[Oberon]

Originally Posted by Mr Quatro

Think about how a conventional war would be over in three days ... all NK strategic targets eliminated on first strike ... No NK air force or navy left when the NK army runs out of supplies and the war is over.

No nuclear fallout ... rocket man dead or missing in action. White flag is flown as the entire world slams America for doing such a vile and terrible thing to a poor nation like NK.

Excellent!

Now back to reality.

The US has no chance of finding all of the DPRKs nuclear missiles, it took days of hunting back in the 1990s to get Saddams scuds and that was in the relatively flat terrain of Iraq. North Korea has mountains and tunnels everywhere. They have spent sixty years fortifying their country.
As for hitting 'Rocket Man', you mean like how the US immediately managed to hit and kill Saddam Hussein on the first day of the invasion of Iraq? You know, that important mission where they killed him at Dora Farms where he hadn't been in five years.
So, the US launches an attack, or perhaps even before it does, North Korea launches...not just one missile, not some artillery shells...but its entire nuclear arsenal. There's two scenarios, the best scenario is that they just hit South Korea, Guam and Japan, in an attempt to destroy as many airfield and military bases as possible. The worst scenario is that they go all out and target cities in South Korea, Japan and the US mainland. The latter is more likely than many would think since we've been telling Kim Jong-un for several months that we're going to kill him as early as possible in our attack...so why should he sit around and wait to be killed when he can kill as many Americans as possible on the way down?
Of course, the nuclear missiles are just part of the fun, mixed in with them will be all kinds of chemical and biological weaponry, which will rain down on Seoul and Tokyo, perhaps even American cities too. Kim Jong-un has seen the Invasion of Iraq, he's seen the invasion of Afghanistan, he knows that the US has a major advantage in air power...so why do you think that he's going to sit back and let the US smash him into the dirt like a good little boy? He knows the best way to beat the US airforce is to launch everything before the US airforce can reach it. Which means if he even gets a itch on the back of his head that a US decapitation strike is coming in, he launches. If his radar system malfunctions and tells him that a US cruise missile is heading for Pyongyang, he launches. The North Korean missile system will not be set up to fail safe, it will be set up to fail deadly. Even if by some miracle we do kill Kim Jong-un in the first few minutes of the attack, the loss of communications will prompt the missile forces to launch. Have you ever heard about how the Royal Navy SSBN force detects that a nuclear war has begun? It listens to hear communications from headquarters...if it can't get headquarters then it listens for the BBC Radio service, if it can't get that then it's assumed that London is now an atomic crater and the captain opens the envelope of last resort.
Chances are that the DPRK has a similar system, so killing Kim Jong-un and/or destroying the DPRK communications network will basically tell the missile commanders to fire.
At this point it's basically a dice game as to whether the missile interceptors will get them all, but with an estimated 1,000+ ballistic missiles within North Korea, some will get through. At that point you just pray that whatever comes through just as a conventional warhead.

So, at this point Seoul is in ruins, Japan is on fire, there's a reasonable chance that a couple of US cities are on fire and hundreds of thousands have just died. Now it's time to actually start the war with North Korea.
Remember Japan in World War II? Japan was quite an open society compared to North Korea. Go and read up on Operation Downfall.

Done? Ok, you'll note that the US military is still using Purple Heart medals which were made for Operation Downfall. The estimate by the US military for casualties during the invasion of Japan was greater than every single casualty suffered by the US in war since 1945. A DoD report from a while ago estimated 200,000 to 300,000 US and ROK casualties within the first 90 days, and that was before nuclear weapons got factored into the equation.

Do you really think that a populace which has been brainwashed for sixty years is just going to fold? Especially if you've just taken out their leader. It would have been a bit like killing the Japanese Emperor before you bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Do you think that the North Korean military has not noted the weakness of American forces to asymmetric warfare which has been waged against it by insurgents in Afghanistan and Iraq?

Think about it seriously for a moment, and think about the conflicts since 2001, and now think about a force that has chemical, biological and nuclear weaponry conducting insurgent style attacks against US forces. Think of the death toll.

Sure, the Allied forces would win, there's no question that the US would win a war with North Korea, but at the end of it there's probably going to be a lot of caskets with American flags on them landing in US airbases. As well as the big clear-up operations in whatever cities have had their centers destroyed. Oh, and the Asian economy would probably collapse, which means that the global economy would go with it. Oh...and if the US hits North Korea first, then there's always the possibility that China will step in, in fact, there's that possibility anyway if the US decides to invade North Korea. So that would be fun.

So yeah, easy stuff, should be over by Christmas.