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I'd rather avoid Vietnam and Fallout 3, we'd only need to smoke out (or bunkerbuster) the military hardware. I'd personally say leave a trail of destroyed military machinery and then ditch the place, launching a missile whenever they try to build anything somewhat sophisticated.
If you make it so the military is afraid to come out of their hole, you let the unwashed villagers do whatever the hell they want. Our problem in Vietnam is we are trying to occupy a territory where people hated us, and were living all around us every day (same in Iraq/Afghanistan). My solution is to not live there, just kill anything we hate that does live there, and leave the mess for them to clean up or prey upon each other.
I doubt they'll be able to keep a repressive closed borders regime when all of their military is sitting scared shitless in a bunker, and when they try to roll a tank to suppress a revolt in a village it gets blown to bits by a bomber.
Basically play to our strength and most importantly, don't present our people or property with any weaknesses by not making it accessible to attack. If we don't have a base crawling with Iraqis or Vietmaneese in close proximity I'd like to see them get close enough to do guerilla tactics. Same with the British in the Revolutionary War, they did reasonably well at occupying strong points, particularly where they had naval support to break up approaching attacks. They sucked ass trying to travel or go cross country, where terrain knowledge played to guerilla strategy. Or in maintaining industrial/civilian capacity when the populace was littered with militants or 'traitors' (from their perspective).
The problem is people consider war to be occupation, and they think with their egos instead of their heads. All we need to do to North Korea is disable its capacity to project attacks on South Korea, we don't need their shitty land, let them rot in it. We don't need the nuclear fallout from that option, the threat being not direct radioactivity or retaliation capability from North Korea, but rather secondary damage to South Korea and China which will make them royally pissed off at us. A nuclear option should only be considered from the standpoint of disabling North Korea launching a nuclear attack on its neighbors, in which case we have enough moral high ground and backup from China (which doesn't want nukes flying in its backyard, bad for business) to at least constrain the costs to environmental damage and not political blowback.
Does this make any sense? An occupation would go exactly as you describe, they'd burrow and we'd spend years digging out guerilla fighters while getting spit on by the people. On the other hand, a military ass whooping, we identify their concentrations of equipment and men, devastate them, and prevent them from controlling the population. We also don't present any targets of opportunity for them to rally the people around.
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