What would a war with North Korea look like?
ANY US attack on North Korea will be swift and brutal. But it’s the destruction Pyongyang can unleash — and what potentially comes next — that has military analysts squirming.
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ANY war with North Korea will likely be swift, brutal and victorious. But it’s what potentially comes next that has military analysts squirming.
President Trump has promised he would “solve” the North Korean nuclear crisis before Kim Jong-un was capable of hurting the mainland United States.
That opportunity has already passed.
Now, he’s threatening ‘fire and fury like the world has never seen’ in response to reports Pyongyang is already capable of building miniaturised nuclear warheads.
For more than a year North Korea has been engaged in a fresh round of missile testing. This has culminated in the recent launches of fully-fledged Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles, feared capable of carrying payloads of mass destruction as far as the continental United States — and Australia.
Washington is incensed.
United States’ United Nations Ambassador, Nikki Haley has asserted: “The time for talk is over. The danger the North Korean regime poses to international peace is now clear to all.”
And military commanders are making it clear they are even now formulating attack plans to present to the President of the United States.
But even the smallest, most ‘surgical’ strike has dire implications.
US military intelligence advisers believe any attack on North Korea would immediately trigger a retaliatory artillery barrage — potentially killing up to one million people in the city of Seoul.
And any escalation in response to that barrage could anger Beijing.
Now an unusual array of Chinese military exercises around the Korean Peninsula are a clear threat to Kim Jong-un to reign in his excesses.
It also carries another message: America, beware.
PREVENTIVE WAR?
White House National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster at the weekend told US media he was prepared to counter North Korea’s accelerated nuclear weapons program with war.
“What you’re asking is, are we preparing plans for a preventive war, right?” he told MSNBC. “A war that would prevent North Korea from threatening the United States with a nuclear weapon …
“If they have nuclear weapons that can threaten the United States, it’s intolerable from the president’s perspective. So of course, we have to provide all options to do that. And that includes a military option.”
He was keen to emphasise the threat posed by Kim Jong-un and his regime.
“I think it’s impossible to overstate the danger associated with a rogue, brutal regime, I mean, who murdered his own brother with nerve agent in an airport,” McMaster said. “I mean, think about what he’s done, in terms of his own brutal repression of not only members of his regime but his own family.”
The methods available to eviscerate North Korea’s nuclear capability — and leadership — have been loudly broadcast in recent weeks.
Two nuclear-capable B-1B bombers — escorted by Japanese Air Self Defence Force F-2 and South Korean Air Force F-15 fighter jets — swept over the Korean Peninsula. Such high-precision bombers could strike missile and nuclear production facilities, though finding those hidden on truck-mounted trailers could prove difficult.
The ability to hit command bunkers and underground research facilities was also widely broadcast last month, with South Korea releasing video of a new bunker-busting bomb in action. It’s a direct message to Kim himself — that there is no such thing as a safe bolthole.
But the price of any such “surgical strikes” could be colossal.
Even if North Korea was still willing to fight.
OVERWHELMING FORCE
The commander of US Pacific Air Forces added his voice to threats last month that the United States and its allies were ready to use “overwhelming force”
General Terrence J. O’Shaughnessy said: “If called upon, we are ready to respond with rapid, lethal and overwhelming force at a time and place of our choosing.”
Half-starved North Korea still manages to maintain one of the world’s largest armies. Some estimates put it at 1.19 million.
But it is poorly equipped.
It has 545 combat jets, 21,000 artillery pieces and 3500 tanks But most look as though they belong in a museum, not in the hands of a fighting force threatening the world’s greatest superpower.
South Korea fields 630,000 soldiers, 567 jets 11,000 artillery pieces and 2400 tanks. All are vastly superior to the North.
And then there’s the United States: 28,000 troops, 40 fighters and 24 ground-attack jets, this of course counting only forces permanently deployed to South Korea but subject to massive reinforcement within days.
