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Why would NK generals ever agree to a war? They are on the top of the food chain in NK. If they went to war they would lose instantly. Better to just sabrerattl

Why would NK generals ever agree to a war? They are on the top of the food chain in NK. If they went to war they would lose instantly. Better to just sabrerattle and get some benefits rather than start a war for no reason. There is no ideology or religion behind NK unlike groups like ISIS. If Kim Jong Un tried to push for a war, he would be deposed in a second and replaced by someone who “gets it”.

SEJeff 6y ago
That’s literally my point. Everyone, including them, knows they’d lose and the gravy train would stop. There is no way they’d ever do a premature attack. It’s insane.
- cle 6y ago
  History is filled with people doing insane things.
  - lambdasquirrel 6y ago
    Well the kicker is that the North Korean foreign policy is predicated on them trying to appear as insane as possible to other people, without really being actually too insane. And maybe ironically, not really an act that any sane person want to play or be a part of.
    - ganafagol 6y ago
      But the people involved literally don't have a choice. What do you think their alternative is? Let it be, go home, take a beer out of the fridge, lay down on the sofa, watch some football and call it a day? That's not how the life of those generals looks like. Easy to claim what "a sane person" would do from the arrogant POV of a western average citizen, but reality looks very different.
      - samus 6y ago
        Their defense policy is the same as the US: don't attack, else you risk slagging of your city/ies. This is the core of MAD. You don't maintain MAD by not promising you are going to shoot back.
- arethuza 6y ago
  Soviet generals were all for a war with the US at the time of the Cuban Missile crisis even though they knew they'd come off very badly. I don't think there was anything unusually irrational about them - people just do crazy things in situations like that.
  - chefkoch 6y ago
    Because they thought the US would nuke them first. And from what i read there we're enough crazy generals who wanted to exactly do that during the cold war.
    - arethuza 6y ago
      Absolutely, a lot of people wanted a "preventative" war against the Soviet Union notably Curtis LeMay: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1995/06/19/the-general-and-world-war-iii https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1995/06/19/the-general-an... I've even had people on HN arguing with me that such a war was the "rational" thing to do - which I found rather disturbing, to say the least.
ojbyrne 6y ago
You should probably read about Serbia circa 1914.
- ddalex 6y ago
  That was an excuse, not a trigger for war. War was desired by all parties - at least in the beginning. People celebrated when war started - look up archive photos and movies. Everybody thought that they'll have a nice fight, down a beer at the pub afterwards and be home by Christmas - effectively rehashing the last Prussian war 30 years before. What nobody perceived at that time is technology changed enough to make the war catastrophic, and it took 2 world wars for that perception to sink in.
rtkwe 6y ago
Depend on a lot. Kim could pull a much more literal version of Nixon's Saturday Night Massacre to find someone willing to follow the orders, who knows how that would play out.
fatbird 6y ago
The Japanese generals and admirals agreed to the attack on Pearl Harbour despite the admiral leading it reminding them that their own wargames showed such a scenario as leading to Japan's defeat--pretty much as what actually happened, with US industrial capacity eventually swamping Japan's war effort, even with the Southern Resource Area secured. Humans don't reason, they rationalize.
- avar 6y ago
  Taking a swing at Mike Tyson in the parking lot before the match is pretty dumb, but if your alternative is facing him in the ring it's probably your best option. That was the context of Japan attacking the US at Perl Harbour[1]. The US had already effectively declared war on the US at that point from the point of view of Japan. They'd demanded an unconditional withdrawal from China. There's some alternate history where Russia never sold Alaska and Japan military bases there. What do you think if the US had done in 1941 if Japan demanded it withdraw from the "occupied" territory West of the Mississippi and return it to native control, while amassing a fleet in Russian/Japanese Alaska? Furthermore, maybe Japan just wanted the US withdrawn from New Mexico & Nevada[2] (post 1937 occupied territories), but left the demand delibirately ambiguous so as to suggest everything west of the Mississippi (Manchuria)[2] (search for "was later deleted"). I'm not suggesting those are morally equivalent, but merely that Japan at the time pretty much saw it that way. Manchuria was around half of the empire's territory. So suggesting that Perl Harbor wasn't reasonable is a pretty big stretch. Unless one of your options is to effectively become a vassal state of the US (unconditionally abandon >50% of your territory) war was inevitable. At that point they could either take the initiative at Perl Harbor, or wait until the US attacked them at its leisure. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attack_on_Pearl_Harbor#Diplomatic_background https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attack_on_Pearl_Harbor#Diploma... 2. http://www.sdh-fact.com/CL02_1/56_S4.pdf http://www.sdh-fact.com/CL02_1/56_S4.pdf
  - dotancohen 6y ago
