Defending South Korea

I was reading Michael O'Hanlon's policy paper on the scary question of what to do if a nuclear-armed regime collapses, and I was struck by this aside: "Pentagon planners have estimated the U.S. forces needed for the defense and ultimate liberation of the ROK to be roughly six ground combat divisions, including Marine and Army units, ten Air Force aircraft wings, and four to five Navy aircraft carrier battle groups – altogether totaling at least half a million Americans under arms."

How can that possibly be right? South Korea has twice the population of the DPRK and is far richer. In principle, the ROK ought to be able to defend itself adequately without any outside assistance. An American defense commitment to South Korea makes good sense (we get some influence in the region and it motivates South Korea to help us out with other stuff) even though I think they could get along without us, but there's just no way such an enormous quantity of assistance should be necessary especially because it would, in practice, take an unduly long time to move that much stuff to Korea in the event of a crisis. Meanwhile, South Korea has a $21 billion defense budget to North Korea's $5 billion and we're talking about helping the ROK with a defensive operation.

Something doesn't add up.

Comments

The Korean People's Army is now the second largest in the world (Iraq used to be). The fear is that if the state collapses, some General who is currently being restrained by Kim Jong Il might decide he wants to invade South Korea ... or something.

I think there's a widespread belief that some fraction of the South Korean populace would support North Korea in the event of military action.

Posted by Nicholas Beaudrot | October 4, 2006 5:01 PM

US has an interest in keeping Korea divided. Otherwise, there would be no justification for basing a whole lot of troops in a foreign country near China.

Posted by JP | October 4, 2006 5:02 PM

I think the problem here is geography. Seoul is within artillery
range of the border with NK. So you can't actually "defend" Seoul
(and a large part of the South's population) without mounting an
offensive through difficult territory to push the NK forces back
a good way.

I've been mulling these issues of what kinds of military operations
in distant lands are feasible and useful over in comments at
http://www.intel-dump.com ISTM that, as Hezbollah and the Iraq
insurgency have shown, a determined lightly-armed irregular force
can now be so dangerous and disruptive that military interventions,
even by well-equipped and highly-trained armies like the IDF and
US Army, are now going to be bloody and ineffective in achieving
the desired political goals. Which raises the question of whether
it's worth continuing to pay the mind-boggling costs of maintaining
a global force projection capability which can't actually do what
you need. The political and strategic utility of blowing things
up is rather severely limited.

Posted by Richard Cownie | October 4, 2006 5:04 PM

I agree that South Korea should do better and defending themselves. But at least comparing defense budgets is insufficient. It is probably a lot cheaper to hire soldiers in North Korea than South Korea.

Posted by mpowell | October 4, 2006 5:04 PM

Matt, are you genuinely confused by the fact that the U.S. spends large amounts of resources on its military, whether we really need to or not? How much of U.S. military spending do you really think is necessary to, like, defend the Unites States?

It's entertaining to watch you slow-ly, slow-ly work your way round to radicalism. I don't think you'll cross that bridge -- too un-Harvard, y'know -- but it's something to think about.

Posted by MQ | October 4, 2006 5:05 PM

Just checked my facts: the Seoul metropolitan area has about 23M
of South Korea's 49M population, and Seoul itself is just 30 miles
from the border. It's an awkward situation.

To elaborate further, you're correct that it would take us a long
time to get all those troops and equipment there, even if we had
them in a suitable state of readiness, which at the moment we don't,
because 20K guerrillas in Iraq have essentially worn out all the
equipment and it's going to take about $40B to repair it, which W
don't want to put in the budget because it would be kinda embarrassing -
better to leave that for the next administration and just keep your
fingers crossed for the next 3 years.

So we're paying more for our military than the rest of the world
put together, and still if Kim Jong Il gets out of the wrong side of
bed one day then Seoul gets shelled to rubble and we can't do much
about it. Offering a non-aggression pact in return for a North Korean
nuclear freeze would be a smart move.

If this sounds insane, well, yes. From the same great thinkers who
brought you Mutually Assured Destruction and the Vietnam War, what
do you expect ? But talking sense about the USA's military is
probably political suicide.

Posted by Richard Cownie | October 4, 2006 5:16 PM

And part of the problem here may be the notion of "defending" South Korea. South Korea does not agree with the GWB administration's confrontatory policies toward North Korea. Maybe the real question is, if there is war between the US and North Korea--war not necessarily started by a northern attack on the south--can we count on South Korea's support?

Posted by rea | October 4, 2006 5:16 PM

Nicholas

"I think there's a widespread belief that some fraction of the South Korean populace would support North Korea in the event of military action."

