The Glade 4.0

DE, question for you. (And anyone else that wants to chime in really)

Is NK, and KJU a credible threat to the US? I have my own reasoning on this, and am interested in what y'all think.

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Holy shitsnacks!

NK isn't even much of a threat to SK at this point. Without China's backing, we'd really be better off if he'd do something to give SK an excuse to invade.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Interesting opinion piece on exactly this topic I read yesterday:

http://sofrep.com/18785/the-north-korean-threat/

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“The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.” - Thomas Paine

That's ridiculous. Seoul is within range of artillery hidden in the mountains. Last report I heard said NK could hit Seoul with 500,000 artillery rounds within the first hour of a conflict. That would mostly level Seoul before anyone can really effectively respond.

NK would be crushed, but the loss to the South would be staggering.

I believe there is some credible threat to Seoul because of it's proximity to the border. But beyond NK's ability to really screw up that city, they aren't that huge of a threat.

The big issue will be if KJU is unhinged enough to do a scorched earth policy with their nuke if they end up losing a war I would think. I'm not sure how good our intel is on how many they have, where it is and if it works.

Er: Arathain beat me to the punch on Seoul.

Someone at the Pentagon seems to think the threats possess some degree of credibility, based on changes on deployment patterns and phase-ops in the USAF.

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The credibility of the threat they present depends a lot on which of their threats you're talking about.

They can do extremely serious damage to Seoul with chemical and conventional artillery munitions, although 500,000 rounds per hour seems exceedingly high since only their longest-ranged artillery and rockets can reach Seoul. It's close to the border but it's not so close that mortars or medium-range artillery can hit the city. I would like to know how that figure was obtained.

They present a real risk to Japan; they have numerous ballistic missile systems that could reach Japanese cities within a few minutes. These could carry chemical warheads.

As for nuking Alaska, Hawaii, or San Francisco.. well, they haven't had a great deal of success with the tests of their longest ranged missiles, but they haven't tested a great deal. Smart money is not to just laugh at them and assume they'd fail. Reaching Alaska and Hawaii, and possibly even California with a missile is a pretty significant probability.

Defending against the missile attack is probably not going to be that hard, however; even if they can fire multiple missiles there's probably not enough to totally saturate the GMD system. Even then, it could be supplemented with Aegis ships armed with SM-3 near the target areas; although I don't know that SM-3 is all that reliabile yet against intercontinental systems, each ship can carry enough to just spam them at anything that survives GMD.

One could, however, slip through since despite the sophistication of these systems, no one has ever actually defended against intercontinental ballistic missile attack before. The closest is the use of Patriot in Desert Storm, and the system of the time wasn't really made for that.

At this point its pretty unlikely that North Korea has a nuclear device small enough to fit on a missile, and may not yet have the means to make a reliable re-entry vehicle either.

However, if one does slip through that could still mean nerve gas, or even just high explosive supplemented with high-mach-number kinetic energy. A few hundred dead are a real possibility in either case. Or we could be totally wrong about his ability to put a nuclear warhead on them, and then we could be looking at 40 kilotons over Honolulu or Juneau or Fairbanks, or San Francisco.

The credibility comes not from the likelihood that this will happen, but from the consequences if it does. So, it's credible, but not strongly so. It's more in the manner of we shouldn't simply scoff at it.

The other aspect comes from whether he's serious or not. There is no way at all Kim can win against either the U.S. or South Korea. He cannot stop a retaliatory strike if he DOES use a nuke. A first strike does him no good at all; it just gets him wiped off the face of the earth.

So why he's threatening one is a mystery. I think it's a combination of 2 things - A) spring is here and he needs to distract the population from low food supplies after the winter depleted them and B) he also may be thinking that if he can establish a credible nuclear capability, he can start cutting conventional forces and maybe improve his economy a bit. I don't think he really wants to fight; even if he's only fighting the South he's going to lose. I do think, however, that he could perceive himself as being under much more imminent threat of attack than he actually is, and thereby "use it rather than lose it" when no one else thinks things are at that level. That could be bad, because it could give him the element of surprise.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

I don't know how the figure was obtained, but it's worth noting that the figure was 500,000 in the first hour, not per hour.

It came from Foreign Policy Magazine.



http://www.businessinsider.com/why-no-o ... war-2013-4

They support DE's assertion too:

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I found the 500,000 rounds in the first hour quote, but it seems to refer to the "greater Seoul area", not the city itself. That's still significant though because including its metropolitan area there are about 25 million people in and around the city. It's about 35 miles from Seoul to the DMZ, and the DMZ itself is a little over 2 miles wide.

That means the city proper can only be attacked by long-range systems like 240mm rockets (M-1991 240mm rocket in particular, and possibly the M-1985 240mm) and the 170mm howitzer while using rocket-assisted projectiles.

However, it's unlikely these weapons would simply target Seoul itself or the surrounding areas indiscriminately. Some might do that, but these weapons could be profitably used against airfields and other SK military targets that are around Seoul and in between it and the DMZ. This is especially true of the shorter and medium ranged systems. While many of these targets might technically fall inside the "greater Seoul area", targeting priorities aren't really conveyed by the 500K/1st hour figure.

I doubt very much that more than 10% of the rounds fired would be targeted on downtown Seoul, and those that are would be aimed mostly at government facilities.. to the best of the ability of the accuracy of these systems. However, those rounds would also be the most likely to have chemical warheads, and would be of the largest caliber available in order to reach that far so.. it's still be nothing nice. The other 450,000 rounds would fall in the "greater Seoul area" but a great deal would be targeted on military forces and their support facilities. These artillery pieces are a key part of NK war strategy, so eliminating the infantry forces that can get close and destroy them quickly would be a priority.

