Destablization v2.0

So does this mean that the Japanese are going to arm themselves? Because if they decide to do so, they'll probably be able to do it quickly and extremely well.

James, see the link from SMASH.

So does this mean that the Japanese are going to arm themselves? Because if they decide to do so, they'll probably be able to do it quickly and extremely well.

Trackback didn't work, but included you in my blogosphere reaction roundup.

Its their stupid move. This action only makes things worse for North Korea.

John,
We don't really know whether their missiles actually don't work, or if they purposely dudded a firing to test launch stages but didn't want their missiles falling into our or Japanese hands after falling into international waters.

More to the point, it's irrelevant whether or not they have a missile capability. They weld a nuke into the hold of a small boat, get it into LA or SF harbor, and then wait for the right moment. Deliverability is no longer tied to ballistic missiles and bombers, and the Koreans sure as hell don't think of it in those Western terms.

John,
We don't really know whether their missiles actually don't work, or if they purposely dudded a firing to test launch stages but didn't want their missiles falling into our or Japanese hands after falling into international waters.

More to the point, it's irrelevant whether or not they have a missile capability. They weld a nuke into the hold of a small boat, get it into LA or SF harbor, and then wait for the right moment. Deliverability is no longer tied to ballistic missiles and bombers, and the Koreans sure as hell don't think of it in those Western terms.

I don't think the North Korean nuclear test is the big story tonight.

I think it's a ruse. I believe it is a distraction.

Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs posted a story tonight that I consider bigger: a possible attack on the home of English-speaking civilization?

Britain, i.e., London.

Report: UK Metro Police Chief Issues Ominous Warning

It's speculative so don't take your eye or thoughts off of North Korea and Japan, but consider it in context. It may be part of a larger plan.

William, good thought but the Norks don't roll jihadi like that.

They want to be able to threaten us with a nuclear tipped missile that can hit Hawaii, Anchorage, LA, etc.

With that, they think they'll be able to retaliate against the south without consequence.

Not smart, but it's the way these clowns operate.

Good analysis on the problems of mating a warhead with a delivery system... but, consider this.

There have been tunnels in the past discovered under the DMZ, and even well into S. Korea. That means there are probable some we have not discovered.

Wouldn't it just be peachy if they detonated a device UNDER Seoul?

It is time to quit dicking around. We need to make an under-the-table deal with China... THEY depose him and install a leader that we can deal with. I really don't care if North Korea remains Communist or not. I really don't. You can deal and reason with a Communist. You CANNOT reason with Kim Jong Il. And, I think the Chinese are beginning to realize that Kim is a liability they can no longer afford.

> Here's my question. Does a successful test scare Japan into building an arsenal of their own?

More likely, Mr Abe will be jumping for joy! Finally, he has found enough reasons to militarised Japan to return Japan back into a "normal nation".

I think we will be seeing a Japan that's more nationalistic than ever.

So who wants to start the pool for the date when the Chinese roll over the NK border?

It strikes me as a significant diplomatic opportunity for the US. Remind all the regional leaders that NK is a threat and China can't control it. Remind them that Japan is likely to get nukes as well. Then point out that being a close US ally would get them protection from NK, China and Japan. Play it right and suddenly China and NK are encircled.

John, disagree again. The North rolls in many ways exactly like Jihadis. Consider the fact that they've gone terrorist before successfully and with great effect (decapitating the South Korean gov't with the exception of the sitting PM), and that they don't fight the way we'd expect a conventional army to. A big part of North Korea's war plan for invading the south is apparently still infiltration of light infantry past the militarized border using their massive tunnel system. That sort of tactic is deceptive warfare, of the sort far more common in the East than in the West. I think North Korea is developing missiles because countries like us are scared of missiles, but I don't think that necessarily means that they would rule out unconventional delivery methods. In terms of the blackmail threat, as an American president I would be far more scared of a North Korean statement that a nuke is present in a major American city than a missile fueling. We can bomb the crap out of their launch fields, but we can't effectively deal with an infiltrated nuke.

Of course the left blames Bush.
It's not Clinton's fault for giving them the tech for making nukes. Nah.

But everything is Bush's fault. That'll be their default excuse for everything and a reason for inaction if they get back in power.

