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Subject: Proposed attack on North's artillery close to Seoul - Any thoughts
JIMF    5/24/2010 5:40:34 PM
"....A surprise attack from B-1 bombers dropping conventional (not nuclear) bombs; warships and submarines launching precision guided cruise missiles from the seas east and west of the peninsula, and South Korean and US artillery firing from south of the DMZ, coordinated to land explosives simultaneously, could trap their targets underground and shock the poorly trained North Korean Army into standing down. Risky? Admittedly, yes. But doing nothing would be to risk another violent North Korean provocation in the unknown future." Richard Halloran, a free lance writer in Honolulu, was a military correspondent for The New York Times for ten years.
 
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Nocturne       6/2/2010 5:42:17 AM
South Korea at war with the North in a war that will result in hundreds of thousands of dead South Koreans.

Seriously how do you get that number? Of course were would be casualties..but i dont see it running into hundreads of thousands. DMZ is like 4km wide? and Seoul is like 45km away? ok take suburbs - still 30-35km. So to hit Seoul those thousands and thousands of guns should be concentrated like several kilometers in width. So those gunners are standing shoulder to shoulder or what? And if u live next to DMZ i think you fairly good basement, gas mask and the instinct to react to the warning sirens.
If they start using chemical weapons en mass it will be too nasty even for china. 99% of the world will be upon NK and we shouldn't foget who are paying for PRC booming economy. Without China NK will be out of fuel and starving even before the SK soldiers start some sort of offensive.

Unless Obama flips over NK destructive potential is  in question
 
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Hamilcar       6/2/2010 8:49:09 AM







No, I'm not. Modern root cause is associated with the US Strategy of regional balance of power between Iran and Iraq. That is the specific root cause for the current conflicts involving the United States. 



-DA 








Of [course] it is.  the conflict  between the Iraqis and Iranians is steeped in history.  prior to Shi'ite and Sunni  secular issues it was an Assyrian - Hittite - Persian problem - ie a tribal problem.

Medes, Chaldeans, Chubras, Kurds  and  Turks too.

The US is a modern day extension of the catalyst of millenia gone by.  You have noted no doubt that the Sunni Shi'ite brawling continues without any US presence.

Oh yes. The IED body count in Iraq has not gone down as a daily ratio to population overall. 

The US is an inconvenience in an ongoing struggle between the 2 - and the State Dept is too dumb to work out that they're being played over a family squabble that goes back in history for 5000 years.  The same vehicle of opportunity in using the US to resolve family squabbles is happening in Afghanistan where all too late the US had found that backing one tribe has been out of local posturing and that all they've done is walk into the middle not understanding the rules of the game.

You would think that the victors over the Apache, Comanche, and the Sioux would look to their OWN history to see what kind of  a tribal  buzzsaw they walked into.

The US is a convenient vehicle of opportunity for these tribes and clans to redirect the fight against long festering disputes.

We bomb "Taliban" with robots and who is to say that they are "Taliban"? We have poor Humint.   

US policy is an afterthought at the tribal level, at the secular level.  The tribes prev used the Brits, the Russians and even the Mongols to provide leverage in some of their problems.

I said it reminded me of the awful Native American Wars where various tribes used the US Army to massacre their neighbor enemies. In the end (about the time of the Trail of Tears), we said to hell with it and crushed them all. It was a pogrom pure and simple and still indefensible. But it cleared out a lot of low level inter-tribal warfare and established uniform national law at the muzzles of US cavalry carbines. Not pretty, but it worked.       
US policy is causing them grief, but at the local level they don't give a foxtrot foxtrot about the US except about what the US can do to further their own needs.  Massoud, Dostrom  et all all have played the parly and convenient friend card to their benefit.
 
Malaki (Malarky) is a master at this nonsense. By rights he should be strung up as a thief and murderer. He's no better than al Sadr.
 
This isn't a US foreign policy problem, but the US is making a rod for their own back by not looking beyond the bulrushes.

At some point, the bribe has to met and aided with the gun. Carrot and stick. The tribal chiefs are BANDITS.  

We're all being played, albeit with good intentions.  these people are smarter than the west when it comes to "managing" events

Then change their game. Insert "Western rules".  I mean American West. 


H.
 
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LB       6/2/2010 11:05:31 PM
Do you have a realistic appreciation of both sides capabilities and force structure?  North Korean doctrine and preparation seems very offensive minded throughout the depth of the theater including extremely large numbers of commando units and also utilizing secret tunnels- some of which are quite large.  North Korea has many facilities dug in very deep.  South Korea has a large well equipped military that can defend the nation.
 
