DPRK Special Forces on Parade
First, the bragging dummies
Trump
and Haley are still at it. The want to force China to take action
against the DPRK by threatening to take North Korea “into their hands”
if China refuses to comply. Haley said “But
to be clear, China can do more, (…) and we’re putting as much pressure
on them as we can. The last time they completely cut off the oil, North
Korea came to the table. And so we’ve told China they’ve got to do more.
If they don’t do more, we’re going to take it into our own hands and
then we’ll start to deal with secondary sanctions.”
First, let’s reset this scene in a kindergarten and replay it.
Kid
A has a fight with Kid B. Kid A threatens to beat up Kid B. Kid B then
tells Kid A to go screw himself. Kid A does nothing, but issues more
threats. Kid B keeps laughing. And then Kid A comes up with a brilliant
plan: he threatens Kid C (who is much much bigger than Kid B and much,
much stronger too!) by telling him “if you don’t make Kid B comply with my demands, I will take the issue in my own hands!“. The entire schoolyard erupts in hysterical laughter.
Question: how would you the the intelligence of Kid A?
Anyway,
This
would all be really funny if this was a comedy show. But what this all
is in reality is a slow but steady progression towards war. What makes
this even worse is the media’s obsession with the range of North Korean
missiles and whether they can reach Guam or even the US. With all due
respect for the imperial “only we matter” (and never mind the gooks),
there are ways “we”, i.e. the American people can suffer terrible
consequences from a war in the Korean Peninsula which have nothing to do
with missile strikes on Guam or the US.
The lucrative target: Japan
This
summer I mentioned one of the most overlooked potential consequences of
a war with the DPRK and I want to revisit this issue again. First, the
relevant excerpt from the past article:
While I personally believe that Kim Jong-un is not insane and that the main objective of the North Korean leadership is to avoid a war at all costs, what if I am wrong? What if those who say that the North Korean leaders are totally insane are right? Or, which I think is much more likely, what if Kim Jong-un and the North Korean leaders came to the conclusion that they have nothing to lose, that the Americans are going to kill them all, along with their families and friends? What could they, in theory, do if truly desperate? Well, let me tell you: forget about Guam; think Tokyo! Indeed, while the DPRK could devastate Seoul with old fashioned artillery systems, DPRK missiles are probably capable of striking Tokyo or the Keihanshin region encompassing Kyoto, Osaka and Kobe including the key industries of the Hanshin Industrial Region. The Greater Tokyo area (Kanto region) and the Keihanshin region are very densely populated (37 and 20 million people respectively) and contain a huge number of industries, many of which would produce an ecological disaster of immense proportions if hit by missiles. Not only that, but a strike on the key economic and financial nodes of Japan would probably result in a 9-11 kind of international economic collapse. So if the North Koreans wanted to really, really hurt the Americans what they could do is strike Seoul, and key cities in Japan resulting in a huge political crisis for the entire planet. During the Cold War we used to study the consequences of a Soviet strike against Japan and the conclusion was always the same: Japan cannot afford a war of any kind. The Japanese landmass is too small, too densely populated, to rich in lucrative targets and a war would lay waste to the entire country. This is still true today, only more so. And just imagine the reaction in South Korea and Japan if some crazy US strike on the DPRK results in Seoul and Tokyo being hit by missiles! The South Koreans have already made their position unambiguously clear, by the way. As for the Japanese, they are officially placing their hopes in missiles (as if technology could mitigate the consequences of insanity!). So yeah, the DPRK is plenty dangerous and pushing them into their last resort is totally irresponsible indeed, nukes or no nukes.
Yet,
for some reason, the western media rarely mentions Japan or the
possible global economic consequences on a strike against Japan. Very
few people know for sure whether the North Koreans truly have developed a
usable nuclear weapon (warhead and missile) or whether the North Korean
ballistic missile truly can reach Guam or the US. But I don’t think
that there is any doubt whatsoever that North Korean missile can easily
cover the roughly 1000km (600 miles) to reach the heart of Japan. In
fact, the DPRK has already lobbed missiles over Japan in the past. Some red-blooded Americans will, no doubt, explain to us that the US THAAD system can, and will, protect South Korea and Japan from such missile strikes. Others, however, will disagree. We won’t know until we find out, but judging by the absolutely dismal performance of the vaunted US Patriot system in the Gulf War,
I sure would not place my trust in any US made ABM system. Last, but
not least, the North Koreans could place a nuclear device (not even a
real nuclear warhead) on a regular commercial ship or even a submarine,
bring it to the coast of Japan and detonate it. The subsequent panic and
chaos might end up costing even more lives and money than the explosion
itself.
