Reply #61: Obama is trying to keep the peace, not start a war. [View All]

North Korea appears to see us as vulnerable. We are heavily extended in the Middle East so Kim is likely thinking that he can get away with pushing his weight around with Korea.

By putting the military to a higher state of alert, Obama is trying to display to Kim that restarting an active Korean War would be a really bad idea for him. And it would be.

I would bet that all of the North Korean tunnels under the DMA have been found, although only a few of them would be advertised. Using modern siesmic methods it should not be an extremely difficult problem to find the tunnels. Given the extreme importance of locating the tunnels, it is unreasonable to believe that moder methods have not already been employed.

North Korea's Air Force is mainly made up of old MiG 17s (Korean War vintage), 19s (Late 1950s), 21s (Vietnam War vintage) and a few modern aircraft. Their pilots recieve very limited training due to the expense of such training. The NK Air Force would be destroyed in the opening moves of a new war.

Their Navy is a coastal defense force that wouldn't be able to do much.

They do have almost 20,000 artillery pieces, but they are older pieces. For accurate pinpoint fire, they would need forward observers. They are suitable only for firing shells into an area. They are not rapidly mobile, and the firing location of almost all of them is already precisely known and the GPS coordinates are already in American/South Korean computers. American artillery is able to shoot and move, and the shells are able to steer themselves to precise GPS coordinates. The new Small Diameter Bomb weight only 262 lbs and can glide up to 60 miles from the point where the aircraft releases it, to land with extreme accuracy on the target. A B-52 can fly along, miles outside of the North Korean Air Defense Missile umbrella and rain destruction on hundreds of independent targets. The new SBD2 bomb has a radar/heat seeker head that enable it to independently search for and target itself on tanks and trucks in a selected target area. So an NK armored column could be destroyed by a single B-52 dozens of miles away.

Much of the North Korean battlefield communications is non-electronic. That means human runners who are slow and may get killed, or may discover that the unit they are taking the message to has moved.

A modern war take fuel, and LOTS of it. NK fuel convoys would have little change of getting to the units that need the fuel. A tank that is out of fuel is a very expensive pillbox, easily destroyed from the air.

Sleeper sabotage units would be unreliable. After such a unit had been in the South for a few weeks, they would have been able to see for themselves that Dear Leader had lied to them.

The initial blow from the North would be staggering and US/ROK forces would have to fall back. Seoul would be pummeled. But in a few days time, the NK military would be destroyed.

Obama is hoping that Kim's generals will somehow get him to understand that. We all hope that Kim doesn't actually believe his own bullshit.