The curtain coming down on the Stalinist Theme Park of North Korea.

On June 25, 1950 the army of North Korea rolled south and invaded the Republic of Korean (South Korea, or the ROK).  The North Korean Army, equipped and trained by the Soviet Union, looked as if it was about to make short work of the South Korean Army.

 South Korean Army band, and military policeman, 1987.

This was not because the North Korean army was so good, as would soon be seen, but rather because the South Korean Army was so very bad.  Trained in only a very rudimentary fashion by the US after World War Two, the South Korean Army suffered from the fact that its conscripts were of an overwhelmingly primitive rural background and that the U.S. didn't regard Korea, a former colonial province of Japan, as being particularly important in any fashion.  To compound it, after the Second World War, the United States came to the conclusion that all future wars would be nuclear wars, and therefore it didn't really need to train its own Army that much.  That reflected itself back on what little we did to arm and train South Korea's army.  The ROK army still had horse cavalry in 1950, and some South Korean soldiers lacked shoes of any kind. 

The Korean War would be the wake up call.

 ROK M48s, 1987.

Stunned by Nationalist China, an Allied power during World War Two, falling to the communist in 1949, the US suddenly regarded the Korean Peninsula as a dagger pointed at Japan, which the US cared about very much.  So, contrary to all expectation, when the North Koreans rolled south the US suddenly went in.  Fortunately for the US, the negligent neglect of the military would not prove to be fatal, in no small part because the US had a massive reservoir of men who trained and fought in World War Two, which had only been over for five years.  The Regular Army was full of men who had trained to fight the Germans and the Japanese who were mixed in with men who had entered the service post war and hardly been trained at all.  National Guard units were likewise packed with men who had seen service in the Second World War.  The US was able to get by, and get to Korea.  Making a stand on the Pusan Perimeter, General MacArthur, serving as the US administrator of Japan, conceived of an end run using Marines at Inchon that resulted in a collapse of the North Korean army.  North Korea was saved from defeat only because the Red Chinese came to their aid when the advancing American, UN, and ROK forces came to close to Manchuria. That act, however, significantly came not because the Peoples Republic of China loved the Communist regime in North Korea, but rather because the PRC couldn't imagine having American troops on its immediate border.

The South Korean Army that performed so badly in 1950 was first rate by the 1960s, and was one of the most effective anti communist armies to fight in the Vietnam War.  That army remains one of the best in Asia today.  It's a modern, effective, army.

South Korean M48 tanks, approximately 20 miles or so south of the DMZ, in 1987.

South Korean infantry in 6x6 truck, 1987.

The North Korean army, however, is not.  It was a poor army in 1950 through 1954, when it took on the anemic South Korean army and nearly beat it in 1950, only to face being rolled up and defeated that same year by a U.S. Army that hadn't reequipped since World War Two, and which had largely stopped training to fight a conventional ground war..  Only the Red Chinese, with an army that had been fighting, in one fashion or another, back into the 1920s, and with a massive manpower reserve, kept North Korea in existence.  Frankly, had the US not neglected its own military from 1945 to 1950, and kept an army trained to its 1945 standards, and equipped in way reflecting the lessons of ground combat from 1939 to 1945, the Chinese also would have suffered defeat.  The Chinese were mostly able to rely on sheer mass, more than anything else.  That work in 1950 to 1954, but in learning the lessons of this war, and applying them to the possibility of a war with the Soviet Union in Europe, the US developed the technology and strategies to cope with fighting a numerically superior foe. By the 1990s, it was pretty clear that the yields of that strategy were so vast, that the American army was incapable of being defeated in a war against a conventional enemy, no matter who that enemy might be.  Nuclear war, and guerrilla wars, however, remain different in consideration.

South Korean M38A1 with recoiless rifle, 1987.

The Peoples Republic of China has taken this to heart, but by all appearances, the North Koreans have not.  In spite of fielding a few impressive large weapons platforms, they're at best a 1970s vintage Soviet style army in terms of equipment, and a 1920s style Soviet army in terms of the manpower base making up the army.  Should the North Korean army actually tangle the with the modern South Korean army, the results would be disastrous for the north.  In spite of that, however, the appearances are begging to suggest that they really don't know that.

South Korean army compound, 1987.