Then there is Seoul, of course. US analyst Anthony Cordesman put is very simply “A battle near the DMZ, directed at a target like Seoul, could rapidly escalate to the point at which it threatened the ROK’s entire economy, even if no major invasion took place“.
[Sidebar:
Cordesman being Cordesman, he proceeds to hallucinate about the effects
of a DPRK invasion of the ROK and comes up with sentences such as "Problems
drive any assessment of the outcome of a major DPRK invasion of the
ROK, even if one only focuses on DPRK- ROK forces. The DPRK has far
larger ground forces, but the outcome of what would today be an air -
land battle driven heavily by the overall mobility of DPRK land forces
and their ability to concentrate along given lines of advance relative
to the attrition technically superior ROK land and air forces could
inflict is impossible to calculate with any confidence, as is the actual
mix of forces both sides could deploy in a given area and scenario". Yup, the man is seriously discussing AirLand battle concepts in the context of a DPRK invasion of the South! He might as well be discussing the use of Follow-on-Forces Attack
concept in the context of a Martian invasion of earth (or an equally
likely Russian invasion of the Baltic statelets!). It is funny and
pathetic how a country with a totally offensive national strategy,
military doctrine and force posture still feels the need to hallucinate
some defensive scenarios to deal with the cognitive dissonance resulting
from clearly being the bad guy.]
Why does Cordesman say that? Because according to a South Korean specialist “DPRK artillery pieces of calibers 170mm and 240mm “could fire 10,000 rounds per minute to Seoul and its environs.”
During the war in Bosnia the western press spoke of “massive Serbian
artillery strikes on Sarajevo” when the actual rate of fire was about 1
artillery shell per minute. It just makes me wonder what they would call
10,000 rounds per minutes.
The
bottom line is this: you cannot expect your enemy to act in a way which
suits you; in fact you should very much assume that he is going to do
what you do not expect and what is the worst possible for you. And, in
this context, the DPRK has many more options than shooting an ICBM at
Guam or the US. The nutcases in the Administration might not want to
mention it, but an attack on the DPRK risks bringing down both the South
Korean and the Japanese economies with immediate and global
consequences: considering that rather shaky and vulnerable nature of the
international financial and economic system, I very much doubt that a
major crisis in Asia would not result in the collapse of the US economy
(which is fragile anyway).
We
should also consider the political consequences of a war on the Korean
Peninsula, especially if, as is most likely, South Korea and Japan
suffer catastrophic damage. This situation could well result in such an
explosion of anti-US feelings that the US would have to pack and leave
from the region entirely.
How
do you think the PRC feels about such a prospect? Exactly. And might
this not explain why the Chinese are more than happy to let the US deal
with the North Korean problem knowing full well that one way or another
the US will lose without the Chinese having to fire a single shot?
The terrain
Next
I want to re-visit a threat which is discussed much more often: North
Korean artillery and special forces. But first, I ask you to take a
close look at the following three maps of North Korea:
You can also download these full-size maps from here.
What
I want you to see is that the terrain in North Korea is what the
military call “mixed terrain”. The topography of North Korea article in
Wikipedia actually explains this very well:
The terrain consists mostly of hills and mountains separated by deep, narrow valleys. The coastal plains are wide in the west and discontinuous in the east. Early European visitors to Korea remarked that the country resembled “a sea in a heavy gale” because of the many successive mountain ranges that crisscross the peninsula. Some 80 percent of North Korea’s land area is composed of mountains and uplands, with all of the peninsula’s mountains with elevations of 2,000 metres (6,600ft) or more located in North Korea. The great majority of the population lives in the plains and lowlands.
Being
from Switzerland I know this kind of terrain very well (it’s what you
would see in the Alpine foothills called “Oberland” or “Préalpes”) and I
want to add the following: dense vegetation, forests, rivers and creek
with steep banks and rapid currents. Small villages and *a lot* of deep,
underground tunnels. There are also flat areas in North Korea, of
course, but, unlike Switzerland, they are composed mostly of rice fields
and marshes. In military terms this all translates into one simple and
absolutely terrifying word: infantry.
Why
should the word infantry scare so much? Because infantry means on foot
(or horses) with very little airpower (AA and MANPADS), satellites
(can’t see much), armor (can’t move around), gunships, submarines or
cruise missiles can do. Because infantry means “no lucrative targets”
but small, dispersed and very well hidden forces. Company and even
platoon-level warfare. Because infantry in mixed terrains means the kind
of warfare the Americans fear most.
