Time to leave Iraq.

[wiggin]

*shrugs* You have some good points, but I think you're too pessimistic on this one. We also haven't been trying to rectify our mistakes for 8 years... we've spent a good chunk of that time making the mistakes.

How much money have we spent on South Korea in the last 50-odd years? I think losing that war was a definite mistake, and it has had pretty awful consequences for the peninsula ever since. We keep our troops there to protect SK from a nutso regime up north in the faint hope that some day we can pull out after the Koreas reunify peacefully.

[Loki]

*shrugs* You have some good points, but I think you're too pessimistic on this one. We also haven't been trying to rectify our mistakes for 8 years... we've spent a good chunk of that time making the mistakes.

How much money have we spent on South Korea in the last 50-odd years? I think losing that war was a definite mistake, and it has had pretty awful consequences for the peninsula ever since. We keep our troops there to protect SK from a nutso regime up north in the faint hope that some day we can pull out after the Koreas reunify peacefully.

I think you're too willing to waste a massive amount of resources on objectives that have a minimum chance of succeeding. The burden of proof is on someone who thinks we should use resources on something, not the one making the opposite case. Do we have convincing evidence that our military presence is having a good short and long-term effect and justifies the costs involved?

I'm not convinced that's worthwhile either. South Korea would win any war that was fought against the North right now. A minimum military presence on the border along with a defense pact would probably serve the same purpose as the tens of thousands of troops.

[Dreadnaught]

I think comparing Iraq in 2006 to now does show very material progress. And having US troops in Korea (which really is a token force) does speak louder than a defense pact when it comes to deterring the North from an all-out war.

[Loki]

I think comparing Iraq in 2006 to now does show very material progress. And having US troops in Korea (which really is a token force) does speak louder than a defense pact when it comes to deterring the North from an all-out war.

Please tell me what the material progress in the last 3 years has been and how it's only going to remain if our troops stay.

29k troops is a token amount? I'm pretty sure the fact that North Korea can't win a war against the South is a sufficient deterrent.

[Dreadnaught]

Sectarian violence is dramatically down, you know that as well as I do.

And while South Korea can win a war with North Korea, our presence in South Korea helps doubly-ensure that North Korea doesn't even try.

[Loki]

Sectarian violence is dramatically down, you know that as well as I do.

And while South Korea can win a war with North Korea, our presence in South Korea helps doubly-ensure that North Korea doesn't even try.

Sectarian violence has been down since 2007. And it's been down once we drastically cut back on the amount of troops doing patrols. There's little reason to think that there would be an orgy of violence if we pulled a vast majority of the troops out. Furthermore, the factors that might cause the violence to recur, namely political and economic grievances, aren't being resolved, which means if violence does break out, it won't be because of a lack of American troops.

Why would they try when they know they can't win? And should we implement a policy of sending 29k troops to any country that might conceivably be attacked?

[wiggin]

I think you're too willing to waste a massive amount of resources on objectives that have a minimum chance of succeeding. The burden of proof is on someone who thinks we should use resources on something, not the one making the opposite case. Do we have convincing evidence that our military presence is having a good short and long-term effect and justifies the costs involved?

(Source: Iraq Body Count)

US change in strategy and increase in troops happened in mid-2007. What happened to Iraqi casualties since then? Long term effects are a bit harder to prove now, given that they're in the future, eh?

I'm not convinced that's worthwhile either. South Korea would win any war that was fought against the North right now. A minimum military presence on the border along with a defense pact would probably serve the same purpose as the tens of thousands of troops.

Given your exchange with Dread, I'm assuming you haven't read tactical analyses of potential SK-NK confrontations. They aren't pretty.

Absent American intervention, SK is extraordinarily outnumbered and while technologically superior, has a limited ability to protect Seoul in the event of a war. NK has about 1.1 million active duty troops; SK has just over half that. NK also has a ridiculous number of long range artillery pieces (I saw some estimates of 10k pieces, most protected from airstrikes and close to the DMZ), a number of which can reach Seoul without moving an inch. NK has ridiculously extensive tunneling networks and experience, which would make comprehensively clearing an area difficult to impossible, and may allow them to launch an initial invasion from further south of the 38th parallel. While their air defense system is not state of the art, it's still pretty extensive and would give an unaided SK air force serious trouble establishing air supremacy. On the naval side, the South Koreans have a lot of technological superiority, but asymmetric threats (such as microsubs and the like) such as the ones that sank the Cheonan are likely to be a deciding factor that will keep the SK Navy largely out of the conflict. Let's also not forget they have some nukes.

