We wargamed the collapse of North Korea and we've leaked we have issues to work through:
While not all lessons learned from the exercise were fully hashed out in this unclassified setting, some officers involved expressed their views of how the past decade of war has influenced how the Army prepares to fight.
“We’ve had the luxury in the last several wars of a place called Kuwait” from which to launch troops and stage equipment, one officer said. “I think our skills have atrophied in the call you get in the middle of the night,” and in forcible-entry operations from the air and sea. Skills haven’t been kept fresh in doing things such as loading trains full of equipment, and in setting up new command posts, he said.
Another leader agreed. “We have been spoiled by a command-and-control network that has been established for a decade” in Afghanistan and Iraq, he said, adding that the Army has to get back to training to operate in an austere environment.
Yeah, we must have completely forgotten the advance into Afghanistan with no easy way into that landlocked country.
And deploying into Saudi Arabia through Dhahran to advance into Kuwait 250 miles north in 1990-91; and deploying into Kuwait in 2003 to advance 350 miles into Iraq spoiled us.
Gosh, if only we had some type of advanced and wealthy country nearby North Korea with an advanced military and civilian infrastructure plus established command-and-control facilities that we could use before a crisis. If we had that, advancing the 120 miles from Seoul to Pyongyang might be doable, logistically speaking. Gosh, if that hypothetical country had a large and advanced military, too, that would be pretty ideal, wouldn't it?
So while some of the problems discussed are real, if our military can't overcome them, whose can? For goodness sake, beef up the engineering contingent that we plan to send for the scenario and make sure we have railway building capabilities to push north of the DMZ.
And if we can't use South Korea as a launching pad to march north, where could we? I call BS on this article. It sounds more like wargaming excuses not to intervene.