The adversary
And
with that in mind, let’s repeat that besides its huge regular armed
forces (about a million soldiers plus another 5 million plus in
paramilitary organizations) the DPRK also has 200,000 special forces.
Let’s assume that the Western propaganda is, for once, saying the truth
and that the regular armed forces are poorly equipped, poorly trained,
poorly commanded and even hungry and demotivated (I am not at all sure
that this is a fair assumption, but bear with me). But spreading that
amount of soldiers all over the combat area would still represent a huge
headache, even for “the best and most powerful armed forces in history”
especially if you add 200,000 well-trained and highly motivated special
forces to the mix (I hope that we can all agree that assuming that
special forces are also demotivated would be rather irresponsible). How
would you go about finding out who is who and where the biggest threat
comes from. And consider this: it would extremely naive to expect the
North Korean special forces to show up in some clearly marked DPRK
uniforms. I bet you that a lot of them will show up in South Korean
uniforms, and others in civilians clothes. Can you imagine the chaos of
trying to fight them?
You
might say that the North Koreans have 1950s weapons. So what? That is
exactly what you need to fight the kind of warfare we are talking about:
infantry in mixed terrains. Even WWII gear would do just fine. Now is
time to bring in the North Korean artillery. We are talking about 8,600
artillery guns, and over 4,800 multiple rocket launchers (source). Anthony Cordesman estimates
that there are 20,000 pieces in the “surrounding areas” of Seoul. That
way is more than the US has worldwide (5,312 according to the 2017
“Military Balance”, including mortars). And keep in mind that we are not
talking about batteries nicely arranged in a flat desert, but thousands
of simple but very effective artillery pieces spread all over the
“mixed terrain” filled with millions of roaming men in arms, including
200,000 special forces. And a lot of that artillery can reach Seoul,
plenty enough to create a mass panic and exodus.
Think total, abject and bloody chaos
So
when you think of a war against North Korea, don’t think “Hunt for Red
October” or “Top Gun”. Think total, abject and bloody chaos. Think
instant full-scale FUBAR. And that is just for the first couple of days,
then things will get worse, much worse. Why?
Because
by that time I expect the North Korean Navy and Air Force to have been
completely wiped-off, waves after waves of cruise missiles will have hit
X number of facilities (with no way whatsoever to evaluate the impact
of these strikes but nevermind that) and the US military commanders will
be looking at the President with no follow-up plan to offer. As for the
North Koreans, by then they will just be settling in for some serious
warfare, infantry-style.
There
is a better than average chance that a good part of the DPRK elites
will be dead. What is sure is that the command and control of the
General Staff Department over many of its forces will be if not lost,
then severely compromised. But everybody will know that they have been
attacked and by whom. You don’t need much command and control when you
are in a defensive posture in the kind of terrain were movement is hard
to begin with. In fact, this is the kind of warfare where “high command”
usually means a captain or a major, not some faraway general.
You
might ask about logistics? What logistics I ask you? The ammo is stored
nearby in ammo dumps, food you can always get yourself and, besides,
its your home turf, the civilians will help.
Again,
no maneuver warfare, no advanced communications, no heavy logistical
train – we are talking about a kind of war which is much closer to WWII
or even WWI than Desert Storm.
[Sidebar:
as somebody who did a lot of interesting stuff with the Swiss military,
let me add this: this kind of terrain is a battlefield where a single
company can stop and hold an entire regiment; this is the kind of
terrain where trying to accurately triangulate the position of an enemy
radio is extremely hard; this is the kind of terrain where only horses
and donkeys can carry heavy gear over narrow, zig-zagging, steep paths;
entire hospitals can be placed underground with their entrance hidden by
a barn or a shed; artillery guns are dug in underground and fire when a
thick reinforced concrete hatch is moved to the side, then they hide;
counter-battery radar hardly works due to bouncing signals; radio
signals have a short range due to vegetation and terrain; weapon caches
and even company size forces camps can only be detected by literally
stepping on them; underground bunkers have numerous exits; air-assault
operations are hindered by the very high risk of anti-aircraft gunfire
or shoulder-fired missiles which can be hidden and come from any
direction. I could go on and on but I will just say this: if you want to
defeat your adversary in such a terrain there is only one technique
which works: you do what the Russians did in the mountains in southern
Chechnia during the second Chechen war - you send in your special
forces, small units on foot, and you fight the enemy on his own turf.
