User blog comment:Daxus Inferno/Real Countries?/@comment-4780584-20130402142849/@comment-1375165-20130402180135

Vivaporius, your line of thinking is exactly what would be the undoing of a country at war with the United States. You're thinking in terms of outdated Cold War-era tactics that have no place in modern warfare. How many troops you can field means nothing when a bomber can level several square kilometers of land, without fear of reprisal, in one run. Submarines are floating deathtraps when they lack the technology to stealth against modern sensors and manoeuver from anti-submarine weapons. The United States and, I'm going to extrapolate, South Korea, would not fight primarily with soldiers on the ground and boats in the water. Air superiority would win major engagements. As US analysts have said, the North Korean air force "has a marginal capability for defending North Korean airspace and a limited ability to conduct air operations against South Korea."

However, you're right about the defensive capacities of North Korea. An invasion of their territory would effectively be suicide for even the most capable modern military. Their air defenses are modest but numerous and effective, and their ground defenses are basically impenetrable. But that's exactly why neither the US nor South Korea would incorporate an invasion in their strategy. It would, as you've pointed out, be a display of tactical stupidity.

No, the war would have two objectives: neutralize any military operations of North Korea outside their borders and force North Korea into submission by a war of attrition. There is no doubt that US-South Korea can accomplish the former through air superiority. With destruction of exposed targets by long-range missiles, isolation from international commerce, and the massacre of any troops leaving North Korea, the latter would be accomplished as well, it being only a matter of time.

I'm not arguing that North Korea isn't dangerous. Even if analysts have discounted their air force, their threats of long-range missiles are paltry at worst, and their nuclear program is a joke, the North Koreans field an impressive army with reserves numbering in the millions of experience citizens and are sufficiently focused on a state of total war. There is good reason to watch them and prepare for the worst, since they are one of the few countries psychotic and powerful enough to be a threat to lives. But they don't have the supply or technology to win a war.