Must Read: Winning the Information War inside North Korea
by Richardson ~ January 8th, 2008. Filed under: Defectors & Refugees, Diplomacy, Economics, Geopolitics, History, North Korea, Nuclear Proliferation, ROK Miltary, Reunification, U.S. Military, U.S.-Korea Relations.The latest edition of the Military Review, a publication of the US Army’s Combined Arms Center located at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, has an excellent paper on, “Finding America’s Role in a Collapsed North Korean State.” (PDF) An excerpt:
American military and political thinkers today are focused on creating policies to govern stability operations, but this invariably presumes the deploy¬ment of American Soldiers to advance U.S. inter¬ests. Direct stability operations are needed in Iraq and Afghanistan, but are they always necessary?
I propose the United States should adopt a new stability operations strategy, one based not on the deployment of American Soldiers but, rather, on setting conditions and providing logistical support for a third country to conduct stability operations that advance U.S. interests. For several reasons, the Korean peninsula is an excellent candidate for such a strategy.
The United States should begin creating the diplomatic conditions now to justify and support a South Korean-led occupation of North Korea. The best way to begin is by winning the information war inside North Korea.
This is the sort of strategy the U.S. should pursue regardless of who is in the White House. Read the entire article here.
January 8th, 2008 at 7:29 pm
I don’t know….
North Korea is too unique a case….It has been so successful in isolating its people and built so much of its sense of society on a hatred of the US, we plainly can’t go into NK unless it is an ABSOLUTE must.
Letting SK do the ground work is about the only way to go.
But, I don’t know if you can say that about too many other nations.
Somalia (and perhaps Afghanistan) were cases that I can see with this because of how decentralized and chaotic they were. But, a nation like Iraq (and probably Iran) are more the norm and more managable…
January 9th, 2008 at 11:14 am
China and the US have very different agendas, and once the regime does collapse (it is not a matter of if but when), and I have to agree something needs to be done now and have some kind of solid plan in the event it does happen. The main problem I notice is the Korean question is not on the forefront of the agenda not for Washington or others I know. Korea is far away, the DPRK is not really known, and frankly, people do not seem to care.
That is a tragedy in my view because once the regime does go away and there is no plan in place, it will be one of the biggest humanitarian and political nightmares the world has seen in a long time. When that will happen is anybody’s guess, but usually things happen at the worst possible time. I think it is a good idea to act now instead of later. Why? There is a lot of work to be done and a lot of sticky negotiation.
January 10th, 2008 at 12:09 am
It will be really interesting to see how it plays out…
….because you also have big (potentially very big) things that come up like the recent election in South Korea. For the past ten years, since the President Kim Dae Jung and Sunshine era began, you could really work together with South Korea on plans, at least that is what it seemed like from the outside. Like that operational plan that was big political news on the anti-US front under the Roh administration.
The election of Lee, and his transition staff’s early talk of scrapping the Unification Ministry altogether, has completely changed the environment.
Lee and a conservative government still will work to avoid a collapse of the North as their key policy, but they will certainly be game to making serious contingency plans for different possible collapse scenerios at the military and staff levels (as opposed to front-page, frequently talked about “big picture” type policies presidents announce to the public).
If Bush could have just hung onto his balls and patience long enough, and kept his ear turned toward others, if he could have just waited for the South Korean election, we would have found ourselves in a much better position to do some real preparation.
But, given Bush’s flipflop and the current US election cycle, I think much of the window of opportunity Lee’s victory could have brought in creating useful NK policy and plans has been closed.
Without a firm, immediate sense of partnership with the US on even just broad strokes of a NK policy with Lee early on, he will drift quickly to the gravitational pull of South Korea’s unified fear of having to unite with the economic basketcase of NK.
By the time the next president takes the White House, whoever it is, has settled down and figured out that North Korea exists, it will be too late —- nobody will see a need to do much or even have seen that we had an opportunity to do something. In short, it will take too long for the current crop of US presidential hopefuls to really get up to speed on the North to realize what they could have done with a President Lee and a Korea willing to vote so overwhelmingly for conservative candidates. And before they get that realization (if they ever do), Lee will have moved away to other ideas of his own.
The best hope we have, ironically enough, is that North Korea will help us out by doing some outrageous stuff….
….which given NK’s track record, it could actually happen.
If North Korea reacts with brinkmanship to anything Lee does, Pyongyang could help throw Washington and Seoul together at just the time it would be great to have Washington and Seoul work together.
Given how much North Korea didn’t see that they needed to throw Roh Mun-Hyun many more bones to boost the popularity of the Sunshiners in the South the whole time Roh was president, I give it a fair chance that Pyongyang will not see that going after Lee and making provocations is not in NK’s best interests at all — that what it needs to do is lay low for a year to a year and a half and let the US and SK stay focused on their domestic scene….
January 10th, 2008 at 12:11 am
“For the past ten years, since the President Kim Dae Jung and Sunshine era began, you could really work together with South Korea on plans”
That should be a big NOT work together with South Korea on plans….
January 10th, 2008 at 12:15 am
“Without a firm, immediate sense of partnership with the US on even just broad strokes of a NK policy with Lee early on, he will drift quickly to the gravitational pull of South Korea’s unified fear of having to unite with the economic basketcase of NK.”
Here’s the picture….
Imagine you are Lee and talking about scraping the Unification Ministry and you turn on CNN to hear Christopher Hill talk about how we still have progress in Agreed Framework 2.0….
…or better yet….
Imagine a gung-ho Lee on the phone talking to ANYBODY who is leading the current policy views on North Korea in Bush’s administration today……
The idea of Lee remaining gung-ho quickly vanishes…..
January 10th, 2008 at 1:51 am
On the first part, yes, indeed. President-elect Lee is on record stating his desire to see North Korea survive and reform.
As for the second part, I do not think there is a need for a future tense.