This sounds positively deranged to me. Do you have a cite on this - anything to make one think it's not a totally insane statement?

I stipulate that the US is not popular and getting less so in the ROK, but, the idea that South Koreans (unless by "some fraction" you mean 1/50,000,000) would join up with an invading north is not serious.

joshb

Posted by joshb | October 4, 2006 5:19 PM

I expect that a lot of those assumptions stem from the original Korean war, and China's entry into it. I seriously doubt that China would go in with North Korea at this point - but I can understand those numbers if they come from a "worst case, China comes in" estimate.

Posted by James Robertson | October 4, 2006 5:54 PM

But at least comparing defense budgets is insufficient. It is probably a lot cheaper to hire soldiers in North Korea than South Korea.

Agreed completely. The comparison of defense budgets is worthless. These are purchasing power parity numbers.

On the larger question, I've questioned for years why we continue to defend South Korea. Do we get anywhere near a return on what we put into such defense? I don't think so. If it were up to me, I'd say "see ya, South Korea - you're all growed up now and are perfectly able to handle this problem on your own."

Posted by Al | October 4, 2006 6:15 PM

Here's an article by Scott (not John) Stossel on the wargaming "war with North Korea". Estimates include hundreds of thousands of military casualties, plus untold civilian casualties, within 90 days of fighting.

Posted by Nicholas Beaudrot | October 4, 2006 7:37 PM

hundreds of thousands of military casualties, plus untold civilian casualties, within 90 days of fighting.

That sounds a tad high.

American casualties? 0.

Unless somebody gets hurt pushing an ICBM button.

Posted by Jeffrey Davis | October 4, 2006 8:30 PM

the stossel piece mentions repeatedly that the north koreans cheated on the agreed framework, but there is no mention that we also did not fulfill the deal (by not coughing up the light-water reactors). another thing in the piece: while the agreed framework was in place NK did not produce any new plutonium, but they have since bush took office and pitched the framework.

Posted by supersaurus | October 4, 2006 8:32 PM

Some of the papers I've seen have cited polls saying as much as 2/3 - mostly among the youth (you know, the ones of military age) in Korea would back the North psychologically or physically in case of war (I'm too lazy to pull out those articles now). It really gets down to who will you fight for, your good but cocky friend or your deadbeat brother? The two most anti-American non-Muslim countries in the world today (ok, among countries that count, not NK) are Korea and Argentina.

Also, the Agreed Framework was about uranium. NK still lacks the ability to make nukes out of that. Their current program is based on plutonium enrichment. NK may suck, but their actions are largely reactive here. Clinton cheated a bit on the AF by not delivering on the agreed lightwater reactor and Bush pulled out on food shipments and such. We probably could have avoided this with smarter planning and follow-through.

Posted by Reality Man | October 4, 2006 9:01 PM

"American casualties? 0."

Bzzt. Wrong answer. There are about 35K US troops in
South Korea - not to mention quite a few civilians around
Seoul. In that wargame cited earlier, the most optimistic
participant felt there would be 100K civilian dead in Seoul
in the first 48 hours; the others thought it could be much
worse than that, especially if NK uses the nukes or chemical
weapons which it has. The only way to "defend" Seoul is to
find and destroy - mostly with airstrikes - all the artillery
and planes. That's hard. Maybe you can do it, but you
can't do it in just a few hours.

Posted by Richard Cownie | October 4, 2006 9:24 PM

Bzzt. Wrong answer. There are about 35K US troops in South Korea

Not to mention tens of thousands on Okinawa, well within range of a North Korean missile even with a nuclear warhead. And since those troops would probably be the tip of the spear in Inchon II, a strike on them would probably make tactical sense as well as being a symbolic strike against the hated Americans and hated Japanese.

Posted by Dave Pooser | October 4, 2006 10:36 PM

I've long suspected that the North Korean military is a mile wide and an inch deep. In other words, if an actual war erupted, very few of the NK troops would be willing to fight.

Posted by Peter | October 4, 2006 10:46 PM

Maybe it's because they're not planning a *defensive* operation...good gawd...I hope I'm just being paranoid, but really, who wouldn't believe at this point that the administration is capable of being that frivolously stupid? An aggressive military attack on the ROK would depress the hell out of me, but it wouldn't exactly shock me.

But reason says this is nothing more than saber-rattling on our part. There's no real bark to our bite, militarily speaking, as long as we're still in Iraq, and everyone knows it. Loud, meaningless, yet technically-threatening noises must be made, so we can "look tough". Big whoop.

