Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
A (Partial) Solution to North Korea
The US should be dropping care packages all over North Korea, but especially in and near population centers: Food. Information sheets. Windup radios. And small-caliber firearms.
The battle for hearts and minds starts with stomachs, especially within a starving nation. It continues with information (printed and over the air). And a citizenry that might have small arms, is a citizenry that may well be able to effectively distract the regime. By doing nothing more than dropping nice things for people, we can drive the government crazy.
The Norks take their internal situation for granted. The US can change the entire calculus if there are hundreds of thousands or millions of citizens who might start to see the United States as a potential salvation, and who have the capability to defend themselves in extremis. Even if citizens never do use a firearm in self defense, the prospect that they might would threaten the entire foundation of the tyranny.
The packages should come in all shapes and sizes. Drop ammo here, guns there, empty boxes elsewhere. Candy bars in nice shiny packages. Toys for children. Keep it random and hard to predict. Make the regime entirely unsure of who might have received what. The overall cost of such a program would be very low, indeed – especially compared to war. It would lead to internal paroxysms as the military and police would go crazy chasing their tails.
Indeed, the US could execute this strategy by defining an “average” package, and paying private operators a flat “per package” fee. A million packages at $100 or $200 apiece … it could be amazing how quickly this would be done. I think the delivery service would start with UAVs, and then as the Norks run out of anti-aircraft capabilities, you could do it with any of a number of smaller cargo aircraft.
Might this not be a great “next step” for an out-of-the-box Trump administration?
Published in Foreign Policy
We don’t need to design the solution. Clearly there are a range of workable solutions. By offering a “prize” for packages delivered (not that different from paying for coyote-pelts), we can let creative innovators have a field day.
But game out the scenario, how would it work in practice?
So thousands upon thousands of drops and then what? Will starving North Koreans browbeaten, terrified and indoctrinated suddenly acquire knowledge of guerilla tactics and become a viable insurgency?
In fact how would you ensure that the drops, since this would be supplying armaments, reach the parties we wished? The organization best placed to track these drops and retrieve this food and weaponry would be the North Korean army, so wouldn’t this plan end up with us supplying the regime?
Best to do something that is the right thing to do, but doesn’t matter so much how it would work in practice.
Or they might respond by invading Taiwan.
Brilliant.
We’ve all asked for out of the box. This is out of the box, literally.
Small care packages of rice, dried tofu and soybeans and children’s toys wrapped in intelligent propaganda.
I’d wait on the small arms for subsequent drops, and maybe replace them with some dried jerky meat of phony companion animals confiscated from US flights.
No doubt the Norks would try a poisoning false flag, but rural common sense would prevail.
We were gearing up to do something like this, once.
Only a fraction of the ones that were produced were actually dropped, but even if the Germans found a significant portion of those and prevented their distribution, the effect of not knowing whether or not the little old man tottering up to the checkpoint was packing had to have some of the sentries with their heads on swivels.
But don’t drop the weapons and the ammo separate.
From what I’ve read I think this is incredibly probable, and as brutally totalitarian as the state is, my concern is that we might hurt as much as help if it is the only strategy. Dropping guns would make the regime crazy, and when regimes like this get crazy they murder people en masse. If we’re doing something like that we’d better be on the point of action.
It would be little comfort to those in Seoul that we “have the right of it” in such a case.
If the best judgment of the President’s wisest advisers is that war is unavoidable than this is one way to go about it, but almost certainly not until that moment, short of information we don’t have.
But at the right moment it could be used to effect. Didn’t we do something like that, effectively, in Afghanistan and Iraq? I agree that the benefits can be real if intangible — it’s something about the way the human mind works, something about the power of momentum.