Thursday, April 11, 2013

Would North Korea start a war?

All the opinionators I have seen are agreed that North Korea is not likely to start a war. Most cite the apparently obvious fact that they could not win it, although that never deterred George W. Bush.

RtO has no way of assessing what the Norkoms want to do or might do. It does, however, know how similarly situated states behaved in the past 100 years. They often went to war.

Most of the war deaths of the 20th century came in fights initiated by states that had no reasonable prospect of winning. Although, as it happened, often enough they won anyway. It depends largely upon whether you have big, firm friends.

World War I began because Conrad, the chief of the Austro-Hungarian general staff, believed his army could handle Serbia (true) and its big friend Russia (false). For reasons that are hard to justify, German generals are highly thought of by most military historians.

Conrad's polyglot and disaffected conscript army did not much want to fight anyone, and some of the ones who did want to fight wanted to fight the Austrian Germans. Others were opposed to fighting fellow Slavs. Similar problems faced Saddam Hussein, but they did not prevent him from starting two wars either.

Conrad's officers, promoted on the basis of birth, religion or nationality, were, as one would expect, unimpressive. Again, like Hussein's.

On the other hand, in 1915, when it was apparent how bad the Austro-Hungarian army was, the Italians switched sides to fight the Germans. Although the Italians had been bested by even the Ethiopians at Adowa, and had had indifferent success against even the Arabs in Tripoli, they thought themselves superior. In about 20 murderous "battles of the Isonzo," neither side had any success.

Memories of Italian fecklessness failed to deter Italy from starting wars with France, Greece and Britain, against all of whom it failed in 1939-40.

Remarkably, in 1939 the German army was nervous about taking on the Poles despite an advantage of around 10 to 1. The easy victory then went to their heads, and they went off to war against the USSR not expecting even to have to fight.

They had the advantage of watching the Red Army struggle weakly against the Finns, but they should have paid more attention to the Red Army's annihilation of the Japanese Kwantung army at Nomonhan. The Germans were so confident the Russians would collapse without a fight they didn't bother to order clothing for a winter campaign. Evidently they, like George Bush, imagined an occupation would take care of itself.

Skipping over a variety of conflicts, the Vietnamese rose against the French despite few resources. This is not exactly an example of a lesser power going to war against a greater; it is more like one of history's many examples of desperate risings against an oppressor. Later, however, once they had a state, the North Vietnamese dared to take on the Americans. And they beat them, one example of an underdog winning through.

Going back to the Norkoms, in 1950 they had every rason to think they could conquer the South Koreans, who didn't even have an army. They apparently thought they could occupy the peninsula before the Americans could react, and they were almost right. But not quite.

It is hard to figure what lesson he Norkoms carried away from the 1950-53 war. My sense is that whatever hardheaded lessons were learned have been lost with the deaths of the men who learned them. As far as I can tell, 60 years of indoctrination about the victory of 1950 probably has produced a military high command that believes it to be a fact that the Koreans defeated the Americans.




5 comments:

  1. All the opinionators I have seen are agreed that North Korea is not likely to start a war. Most cite the apparently obvious fact that they could not win it, although that never deterred George W. Bush.

    Nonsense. Operation Iraqi Freedom toppled Saddam at bargain rate prices.

    It was the Iraqis themselves who lost the peace.

    And as a strategic matter, you really should argue for the alternative reality where Saddam is still in power, rather than for [ ].

    As for the Norks carrying through on their threats, everything you write after RtO has no way of assessing what the Norkoms want to do or might do. It does, however, know how similarly situated states behaved in the past 100 years. contradicts it.

    In each of the wars you mention, each of the initiating combatants did in fact have plausible reasons to believe they would win (BTW, in mentioning Conrad, you leave out the Triple Entente and the Triple Alliance.).

    Regarding WW II, you neglected to mention that Germany had invaded Western Europe a year before Barbarossa, with what most would consider reasonable success, after a string of easy victories before that. It is easy to see now how Hitler confused tactics with strategy, but at the time that insight wasn't available to anyone.

    So, contrary to your thesis, in all your preceding examples, the instigators had valid reasons for thinking they would succeed. (Vietnam might be a counter-example, but for reasons not worth going into here, I think the Vietnamese had good reasons to expect success. Never mind that their success was ultimately failure.)

    This means North Korea stands out as an exception. I don't think there is any chance they will start a war, or get up to anything more provocative than launching a missile.

    The regime must know that if they start something, they will die. And at some level, the regime must know they can't keep crying wolf.

    I am no Obama fan, but I must admit he appears to be handling the Norks quite well, even if his initial sentiments, before he became president, amounted to enabling of the very worst kind.

    Probably one of the things that got him that peace prize, though.

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    1. It wasn't by happenstance that this post was followed by Stafford's "Endgame." He made (not all that well, but he tried) the point that according to common sense (and now, according to international law), an invading army has an obligation to govern conquered territory until a proper civil authority can be established.

      So you haven't won until you've done that. Bush II didn't even try. The occupation was insanely incompetent. So we lost.

      You cannot shift that off on the Iraqis. Besides, it looks like the Shia are going to emerge with, more or less, an alliance with the Iranian Shias. They will not regard that as a loss, but I think America ought to.

