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Objects in the Binocular Lenses May Be Smaller Than They Appear
In the late 1980s, I witnessed the Reagan buildup of the American military, with entirely new generations of equipment overlaid on a lot of older supporting systems. The Air Force got B-1 bombers, F-16s, and F-15s. The Navy got new carriers, submarines, F-14s, and F/A-18s. The Army got the M-1 Main Battle Tank, M-2 Bradley Fighting Vehicles, MLRS artillery systems, AH-64 and UH-60 helicopters, Patriot Air Defense Missile systems (fielded to break massive air strikes, not shoot-down missiles), Stingers, and a new generation of trucks for all the logistics. All of this equipment was fielded, along with new doctrine and systems of training, to change the calculus in Europe.
The Soviet-controlled Warsaw Pact was seen as an offensive juggernaut, poised to come crashing through the Fulda Gap into West Germany. It was widely believed that the only means of stopping such massed formations of tanks supported by mobile infantry and integrated fires from tube artillery to penetrating fighter-bombers was tactical nuclear weapons. But nucs are nucs, so duck and cover, there go the homelands. The Reagan buildup took advantage of a great leap forward in precision lethality of non-nuclear forces, to signal to both European populations and the Kremlin that we planned to stop the tank armies without triggering Armageddon. Then the unexpected happened and the Warsaw Pact disintegrated without a single artillery round fired in anger.
With East Germany and Czechoslovakia free of both Moscow and their own communist masters, we got a look at the vaunted Soviet war machinery and found bad wiring and the rust of neglected maintenance. A corrupt system that pretended to pay workers and insisted they live a lie was vulnerable to workers pretending to work and write readiness reports based on lies. The 10-foot-tall Soviet soldier was the Dread Pirate Roberts entering the castle.
So, now we have the report of a North Korean soldier escaping across the DMZ with serious malnourishment brought on by lack of basic medical care and apparent lack of food for front-line troops. Those massive artillery formations dug into mountains? Just how many practice rounds do you think a cannon crew gets in a year? The DPRK cannot rain down destruction on Seoul if soldiers are not proficient in reloading and adjusting the cannons’ aim. Their air force is not the Russian-trained superior force of the early 1950s, indeed they can barely fly. So, unless North Korea gets nuclear-tipped missiles, they may already be ineffective as an offensive force. The forces we see through binoculars across the DMZ may be little more than the empty propaganda village they maintain.
Published in Foreign Policy
You do not have to be very proficient to rain down destruction on a city the size of Seoul. Given the hardened sites the pukkuks have built over the decades, even the very proficient counter-battery fire of the US and the ROKs is going to take some time to degrade the North’s artillery, during all of which time they will be raining down destruction. You are of course right, that their ability to interdict specific points, neutralizing key intersections, taking out bridges to prevent reinforcement from the south or hitting key communication and command facilities is all likely to be spotty, but that will be cold comfort to those who live nearby.
Remember when the media were wringing their hands about Saddam’s elite Republican Guards? Wouldn’t want to underestimate the other side, but these thoughts have been in the back of my mind for a while now. Could it be there is nothing to fear but fear itself? I have a feeling that President Trump may be thinking along the same lines.
This shouldn’t be at all surprising. The economic systems on which the USSR and now the DPRK are built could not possibly have fielded an army capable of regional, let alone world, domination. Socialist economies do not have the production capacity nor the flexibility to compete with free markets, or even quasi-free markets like we have in the West. Rethinking what actually “won” us the Cold War would, I think, go along way to reigning in some of our empirical tendencies. If we think that the Norks are a paper tiger with painted over rust, why can’t the South Koreans handle their own defense? Worried about the Norks getting a nuclear missile? Fine, we can develop–in fact I would advocate that we do–a robust missile defense system capable of neutralizing any missile threat. Invite our friends in under the umbrella. Tell China, Russia, and any other country not on our friends list should be put on notice that their offensive weapons are no longer operative. There are so many ways to handle our “national security” concerns without being the world policemen, spending more treasure that we don’t have (20 trillion anyone?), and losing more sons, and now daughters too, to the alter of the god of War.