I imagine that a large amount of that 500,000 rounds comes from mortars and small caliber howitzers that have a very high rate of fire. These weapons could only hit targets in the direct vicinity of the DMZ, but that could easily be called part of the "greater Seoul area"; 35 miles from downtown of NYC is definitely part of its metropolitan area. These are direct support weapons that can easily respond to movements by SK or US forces engaging NK positions.

It also explains why it's 500,000 the first hour. Artillery can almost always fire faster than stores can be replenished. For example, the Paladin fires 4 rounds/minute for the first 2 minutes and 1 round/minute per minute afterwards. (Wiki says 6 and 3, but it was 4 and 1 when I was in a Paladin unit, so unless there's been a doctrinal change, Wiki is wrong) Because the rounds weigh between 95 and 140 pounds depending on type and are entirely handled manually, that means you have to start refilling the howitzer when it has 2/3 of its ammunition remaining. The M992A2 ammunition carrier must also be refilled with 2/3 remaining as well. That means you need to have flat racks of ammo rolling to the battery pretty much when the gun chief yells "FIRE!" for the first round.

The flat rack holds about 170 rounds so it can easily refill the gun and carrier with 50 rounds left over, but then the truck is not moving back to get more unless it can just dump the rounds, lift the flat rack, and start rolling, so depending on how frequent the fire missions are and how far away the ammunition holding area is, the battery may not have any ammunition left before the second turn of the ammo carrier. Of course, if the battery is moving it will fire less often, and its likely specialty rounds like illumination and smoke might remain, but that just means killing munitions deplete faster since some space was taken up with utility ammo. NK isn't likely to use much in the way of smoke screens or illumination, but still they need to get new ammo to the guns somehow, and those trucks in the open are easy prey to A-10s or F-16s.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

I have to say, I'm increasingly of the opinion that we should take NK out before they have that capability for sure.

Their saber rattling would seem to be making it easier for the US to justify such an action. Even China is fed up with their BS.

In which case, you risk the arms proliferation that happens in the wake of regime-toppling. And, unlike we were told in Iraq, for North Korea that means potential proliferation of chemical and nuclear materials.

No, peaceful integration of North Korea over time (a la China) is the solution. The problem is that that seems unlikely.

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“The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.” - Thomas Paine

I agree. Especially because the west could provide nominal support and let SK do most of the work.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Just try to arrange a deal where China gets half of NK and SK gets the other half.

Yeah China wants a barrier but the upper third of the peninsula could be enough of a physical barrier.

Just send in a Chinese Army battalion to parade in front of dear leader to be used as propaganda and have the envoy shoot him in the head as it goes by and turn the weapons on associated leaders. Boom regime change. Secure Pyongyang and draw up split agreement with SK later.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

'That's essentially what's going to happen if the balloon goes up anyhow now, because we only have one brigade, some aircraft, and reinforcing elements in the area, plus naval assets. The ROK army has 520,000 active personnel, all better fed, trained, and equipped than the North Koreans. By the time we could start putting units across the Pacific, the fight would be pretty well decided.

If China were to come in, they'd definitely feel the pain before overrunning SK, and that's something we'd (somehow) have to deal with, but I don't think they'd do that. China has always had a different attitude towards the idea of South Koreans on its border as opposed to US forces.

DFK! makes a good point about proliferation. There's the temptation to believe that the West won't ever attack a country that has nuclear weapons just because of the off chance of losing a city, a carrier battle group, or even a lot of troops to a nuke. If we pre-empt NK acquisition of nukes, there's real risk of reinforcing that perception; that we only want non-proliferation as a means to keep smaller nations nice and invadable.

On the other hand, nonproliferation and the idea of getting rid of nukes is a pipe dream anyhow. If you get rid of them, the country that can build 5 nukes is now king of the world, and everyone will always know the biggest nations can build one whenever they want.

By shrinking nuclear arsenals, we've brought nuclear war down into the realm of winnable. Note the lack of quotes; there can be a winner and a loser; large nations can expect to survive a nuclear war at present with sufficient cohesion to attempt national rebuilding. That situation will only increase as arsenals shrink farther. We've traded away the near-certainty that nuclear war would not happen for a vast decrease in the destruction if it does happen, from "back to the 1600s" down to merely appalling.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Just so you know, DE, our presence in SK is rather elevated at the moment. And a few airplanes is a bit of an understatement at the moment ...

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At the moment yes, that's correct. There are annual surges for exercises like Foal Eagle, and due to the current tensions, we have more assets in the area than normal. However, a major deployment of heavy land forces would take quite some time. For example, to move the 1st Cavalry Division from Fort Hood to Korea would mean railoading the entire division set of equipment to Beaumont or Galveston, loading it on ships, and then sailing it to Korea. That.. you're looking at 3 weeks easy, maybe more between time to raiload, load the ships, and then sail and unload. Moving the men is easy; they fly. There's most likely a few brigade sets of prepositioned equipment there as well, and light forces (most notably the 82nd Airborne) could be there in 72 hours. The Marines could possibly fast sealift a few Regimental Combat Teams to SK in pretty short order too. However, all that would still be damn small compared to the South Korean Army. We don't have a major annual deployment exercise to Korea like we used to with REFORGER, and unfortunately over the last 10 years we've kind of lost focus on this sort of thing.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

It seems there's a new report out in the last few hours that NK is believed to now have the ability to produce a nuclear warhead small enough for a missile.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

**** just got real.

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Holy shitsnacks!

I will say, that sometimes the comments on articles provide much needed amusement.

http://www.naturalnews.com/039881_North ... siles.html


Yeah, people really understand how nukes work.... and that's not how.

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Holy shitsnacks!

/facepalm

I can't read comment sections on news articles. I start weeping for the future of the human race.

Those comments are posted by people sympathetic to your general political bent, TheRiov.

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