Posted on 05/28/2009 5:34:54 PM PDT by xzins
WASHIGTON – It would take the Army time to "shift gears" if it needed to fight against North Korea, Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey said Thursday.
Right now, the Army is focused on the counterinsurgency efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, but North Korea’s recent saber rattling has raised the prospect that the Army might be called upon to fight a conventional war.
"I have said publicly for some time that if we had to shift gears, it would probably take us about 90 days or so to shift our gears and to train the folks up that were preparing to go to Iraq and Afghanistan to go someplace else," Casey said after a speech at a Washington think tank.
That doesn’t mean that it would take at least 90 days to send reinforcements to U.S. troops in South Korea, Casey said.
"We would move forces as rapidly as we could get them prepared," he said.
Casey declined to say how fast the Army could mobilize to meet a threat from North Korea, but he stressed the Army is "combat seasoned" and can move quickly.
"The mechanical skills of artillery gunnery and tank gunnery come back very, very quickly," he said. "The harder part is the integration — that really brigade level and above of massing fires and effects in a very constricted period of time as opposed to what you do in a counterinsurgency over a much longer extended period of time."
Looking to the future, Casey said he expects conflicts this century to look a lot like the U.S.-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as the Israeli war with Hezbollah in 2006.
Regarding the latter, Casey noted that the key lesson the Israelis learned was that they were too focused on irregular warfare.
"They were working so much in the West Bank and conducting counterinsurgency-like operations that they lost their combined arms skills, the ability to integrate fires in air and tanks and artillery," he said.
The U.S. Army needs to be prepared for the "full spectrum" operations ranging from offensive, defensive and stability operations, he said.
Casey expressed confidence that the U.S. Army can fight and win a conventional war against North Korea given its experience in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"I’m not afraid of putting this force in the field against anybody," he said.
Well if we stop sending them food they’d be in a pinch real quick. People forget that we’re feeding them. They don’t have the land and resources to farm for their people.
they have the weapons and the doctrine
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South Korea has no nukes
NK does.
I think it took the realization of the horror of massive conventional assault, to make the bomb “better” in 1945.
It make take another horror of conventional warfare to ever see it used again.
“What I meant is that they’d run out of men at a sufficient rate to make the regime stability in question if they lost and a counter offensive was launched”
perhaps, when I was there a NK sub had problems and ended up on the beach. The Captain lined 10 of his sailors up and shot them, then himself. Two others went on a killing spree through the farm lands until the military could react and kill them.
They don’t surrender because if they do their entire family will be killed or sent to the death camps. We’re talking babies, cousins, grand parents. They have been ruthlessly indoctrinated from birth to worship their leader. Any doubters are turned in by their kids and culled. They experiment on whole families to see what different weapons will do. Or they’ll just kill them outright after raping the women and girls in front of their husbands and children.
Another war like Vietnam would look like.....well, in the MidEast it just might look like Iraq.
One year rotations, war drags on endlessly, and political parties sway the public with their posturings.
“They don’t have the land and resources to farm for their people.”
yes they do, NK is rich in resources. What they lack is the leadership to do anything with it. Plus a HUGE percentage of their GNP is spent on the military.
Their army eats before the babies do.
they’d better take out the SAMs first.
We need an army that can fight both insurgencies and large scale warfare at a moments notice, at the same time. The fact that it would take 90 days to retool is not a good sign, especially given the fact that Iran, Russia, and China represent much more dangerous (and better equipped/trained) conventional threats than Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. And, they have nuclear weapons too.
We would have to use tactical nukes on the N.Korean forces to stop their artillery strikes and advances over the DMZ, and a strategic nuke on Pyongyang, or most of South Korea will be damaged.
The best fighter North Korea has is the MiG 29 without an upgrade package. This fighter is obsolete even against our ANG F-16 and Paki F-16’s, and all Russian MiG-29’s currently in service with Russia and other client nations.
It took us 180 days to position a half-million troops and materiel for Desert Storm. Not going to be much left after 180 days.
Which is different from any point in the last 5 decades how?
The North Koreans know their day in the sun, conventional arms wise, passed long ago, and the only existential threat their military can pose is against their own people.
Hence their drive to build nuclear weapons - they recognize nukes are about the only thing which will give their continual sabre rattling any semblance of relevance.
http://www.agnet.org/library/eb/475/
Only about 20% of NK is arable. Only 1.6% is actually used. They’re still coming off of a famine caused by a lack of fertilizer and fuel. Going to war would cut off food aid and shift resources away from farming making widespread famine in the next year unavoidable.
30 miles of level ground.
Just F*%#ing great , a senior US General telling the enemy precisely how much of a reaction time he has before we can respond......
These people are on the bus to crazyland
There is quite a bit more to being able to launch one. Regardless, the first targets on the block would be those facilities.
.
Looks good
Frame by Frame - or - Composite?
You think they have 1950s technology?
The Davy Crockett
http://www.guntruck.com/DavyCrockett.html
The US development resulted in a number of test weapons. The first artillery test was on May 25, 1953 at the Nevada Test Site. Fired as part of Operation Upshot-Knothole and codenamed Shot GRABLE a 280 mm shell with a gun-type fission warhead was fired 10,000 m and detonated 160 m above the ground with an estimated yield of 15 kilotons. This was the only nuclear artillery shell actually fired. The shell was 1384 mm long and weighed 365 kg, it was fired from a specially built artillery piece by the Artillery Test Unit of Fort Sill, Oklahoma. Around 3,200 personnel were present. The warhead was designated the W-9 and 80 were produced from 1952-53 for the T-124 shell, it was retired in 1957.
The Mk-54 Davy Crockett was designed to be fired from the M-388 recoilless rifle. Weighing only 23 kg the warhead, in its casing, was 400 mm by 273 mm. It was first tested in October 1958 as part of Operation Hardtack and yielded 10 tons, later developments increased that to 1 kt. 400 Mk-54 warheads were produced from 1961-65 and the last was withdraw in 1971. The warhead was also adapted for the Mk-54 SADM (Special Atomic Demolition Munition), this was a cylinder 40 cm by 60 cm and weighed 68 kg, fired by a mechanical timer it had a variable yield from 10 tons up to 1 kt. 300 SADMs were made and they remained in the US arsenal until 1989.
Only one type of artillery round other than the W-48 was produced in large numbers, the W-33 for use in a 203 mm shell. Around 2,000 warheads of this type were manufactured from 1957-65, each was 940 mm long and weighed around 109 kg, they were fitted in the T-317 AFAP and fired from a specialised howitzer. The warhead yield was greater than the W-48 and it was made in four types, three yielding 5 to 10 kt and one 40 kt.
In 1991 the US unilaterally withdrew its nuclear artillery shells from service, and Russia responded in kind in 1992. The US removed around 1,300 nuclear shells from Europe.
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