Although I agree with your post, I can’t help but remember some years back about a neighborhood dispute near me. One neighbor killed another with a muzzle loaded musket. The neighbor killed had a semi automatic but the fellow with the musket fired first. Dead is dead.
Wow! I wonder how many murders per year are committed with muskets?
So I guess that means that muskets are assault rifles, right?
This also happened in the Gulf War in 1990 and the Iraq War in 2003.
Intuitively it makes sense because North Korea has so little commerce, and it’s commerce that generates money for any government.
A great post. Thank you.
Funny!
Tell that to the Democrats. They’ve been thwarting missile defense since Regan proposed SDI.
A very facile argument.
Do you know why those Soviet and Warsaw Pact armies were in such bad shape? Because we had a huge military that compelled them to counter with a huge military. And finally our stealth technology made all of their radar systems obsolete. That last was probably the straw that broke their backs. They could not keep up the spending.
I don’t think anyone with any insight thought Iraq would be a huge problem defeating. Many simply thought he could kill a lot more people before he was defeated.
With the Soviets, they were quite capable of hurting Europe severely had we not outspent them.
The sorry state of Soviet weaponry was a result of our massive military. Their government’s collapse was because they tried to compete with our economic engine.
No one has any pretensions that North Korea could defeat us. They can’t. But if we don’t deter them, or destroy them, they can do a lot of hurt to us.
If the musket in question is painted black and has a pistol grip.
Superb post. I think you are right on all counts.
The US army artillery on the border can silence Nork artillery within minutes.
Though I still prefer my solution – the US Government should offer a bounty for all “care packages” dropped in North Korea. Each care package should contain a semi-random assortment of food, handguns, bullets, wind-up radios, and South Korean magazines. Let the Norks go to war because we are feeding their people.
For the cost of paying for a few million care packages, we could spend much, much less than any shooting war would cost. Assume we could do it for $500 apiece, delivered (again, as a bounty for private companies). A few billion dollars would go a very long way!
I think an interesting solution would be to arm their people. Just drop hundreds of thousands of rifles and machine guns randomly about the country and see what happens! I’ll have to think more on that one.
I prefer handguns (which are not very useful in a battlefield setting), and by mixing it up (guns of various kinds, bullets of various kinds, empty boxes of both, etc.) make their entire internal security apparatus go bat-guano crazy.
Actually no, we did not build a huge military post Vietnam. Indeed we shrank into an All Volunteer Force which had to be grown in experience while overcoming serious internal problems left over from Vietnam. The big Soviet forces came first. We never came close numerically on land or in the air. We just got much better qualitatively.
The Russian war in the eastern Ukraine perhaps offers some insight into the weakness of the Russian Air Force. Although the Russians are supplying armor, artillery, and military advisors to Russian separatists they are not conducting airstrikes. The Russian Air Force would be at a disadvantage against NATO air power due to the fact that NATO forces would not have to overfly Russia to engage them. I also suspect that they do not have the electronic capability to survive against Western aircraft.
The Israelis warned the Syrians when Russia was conducting airstrikes in Syria that Israel could destroy Syria’s air defense system in one night. The Israelis also flew three major airstrikes against Syria even though the Russians were conducting air-ops over Syria. One of those strikes destroyed an Iranian arms depot located on the outskirts of the Damascus International Airport.
Just a point of historical interest here. The B-1, F-14, F-15, F-16, and F/A-18 were all designed and deployed in the 1970s. The Reagan-era developments on these programs were the B-1B upgrade, F-14B and F-14D upgrades, the F-15C upgrade, the F-16C upgrade, and the F/A-18C/D upgrade. So the meaning of of “entirely new generations” is open to interpretation.