That is an extremely brutal, dangerous and difficult kind of warfare
which I really don't see the Americans doing. The South Koreans, yes,
maybe. But here is where the number game also kicks in: in Chechnia the
Russians Spetsnaz operated in a relatively small combat zone and they
had the numbers. Now look at a map of North Korea and the number of
North Korean special forces and tell me - do the South Koreans have the
manpower for that kind of offensive operations? One more thing: the
typical American reaction to such arguments would be "so what, we will just nuke them!".
Wrong. Nuke them you can, but nukes are not very effective in that kind
of terrain, finding a target is hard to begin with, enemy forces will
be mostly hidden underground and, finally, you are going to use nukes to
deal with company or platoon size units?! Won't work.]
If
you think that I am trying to scare you, you are absolutely correct. I
am. You ought to be scared. And notice that I did not even mention
nukes. No, not nuclear warheads in missiles. Basic nuclear devices
driven around in common army trucks. Driven down near the DMZ in
peacetime amongst thousands of other army trucks and then buried
somewhere, ready to explode at the right time. Can you imagine what the
effect of a “no-warning” “where did it come from?” nuke might be on
advancing US or South Korean forces? Can you imagine how urgent the
question “are there any more?” will become? And, again, for that the
North Koreans don’t even need a real nuclear weapon. A primitive nuclear
device will be plenty.
I
can already hear the die-hard “rah-rah-rah we are number 1!!”
flag-wavers dismissing it all saying “ha! and you don’t think that the
CIA already knows all that?”. Maybe they do and maybe they don’t – but
the problem is that the CIA, and the rest of the US intelligence
community, has been so hopelessly politicized that it can do nothing
against perceived political imperatives. And, frankly, when I see that
the US is trying to scare the North Koreans with B-1B and F-22s I wonder
if anybody at the Pentagon, or at Langley, is still in touch with
reality. Besides, there is intelligence and then there is actionable
intelligence. And in this case knowing what the Koreans could do does
not at all mean know what to do about it.
Speaking of chaos – do you know what the Chinese specifically said about it?
Can you guess?
That they will “not allow chaos and war on the peninsula“.
Enter the Chinese
Let’s talk about the Chinese now. They made their position very clear: “If
North Korea launches an attack that threatens the United States then
China should stay neutral, but if the United States attacks first and
tries to overthrow North Korea’s government China will stop them“.
Since there is no chance at all of a unprovoked North Korean attack on
the South or the US, especially with this threat by the Chinese to
remain neutral if the DPRK attacks first, let’s focus on the 2nd part of
the warning.
What could the Chinese do if the US decides to attack North Korea? There basic options depend on the nature of the attack:
- If the US limits itself to a combination of missile and airstrikes and the DPRK retaliates (or not), then the Chinese can simply provide technical, economic and humanitarian aid to the DPRK and denounce the US on a political level.
- If the US follows up with a land invasion of some kind or if the DPRK decides to retaliate in a manner which would force the US into a land invasion of some kind, then the Chinese could not only offer directly military aid, including military personnel, but they could also wait for the chaos to get total in Korea before opening a 2nd front against US forces (including, possibly, Taiwan).
That
second scenario would create a dangerous situation for China, of
course, but it would be even far more dangerous for US forces in Asia
who would find themselves stretched very thin over a very large area
with no good means to force either adversary to yield or stop. Finally,
just as China cannot allow the US to crush North Korea, Russia cannot
allow the US to crush China. Does that dynamic sound familiar? It should
as it is similar to what we have been observing in the Middle-East
recently:
- Russia->Iran->Hezbollah->Syria
- Russia->China->DPRK
This
is a very flexible and effective force posture where the smallest
element is at the forefront of the line-up and the most powerful one
most removed and at the back because it forces the other side to
primarily focus on that frontline adversary while maximizing the risks
of any possibly success because that success is likely to draw in the
next, bigger and more powerful adversary.
