User blog comment:Daxus Inferno/Real Countries?/@comment-4780584-20130402142849/@comment-3398633-20130402162521

They do lack fuel, but if China or Russia get involved, then it would be over for South Korea. North Korea's tech is obselete, but it still works. For instance, American and South Korean fighters were designed for long range combat, not dogfights. Korea is a densely populated region, and most of the fighting would be up close. North Korean fighters are nimble, made for point-to-point killing, and are more manuverable. They can climb higher and faster than an American jet, and have more munitions for fighting up close, where as most American jets don't even have guns, but just long-range missiles.

The M-1 Abrams is a beast. But as was shown in Iraq, they are best suited for wide open terrains, not the narrow valleys found in Korea. The North Korean tanks are designed for that kind of terrain, and are much more mobile. Plus, they can kill an Abrams. With two shots, the reactive armor is gone, and the second with penatrate and kill the crew. While most of the population is starving, the soldiers are not. Remember that North Korea is governed by the military for the military. That's where all the water and resources go. The army is fat and healthy, the people supporting it are not.

The US government recognizes North Korea as a very dangerous enemy, and even regards it as one of the very, very few nations that can wage a total war with the United States. They have the largest submarine force in the world, and remember, an American battlegroup has but a few subs for every carrier. Enough North Korean subs, and that precious $15 billion dollar carrier sinks to the ocean floor. Even though their weapons aren't advanced, they were made to work, to kill, and to be mass produced. They could overrun enitre positions were those weapons, solely because they have a lot of them.

Factor in the fact that the North Koreans have nothing to lose in a war, and you have an enemy capable of beating the United States just as Vietnam did. Also, those B-2's are expensive (there's a good reason we only have 14 of them), and the government doesn't want to risk using them in a conflict they could be destroyed in. The bombers were show of force. In reality, we have no idea what to hit in North Korea, and the CIA director called their intelligence operations there "the single greatest series of failures in intelligence history." How do you expect we use these advanced bombers if we don't even know what to use them against?

North Korea is a maze of bunkers, tunnels, hidden hangers, gun emplacements, and barbed-wire. Any American-led force going in there is going to lose thousands of troops. Its a fact. I'm not a fear-mongering, but I've read and studied enough military history, technology, logistics, and strategy (its hobby) to understand that North Korea is a beast unto itself.