So, about North Korea's air force:
[In] late 2010, after North Korea artillery fired on South Korea (Yeonpyeong Island), North Korea quickly made preparations for war. These preparations were apparently ordered without much warning. So too, apparently, was the attack on Yeonpyeong Island.
What the South Korean intel analysts were particularly amazed by was the poor performance of the North Korean air force during this hasty mobilization. It was known that North Korean pilots had been getting less and less flying time in the past decade, but when ordered into the air on a large scale for this hasty mobilization, the results were amazingly bad. ... There were several crashes, and many near misses in the air, and a general sense of confusion among the North Korean Air Force commanders and troops.
While North Korea was apparently trying to impress, and intimidate, South Korea with this display of aerial might, the impact was just the opposite.
This is not a surprise. The North Koreans keep as front line planes craft that should be in a museum. They have little money for maintenance. And their pilots just don't fly much. It is easy to conclude that the air force is a facade with nothing behind it. And then the North Koreans went and confirmed that deducible fact.
Well, they confirmed it to us. We can look at this and conclude that North Korea is so far gone that they wouldn't dare attack South Korea (or Japan). But what was easily deducible wasn't known to North Korea's leadership. North Korea's elites assumed that the air force was a well-oiled machine awaiting orders to strike. Recall that the leadership gave the orders without much warning. I'm sure that the air force leadership passed along reports of readiness that led the political elites to believe the air force was a force capable of taking to the air. How far down that belief spreads before you get to the people who know that their force is crap, I don't know. Fear of reporting the truth up the chain of command would stifle that impulse.
This is why I worry about chances of war on the Korean peninsula as well as elsewhere. Leaders order war when they think they have a good shot at winning--or at least feel the chances of victory in war are greater than the consequences of not rolling the dice on the battlefield. We know that North Korea's military is crappy. We wouldn't attack with a military like that.
But one, we don't know if our enemies know the true state of their militaries. Even now, are North Korea's elites feeling that the epic intimidation fail was a fluke? Do they read after-exercise reports and breathe a sigh of relief that they fixed those problems revealed and now all is well?
Second, even if the elites know exactly the state of their military and even know that they almost certainly can't win a war, might they think even that small chance is greater than the risk of not going to war?
We aren't immune to this, either. Which is why I strongly believe that when defense budgets are cut, training and maintenance should be the last to be cut. I'd rather have fewer forces with less modern equipment that they can use expertly than a larger, more modern force used by troops that don't really know how to use their equipment, which might not be able to take to the field for long from lack of maintenance depth.
A "hollow" force, as the latter is known, creates a military that looks like it can fight a war. So even our leaders might order it into action in the failed belief that it is a potent fighting force, just like it was in the recent past, only to be shocked that the results are amazingly bad. Even if amazingly bad is only in contrast to our own military's excellence over the last few decades, combat would remove all doubts about what we really have.
Worse, it will easy for leaders to fool themselves into thinking it won't matter if our military becomes hollow because our military surely won't need to fight any tough enemy. Enemies know that they can't beat us, right? From Panama in 1989 to Iraq and Afghanistan today, we've smashed foes in battle. And besides, we have no appetite for more wars. Since we don't want them and nobody else wants to take us on, logically we won't need a military capable of fighting. The logic is impeccable. So taking risks with training and readiness is really just a prudent and acceptable risk to maintain our industrial base. So we'll produce fancy new weapons but fail to provide the logistical back up to use them or allow our military to train on them sufficiently.
Don't fool ourselves. We won't fool enemies.
UPDATE: Strategypage has more on the poor mobilization effort:
South Korean intelligence has concluded that the North Korean armed forces are no longer in any shape to go to war. This was discovered a year ago, when North Korean artillery fired on a South Korean island. North Korea apparently felt this act of naked aggression would actually compel the south to counterattack. So North Korea armed forces were ordered to mobilize for war. These preparations were apparently ordered without much warning. So too, apparently, was the attack on Yeonpyeong Island.
Worse, despite what has been apparent even to pajama-clad bloggers looking from afar, the North Korean leaders did not know this. They ordered the bombardment thinking that it would lead to war. Still, even though the North Koreans assumed bombarding the island would lead to war, they did not plan to initiate general war by invading South Korea, so they have some inkling that their military has eroded. If the North Koreans don't think that their military is capable of even defending their country, what will they do?
This mess was apparently more of a shock to northerners than to military experts in the south. American and South Korean analysts have been tracking the North Korea armed forces for decades, and have carefully monitored the decline of the military up there. The North Korean generals were apparently more inclined to believe their own propaganda. This sorry state of affairs apparently will make the northerners even more reluctant to give up their nuclear weapons.
And what other strange (and dangerous) things do the rulers still believe?
UPDATE: Not that believing strange things is restricted to North Korean elites. No, I'm not taking a cheap shot. But how much worse must it be in Pyongyang if it is that amazingly clueless here? I'm sure the North Koreans believe they've made all the right decisions, too. I'm sure they continue to believe that. In a year or two, they might firmly believe they've fixed all the problems that the mobilization effort revealed.
