Thunder Run to Seoul: Assessing North Korea’s War Plan
Raymond Farrell | April 25, 2017
For Westerners, North Korea is perennially on and off of the headlines. This year, the confluence of a new US president, the US missile attack in response to the use of chemical weapons in Syria, and an apparently in-your-face program of missile and nuclear tests on the part of North Korea has returned the world’s last Stalinist state to comment threads and coffee-room speculation. Military professionals obviously follow these events even more closely, and Maj. ML Cavanaugh’s recent thoughtful pieces for MWI serve as an example.
But for military planners in South Korea (the Republic of Korea or ROK) and the United States, planning for war with North Korea (the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea or DPRK) has been constant since the last Korean War ended in 1953. Indeed many will be aware that the Korean War ended in an armistice only, rather than a formal peace treaty, so that the two sides remain technically at war. An interesting consequence of this is that while Western military staff colleges spend a great deal of time studying strategy and campaign design, ROK planners focus purely on one strategic problem and one campaign: Korean War II.
https://mwi.usma.edu/thunder-run-seoul-assessing-north-koreas-war-plan/