A high intensity fought war like there would be in Korea has not been seen in a long time.  Most such conflicts in the 2nd half of the 20th century have been of very short duration.  The last Korean war was a much more limited conflict and South Korea still lost over 500,000 killed (about 3/4 civilian).  In a future conflict the main military will not be the US but South Korea and the population density is far higher.  Hundreds of thousands of dead South Koreans is the low end of the scale.  There is a reason they wish to avoid a conflict at almost any cost.
 
North Korea is the scariest and most bizarre land on earth.  The power play for who the next dear leader just involved sinking a South Korean warship.  What's coming next?  North Korea is not rational, has a very large armed forces with nuclear weapons willing to starve to death millions of it's own people while the rest live with malnutrition.  This is an extremely isolated and extremely well organized police state.  If this bizarre land can create a high level of motivation in it's armed forces than the carnage will be worse than most believe.
 
It's important to remember that the main actors in the Korean War were the US and China- two rational actors waging a limited war of limited aims.  The next war will be mainly fought between North and South Korea.  North Korea is not going to be fighting a limited war and is not likely to stop fighting without being defeated.  Leaving aside the small notion of how many nukes they decide to deliver where.
 
 
 
South Korea at war with the North in a war that will result in hundreds of thousands of dead South Koreans.




Seriously how do you get that number? Of course were would be casualties..but i dont see it running into hundreads of thousands. DMZ is like 4km wide? and Seoul is like 45km away? ok take suburbs - still 30-35km. So to hit Seoul those thousands and thousands of guns should be concentrated like several kilometers in width. So those gunners are standing shoulder to shoulder or what? And if u live next to DMZ i think you fairly good basement, gas mask and the instinct to react to the warning sirens.

If they start using chemical weapons en mass it will be too nasty even for china. 99% of the world will be upon NK and we shouldn't foget who are paying for PRC booming economy. Without China NK will be out of fuel and starving even before the SK soldiers start some sort of offensive.




Unless Obama flips over NK destructive potential is  in question

 
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cwDeici       6/3/2010 5:19:12 PM

As far as the US is concerned I think we can pretty much take nuclear weapons off the table.  At this point I'm not entirely confident that President Obama would deploy nuclear weapons even in North Korea detonated one. 

 

This is a war nobody wants.  We would win, but the cost in human life would be enormous for both civilians and military.  Conceivably the US alone could lose more soldiers in a matter of weeks in another Korean war than we have in some years in Iraq.  That is why so many people really wanted the cause of the sinking of the South Korean ship to be anything other than a North Korean torpedo.  The South waited until they had definitive proof until they declared that the North sank their ship, and the North responded with characteristic irrational truculence, declaring that any retaliation would result in "all out war."  The dilemma facing the South and the US is an uncomfortable one.  Do they prepare for a NorK invasion and hope for the best, or do they launch a preemptive strike and cut the head off of the snake before it strikes?  I seriously doubt that a "shock and awe" aerial attack on the NorKs will convince its military to "stand down."  The military is too indoctrinated and the population too brainwashed to collapse without a fight. 

 

I have to agree with DA about the NorK military.  It may be poorly equipped, but it is not poorly motivated or trained and it would be a mistake to go to war against the North thinking that they will be as easy to defeat as the Iraqis were in 2003.  The NorKs will fight, and some units may fight to the death.  This is one situation where maintaining the status quo for as long as possible is the goal. 



This kind of thinking is why they didn't let McArthur secure the Yalu riverbank, why North Korea was able to weaponize its border to the nth degree and why they have nuclear bombs that may potentially be deployable.
 
As a Hong Kong citizen I wish China had failed in protecting North Korea. I also know from reliable sources that half our government was terrified during the Korean War and that it further emboldened Chinese right-wing leaders who were proven right regarding Western recalcitrance to escalate a fight or even just decisively seal the deal with sufficient resources more than available to it at the time. In fact the SU was quite frightened during the Korean war, and this is what led to the great Sino-Soviet friendship split.
Ultimately it would be nice if we could let the poor NK peaseants starve a bit further so we don't have to fight, it is quite likely that given no western aid at all NK will be forced to listen to China more. However it is ultimately in the West's interests to control North Korea.
China is unlikely to risk a big war with the West and if it occured would be likely to lose despite the West's current deployments... given enough will of which there may very well not be enough of.
 
Therefore the best solution is unavailable to be replaced by a policy of painfully slow self-strangulation of the West's oppertunities... or a continuing oppertunity cost one might say.
 
The correct action for the West to take would be to stir nationalistic sentiment in the West in order to remove such evil nations as North Korea. Waiting will only enable either a threadbare regime crawling on in years or a strengthened but saner regime allied to China.
 