    Thank you for this assessment. If you're as versed in other historical wars as the Pacific front, I would love to hear your assessments of Operation Barbarossa, Israel's six-day war, and the Russian intervention in Krim. All conflicts are difficult to find non-biased assessments of, but those three each have nuances that that are rippling through the years and I would love to further understand them.
varjag 6y ago
> There is no ideology or religion behind NK You lost me here.
- howlgarnish 6y ago
  The ideology of the NK leadership is survival. They're not trying to spread Juche throughout the world with messianic zeal, all they want to do is stay on top of the dung heap.
  - varjag 6y ago
    Their ambitions are curbed by their capacity, nothing more. The initial phase of NK existence was militant expansion, arrested only with crushing military defeat. The broad framework of Communist states at the time was establishing world dominance through force and persuasion, although they couldn't agree on the exact pace and methods. NK was in this respect not an outlier, the Kim v1 likely seeing his role in the new world order less marginal than ruling half a peninsula. In particular, anti-Japan sentiment was and still is cultivated throughout society. In 2020 it can not be ascribed to realistic self-preservation interest. And in either case, the very fact they do have ideology means a lot. Certain decisions are going to be made not due to strategic and personal interest but to an abstract rulebook not necessarily in sync with reality. Therein lies a huge danger not covered by assumptions of rational actor model.
    - remote_phone 6y ago
      NK is barely surviving. They don’t have enough ammunition and fuel for a full blown war. They don’t care about religion or doctrine. They are not trying to spread communism. They have no delusions they can take the Korean Peninsula. Without anything motivating themselves besides just trying to survive, the motivation of everyone to fight is very low. That doesn’t make for a good dedicated army. Most NK soldiers would surrender as soon as they could.
  - FooBarBizBazz 6y ago
    Side note: Even if the leadership were True Believers (which I agree they aren't), Juche doesn't seem like the kind of ideology that could really be used to justify expansion. I understand it to be pretty ethnocentric. At most it would support unifying Korea. But I don't see it trying to expand outside "the homeland". You might see import substitution, less-open borders, restrictions on foreigners, stuff like that. If Korea had some grand historical claims I could see it going irredentist, but I don't think those claims exist.
Udik 6y ago
The truth is that NK would never ever move a finger against the US, it wouldn't make the slightest sense. On the other hand, it does feel threatened, and having a dangerous weapon and acting reckless keeps possible attackers at bay. But if an all-out war between NK and the US started, it would be started by the only ones who can possibly think of winning it, that is the US.
- posix_me_less 6y ago
  Why NK can act only rationally, while US could choose to act irrationally? Both sides can act irrationally, as history shows.
  - Udik 6y ago
    Why would it be irrational for the US to attack (a non nuclear-ready) NK? If NK didn't have nuclear weapons, invading it would be an option for the US- as they did recently with Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. I'm not sure what the gains would be, but it's not completely irrational to start a war when you have such overwhelming military superiority.
    - bigbubba 6y ago
      It is 'more rational' for an American president to avoid war with NK and leave it as something for his successors to deal with. Kicking the can down the road is easier than a war where potentially a few million South Koreans get killed in the crossfire. This is, after all, what American presidents have been doing for the past few decades.
    - remote_phone 6y ago
      Same reason why the Korean War ended. China wouldn’t like a US-friendly country so close to its borders. NK is a great buffer zone and a great way to keep US distracted over South Korea. If NK gets overtaken it means Korea would extend all the way to china’s borders which they would not accept.
    - posix_me_less 6y ago
bigbizisverywyz 6y ago
Based on that I'm actually surprised SK basically adheres to the rules. I"m pretty sure though that a determined effort to overthrow NK by sneakier means would move the needle a lot. E.g. making small scale incursions, or military maneuvers that 'mistakenly'cross the border by about 10 km, but now we refuse to budge. oops we landed on this small shoreline here, but we'd like to stay. What, You're all starving? We sent a massive peace mission backed by unarmed troops, and lots of food - win hearts and minds. Basically play a constant game of chicken with them, call their bluff and needle the regime whilst taking chunks of territory at the same time. It might soften the border enough and cause so much stress to the regime that it collapses by itself.
golergka 6y ago
That's assuming that they are acting rationally, which is a pretty big assumption. Yes, winning at politics requires some skill and intellect, but it doesn't mean that the winning actor is intellectual or rational.
billfruit 6y ago
Also in the mid 90s during Clinton times, the level of engagement between US and NK had warmed enough that US even agreed to supply nuclear reactors to NK. If I am not wrong one of them was even actually partially installed in NK, before construction was halted abruptly by the NK nuclear test.

