North Korean military engineers are completing an underground runway beneath a mountain that can protect fighter aircraft from attack until they take off at high speed through the mouth of a tunnel.
The 6,000ft runway is a few minutes’ flying time from the tense front line where the Korean People’s Army faces soldiers from the United States and South Korea.
The project was identified by an air force defector from North Korea and captured on a satellite image by Google Earth, according to reports in the South Korean press last week.
It is one of three underground fighter bases among an elaborate subterranean military infrastructure built to withstand a “shock and awe” assault in the first moments of a war, the defector said.
So what? So a bunch of half-trained pilots who barely know how to fly their obsolete planes are safe on the ground? Why would we waste our time even trying to bomb the place? The pilots will be shot down within minutes of taking off from their Bat Cave.
By all means, North Korea. Dig deeper. At least six feet, anyway.
UPDATE: Austin Bay discusses the underground airfields. And note too, the Syrian-Iranian-North Korean axis. I once thought that Syria could be "flipped" but I've had to come to the conclusion that the Assad regime has bet its life on being Iran's poodle. We need regime change in Damascus, too, I'm afraid.
