"Solving the Siege of Seoul" Topic

"Regardless of one's opinion of Steve Bannon's White House legacy, he stated the military conundrum that is North Korea well: "'Until somebody solves the part of the equation that shows me that ten million people in Seoul don't die in the first 30 minutes from conventional weapons, I don't know what you're talking about, there's no military solution here, they got us."…"
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"They got us…"

That is until we alter the parameters.

When my wife and oldest son lived with me in Seoul we were within range of their longest artillery, definitely a nervous situation. The ROKs have a quiet plan to evacuate but don't practice it as that would be admitting the unthinkable to them scenario of abandoning the capital again. The US and other allied nations don't play by those same rules- we practice Non-Combatant Evacuations every year. Although I do admit my knowledge is now several years old, and everything I just said is open source info.

making North Korea that powerful is like. Making Iraq that powerful in opening stages of the war. How much of their stuff will be around after the first salvo? I think the shellacking they will get will drive their artillery almost none existent. Yes their will be casualties. But the war games south Korea have been practicing will be put into play. Would make for an interesting Team Yankee scenario!

No attack that the US and allies are capable of is going to neutralize that artillery fast enough to prevent huge civilian casualties. And practicing a massive evacuation of civilians in Seoul is going to look very much to the North Koreans like a prelude to genuine war, which might be enough to provoke a strike in itself.

Could a first strike by North Korea crater our runways before our air forces could even get in the air? I guess our intel would pick up warning signs to prevent this. But even if all our aircraft get airborne, what could they do to stem the tide short of using tactical nukes?

Could a first strike by our air forces neutralize enough of the North Korean arillery which is in range of Seoul? Even if we could neutralize 90%, that would still mean thousands of shells hitting Seoul.

I think Brannon has it right on this one. It's a military stalemate. A lose lose.

The biggest problem is that all the guns within range of Seoul are deeply dug into granite.

Nothing short of nukes is going to dig them out. Thermobarics or chemicals might kill the crew and make the guns unusable, but chemicals aren't on the table for the US.

US bases are out of major artillery range of the DMZ, but bigger rockets like SCUDs could still reach them.

So yeah, any conflict on the Korean Peninsula starts with the assumed destruction of Seoul.

Going all sci-fi here, but with the advent/deployment of laser weapons, could we design and field a laser based anti-artillery platform in the next few years? Something like the Hammer's Slammers calliope tank. The US would need a slow, and secret build of up of said weapons to be able to shoot down arty shells in flight. But it would be a huge game changer.

the navy has one in use on a zumwalt. the army has 1 laser tank on experimentation. if i can get the picture here. willpost it.

@Stryderg: In theory. But we'd need to put MANY of them around Seoul. There are 30,000 (not a typo, thirty thousand) artillery pieces pointed at Seoul, and the laser systems I've seen in tests are only killing about one shell every second at the fastest (and one missile every 5 seconds regardless of whether it's a TOW or a Titan).

So we'd probably need over a thousand lasers to cover Seoul.