Could the DPRK military beat the ROK forces in detail? Probably not; ROK planners have been working on this contingency for a long time. The active military is set up in protected forward positions to absorb the initial assault while the reserves get mobilized, and their advantage in the air would help blunt the rather large armor force that would be rolling at them. But their plans would likely leave hundreds of thousands (if not millions) or South Korean civilians dead, are not guaranteed to protect Seoul from being overrun, and largely necessitate a long, drawn-out confrontation.

Such a long war would favor the NK strategy immensely. They've spent more and more of their resources on asymmetric threats, and have trained a large commando force to deliver these threats. Essentially, after the initial attack, NK would likely shift to a guerrilla-style campaign in SK that would be very difficult to counter with a military the size of SK's. It could easily degenerate into a bloody holding pattern.

The role of US forces ('only' 30,000 troops? That's more than the planned residual force for Iraq, for a much larger country!) is not just to provide a concrete commitment to SK security. It's also meant to provide frontline support to absorb the brunt of the initial attack. The 7th Air Force's F-16s and A-10s are particularly important for this, as are the ~20k Army troops, SOCKOR (special ops guys), and the large protected infrastructure in place to allow the US to quickly surge troops to the region in the event of a war. The US sees its role as holding the line roughly at the DMZ to prevent things from degenerating into a guerrilla war, and then to move northwards as US and Korean reserve reinforcements roll in. I guarantee that the DPRK is a lot more worried about the possibility of hundreds of thousands of heavily armed US troops (and several hundred aircraft) flooding the peninsula than they are about ROK forces. This is because we have the resources for a sustained campaign, and because they have little chance of capturing our naval and air transport hubs in SK in the initial attack. Absent our presence, it's questionable whether ROK units would be able to hold out as an organized force long enough for us to move serious assets into play.

[Loki]

(Source: Iraq Body Count)

US change in strategy and increase in troops happened in mid-2007. What happened to Iraqi casualties since then? Long term effects are a bit harder to prove now, given that they're in the future, eh?

Yes, the strategy worked (militarily that is; it had no impact politically). Now we're no longer in the driver's seat and the casualties are staying down. Everyone in Iraq is expecting us to leave. If they wanted to start the fireworks, they'd have done so by now. The reality is that the main problems facing Iraq are political fragmentation and massive corruption. We're not helping with either. There is no military problem to solve anymore, and we shouldn't be giving the Iraqi government a convenient excuse to not undertake any fundamental reforms (which is the consequence of us promising to protect that government).

Given your exchange with Dread, I'm assuming you haven't read tactical analyses of potential SK-NK confrontations. They aren't pretty.

Absent American intervention, SK is extraordinarily outnumbered and while technologically superior, has a limited ability to protect Seoul in the event of a war. NK has about 1.1 million active duty troops; SK has just over half that. NK also has a ridiculous number of long range artillery pieces (I saw some estimates of 10k pieces, most protected from airstrikes and close to the DMZ), a number of which can reach Seoul without moving an inch. NK has ridiculously extensive tunneling networks and experience, which would make comprehensively clearing an area difficult to impossible, and may allow them to launch an initial invasion from further south of the 38th parallel. While their air defense system is not state of the art, it's still pretty extensive and would give an unaided SK air force serious trouble establishing air supremacy. On the naval side, the South Koreans have a lot of technological superiority, but asymmetric threats (such as microsubs and the like) such as the ones that sank the Cheonan are likely to be a deciding factor that will keep the SK Navy largely out of the conflict. Let's also not forget they have some nukes.

Could the DPRK military beat the ROK forces in detail? Probably not; ROK planners have been working on this contingency for a long time. The active military is set up in protected forward positions to absorb the initial assault while the reserves get mobilized, and their advantage in the air would help blunt the rather large armor force that would be rolling at them. But their plans would likely leave hundreds of thousands (if not millions) or South Korean civilians dead, are not guaranteed to protect Seoul from being overrun, and largely necessitate a long, drawn-out confrontation.

