Some pretty cool shit.

BOOM!

Make sure you set the video to 1080P HD.

a political demonstration but a fascinating one.

90 foot fucking fast rope!

fuck that shit.

I liked working with the ROK Army. They were great.

Now that was cool!  

South Korea best Korea

wow, now that is what I call a real shooting range.

I like how they blew up the target that looked like a hospital. Kill the enemy wherever they're at

HOLY SHIT! I thought they had already retired the last phantoms.

Would love to be a spectator at something like this.

First thing I thought as well!

Not being particularly knowledgeable on the subject of modern military technology, strategy or tactics, I gotta ask:

It would appear that on the modern battlefield, quite a bit hurt can be delivered both quickly and accurately.


In light of this, in a reasonably evenly-matched, conventional conflict, how does one... win?

Most efforts are along the lines of "Take out his HurtDeliverySystems first".  If his aircraft are pummeling your ground forces while your aircraft are pummeling his ground forces, you've done something wrong.

Out last the other guy. Wars of maneuver will quickly turn into wars of attrition, as the weaponry, ground and air, are just too effective and the rapid movement means exploiting a breakthrough is hard as counter attacks can happen fast. Basically, whoever runs out of the good equipment first, they lose. In the mean time, a shit load of highly trained officers, NCOs and soldiers will be dead on both sides, and a lot of money lost.

Read Red Storm Rising, a pretty entertaining and descriptive fictional account of a hot war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact, minus nukes or chemical weapons.

Also "Team Yankee."

maneuver trumps firepower for obvious reasons.  

The objective is to "find, fix and destroy."  How you "fix" the enemy is somewhat a mystery.  In the case of delivering that much firepower in a small area you have to have reserves to counter attack the force that exploits that area because the force there is either going to be annihilated, or, more likely, they will withdraw.

The clash of mass between equal powers is not of concern to the US simply because of nuclear weapons.  arguably the same is true in the korean peninsula.  if SK massed that much combat power in a 2 square mile area, would NK use a nuke to wipe it out?  

Who knows?  and thats the point of deterrence.  Mitigating risk on a possible nuclear battlefield is why the army developed the pentomic division.

its a tactical paradox.  you must mass force at the decisive point, but you cannot mass it to the point that you invite the use of unconventional weapons to wipe it out.

that paradox reigns supreme in our Korean scenarios.  It will become an issue in the middle east very soon with an upcoming nuclear iran.

Yeah, that was a pretty good book too. I used to love military techno thrillers, they painted a pretty decent picture of what a high intensity maneuver war would look like. Larry Bond actually did one about a NK invasion of SK, called Red Phoenix.