Chad Irby writes:

In article mail-0E43D5.00500922122003@localhost,
Michael Ash wrote:

North Korea, on the other hand, has enough artillery on the border to
completely level Seoul within a few hours, from what I understand. That
alone is enough to stop any plans for an invasion. In a way, it's even
worse than the nuclear problem. Unlike a nuke and its delivery system,
there's no possible way to take out mumble-thousand pieces of artillery
before the deed has been done.

Kinda makes you wonder how well they can coordinate those artillery
pieces... they can't even feed their troops.

Out of the tens of thousands of cannons sitting on the north side of the
border, anyone want to bet that no more than a couple of hundred
actually get to fire? Especially with a few dozen MLRS launchers and a
couple of hundred attack aircraft cranking out a few million
submunitions across their firing positions... while reducing their
command centers to smoking holes in the ground and jamming
communications.

How do you jam a homing pigeon?

The DPRK is hopeless at economics, yes, but the NKPA does traditional
twentieth-century warfighting reasonably well. I have recently argued
in another post that their ability to destroy Seoul by artillery fire
is vastly overrated, that with few exceptions the guns simply won't
reach.

But what fixed targets are within 15-20km of the border, those are
going to get plastered. The North Korean artillery is seriously
hardened; area weapons like MRLS will not even annoy it, only the
one-on-one attention of guided penetrator munitions. We can't
deliver those fast enough to take out the guns before they shoot
through their ready stocks of ammunition.

And the command and control battle, *on this issue*, favors the
North. Planned bombardment of fixed targets by prepositioned
artillery assets, requires only the general distribution of an
"Execute War Plan A" message in real time. War Plan A itself
can be distributed ahead of time, and as securely dug in as the
guns that will execute it. The implementation order goes out by
general broadcast, landline telephone, bicycle courier, signal
flare, and I wasn't kidding about carrier pigeons. With massive
redundancy in all channels. It will get through.

Once events diverge from War Plan A, yes, the NKPA will be blind,
dumb, and paralyzed. But the first day of battle, on the border,
will probably be theirs.


For reference, look at the "massive" weapons infrastructure in Iraq, and
how they never managed to get more than a few percent of them into play.
And Iraq was in relatively good shape compared to what Korea's going
through right now.

But Korea set everything up when, with Soviet and/or Chinese assistance,
they were in relatively good shape themselves. Given their patrons'
taste for extremely robust hardware designed for operation by illiterate
conscripts, that system will outlast the rest of North Korea by at least
a decade.

And the comparison with Iraq, misses some key differences. The Hussein
regime spent roughly a generation trying to opportunistically exploit
whatever weaknesses or instabilities their neighbors showed, and defend
against whatever threats arose, anywhere on a 2,500 km open desert border.
That requires flexibility at every level; "Execute War Plan A" doesn't
help the Iraqis.

North Korea, has had two generations to dig in and prepare for battle
with one specific adversary, on a 250 km front characterized by mountain
and storm. They know what they'll be facing on the first day of the
war, they are going to smash it hard, and we probably can't stop it.

Doesn't mean they would *win*, just that it won't be Iraq all over again.


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