S. Dakota #Airmen arrive on Guam; conduct #bilateral missions w/Japan & ROK--U.S. ready to #fighttonight https://t.co/DhOTTdNT19 pic.twitter.com/HSOkYKHPQ4
— PACAF (@PACAF) August 8, 2017
Put simply, most military analysts argue North Korea cannot win any conflict.
It can, however, exact a huge human toll.
Even more so if it can effectively deploy its weapons of mass destruction.
North Korea’s artillery looms large over the city of Seoul.
In the opening minutes of any conflict, these could lob tons of high explosive — along with chemical and possibly even nuclear — weapons into its densely populated suburbs.
US Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis said in June that any fight with North Korea would lead to “a serious, a catastrophic war, especially for innocent people in some of our allied countries, (and will) include Japan most likely …
“It will be a war more serious in terms of human suffering than anything we’ve seen since 1953. It will involve the massive shelling of an ally’s capital, which is one of the most densely packed cities on Earth. It would be a war that fundamentally we don’t want … (but) we would win at great cost.”
Such murderous artillery attack would almost certainly result in a South Korean assault on the North. The weapons raining death upon South Korea’s citizens must be neutralised, after all.
But any crossing of the uneasy 38th parallel ‘demilitarised zone’ by US or South Korean forces represents yet another trigger point.
THE CHINA EQUATION
President Trump placed great expectations in Beijing’s abilities to reign in its neighbour when President Xi Jinping visited the US in April. But, recently, Trump’s tweets have begun to reveal a growing sense of frustration.
Beijing hasn’t been idle. It cancelled coal imports in February. It’s just agreed to impose new sanctions under the auspices of the UN.
China, however, has its own concerns.
It also has a price.
Xi told Trump he wanted the US to put a freeze on its military exercises in and around the Korean Peninsula. In exchange, he offered to convince Kim Jong-un to suspend his ICBM testing program.
US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson later stated such a mutual freeze was “premature”, and that it didn’t actually solve anything.
But any escalation on the Korean Peninsula — be it the addition of more weapons, such as the antimissile THAAD systems — or “surgical” military strikes risks an international crisis.
And would Xi tolerate the idea of a reunified Korea, allied to the United States, on its border?
This is the delicate balance of diplomacy President Trump must navigate.
In recent months Beijing has been quietly reinforcing its own border with North Korea. A new defence brigade has been established, surveillance equipment deployed, artillery, tanks and helicopters redeployed.
Kim Jong-un may be gambling on Beijing’s refusal to allow any external power to exercise military might on or around its borders.
Any thought of attack on him, he hopes, threatens to trigger a massive regional conflict.
APOCALYPSE NOW?
North Korea could become to China what the Cuban missile crisis was to the United States: a tense standoff between nuclear-armed rivals where one misspoken word could trigger a global war.
Beijing has repeatedly asserted it doesn’t want a US military presence within its own sphere of influence. And tensions are already running high over its expansionist claims on the South and East China Seas.
So any attack on North Korea presents a real risk of return to the regional conflict of the 1950s.
For the first Korean War, the United States assumed China would not react if it — and UN forces — went to the aid of South Korea.
It was wrong.
Chairman Mao Zedong ordered an assault as UN forces — including Australia — steamrolled North Korean troops back towards the Chinese border. General Douglas MacArthur was himself then compelled to retreat, eventually establishing an unsteady armistice based on a ‘demilitarised zone’ between North and South.
It’s still there.
China, then, had an overwhelmingly large but generally ill-equipped military in the face of a young nuclear superpower unwilling to unleash hell.
Now, China has its own nuclear arsenal of ICBMs, submarines and bombers. But it also has swarms of missiles designed to do one thing — overwhelm the icons of American international conventional power projection, the supercarrier.
The loss of one of these enormous, nuclear-powered ships — and its crew of about 5000 — would be a humiliating defeat bound to spur yet another round of escalations.
So Beijing’s large-scale live-fire military exercises being staged off the Korean Peninsula this month contains a double-barrelled message.
First, it is reminding Pyongyang that the United States and South Korea aren’t the only potential military opponents it faces.
But, secondly, it’s also sending a signal to Washington that its own forces are large, ready — and capable.
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