But that doesn't mean the U. Some U. A third group ran a mock " operation to secure a suspected chemical weapons lab. The Americans and their allies kicked all kinds of butt in the exercise, of course. Other war games, testing out the North Korean scenario, didn't end quite as cleanly. In the summer of U. When Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly went to Pyongyang in October of to confront the North Koreans, he expected them to deny the existence of the uranium program.
They didn't; in fact, evidently they soon restarted their plutonium program, by continuing to reprocess the 8, spent fuel rods from Yongbyon which had been in storage since the signing of the Agreed Framework. In October of the North Koreans said they had finished the reprocessing—meaning, if true, that they had enough fissile material for up to six new nuclear weapons. The Bush administration, not wanting to appear to reward bad behavior, has since adamantly refused to negotiate directly with the North Koreans.
Six-party talks involving China, Japan, Russia, and South Korea—regional powers that the Bush administration hoped could help hold the Kim regime to account—began in August of , but after the third round of talks, last June, the North Koreans pulled out, demanding direct bilateral negotiations with the United States.
The assembled knowledge was extensive, and the range of Washington viewpoints more or less complete—hawk to dove, right to left, neocon to realist. As in our Iran war game, Colonel Sam Gardiner led the proceedings.
Gardiner has run war games for more than twenty years at the National War College and various other military institutions; the strategy that General Tommy Franks used to seize Baghdad in had its origins in a game Gardiner had designed some fifteen years earlier.
Gardiner explained that he would be presenting to the principals a military briefing from the perspective of the commander of the U. The secretary of state in this exercise was Robert Gallucci. The dean of the Edmund A. In he served as the Clinton administration's chief negotiator with the North Koreans during the crisis that ultimately produced the Agreed Framework.
Gallucci did not have to overtax his imagination for this simulation: he had been present at the real versions of such meetings in the White House, including one in June of , when the president considered ordering military strikes on the Yongbyon reactor. Air Force as a pilot, a commander, and a strategic planner, played the role of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
McInerney conducted flight reconnaissance missions during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and later completed four tours of duty in Vietnam. From the late s to the early s he served predominantly in the Pacific theater. While there he watched by means of satellite photography as the North Koreans constructed bunkers and artillery installations in the mountains north of Seoul.
Vallelly that the key to stopping the spread of terrorism is regime change. McInerney thinks we should invade not only North Korea if it doesn't give up its nuclear program but also Syria if it doesn't end its support of terrorism and surrender the WMD that he believes were smuggled there from Iraq and Saudi Arabia if Islamic radicals seize power there.
Filling the newly created position of director of national intelligence was Jessica Mathews, the president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Mathews and McInerney had clashed over Iraq, and their animosity was easy to see; this lent extra verisimilitude to the exercise, since personal disputes over policy often color debates within administrations. Mathews directed the National Security Council's Office of Global Issues from to , and served as deputy to the undersecretary of state for global affairs under President Clinton.
Rounding out the Principals Committee was Kenneth Adelman, who would be serving as secretary of defense. A current member of the Defense Policy Board, Adelman has held a number of positions in Republican administrations. In the mids he was assistant to President Ford's secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld; later he was a key member of Ronald Reagan's foreign-policy team, serving for two years as deputy UN ambassador and for four years as head of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.
He announced that he had a memo from the Pentagon asking for a review of the status of our plans for North Korea. He reminded the group that it had been two and a half years since we had told the North Koreans we knew about their clandestine uranium-enrichment program, and nearly two years since international six-party talks had begun—yet the crisis had if anything only deepened.
Gardiner reviewed some of the basic facts about North Korea's conventional military capabilities. The North Korean People's Army, he observed, is the fifth biggest military in the world, with more than 1.
Consisting of some , troops, the SOF may be the largest such force in the world. In the event of a conflict on the peninsula, Gardiner said, we would find ourselves not only engaging these troops along the border but also combating their sneak attacks from the rear. Displaying a PowerPoint slide that depicted North Korean tunneling operations along the demilitarized zone since the s, Gardiner observed that the SOF would get behind the front lines not only through hidden tunnels that U.
We're improving our ability to contend with the SOF, Gardiner said. Next he summarized the North Korean missile program: the medium-range No-Dong missiles that can hit Japan; the 1,mile Taepo Dong 1 missiles; and the Taepo Dong 2, which could theoretically strike the continental United States. Gardiner paused to get initial assessments from the Principals Committee.
CIA Director David Kay responded first, noting that what confounds policymaking on North Korea is how little anyone actually knows about the country. Secretary of State Gallucci spoke next. Will we be able to track it back to North Korea? Is there any deterrence against [the export of nuclear materials] by a desperate state?
Secretary of Defense Adelman disagreed with the idea that we don't know what North Korea's intentions are. By scaring them with the prospect of a nuclear South Korea, a nuclear Japan, and possibly a nuclear Taiwan. Once the Chinese recognize that they'll soon be looking at multiple nuclear powers in the region if they don't force the North Koreans to disarm, Adelman argued, they'll be compelled to use leverage against North Korea—by, for example, cutting off its food and fuel supplies.