Conclusion: preparing for genocide
The
US has exactly a zero chance of disarming or, even less so, regime
changing the DPRK by only missile and airstrikes. To seriously and
meaningfully take the DPRK “in their hands” the US leaders need to
approve of a land invasion. However, even if that is not the plan, if
the DPRK decides to use its immense, if relatively antiquated, firepower
to strike at Seoul, the US will have no choice to move in ground forces
across the DMZ. If that happens about 500,000 ROK troops backed by
30,000 US military personnel will face about 1 million North Korea
soldiers backed by 5 million paramilitaries and 200,000 special forces
on a mix terrain battlefield which will require an infantry-heavy almost
WWII kind of military operations. By definition, if the US attacks the
DPRK to try to destroy its nuclear program such an attack will begin by
missile and air strikes on DPRK facilities meaning that the US will
immediately strike at the most valuable targets (from the point of view
of the North Koreans of course). This means that following such
an attack the US will have little or no dissuasive capabilities left and
that means that following such an attack the DPRK will have no
incentive left to show any kind of restraint. In sharp
contrast, even if the DPRK decides to begin with an artillery barrage
across the DMZ, including the Seoul metropolitan area, they will still
have the ability to further escalate by either attacking Japan or by
setting off a nuclear device. Should that happen there is an extremely
high probability that the US will either have to “declare victory and
leave” (a time-honored US military tradition) or begin using numerous
tactical nuclear strikes. Tactical nuclear strikes, by the way, have a
very limited effectiveness on prepared defensive position in mixed
terrain, especially narrow valleys. Besides, targets for such strikes
are hard to find. At the end of the day, the last and only option left
to the US is what they always eventually resort to would be to directly
and deliberately engage in the mass murder of civilians to “break the
enemy’s will to fight” and destroy the “regime support infrastructure”
of the enemy’s forces (another time-honored US military tradition
stretching back to the Indian wars and which was used during the Korean
war and, more recently, in Yugoslavia). Here I want to quote an article
by Darien Cavanaugh in War is Boring:
On a per-capita basis, the Korean War was one of the deadliest wars in modern history, especially for the civilian population of North Korea. The scale of the devastation shocked and disgusted the American military personnel who witnessed it, including some who had fought in the most horrific battles of World War II (…). These are staggering numbers, and the death rate during the Korean War was comparable to what occurred in the hardest hit countries of World War II. (…) In fact, by the end of the war, the United States and its allies had dropped more bombs on the Korean Peninsula, the overwhelming majority of them on North Korea, than they had in the entire Pacific Theater of World War II.
“The physical destruction and loss of life on both sides was almost beyond comprehension, but the North suffered the greater damage, due to American saturation bombing and the scorched-earth policy of the retreating U.N. forces,” historian Charles K. Armstrong wrote in an essay for the Asia-Pacific Journal. “The U.S. Air Force estimated that North Korea’s destruction was proportionately greater than that of Japan in the Second World War, where the U.S. had turned 64 major cities to rubble and used the atomic bomb to destroy two others. American planes dropped 635,000 tons of bombs on Korea—that is, essentially on North Korea—including 32,557 tons of napalm, compared to 503,000 tons of bombs dropped in the entire Pacific theatre of World War II.” As Armstrong explains, this resulted in almost unparalleled devastation. “The number of Korean dead, injured or missing by war’s end approached three million, ten percent of the overall population. The majority of those killed were in the North, which had half of the population of the South; although the DPRK does not have official figures, possibly twelve to fifteen percent of the population was killed in the war, a figure close to or surpassing the proportion of Soviet citizens killed in World War II.”
Twelve to fifteen percent of the entire population was murdered by US forces in Korea during the last war
(compare these figures to the so-called ‘genocide’ of Srebrenica!).
That is what Nikki Haley and the psychopaths in Washington DC are really
threatening to do when they speak of taking the situation “in their own
hands” or, even better, when Trump threatens to “totally destroy”
North Korea. What Trump and his generals forget is that we are not in
1950 but in 2017 and that while the Korean War had a negligible economic
impact on the rest of the planet, a war the middle of Far East Asia
today would have huge economic consequences. Furthermore, in the 1950
the total US control over the mass media, at least in the so-called
“free world” made it relatively easy to hide out the murderous rampage
by US-led forces, something completely impossible nowadays. The modern
reality is that irrespective of the actual military outcome on the
ground, any US attack on the DPRK would result is such a massive loss of
face for the US that it would probably mark the end of the US presence
in Asia and a massive international financial shock probably resulting
in a crash of the currently already fragile US economy. In contrast,
China would come out as the big winner and the uncontested Asian
superpower.
All
the threats coming out of US politicians are nothing more than
delusional hot air. A country which has not won a single meaningful war
since the war in the Pacific and whose Army is gradually being filled
with semi-literate, gender-fluid and often conviction or unemployment
avoiding soldiers is in no condition whatsoever to threaten a country
with the wide choice of retaliatory options North Korea has. The current
barrage of US threats to engage in yet another genocidal war are both
illegal under international law and politically counter-productive. The
fact is that the US is unlikely to be able to politically survive a war
against the DPRK and that it now has no other option than to either sit
down and seriously negotiate with the North Koreans or accept that the
DPRK has become an official nuclear power.
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