Thoughts on North Korea

So. . .some recent news stories prompted me to write a military news-themed post - one of the main areas I had originally planned to focus on, before this blog went slightly off the rails.  But that's water under the bridge.  Now, before I dive into this post, I want to make a disclaimer.  My Army service gives me some insight into the military's planning and warfighting processes, but I'm hardly the Second Coming of General Patton.  Truth is, I only scratched a little bit below the surface when it comes to knowledge of those areas.  This is only a collection of somewhat educated guesses, so take them with a grain of salt.  Moving on to the main topic. . .

There have been a handful of news stories over the past two or three days reporting that North Korean hackers acquired a huge chunk of classified data from a South Korean government database, in the neighborhood of 235 gigabytes, last September.  South Korean officials aren't sure what North Korea acquired, but the stolen information reportedly includes joint American-South Korean war plans and proposals for decapitation strikes meant to assassinate Kim Jong Un. To me, that's incredibly important, since tensions remain high and President Trump seems hell-bent on locking the US into a war with North Korea.

I can't emphasize how much of an advantage this gives the North Korean military.  Let's use football as an analogy. When a team is trying to move the ball into the end zone, it generally has two options available: passing or running. Now, the team can develop any number of plays to run or pass the ball, but it essentially has two main options.  It might pull a trick play from time to time, but it won't base its entire offense on wacky strategies like (to take this idea to the absolute extreme) playing two quarterbacks simultaneously or using the kicker to move the ball downfield.

The same thing holds true for warfighting plans.  Any contingency plans the US military develops will share the same basic similarities, because that is just the reality of war.  For example, the military's options at the start of the conflict would be to charge across the DMZ or secure a foothold somewhere else in North Korea.  A frontal charge across the DMZ would incur a lot of casualties, because North Korea expects that and has rolled out countermeasures for it. We could - maybe - create an opening by conducting a massive aerial bombardment/artillery barrage, but I don't know how effective that would be.  It does have the option of letting the military assemble troops and supplies in a safer environment, though.  The other option would be securing a foothold somewhere in North Korea.  That option carries risks of its own.  But assuming it works, once the first wave of troops secures a foothold, it will need a way to deliver supplies, vehicles, additional troops, and other important items.  That means airstrips and/or deep-water ports are prime pieces of real estate, because ships and cargo aircraft are the best ways of transporting supplies in huge quantities.  Those are basically the military's only two options, and they both have pluses and minuses.  Then, if you start thinking about what the military needs in order to fight and win the war, while keeping the supply pipeline flowing, and it becomes clear how few options are really available.

There are also other limitations, such as the number of troops and quantities of supplies available (assembling an invasion force would mean pulling some troops out of somewhere else, such as western Europe or Afghanistan), and equipment capabilities and limitations (our tanks and aircraft are far superior than Korean War era ones; but those are evolutionary, not revolutionary, changes). Additionally, North Korea can correctly anticipate how the US and South Korea will fight based on joint exercises and how the US has fought in the past.  Whatever the US did at the start, a massive bombardment and/or artillery barrage would probably precede any ground assault.  That's just my prediction, but the US is kind of predictable.  There's also the fog of war: things tend to go wrong in unpredictable ways and at unpredictable times.

Long story short, the US is boxed in here.  Any new war plans it develops will be constrained by logistical, technological, and tactical limitations, to the point that they look a lot like the old war plans.  Creating wholly new war plans is unlikely, in my opinion, because there's a lot of painstaking, time-consuming, and possibly dangerous work involved.  And given Trump's unhelpful rhetoric, time might be in short supply.

Again, though, I'm hardly an expert military tactician; but this is just my $.02.