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Patton       12/10/2010 11:40:42 AM
First of all, the NKA is not a "poorly trained" military organization. They are 10 times better than Iraqis or Taliban fighters.  They have out-dated arms and equipment such as the AK-47, BTR-60's and T-62 tanks though and the terrain is such that all of their divisions along the DMZ are leg infantry. You should understand that there are 750,000 NKA troops deployed on the Z along with 10,000 pieces of artillery.  If the balloon went up, everybody on the south side of the Z is dead meat, but that is pretty much as far as the NKA will get.  They are not prepared to deal with the way we fight.
 
Under your surprise attack scenario, I dont see any good coming out of that because KCNA ,or the NK broadcast media news service constantly spews out propaganda to the effect that the U.S. and ROK intend to wage aggressive warfare against the North. You then have to factor PRC intervention in.  Not good buddy...
 
However, I can say with confidence that if the North starts it, we will finish it.  Scary thing to consider though... North Korea and Iran are supposed to be talking.  We would have trouble fighting two separate regional conflicts simultaneously.  Hope they dont figure that one out.
 
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C2       12/10/2010 1:58:54 PM
BM-21 is the cheapest and most commonly documented artillery piece the in the Norks inventory and happens to be the type used in the last attack, It has a range of 45km, all field artillery such as D-20's and such do not have the range to reach Seoul for the closest DMZ point.

In fact the even the the BM-21 has to operate from within a 25 by 25km pocket which make finding them that much easier, and if they don't operate within that pocket then evacuating the outer suburbs of Seoul would alleviate the S.Koreans of Seoul from that threat.

The other long range Artillery that the Norks would likely employ would be either ballistic missiles (SM-3 and PAC-3 food...) or long guns (easy to spot and slow move), either way i just don't see 100,00 artillery pieces aimed at Seoul being a threat to a well drilled and co-ordinated Air-Dominance Search and Destroy counter battery action supported by artillery of our.

If they go all out with their fourth biggest army, then many will die a slow and cold death without a supply and command column, and their retreat will be soured by a surgical South Korean counter attack... 
 
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YelliChink       12/10/2010 4:27:03 PM

BM-21 is the cheapest and most commonly documented artillery piece the in the Norks inventory and happens to be the type used in the last attack, It has a range of 45km, all field artillery such as D-20's and such do not have the range to reach Seoul for the closest DMZ point.




In fact the even the the BM-21 has to operate from within a 25 by 25km pocket which make finding them that much easier, and if they don't operate within that pocket then evacuating the outer suburbs of Seoul would alleviate the S.Koreans of Seoul from that threat.




The other long range Artillery that the Norks would likely employ would be either ballistic missiles (SM-3 and PAC-3 food...) or long guns (easy to spot and slow move), either way i just don't see 100,00 artillery pieces aimed at Seoul being a threat to a well drilled and co-ordinated Air-Dominance Search and Destroy counter battery action supported by artillery of our.




If they go all out with their fourth biggest army, then many will die a slow and cold death without a supply and command column, and their retreat will be soured by a surgical South Korean counter attack... 
 
 
First of all, Goyang and Gimpo, both are Seoul's satellite cities, are within artillery range.
 
Second, KPA's 170mm cannon with RAP or extended range projectiles can cover most of the Seoul area as well.
 
Third, KPA has 240mm rockests may be capable of covering most of the Seoul.
 
There is also no telling how many of those 122mm rockets in KPA inventory are newer Chinese version with max range of 40km.
 
And commies can always supply PHL03 if they think KPA's strength may be severely compromised.
 
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Slim Pickinz       12/10/2010 5:10:38 PM
What if the South invested in U.S. or Israeli made anti-rocket/mortar/artillery systems and deployed them to strategically important positions south of the DMZ, while eventually designing an indigenous system that could be produced in numbers large enough to cover most of the civilian population in the threat area?
 
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C2       12/11/2010 4:46:32 AM
No-one ever said anything about the cities closest to the dmz, one would assume they would have adequate contingencies to artillery fire given their proximity to a war zone, and if not... are they worth risking not going to action over?
 
170mm self-propelled guns are massive beasts, that fire slow and tend to stick out logistically and physically, as for the 240mm, they still use the grad system so any improvement in range is going to offset by rate of fire and volley size.

JSTARs + Global Hawks integrated into the S.K's ISR stack should make 25^(2)km light up disneyland, remember SAR and PESA can tell the dif between a shrub and a battery of BM-21's covered in Shrubs...
 
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YelliChink       12/11/2010 3:02:24 PM

JSTARs + Global Hawks integrated into the S.K's ISR stack should make 25^(2)km light up disneyland, remember SAR and PESA can tell the dif between a shrub and a battery of BM-21's covered in Shrubs...


There is no doubt that KPA artillery batteries will be destroyed after they open up on ROK population. The question is, how much damage can they incurr before they are neutralized?
 
How about some sarin gas landed in one of those satellite cities of Seoul where workign people live? Being able to destroy the launchers afterwards doesn't make much difference.
 
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