The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #70201   Message #1196647
Posted By: Strick
29-May-04 - 03:52 PM
Thread Name: What's up with Korea?
Subject: RE: What's up with Korea?
"Well I just don't think that the North Korean leadership is as stupid as Saddam."

Actually, I don't believe they're really smarter, but they're certainly more insane.

What I was refering to was the obvious economic situation in North Korea. They don't have enough oil to heat the country in the winter or food to eat any time of the year. While I believe they're crazy enough to starve their people to launch a war, I don't think they have the resouces launch a credible attack. It's not about having weapons or men, it's about getting them and fuel and food and ammo to where they have to fight. Tough against an enemy who'd have air supremecy. It would be a very short war once the few old, old tanks that survived the air assualts from Okinawa ran out of gas and spare parts. Even that's assuming China, who wants trouble (especially mushroom clouds) on the peninsula even less than we do, stays out of it. All they'd have to do is decide to cut off supplies to North Korea to end any war.

The North Korean army's defensive capabilities are a different story and would make any invasion terribly expensive. Their nuclear capability is entirely defensive, too. It would be useful to let an opponent know what you'd do if you were desperate enough to survive, but using nukes offensively doesn't make sense when US retaliation is only a few short minutes away. North Korea'd be a tough nut to invade, but that says nothing about their capability to pull off an invasion of their own.

That said, moving any part of our division or worth of men one direction or the other isn't enough to worry the US is considering attacking North Korea. You'd need a much larger army than is in Iraq to do that and that's the only one we have at the moment. The US gave up being prepared to fight a two front war in the 90s, remember?