Scary and immature isn't it?

After reading as many of the comments on ameriKKKablog I could stomach I am left wondering what planet these people are from. These are the same people who support a party that does not even know what an American soldier looks like.

Eric Blair - North Korea might respond to a Chinese invasion (or even the threat of invasion) by attacking the South, for any or all of the following reasons:

(1) A paranoid assumption that the Chinese must be in league with the US

(2) The realisation that this would be their final and only chance to strike at the capitalist enemy

(3) A Schlieffen Plan scenario, in which the North mobilizes for the war they've planned for rather than the war they're in

(4) An attempt to bring America into the war, in the hope that this would either result in clashes between US and Chinese troops or force China to switch sides in order to keep the US away from its border

We should also consider whether North Korea would actually prefer a war against the US to one against China. They might calculate that the US military would be overstretched and the US government would be vulnerable to political pressure, not least over any possible use of nuclear weapons. The Chinese military would be able to concentrate all its forces against North Korea, and the Chinese government would not care about world opinion. The North can't beat either nation on the battlefield, but it might think that it had a better chance of defeating America politically. Therefore it might be willing to start a war with the US in order to forestall one with China.

North Korea's missle program is a feint. Any warheads they want delivered to the US can be simply be coordinated deliveries via cargo ships.

It is interesting most of these posts seem to forget South Korea's armed foreces are more than able to defend itself in a conventional war and that NK plans to draw the U.S into a large deployment on the peninsula are kind of silly. NK's dessicated 1960's soviet style army and doctrine will get mauled by the souths modern army. More importantly I think NK knows that, hence their obsession with the U.S.

A couple of points to consider:

1. There will be a huge need in the next decade for American naval rearmament. Don't plan on having the Panama Canal available in the Next Pacific War. Consider the Canal to be History. The PLAN, or any jihadi group, will be able to destroy the locks with ease. The political parties in this country need to unf**k themselves and get back to the 600 ship navy, or more. Right now, we're building five ships a year. That's simply not enough for the challenges ahead. The next president will have to build ships and raise the taxes to do it. Oh, and an additional four divisions in the actives wouldn't be bad, either.

2. Coordination with the IJN. The Nihon Kaigun is back, and not a moment too soon. Just when the PLAN thought it was going to dominate the WestPac, Condi and Rumsfeld executed an agreement with their Japanese counterparts that basically implies interoperability between the Pacific Fleet and IJN Combined Fleet. By the way, with all due respect to the underfunded Royal Navy, I would stack Combined Fleet against the RN anytime. RN wins because of its combat experience, but only just (the Labour Government's funding cuts have been criminal..). But at worst, IJN's fleet is number three on the planet, which is about where things stood on December 6th, 1941.

OpFor is right: can't mount it on a TaePo Dong, can't use it. So the real danger from Mr. Ronery is in the theater of proliferation. There's a reason that the Revolutionary Guards officers were at the test.

Advice? Start being very aggressive with the Dear Leader on the High Seas. And we need a battle plan for his next long range missile test, which I suspect will be aimed at Pearl Harbor.

No need for a 600-ship Navy. China AIN'T going to war over Kim Jong Il. They'd depose his dumb ass first. Too much to lose economically.

It doesn't matter that the TPD missle cannot carry a nuke. They'll simply detonate one inside one of their tunnels UNDER the DMZ or even Seoul itself.

Yes, the RoK Army is squared away, but let's not toss numbers away yet. The PDRK is MASSIVE with MILLIONS of men. High-tech is nice... hope you have a SHITLOAD of LGB's and other PGM to deal with it. Otherwise, it's an infantry war... hope you have enough 7.62 and can reload quick enough.

YES, I think we (and the RoK's) can handle ourselves on the peninsula... NO, I don't think it will be a cakewalk.

Little to worry about beyond the peninsula at this point.

My advice (if it's worth anything). CUT OFF ALL FOOD SHIPMENTS... every fucking crumb. Let the people starve to death or overthrow Kim. And if the Chinese or Russians complain, then let THEM feed his country. They depend on our food shipments as well.