Prior to the fall of the USSR, the North Koreans had been able to rely upon the Soviets and the Red Chinese to back them up, both economically and militarily.  In other words, the economic impact of a completely failed system was relatively minimal, given the subsidization of the other two major Communist countries; and there was little risk of the North having to really pay militarily for any blunders it might make.  Economically, however, that day is long gone.  With the collapse of the USSR, North Korea is having to more or less pay its own way in the world.  It still gets some  help, but only some, from the PRC, which was never completely comfortable with North Korea in the first place, as it seemed a little too close to the USSR in some ways. Economically, the Chinese aren't helping the north much, in spite of the fact that an economically depressed North Korea is creating a Korean illegal immigrant problem in Manchuria, as desperate North Koreans cross the Yalu into China.

And the China of 2013 isn't the China of 1953.  Communism fell in the USSR, where it got its start, in 1990.  In China, it morphed.  This may be hugely significant for how this story might play out.

China of 1953 was a Maoist state, not quite Stalinist, but no better and varying only, really, in that it was lead by a different brutal Communist dictator.  In some ways, the People's Re public of China remained more communist, longer, than the USSR, but like the unnaturally Communist Slavic empire to its north, the unnatural Communist state to its south no longer is really a Communist state.  It's not a nice regime either.  It's a dictatorship of a type, but not really a Communist one.  It more closely resembles the clerical dictatorships (dictatorships of clerks, i.e., professional bureaucrats) that broke out in some European states mid 20th Century.  And China is open for business.  Indeed, China is dictating business.  It's not really capitalist, but it isn't Communist either.

 Tank retriever of HHB, 3d Bn, 49th FA, Wyoming Army National Guard, 1987.

The dictatorship in China will fall, ultimately, but for the time being its politburo is a ruthlessly pragmatic, expansionist, entity. And it doesn't benefit from a nuclear armed Stalinist state being next door.  It doesn't benefit from the U.S. having a military presence on the Korean Peninsula either.  And it sure wouldn't benefit from the resumption of the Korean War.

It would, however, benefit from a reunited Korea, as long at that Korea was friendly to it, and open to business for it.  It likely doesn't care what kind of government that Korea has either.

 

Bus garage, Seoul, 1987.

South Korea, for that matter, would still like to reunite with the north, although that view is passing as a generation of South Koreans raised in peace and prosperity looses connections with their cousins to the north.  For those who would reunite Korea, that era is passing, and the best time to accomplish it is now.  Otherwise, the disparity in economics and, more significantly, culture may have grown too great for a younger generation of South Koreans to really look upon reunification with much enthusiasm.

 

 Seoul, 1987.

Finally, truth be known, the US would probably be happy to leave South Korea, if it could.  Indeed, we came close to doing so once before, during the Carter Administration, but Congressional reaction kept it from happening, probably wisely. Since that time, in fact, we've had to act on more than one occasion to make it plain that we would come to South Korea's defense, if the North attacked.

Only Japan really has a strong interest in keeping the United States on the Korean Peninsula.  Neither the Chinese or the Koreans like the Japanese, and the US presence there is comforting for Japan, which is pretty nervous about recent developments on the Asian mainland as it is.

 Howitzer battery, U.S. Army, South Korea, 1987.

8in Howitzers of the 3d Bn, 49th FA, Wyoming Army National Guard, in South Korea, 1987.

8in howitzers of the 3d Bn, 49th FA, in a cabbage field, South Korea, 1987.

That's all why I suspect that not only are the North Korean threats childish bluster, or more accurately a childish tantrum, but that this may work out in short order.

We'll see, but my suspicion is that China will act to replace the Korean leadership shortly.  That could happen in any number of ways, but if I were the "Dear Leader" I'd be nervous about accepting any invitations to visit Beijing in the near future.  At any rate, it'd be an easy matter for the PRC to send Kim Jong-un into retirement, followed by a the rise of a friendly military dictatorship. That dictatorship would likely be prearranged to be very brief, with the leaders looking forward to retirement at some plushy villa in southern China.  Prior to that, they'd be the heroes by opening the border and indicating that the days of Korean division were over, and that the ROK could come in and take over.  That my sound farfetched, but we saw it with Germany, in which the Communist East Germany folded itself into the Federal Republic of Germany.  Soon after such a reunification, we'd likely go home, our presence no longer needed or desired.

From that, China would get a neighbor that wasn't run by a nuclear armed baby, and it'd get a neighbor with a robust free market economy.  South Korea would reunify with the north prior to developments making that undesirable, and the United States could end a lengthy expensive overseas commitment that serves only a singular goal, rather than a global strategic goal.  China would also get us off the Asian mainland, which it'd likely like to have done.  It would amount to sort of the Finlandization of Korea, but I suspect that everyone, except Japan, would be happy to have that occur.

Your humble blogger, in South Korea, in 1987.