Why do people keep on assuming that North Korea is a nation of irrational psychopaths? You seem to be forgetting that the North's economy is consistently one step away from collapse. The notion that it can fight a war for any period of time is inconsistent with that fact. The North would run out of supplies within months. More importantly, what exactly does the North gain from an invasion that leads to another bloody stalemate (or, as it more likely to be the case, an utter annihilation of North Korea)? Even in the best case scenario, the North destroys its own economy at the very moment when the troops who would quell potential uprisings would be stuck in the South. Why would North Korea possibly want to do this?

[GGT]

Like it or not, social media and real time photos of death and destruction may very well change the face of War. I hope this will be a good thing. It won't take the State Department releasing pre-approved photos for people to say...hey, wait a minute, what's going on?

If we'd had cell phones and satellites with twitter feeds or Facebook during the Viet Nam war.....would it have ended sooner?

[Veldan Rath]

Yeah, imagine how quickly we may have pulled out of WWII too!

[Nessus]

I have a hard time seeing Hitler rise to power through the magic of Facebook and Twitter, let alone managing the state the way they did. And despite Loki's theory to the contrary, I'm not convinced WW2 would have happened, at least anywhere near as it did, without Hitler.

[Loki]

I have a hard time seeing Hitler rise to power through the magic of Facebook and Twitter, let alone managing the state the way they did. And despite Loki's theory to the contrary, I'm not convinced WW2 would have happened, at least anywhere near as it did, without Hitler.

I never said the war would be exactly the same...but the war likely would still happen. If you exclude how Hitler treated people under his control, he didn't really do anything that the Germans didn't do in 1914. That suggests that without Hitler we might not have had a Holocaust, but we'd still get the casualties from the war itself.

[Nessus]

I never said the war would be exactly the same...but the war likely would still happen. If you exclude how Hitler treated people under his control, he didn't really do anything that the Germans didn't do in 1914. That suggests that without Hitler we might not have had a Holocaust, but we'd still get the casualties from the war itself.

I think we should start a new thread

Your original claim/argument was that the Versailles treaty combined with the German socio-political climate would sooner or later lead into a war of retribution. Which I suppose is a semi-supportable claim to make given that no one in Weimar Germany was interested in having a democratic Germany. But it was Hitler and esp. his ambitious re-armament and lionizing of the populace that made possible the early victories of WW2, and the subsequent Barbarossa which ended poorly. Even with Hitler, the war was taken quite badly. Without him, could they have over-taken Western Europe so easily? And in particular, Barbarossa outlines how a specific ideology guided the way of the war. Had Hitler not been obsessed with the (real) faults of Bolshevism, Germany would have been quite content being the unchallenged master of Continental Europe, at which point the U.S. would not have had much reason to enter the war at all.

[Loki]

I think we should start a new thread

Your original claim/argument was that the Versailles treaty combined with the German socio-political climate would sooner or later lead into a war of retribution. Which I suppose is a semi-supportable claim to make given that no one in Weimar Germany was interested in having a democratic Germany. But it was Hitler and esp. his ambitious re-armament and lionizing of the populace that made possible the early victories of WW2, and the subsequent Barbarossa which ended poorly. Even with Hitler, the war was taken quite badly. Without him, could they have over-taken Western Europe so easily? And in particular, Barbarossa outlines how a specific ideology guided the way of the war. Had Hitler not been obsessed with the (real) faults of Bolshevism, Germany would have been quite content being the unchallenged master of Continental Europe, at which point the U.S. would not have had much reason to enter the war at all.

Eh? When did I claim that? I never bought the Versailles leading to WWII crap. We had a powerful state that did not feel secure without revising its borders. Revising the borders on the western front was not acceptable to any of the other great powers. There was uncertainty over who'd enter the War if Germany was to attack Poland (since both the French and the British violated their treaty with the Czechs). There was also a lot of uncertainty over whether and how quickly Germany could defeat its neighbors in a war. There's also the fact that these were great powers with a long history of conflict, had the industrial capacity and political willingness to build up their armed forces, and had no qualms in using them.

The second Germany attacked France a war without the Soviet Union was inevitable. There was no way that the USSR would allow Germany total dominance over continental Europe (because it would be at its mercy); had Bismarck asked for large concessions from France in 1871, we'd have a world war back then. Stalin was just stalling for time after the '36-37 purges. The only way WWII doesn't happen is if France, Britain, and the Soviet Union make it clear that an attack against one would instantly lead to a war with all three.