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.
What makes Casey think 2009 will be a repeat of 1951-1953? It might look more like August 1945.
Are the SK’s gonna join the fight or is this one all ours?
You don’t have shift any gears if you use the right weapon!
NK would shoot first and could take the capital in a day.
What kind of naval assets do we have in the vicinity? Unleashing UAVs on the Pyongyang dictatorship would slow ‘em down some.
Which is why this should be a WMD war.
Well Obambi, you may get an object lesson why those F22s are more needed than you thought.
North Korea would probably have some help from other nations.
There’s not that much that can be done about Seoul. It’d be flattened to the ground in a day. The commies have so much arty in range there wouldn’t be two rocks standing on top of each other within a day or two. But they couldn’t move in south. That border is one of the most well defended ones.
If we are not prepared to use any and all weapons we have available, we might as well stay home and this president will not use what we have.
Yeah. That comment didn't inspire a lot of confidence in Casey, at least with me.
I think another altercation with the PRNK would be lightening fast and super bloody. They don't have the resources to get into a protracted engagement, even if they wanted too. It would have to be all-in from the get-go. I suppose it's tough to a active-duty Army officer to put it that starkly.
You have a point there. My cousin serves close to the DMZ and from what he “mentioned” to me, the logistics and supply chain have been prepped and studied for a long time which every scenario has been reviewed repeatedly. After Iraq, the commanders there dont want a cluster-f.
A massive provision of WMD ordinance would be about the only prevention of that, that I can think of.
You’d have to take out a lot of artillery and possible missile silos (or the equivalent).
It would have to be done almost across the whole southern end of NK, in one moment to prevent it.
This is all BS. Just move the USS Ronald Reagan and the USS GHW Bush over there and N. Korea would be turned into a parking lot in a day and a half.
It’s too bad our current CiC doesn’t have the balls to defend us. He will send the hildabeast over to talk.
The South Koreans have been buying a lot of smart weapons. The North Korean military is still largely equipped with 1970’s-era weaponry, and their training is pathetic. Seoul would be flattened, but the North would be toast.
What’s their mechanized look like? Could they storm in with tanks or military vehicles? It seems like we could mow down a major portion of the attackers, if they just stormed in.
You believe that our boy (no gonads) president would be willing to nuke anybody? Sorry, ain’t gonna’ happen. ;-)
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