Posted on 10/25/2006 8:27:46 AM PDT by scannell
The U.S. military would prevail in a war against North Korea but at a greater cost in lives than if the United States were not already fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said Tuesday.
"It would not be as clean as we would like it to be, but it would certainly be sure, and the outcome would not be in doubt," said Gen. Peter Pace.
He told a Pentagon news conference that the U.S. military has plenty of people available to fight wars beyond Iraq and Afghanistan, but he acknowledged that U.S.-based ground combat units are not fully equipped.
"We have 2 million folks who can start protecting this nation anywhere else we need them to tomorrow, if we need them to," Pace said when a reporter asked what sort of threat North Korea's military poses.
The fight, however, would be messier than if the U.S. military did not have 147,000 troops tied up in Iraq and about 20,000 in Afghanistan.
"It would be more brute force, wherever we might have to go next, than it would be if we weren't already involved in the war we have going on in Iraq and Afghanistan," Pace said. "Why? Because you need precision intelligence to drop precision munitions. And a lot of our precision intelligence assets are currently being used in the Gulf region. So some of those would not be available if you had to go someplace else."
As a result there would be more unintended damage inflicted, he added.
"You end up more like a World War II, Korean War campaign," he said, adding that he was not making any predictions. "I'm just saying that, on a scale, you're going to have to use more brute force to get the job done" in North Korea.
Pace said U.S. intelligence can determine the size of the North Korean military but it cannot provide an equally important piece of information in assessing the threat of war: the intent of North Korea's leaders.
"What is not knowable is the intent of the leadership in North Korea to use or not use that power at any given time," he said. "And applying Western logic to the leadership in Korea is not something that I would personally want to get my future on."
Concerns about North Korea's intentions have grown in recent months following its July missile tests and its underground nuclear test, which prompted the U.N. Security Council to impose sanctions on North Korea.
Pace said he had seen no indication that North Korean forces have been placed on a higher state of alert.
"To my knowledge, the North Koreans' status of their armed forces is stable," he said. "I mean, they haven't raised or lowered any particular parts of their readiness to cause any kind of alarm." © 2006 Associated Press.
We were licking the chicoms too. Should have finished those bastards off.
""I'm just saying that, on a scale, you're going to have to use more brute force to get the job done" in North Korea."
Hear that, Little Man with the Funny Hair?
TC
That's the nature of nukes...
Oh I figure a nuke would be plenty clean. Everyone who was not vaporized would be sterile. No blood, no dirty rags lying around, etc...
We could easily but do we have the uh-huhs to get the job done?
Like a rented mule...
Since you work at the Pentagon can you explain why those dopes think you can win a war any other way. If we had fought WWII the way we fight these wars today (worried about killing the enemy and its infrastructure) we would have lost that too.
Use the Neutron bombs. Instant death over a wide area. No damage to buildings etc. Radiation dissapates in something like two weeks. No need to rebuild.
Well, this sounds better than the PC wars we have been fighting lately.
I say let's do North Korea Roman style. The Romans knew how to take care of business.
There not much there to be rebuilt.
These same authorities say that the common perception of the neutron bomb as a "landlord bomb" that would kill people but leave buildings undamaged is greatly overstated. At the conventional effective combat range (690 m), the blast from a 1 kt neutron bomb will ruin almost any civilian building. Thus the use of neutron bombs to stop an enemy attack, which requires exploding large numbers of them to blanket the enemy forces, would also destroy all buildings in the area.
Wikipedia?
Sorry, but I dont consider most stuff on Wiki as credible information. Anyone can post to Wiki.
I know, but you might want to read it, there is much data about effective stopping power at various yields versus conventional Nukes, etc.
The UN/Allied armies did totally beat N Kor until China sent 3 million volunteers to swarm the place.
"Gen. Peter Pace: U.S. Can Beat N. Korea"
It's not a matter of "can" we beat anybody. It's do we have the "will" to do it. Like the Great One says...."kill people and break things"
One of the great lines of the press conference was, "...the American people are the center of gravity for our enemies."
Right on, right on, right on!!
The whole press conference is here: http://www.defenselink.mil/Transcripts/Transcript.aspx?TranscriptID=3765
You can bet the Chinese are thinking about this scenario also.
That will probably be another administrations problem.
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