SEJeff 6y ago

That’s literally my point. Everyone, including them, knows they’d lose and the gravy train would stop. There is no way they’d ever do a premature attack. It’s insane.

cle 6y ago
History is filled with people doing insane things.
- lambdasquirrel 6y ago
  Well the kicker is that the North Korean foreign policy is predicated on them trying to appear as insane as possible to other people, without really being actually too insane. And maybe ironically, not really an act that any sane person want to play or be a part of.
  - ganafagol 6y ago
    But the people involved literally don't have a choice. What do you think their alternative is? Let it be, go home, take a beer out of the fridge, lay down on the sofa, watch some football and call it a day? That's not how the life of those generals looks like. Easy to claim what "a sane person" would do from the arrogant POV of a western average citizen, but reality looks very different.
    - samus 6y ago
      Their defense policy is the same as the US: don't attack, else you risk slagging of your city/ies. This is the core of MAD. You don't maintain MAD by not promising you are going to shoot back.
arethuza 6y ago
Soviet generals were all for a war with the US at the time of the Cuban Missile crisis even though they knew they'd come off very badly. I don't think there was anything unusually irrational about them - people just do crazy things in situations like that.
- chefkoch 6y ago
  Because they thought the US would nuke them first. And from what i read there we're enough crazy generals who wanted to exactly do that during the cold war.
  - arethuza 6y ago
    Absolutely, a lot of people wanted a "preventative" war against the Soviet Union notably Curtis LeMay: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1995/06/19/the-general-and-world-war-iii https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1995/06/19/the-general-an... I've even had people on HN arguing with me that such a war was the "rational" thing to do - which I found rather disturbing, to say the least.

ojbyrne 6y ago

You should probably read about Serbia circa 1914.

ddalex 6y ago
That was an excuse, not a trigger for war. War was desired by all parties - at least in the beginning. People celebrated when war started - look up archive photos and movies. Everybody thought that they'll have a nice fight, down a beer at the pub afterwards and be home by Christmas - effectively rehashing the last Prussian war 30 years before. What nobody perceived at that time is technology changed enough to make the war catastrophic, and it took 2 world wars for that perception to sink in.

rtkwe 6y ago

Depend on a lot. Kim could pull a much more literal version of Nixon's Saturday Night Massacre to find someone willing to follow the orders, who knows how that would play out.

fatbird 6y ago

The Japanese generals and admirals agreed to the attack on Pearl Harbour despite the admiral leading it reminding them that their own wargames showed such a scenario as leading to Japan's defeat--pretty much as what actually happened, with US industrial capacity eventually swamping Japan's war effort, even with the Southern Resource Area secured. Humans don't reason, they rationalize.

avar 6y ago
Taking a swing at Mike Tyson in the parking lot before the match is pretty dumb, but if your alternative is facing him in the ring it's probably your best option. That was the context of Japan attacking the US at Perl Harbour[1]. The US had already effectively declared war on the US at that point from the point of view of Japan. They'd demanded an unconditional withdrawal from China. There's some alternate history where Russia never sold Alaska and Japan military bases there. What do you think if the US had done in 1941 if Japan demanded it withdraw from the "occupied" territory West of the Mississippi and return it to native control, while amassing a fleet in Russian/Japanese Alaska? Furthermore, maybe Japan just wanted the US withdrawn from New Mexico & Nevada[2] (post 1937 occupied territories), but left the demand delibirately ambiguous so as to suggest everything west of the Mississippi (Manchuria)[2] (search for "was later deleted"). I'm not suggesting those are morally equivalent, but merely that Japan at the time pretty much saw it that way. Manchuria was around half of the empire's territory. So suggesting that Perl Harbor wasn't reasonable is a pretty big stretch. Unless one of your options is to effectively become a vassal state of the US (unconditionally abandon >50% of your territory) war was inevitable. At that point they could either take the initiative at Perl Harbor, or wait until the US attacked them at its leisure. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attack_on_Pearl_Harbor#Diplomatic_background https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attack_on_Pearl_Harbor#Diploma... 2. http://www.sdh-fact.com/CL02_1/56_S4.pdf http://www.sdh-fact.com/CL02_1/56_S4.pdf
- dotancohen 6y ago
  Thank you for this assessment. If you're as versed in other historical wars as the Pacific front, I would love to hear your assessments of Operation Barbarossa, Israel's six-day war, and the Russian intervention in Krim. All conflicts are difficult to find non-biased assessments of, but those three each have nuances that that are rippling through the years and I would love to further understand them.

