( a few rockets into near space doesn't count ) and as if a nuke is meaningless without it.

Even North Korea has highly effective stealth delivery systems ...

A lead shielded tank ( to disguise from Neutron detectors ) driven across the DMZ or a passenger plane can get to Seoul faster than western experts can type out their lame excuses on their iPads. A ground based detonation would take out a big chunk of Seoul and be extremely dirty rendering it uninhabitable for a long time, and an airburst could level Seoul completely and take a huge bite out of the evil capitalist world stock market along with it.

And this is all dependent on the sanity of one demented dwarf ( with able assists credited to an assortment of world Presidents and western experts ). And this could occur tomorrow morning if he felt like doing it.

So ummm yeah, Stratfor, muh artillery damage, thanks for the advice. Keep training sheeple to not watch for the pea under the walnut shells. There are always shiney things to distract them with.

[Bodleian_Girl]

I don’t really trust Stratfor.

[Chewbarkah]

Stratfors is always worth a read, but the focus on poor accuracy, high ratios of duds, etc. obscures that the NK’s objectives (unless they are even more delusional than I think) will be political rather than physical. The Tet Offensive was a battlefield disaster for NV communist side, but a political success. Nowadays, an incident with a couple of bombs and less than 100 casualties is considered Armageddon (which is reasonable for civilized people; the point is that publics are not prepared to absorb massive casualties that we can see on TV and internet in real time).

NK gunners only have to hit a giant city-sized target. Half of 100,000 artillery shells can be duds and still kill tens of thousands, collapse buildings with mass casualties, start firestorms, and create total panic and chaos. News media here and certainly in SK would wet themselves blaming Trump and demand capitulation to whatever Maximum Liter wants.

We have great military capabilities, but silencing every field gun, tank, missile, submarine, and who knows what, almost simultaneously is not realistic if we stick with conventional weapons. These folks have spent 60 years digging in and planning this battle. The question is whether the SK government and people will take massive pain until we can excise the source. Then what? Invade and occupy NK?

[Feckless]

An actual "invasion" by the North can only occur in the dead of winter when the ground and rice paddies are frozen. Attempts to move equipment and men on the highway system alone will make the "Highway of Death" during Desert Storm seem like a Disney ride.

There are too many places to bottle up forces, creating shooting galleries for our air power.

[Fitzy_888]

Oddly...his older brother was meant to assume leadership. Kim went to a private school in Switzerland, unsavory yes, but the suffering that might have been avoided by putting a bullet through this brain at thirteen.