SD: I feel we've gotten away from the original argument, so I'm going to re-boot this:
Quote:
Originally Posted by SportsDino
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.
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My point was that you can continue to oppress a country just fine without much in the way of military hardware. A combination of a loyal military, automatic weapons, and propaganda will work.
Plus, it's easy to say that you'll put the country on lockdown and blow up any military hardware that shows its face, but how long are you willing to spend the money to keep military satellites on 24-hour surveillance and launch $million-a-pop cruise missiles to zap random tanks?
This is not to say that I would be against zapping via remote control a good portion of NK's conventional military capability. My understanding, however, is that we have not done this because it's figured it would encourage an actual invasion and/or use of nuclear weapons and then the situation simply gets more-and-more messy from there.
Also, it is my understanding that SK prevents us from doing this because, in general, they wish to handle their relationship with NK themselves. To which one could argue: "OK fine, if we can't do this our way, then we're leaving." But if we do that, then either NK invades and gets SK's industrial capacity, or they don't but have increased autonomy. Neither situation helps our non-proliferation aims.
Yet another tactic would be a series of targeted assassinations of NK's leaders until either a) the whole country destabilizes and SK can invade and reunite the country or b) a more reasonable leader takes power. However, there's still an effective international ban on this type of thing (adhered to only by certain states, of course), so....