varjag 6y ago

> There is no ideology or religion behind NK You lost me here.

howlgarnish 6y ago
The ideology of the NK leadership is survival. They're not trying to spread Juche throughout the world with messianic zeal, all they want to do is stay on top of the dung heap.
- varjag 6y ago
  Their ambitions are curbed by their capacity, nothing more. The initial phase of NK existence was militant expansion, arrested only with crushing military defeat. The broad framework of Communist states at the time was establishing world dominance through force and persuasion, although they couldn't agree on the exact pace and methods. NK was in this respect not an outlier, the Kim v1 likely seeing his role in the new world order less marginal than ruling half a peninsula. In particular, anti-Japan sentiment was and still is cultivated throughout society. In 2020 it can not be ascribed to realistic self-preservation interest. And in either case, the very fact they do have ideology means a lot. Certain decisions are going to be made not due to strategic and personal interest but to an abstract rulebook not necessarily in sync with reality. Therein lies a huge danger not covered by assumptions of rational actor model.
  - remote_phone 6y ago
    NK is barely surviving. They don’t have enough ammunition and fuel for a full blown war. They don’t care about religion or doctrine. They are not trying to spread communism. They have no delusions they can take the Korean Peninsula. Without anything motivating themselves besides just trying to survive, the motivation of everyone to fight is very low. That doesn’t make for a good dedicated army. Most NK soldiers would surrender as soon as they could.
- FooBarBizBazz 6y ago
  Side note: Even if the leadership were True Believers (which I agree they aren't), Juche doesn't seem like the kind of ideology that could really be used to justify expansion. I understand it to be pretty ethnocentric. At most it would support unifying Korea. But I don't see it trying to expand outside "the homeland". You might see import substitution, less-open borders, restrictions on foreigners, stuff like that. If Korea had some grand historical claims I could see it going irredentist, but I don't think those claims exist.

Udik 6y ago

The truth is that NK would never ever move a finger against the US, it wouldn't make the slightest sense. On the other hand, it does feel threatened, and having a dangerous weapon and acting reckless keeps possible attackers at bay. But if an all-out war between NK and the US started, it would be started by the only ones who can possibly think of winning it, that is the US.

posix_me_less 6y ago
Why NK can act only rationally, while US could choose to act irrationally? Both sides can act irrationally, as history shows.
- Udik 6y ago
  Why would it be irrational for the US to attack (a non nuclear-ready) NK? If NK didn't have nuclear weapons, invading it would be an option for the US- as they did recently with Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. I'm not sure what the gains would be, but it's not completely irrational to start a war when you have such overwhelming military superiority.
  - bigbubba 6y ago
    It is 'more rational' for an American president to avoid war with NK and leave it as something for his successors to deal with. Kicking the can down the road is easier than a war where potentially a few million South Koreans get killed in the crossfire. This is, after all, what American presidents have been doing for the past few decades.
  - remote_phone 6y ago
    Same reason why the Korean War ended. China wouldn’t like a US-friendly country so close to its borders. NK is a great buffer zone and a great way to keep US distracted over South Korea. If NK gets overtaken it means Korea would extend all the way to china’s borders which they would not accept.
  - posix_me_less 6y ago

bigbizisverywyz 6y ago

Based on that I'm actually surprised SK basically adheres to the rules. I"m pretty sure though that a determined effort to overthrow NK by sneakier means would move the needle a lot. E.g. making small scale incursions, or military maneuvers that 'mistakenly'cross the border by about 10 km, but now we refuse to budge. oops we landed on this small shoreline here, but we'd like to stay. What, You're all starving? We sent a massive peace mission backed by unarmed troops, and lots of food - win hearts and minds. Basically play a constant game of chicken with them, call their bluff and needle the regime whilst taking chunks of territory at the same time. It might soften the border enough and cause so much stress to the regime that it collapses by itself.

golergka 6y ago

That's assuming that they are acting rationally, which is a pretty big assumption. Yes, winning at politics requires some skill and intellect, but it doesn't mean that the winning actor is intellectual or rational.

billfruit 6y ago

Also in the mid 90s during Clinton times, the level of engagement between US and NK had warmed enough that US even agreed to supply nuclear reactors to NK. If I am not wrong one of them was even actually partially installed in NK, before construction was halted abruptly by the NK nuclear test.