North Korea would destroy the south. Note that I didn't say conquer, or invade, or anything similar. Destroy. Preregistered tube and rocket artillery would literally render dead Seoul and anything north of it. Could the South Koreans fight the North on a straight conventional battlefield, sure, maybe. Do you think Southern troops would be willing to just kill hundreds of thousands of their starving and underarmed ethnic brothers? It's the moral dimension that's difficult.

But all that's mostly irrelevant, that's not how the North would play it. What does the south do when four infantry divisions pop up out of tunnels in rear logistical areas? How does the south react when Kim says nukes preplaced in four southern cities will be detonated if the south doesn't comply with whatever deranged wish he happens to have. North Korea especially doesn't think about war the way we do. Kim assassinated the entire South Korean cabinet on a whim. He blew up a South Korean arliner to hurt their tourism bottom line. To him, that's how you fight war. Deceit and subterfuge are worth more than all the fancy electronic gizmos in the world. The dominant infantryman of the 21st century isn't going to be some robocop with 80 pounds of computer equipment strapped to his back, he's a light infantryman in the true sense of the word, able to move quickly and silently through all sorts of terrain including populated areas, infilitrating and exfiltrating with ease. Transformation has trained us to think of war in terms of video-game like hardware matchups, but the hardware is rapidly becoming irrelevant. I can string together enough artillery shells to a remote detonator to destroy any tank on the planet, and I'm not even military trained. A technological advantage is rapidly becoming less meaningful, provided the opfor knows how to effecitvely utilize the tools at their disposal.

The naval stuff is fun to think about, and is relevant in terms of Chinese hegemonic ambitions, but even there it's not terribly useful. China is willing to trade two dozen of its submarines for a carrier kill. We can't afford that kind of ratio, they can. Putting more ships in the area only creates more targets against that sort of opposition. We're looking at fighting eastern opponents on a paradigmatically western battlefield. War with China won't play out how we like to think it would. Look for massive data attacks to cripple the American mainland, followed by industrial and military espionage on a massive scale. The conventional hardware may look familiar when they parade it through Peking, but they won't employ it the way we would.

It doesn't matter if their missiles or nukes actually work at this particular time.

If we continue on our current path of do-nothing-politics and appeasement, they will eventually get them to work. And even then, they only need to get one of them to work.

It doesn't matter if their missiles or nukes actually work at this particular time.

If we continue on our current path of do-nothing-politics and appeasement, they will eventually get them to work. And even then, they only need to get one of them to work.

Oops, sorry for the double post.

We're looking at fighting eastern opponents on a paradigmatically western battlefield.
William Scharf
October 9, 2006 10:52 AM

Indeed.

Not only in N.Korea, but everywhere. We're making this same mistake in the Middle East also.

We should know more about what happened in North Korea in the next few days.

The Air Force will have air sampling aircraft over the area to measure radiation, etc. There is a WC135 in Okinawa waiting to go, and there is a U-2 operating location at Osan AB, where there is usually a U-2 on station, that will be used.

The public may not know the results, but the President will.

What he will do after that?? Nothing.

I'd just like to point people towards www.armscontolwonk.com, where the top two posts detail that based on available evidence, the test looks to have been a failure (stupid NorKs can't do anything right it seems).

I'd just like to point people towards www.armscontolwonk.com, where the top two posts detail that based on available evidence, the test looks to have been a failure (stupid NorKs can't do anything right it seems).

This November, I'm voting for William Scharf for SECDEF.

Hi John,
I'm compiling the largest roundup in the Blogosphere on the North Korean Nuclear test and I added your comments/link to the post: http://jarrarsupariver.blogspot.com/2006/10/north-korea-goes-nuclear-largest_09.html

I tend to believe after decades and decades of time and help from pakistan, that they probably do have a nuke, but who knows, maybe it is all a con.

Hi John,
I'm compiling the largest roundup in the Blogosphere on the North Korean Nuclear test and I added your comments/link to the post: http://jarrarsupariver.blogspot.com/2006/10/north-korea-goes-nuclear-largest_09.html

I tend to believe after decades and decades of time and help from pakistan, that they probably do have a nuke, but who knows, maybe it is all a con.

Assuming that's sarcastic Joel.

Kinda... I am right with you on your thoughts and ideas. However, I do realize that we don't elect a SECDEF, although I wish we did.