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Comment by NoMoreNicksLeft

7 days ago

>It's extremely difficult to believe that the US could fly a bunch of helicopters to Pyongyang or Tehran and do the same within 30 minutes.

Would your answer change if China were somehow guaranteed to not intervene? Because I'm not sure the obstacle here is North Korean defenses, so much as Chinese intervention.

Tehran? I think it'd go more or less like Caracas did.

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NoMoreNicksLeft

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JasonADrury  6 days ago

>Would your answer change if China were somehow guaranteed to not intervene? Because I'm not sure the obstacle here is North Korean defenses, so much as Chinese intervention.

No. The obstacle isn't Chinese intervention, the obstacle is that such an operation would have to be significantly larger and it would take longer. There would be much more air defense assets to suppress, and some of them would be impossible to effectively defeat.

A helicopter assault on either of those cities would in the most optimistic scenario take hours of preparatory bombing, which would give a plenty of time for nuclear retaliation by North Korea. Both countries would also certainly have better safeguarding mechanisms for their heads of state, during that bombing they would be evacuated and now you'd probably be looking at the very least at a weeks-long operation.

Assassination is a different thing, but I would suspect that for purely psychological reasons a rapid kidnapping operation like this would be far less likely to invite anything more than symbolic retaliation than a single targeted missile strike. This kind of operation would be far more confusing for the enemy than a simple assassination, and the window during which for example nuclear retaliation might make sense tends to be rather small.

>Tehran? I think it'd go more or less like Caracas did.

Tehran doesn't have a fancy air defense network, but it does have one. They'd have shot down every single helicopter. You don't even need fancy missiles, a bunch of .50cal machine guns will do the trick.

  • NoMoreNicksLeft  6 days ago

    >A helicopter assault on either of those cities would in the most optimistic scenario take hours of preparatory bombing, which would give a plenty of time for nuclear retaliation b

    I have serious doubts they can manage anything more than a fizzle yield, but also only give them a one-in-three chance of a successful ballistic launch. It may be the case that they don't even have the preparatory work done, in which case hours isn't enough to launch, they'd need days/weeks. In any event, we're talking about one or two missiles only, and the Navy's ability to shoot those down in the midcourse/terminal phase is sufficient for such a small salvo.

    If North Korea wanted to nuke us, they'd be better off handing the warhead off to some terrorist group to truck it across the Mexican border. Supposing their stuff is even small enough to smuggle.

    >Tehran doesn't have a fancy air defense network, but it does have one.

    But it doesn't have a China willing to rush in with 1 million PLA infantry. Which is really North Korea's only saving grace. Even if we got Kim out before they could mobilize, they'd be strutting and posturing for weeks, and there are any number of places they could fuck things up in retaliation. Korea, Taiwan, Philippines, Japan, they might even stir shit up with India. They could, one supposes, send a few divisions to Russia on loan, and enter into the Ukraine fray. And no clever strategy is going to counter that stuff. Some of this stuff they're already considering and only hesitant... a North Korea operation might goad them into working up the courage to try it.