Are you willing to fight the North Korean army yourself Eric? Would you join the Swedish military if they joined in an international mission to fight North Korea? Or do people like my cousin's ex husband and the guy at Miami Subs who I used to work with, who are currently in the military, have to go and fight this war so you can feel better about the world?
Noone would have to fight it on the ground. The believe in ground troops is pretty old-fashioned.
The navy can do the job, with the additional help of drones. It's enough to bomb their central intelligence (presidential palace, military capacity, that sort of things).
The North Korean military has enough artillery and troops on the border to storm into South Korea at the first instant. If we can break through their air defenses quick enough and destroy their leadership compounds, the order will be thrown out to nuke Seoul and storm across the DMZ.
Precisely.
Back in 1994, when Clinton was contemplating strikes against North Korea, the U.S. military prepeared an estimation. In case of war, North Korea would face a sure defeat, but before that's achieved, as many as 100,000 American troops and millions of South Koreans would be dead. Now North Korea got the nuclear weapons, so it would be even worse.
You can't just quickly knock them out.
The accuracy of US munitions has grown substantially in the last 20 years. If we had ample forces in the region these armored columns and artillery pieces would be sitting ducks. Not saying they couldnt try to get through a nuke and lob artillery which would inflict substantial loss of life, but the US and allies could pick apart a conventional army rather quickly. It would be a massacre. These are precisely the wars we are good at fighting... which makes our decision to not thin the toyota pickup truck population all the more frustrating but that is another topic.