      I do not believe there's any evidence that Conrad thought invading Serbia would result in a world war. It seems he conceived that fear of Germany would deter Russia from intervening in favor of Serbia.

      Once you start a war, you own it till it's over.

      I did not want to extend my argument into too much detail. In detail, I think it could be argued that in 1941 Germany might have defeated Russia, perhaps by concentrating on Moscow. But no one in his right mind could have thought a victory could have been achieved without a winter campaign and a long occupation.

      And even if you win on Germany v. USSR, try to explain to me why Germany, already losing in Russia, then declared war on the USA.

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  2. an invading army has an obligation to govern conquered territory until a proper civil authority can be established.

    Which, IIRC correctly, we did.

    Now, as to assessing whether the occupation was insanely incompetent, you would have to come up with an alternate occupation that would have turned out better. Given the internecine rivalry between the Iraqi Sunni and the Shia -- long aggravated by Saddam, BTW -- which was ultimately going lead to slaughter in any event, it is difficult to say how the US occupation produced worse results than waiting for a Syria to happen. What is the latest body count there, now, 70,000?

    Which returns to the fundamental question: as a strategic matter, you really should argue for the alternative reality where Saddam is still in power, rather than for [ ].

    ... try to explain to me why Germany, already losing in Russia, then declared war on the USA.

    Yeah, it was pretty dumb of Germany to attack Pearl Harbor.

    Oh, wait, that version of reality only happened in Animal House.

    After Pearl Harbor, what possible difference did Germany's declaration of war against the US make, in any event?

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  3. It made a huge difference. On Dec. 8, Roosevelt did not ask for a declaration of war against Germany, and it is doubtful he could have gotten one.

    America First and the Nazi lovers (of whom there were plenty) would have been opposed, and some others would have insisted that the nation concentrate on Japan and leave the British Empire to its own problems (many Americans had little love for that empire). Historians are agreed that Hitler's declaration was a political gift to Roosevelt.

    I don't have to argue for Saddam in power. Now, and then -- as you may recall and can look up on your own blog -- I advocated arming the Kurds and letting them take him out.

    Now, and then, too, you will recall that before the invasion started I said the US did not have enough infantry. If it had had, then it could have taken the commonsense policy of sequestering the hundreds of ammo dumps in Iraq. No effort -- zero, nil, nada, not any -- was made to do this, with the result that when the factions began warring against each other, they had plenty of material for their bombs.

    Almost every casualty, hundreds of thousands of them, was due to the incompetence of the US military and civilian high commands.

    More broadly, even if Saddam and his sons were still in charge, so what? The US has lived comfortably with men just as bad. We coddled the shah.

    Getting rid of Saddam will cost us, eventually, trillions, plus it exposed to the world the incompetence of the US military, brought obloquy on our moral behavior, and it proved to the Muslims what I, and others, said at the time -- the US does not have the patience to oppose Islamism.

    The war was a disaster for the United States.

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  4. On Dec. 8, Roosevelt did not ask for a declaration of war against Germany, and it is doubtful he could have gotten one.

    You completely ignore the fact that we were already participating in the battle of the North Atlantic, and unless we were willing to abandon England, then we were going to be in the war.

    I don't have to argue for Saddam in power. Now, and then -- as you may recall and can look up on your own blog -- I advocated arming the Kurds and letting them take him out.

    ...

    Now, and then, too, you will recall that before the invasion started I said the US did not have enough infantry. If it had had, then it could have taken the commonsense policy of sequestering the hundreds of ammo dumps in Iraq.


    It isn't often I see someone gut-shoot their own argument within two paras.

    Okay, let's take as read that guarding the ammo dumps was a consequence of too few "boots on the ground". In what respect would arming the Kurds instead not make that problem even worse?

    And that is before we get to how content free that proposal is. Just how do you propose to arm the Kurds, through Turkey? Not a chance. Iran? Even less chance. Syria? Iraq?

    You don't get to wish away the consequences of Saddam staying in power, because that would have entailed abandoning the sanctions regime, which had reached a dead end. Your argument must take that into account, not ignore it.

    As for the supposed incompetence of our military, all you have done is point out the fog that accompanies all war.

    Almost every casualty, hundreds of thousands of them, was due to the incompetence of the US military and civilian high commands.

    Unlike you, I prefer to blame those who actually did the killing. Of course, collectivists such as yourself always treat our darker skinned brethren as if they have no moral agency.


    More broadly, even if Saddam and his sons were still in charge, so what? The US has lived comfortably with men just as bad. We coddled the shah.

    If Iraq had been somewhere else, then we could have put Saddam on disregard. But it isn't. With international affairs, as in real estate, location matters.

    ---

    The Islamists assumed we didn't have the will to take the fight to them. They no longer think that.

    We don't have to worry about an arms race, and the possibly truly horrible consequences, between Iran & Iraq. You'd think that at least worth mentioning.

    We don't have to suffer the moral obloquy of abandoning the field to a murderous dictator.

    Nor do we have to deal with the impression of the correlation of forces that would have resulted.

    And we allowed, although unintentionally, the Iraqis to experience, and the rest of the world to witness, the Islam's sectarian murderous nihilism.

    The alternative to getting rid of Saddam was disaster. This war hasn't been, and won't be, a disaster for the US.

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