Posted by jimmytex | October 5, 2006 1:37 AM

Matt, yes, something doesn't add up.

That something that fails to add up is what you could call the "productivity" of the US Army. American soldiers are very expensive to maintain and deploy.

Mind you, it's not because of pay and benefits received by the soldiers, of course. When you factor the risk of getting killed or maimed, those benefits are actually pretty lousy.

The problem is the tail. The infrastructure to active ratio of the US Army is enormous. My guess : for each man or woman deployed on the field, there are may be 10 or 15 persons working in the back. And of each person deployed in the field, only a fraction is actually engaged in combat. The rest are technicians, medics, good old cooks, supply chain, etc. If anyone has the hard numbers, feel free to chime in.

The size of this tail is something the US Army generally brags about : a sign of sophistication, etc. A big tail is indeed a good thing for hot combat of the kind we've seen in the first weeks of the Iraq War : huge, extremely fast push by heavily armed elite units that blast everything in the way. The infrastructure to support this type of operation is and should be enormous. Everything must go as fast as possible. No expense spared.

The shit hits the fan when you go outside of this scenario : occupation duties (Irak today), protracted defensive war (South Korea), peacekeeping. For that, you need bodies, lots of them, to perform fairly dull and dangerous tasks.

As Fehrenbach wrote in "This Kind of War" after the (first) Korean War :

"You may fly over a land forever; you may bomb it, atomize it, pulverize it and wipe it clean of life - but if you desire to defend it, protect it and keep it for civilization, you must do this on the ground, the way the Roman legions did, by putting your young men into the mud."

And that's something the US Army really, really sucks at. It sucked at it 40 year ago and it still does. If anything, things have only gotten worse.

Posted by Fifi | October 5, 2006 2:03 AM

Our soldiers are not in S. Korea to defend it. There are about 2 million N. Korean troops, and 600,000 S. Korean troops. Our 35,000, while very effective for their numbers, are not a big deal.

Our troops are there to be killed if a war starts. They are there to make clear in the most demonstrable way that N. Korea can not invade S. Korea without killing American soldiers, and therefore causing war with America. You might think that a defense-pact treaty would be enough, but historically, treaties fail very often.

Posted by Njorl | October 5, 2006 10:12 AM

Our troops are there to be killed if a war starts.

Bingo, Njorl. Reminds me of the "single British soldier" requested by the French pre-1914 (Tuchman, Guns of August).

Posted by Anderson | October 5, 2006 10:22 AM

On the "All grow'd up no, see ya" comment:

A key reason the U.S. doesn't do that is that S. Korea, w/o the U.S. nuclear umbrella, then goes nuclear. And then so does Japan. And then China doubles or triples is arsenal.

The U.S. order of battle does sound worst-case to me, but there seems to be little doubt that the army of the PDRK could send tens of hundreds of thousands of artillery shells into the Seoul area and pentrate toward the perimiter of Seoul before a serious defense could be mounted.

One reason that most of the U.S. force is slated to be withdrawn from Seoul and place farther south is that they're now effectively "hostages," rather than part of an effective defense force.

Posted by Matt | October 5, 2006 2:12 PM

Actually Fifi, I believed the same thing but it's actually about 1/4 in the modern army.

Posted by MNPundit | October 5, 2006 3:40 PM

I have a hard time believing that young South Koreans with their plugged-in lifestyle would rather fight against their own country than against invading North Koreans. Once the first on-line massive role-playing game is disrupted by a North Korean artillery shell, all bets are off. Maybe they sympathize with their starving second cousins more than they sympathize with Americans, but fail to defend South Korea?

Posted by American Citizen | October 5, 2006 4:46 PM

I just read Robert Kaplan's article in the Atlantic about the collapse of North Korea.

According to him, what the military is planning for is the Kim regime collapses and the place turns into anarchy. We go in to put some order into place, feed refugees, round up Kim's nukes, fight warlords. In Kaplan's scenario, China, South Korea, Russia, but not, ever, Japan go with us. And we wear the blue helmets.

I dunno. His most intersting point was that South Korea wouldn't want immediate reunification, but would prefer to basically make North Korea a protectorate and do things gradually. China is said by Kaplan to planning to take defacto control of the land along their borders in event of a devolution in the Kim regime.

He did include a few references to the South Korean left refusing to support an American attack aimed at getting rid of Kim's nukes, or might call for pulling back after a quick border war, but nothign about them actually fighting or supporting the Kimites in event of an actual invasion of South Korea.

Posted by witless chum | October 5, 2006 5:43 PM