We know far less about North Korea's nuclear program than we do about Iran's, she said. There's very little we can say that we know with confidence, either politically or technically, about North Korea. The Chinese, she pointed out, would be reluctant to do anything that might topple the regime and cause a huge flow of refugees across their border.
Finally, Mathews said that we have never really tested whether the right combination of political promises, security assurances, and economic aid would induce the North Koreans to give up their nuclear weapons. She proposed that we begin by offering to sign a treaty formally ending the Korean War. Hostilities ceased in with the signing of an armistice and the drawing of the DMZ, along the 38th parallel—but no peace treaty was signed, which means that technically the United States and North Korea are still at war.
But it says something to them. It may be a very valuable bargaining chip, and we've never spent it. Joint Chiefs Chairman McInerney agreed that the greatest national-security threat posed by North Korea was nuclear transfer, and he echoed Gallucci's concern that deterrence will not protect against nuclear terrorism.
General McInerney was more willing than the other principals to contemplate military action, and more sanguine about how easy a war with North Korea would be to win. Would there be a lot of carnage? Yes, there'd be a lot of carnage. Would we win? Yes, we would win. Would we win quicker than we did in Operation Iraqi Freedom? Optimistically, I'd say we could. More likely, it would take an extra month. But the fact is, we would win. To prevent North Korea's nuclear capability from creating an imbalance of power, McInerney proposed stationing U.
The weapons were on European aircraft, but the United States dictated when they could be deployed. He displayed a map of Korea that depicted the expected North Korean attack routes. Because of the mountainous terrain along the border, the conventional forces of the People's Army would be limited to a few corridors that would be highly vulnerable to U. The bottom line: we could easily repel a conventional ground attack. In winning decisively the scope of the victory and the number of troops on the ground are sufficient to carry out postwar stability operations.
In Iraq, U. Gardiner explained that to control escalation in North Korea, the United States, using its air power, would first have to take out North Korea's aging air force. Though many enemy aircraft are bunkered in mountain redoubts, this would be easy.
But one major problem could keep us from taking rapid control of the peninsula: chemical weapons. If we don't get those early, we end up with chemicals on Seoul. It demonstrated that such a missile launched from the Korean peninsula could reach not only Tokyo, Okinawa, and Beijing but also the U.
To prevent escalation, Gardiner said, we would need to take out the No-Dong and Taepo Dong missile sites quickly—which would not be easy, because we don't know where those missiles are. Many are hidden in underground bunkers throughout North Korea. We would also, of course, need to take out the nuclear sites. Gardiner flashed a map of North Korea's known nuclear-related facilities on the screen, and then showed a series of satellite photos of various WMD targets.
Gardiner continued, explaining that the first few days of the fight would be critical if we were to have any chance of protecting Seoul. To do so, we would have to get the chemical-delivery systems, the missile sites, and the nuclear sites before the North Koreans had a chance to use them.
To accomplish all this we would need to carry out 4, air sorties a day in the first days of the conflict. In Iraq, in contrast, we had carried out a day. But you still prevail. We've got to protect Seoul. If your daughter were living in Seoul, I don't think you would feel the U. I believe that we have the capability—whether from pre-emption or response—to minimize the casualties in Seoul.
A hundred thousand? Two hundred thousand? Only a hard-nosed military strategist, of course, can contemplate , casualties as coolly as McInerney did. He went on to argue that—assuming 4, sorties a day, and given our current targeting technology, combined with the fact that the artillery systems firing on Seoul would be fairly concentrated around the DMZ—we would be able to mitigate the lethality of North Korean strikes on Seoul.
Gallucci added that the North Koreans would be foolish to waste their artillery on Seoul. The other members of the Principals Committee seemed taken aback by this statement. Gardiner tried to resume his briefing by summing up the sentiment of the committee. Adelman interrupted. Let's talk directly: it would be disastrous.
Mathews agreed. South Korean intelligence estimates up to , special operators are in the North Korean military, trained to fight Taliban-like insurgencies. The U. Allied airpower will target infrastructure like bridges and roads, especially the unification highway linking the capital at Pyongyang with the border, to keep Northern forces from being able to move effectively inside their own country.
After the conventional fighting, the question is if North Korea will use its nuclear weapons. It is estimated to have up to eight weapons and ballistic missile technology capable of reaching U. However, experts cannot confirm that the North has ever successfully used a warhead on any of its missiles.
If the North does use its nuclear arsenal, nuclear retaliation from the U. V Osprey aircraft were cut off from the rest of the allied forces and surrounded by the enemy. In all, it took the U. In the end, the North — despite some early successes — would lose. They would be able to inflict massive devastation with conventional weapons in Seoul and near the border areas.
The toll on civilians would likely be massive if they used their biological and chemical stockpiles, and even more so if they used the nuclear arsenal. Special forces would likely detonate their nukes in the border areas for fear of being caught trying to move South.
Once the artillery and missile batteries were taken out, the advanced technology, mobile armor, helicopter support, and airpower would quickly overwhelm the large infantry formations and their associated WWII-era tactics. This is not only to pay for the. This is not only to pay for the war but for food for the population and the restoration of all the infrastructure the Kim regime neglected over the past sixty-plus years.
Marks believes the North and South will continue to only use short, contained attacks on each other, making a full-scale war unlikely. On Jan.
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