Thanks. Sloppy on my part, after all the Iranians got F-14s! Fair to say the Air Force and Navy got significant upgrades in quality and quantity of aircraft (B-1 had been canceled as a failure and was revived as the B-1B) at the same time as the Navy expanded and the Army finally replaced Vietnam era systems.
“It was more during the Nixon and Ford era that key programs were developed that are the backbone of today’s military, and during the Reagan era they were procured,” said Norman R. Augustine, former chairman of Lockheed Martin Corp. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A26273-2004Jun8_2.html
I don’t believe I claimed that. I said we outspent the Soviets, at least we caused them to over spend. It was mostly in technology and not in numbers of people and equipment.
The Russians rely on armor, and it is true that armor has a shock value and you can seize territory. Aircraft cannot seize territory, but unless you can control tactical airspace armor cannot operate, and you can destroy fuel depots, command centers, as well as armor in the field. The problem that the Russians would have would be replacing pilots, especially when they would have to fly against the United States, French, British, Germans, Danes, Swedes, Norwegians, and the Polish forces. I include the Swedes, although not a member of NATO they have signed a mutual assistance military pact with the United States due to Putin’s aggressive threats against the Baltic States. You can probably include Romanian forces as well because they have been conducting joint exercises with NATO.
This was called the Offset Strategy.
The term is used officially to characterize the capabilities of the U.S. military in comparison to possible opponents. Two periods from the Cold War are treated as canonical cases. In the 1950s, President Eisenhower emphasized nuclear deterrence to avoid the larger expenditures necessary to conventionally deter the Warsaw Pact. In a second period from about 1975 to 1989 the term “Offset Strategy” returned, again referring to technological superiority to offset quantitative inferiority in conventional forces. …
Following the Vietnam War, U.S. defense expenditures declined. By the mid-1970s, the U.S. Department of Defense’s annual budget fell by nearly $100 billion in FY 2015 dollars when compared to the peak in defense spending during the late 1960s. Warsaw Pact forces outnumbered NATO forces by three to one in Europe and DoD did not have the funds to increase forces sufficiently to match. Secretary of Defense Harold Brown therefore sought technological means to “offset” the numerical advantages held by U.S. adversaries and restore deterrence stability in Europe.[2]
Secretary Brown’s “Offset Strategy” emphasized new intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) platforms, improvements in precision-guided weapons, stealth technology, and space-based military communications and navigation.[3] These initiatives were guided by a long-range research and development plan for component technologies and systems led by DARPA.
Key resulting systems include the Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) found on the E-2s and E-3s, the F-117 stealth fighter and its successors, modern precision-guided munitions, the Global Positioning System(GPS), and improved reconnaissance, communications, and battle management. Although the U.S. never used Offset Strategy’s technologies against the Soviet forces, they directly led to the ease with which the United States expelled Iraqi Forces from Kuwait during Desert Storm. Some historians and military analysts treat the Cold War Offset Strategy as a source of a new “American Way of War”[4] which redirected American military innovation toward a new era of persistent conflict and hybrid wars.
This is all true. What the North does have is thousands of poorly maintained pieces of artillery with unreliable ammunition that will pose a risk for a few hours or days to Seoul. A few random shells will get through – and will wreak havoc – possible tens of thousands in casualties. We can stop most, but not all.
That is messy.
I’m not sure, but it seems like you’re saying there’s some kind of massive anti-artillery shield in place over Seoul. First I’ve heard of it. Can you provide details?
How do you know this isn’t already being developed?
It seems like the 80’s was the 30’s regarding some of the concerns of our modern era – cyber attacks could change a lot of things, rendering a powerful city or country powerless, without a ton of hardware investment, as well as much smaller deadly devices that can be smuggled into large areas. Our enemies spend a lot of time and effort on information warfare, and the bad eggs out there with no allegiance to any country, but sick ideologues are all too willing to do the dirty work for a price.