North Korea's Military Capabilities
- Thread starter foxholeatheist
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John Jones
Penultimate Amazing
There's that.
Don't get me wrong. The USA had no business in that conflict, but the Paris peace talks really proceeded after Operations Linebacker and Linebacker II in late 1972.
catsmate
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Because they could. The Maginot line didn't cover the entire Franco-German border; some parts held out against German attack rather well, even after being flanked.
catsmate
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The carriers armament is light; 20mm Phalanx automatic cannon and Sea Sparrow short range missiles. However these are only intended to shoot down anti-ship missiles at short ranges (<10km), it's the job of the escorting cruisers and destroyers to defend the carriers. They have the AEGIS system and SPY air search radar, combined with Standard and ESSM air defense missiles for longer range engagements. This was a response to the cold war era Soviet tactics mentioned, massive missile wave attacks.
For example the Soviets deployed the 'Komar' missile boats in squadrons of six, each with two 'Styx' anti-ship missiles, to attack NATO warships as it was calculated that the two hits needed to disable/destroy the ship would require twelve launches; if the target was prepared for an attack three such squadrons would be needed. Human wave tactics.....
The two missiles listed above are members of the 'Scud' family, they're inaccurate ballistic missiles with very limited anti-ship capability without nuclear (or chemical, they've lots of chemical agents) warheads.
The DPRK has actual sea-skimming anti-ship missiles, mostly of the 'Silkworm' family or the earlier Soviet Termit. These would pose a limited threat, and one that (in the case of the Termit at least) has been extensively studied by the US Navy as they received over 200 of the missiles after German reunification.
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Ziggurat
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MG1962
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And thats the biggest problem. NK adapts its defensive posture eveytime the US reveals new lines of weaponry.
If the US ever engage in the area, it can not be half an effort. They will need to put every plane and ship they can spare into forcing the North Koreans to get their heads down and try and slow the civilian casualty rate.
I am sure far smarter people than me have thought this through, but getting the arty has to be the priority. Then some sort of seaborne flank attack to get behind the NK defensive line
And then the nukes are an issue because the NK leadership is definately that crazy.
Or could we be so lucky for the Chinese invade from the north?
Ziggurat
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You don't need seaborne to get behind their lines. South Korean planes gain air superiority rather quickly.
Indeed. But it isn't enough to be able to just detonate something (and even there they screwed up), you need to be able to deliver it. And it's not clear that they can do that yet. Launching a nuke on a ballistic missile requires that the nuke be pretty small (theirs might not be small enough), and dropping it from a plane requires that you can get a plane over the target (which they can't count on).
I have no doubt that the leadership is perfectly willing to kill any number of South Korean civilians, but if they expect to survive a war (and I don't just mean the regime, I mean the individual leaders not getting executed), they'll need to either not have done something the south could never forgive (which wouldn't include dropping a nuke), or they'll need to flee to China. So depending on what China has said to them behind closed doors, they may or may not have gotten the message that nukes are not on the table. If China put their foot down, then the leadership probably won't use a nuke, even if Kim wants to. But China is never going to tell us what they said, because that ambiguity serves their interests, even if they did put their foot down.
If there's a massive enough refugee flow, maybe they'd invade to try to stem that tide. But I wouldn't count on it.
Shift key not working? That's so SAD.
Nope! I hit the smiley, it shows up as
on my screen, but when it sends, changes to a :d. I have tried edit many times (note, the change to :d does not happen every time - about 10-15%) with no success.Corsair 115
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Seems to me that in this day and age of LGBs, JDAMs, and Tomahawks a dug-in enemy is a dead enemy.
Chuck Yeager said it best: "It's the man, not the machine." A superior pilot in an inferior machine will nearly always beat an inferior pilot in a superior machine. The history of aerial warfare has demonstrated this time and again.
Delvo
Дэлво Δε&#
If you have enough firepower, yes. If not, no.
Not at all. It's only true if the planes are about the same, and even then, it only applies in individual fights between small numbers of pilots; in a large-scale campaign where there are enough engagements to look at average outcomes, the better plane will still win most engagements even if it loses some, unless the difference in training between the two sides is atrocious, which there isn't much reason to count on with China or Russia.
Otherwise, there'd be no reason to bother obtaining new planes with new technology, because they would never be more effective than the ones that came before. And there'd be no way to explain the results of historical hardware upgrades/replacements that have changed outcomes in real combat and in friendly exercises. For example, American pilots in F-15s in friendly exercises against "enemies" with the same planes or others like F-16s and Typhoons and Rafales got mixed results, but a certain set of them suddenly went to a kill ratio of hundreds to one in the last few years (and that one was due to a way the simulation differed from real combat, allowing a "shot down" plane to fly out of the engagement area and come back in to simulate new combatants arriving; the pilot ignored one because he knew it had already been "shot down"). Is it some huge coincidence that the very same American pilots somehow got that much better at exactly the same time that they irrelevantly switched from F-15s to not-really-any-better F-22s?
Spindrift
Time Person of the Year, 2006
Can't really compare Vietnam to Korea.
In South Vietnam you had a dysfunctional government, an army (ARVN) that basically did not want to fight and a large home grown insurgency (the Viet Cong). Then add a very large and well-supplied NVA that could move troops south in spite of the incessant bombings and a willingness to wait out the Americans until the war was politically unsupportable and you had a very good recipe for the North winning.
In South Korea the government while corrupt at times does run effectively, the ROK army is quite good and does not flinch at fighting and while I wouldn't doubt that the North has infiltrated the South I don't think the sympathy of the South is with them. The North alone does not have the resources for a long duration war and I don't know if the Chinese would help them over the long haul.
Skwinty
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Compare the Korean war to the new Korean war then.
I love these statements from the hawks
" It will all be over in no time at all"
Famous last words.
And then 5 years later a negotiated settlement and no territory won.
WildCat
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WildCat
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Quite a few things have changed in the last 60 years.
Delvo
Дэлво Δε&#
The site also converted capitals to lowercases in a post of mine months ago. I wasn't trying to use smilies in that case, but it was still capital letters being replaced by lowercase, both when I originally posted and when I tried to edit. It even lowercased an all-capital word I was quoting from someone else, which had been left unaltered in that person's original post.Nope! I hit the smiley, it shows up as
I don't know what makes it do that sometimes to one post and not to most others, but it happens.
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Skwinty
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Sure, but they changed for every one.
I do not believe if there was war between the USA and NK, nuclear weapons would be used.
The threat of nuclear weapons was also used in the Korean war.
Never under estimate those who have nothing to lose.
Spindrift
Time Person of the Year, 2006
Okay. In 1950, the US was demilitarizing itself and along with SKorea was caught totally by surprise. The US had very few troops and S Korea was not a highly trained army and the gap between what we had and what they had wasn't that big.
Today the South Korean armed forces are well-trained and well-armed. The US has a significant number of troop in Korea. The US weapons systems are vastly superior to what the North Koreans have.
BTW: I'm not a hawk, I just don't think that Vietnam and Korea are analogous.
I do not think the US and/or South Korea should attack the North unless faced with a full-fledged attacked from the North. I believe China is a dangerous wildcard, many others will disagree with that.
And if it came to war, I don't know if it would "all be over by Christmas" of whatever year whenever it starts.
WildCat
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Not really. The technological gap between S. Korea and N. Korea has become enormous since 1952.