Attacking North Korea Is Unthinkable. Or Is It?

If radical concessions like pulling troops off the peninsula won't work, the U.S. will have to take out Kim's nukes and artillery from the air.
By Tobin Harshaw
January 27, 2018, 8:00 AM EST

Old bomber, new targeting technology. Photorapher: Ethan Miller/Getty Images
For any number of foreign-policy pundits, nonproliferation zealots, late-night chatterbots and enterprising T-shirt vendors, the Donald Trump-Kim Jong-un feud has been the gift that keeps on giving career advancement.

Yet for all the debate over how to deal with North Korea's nuclear weapons, there are really only three options. The first, to which the vast majority of national security and military professionals are resigned, is remarkably unsatisfying: live with it. North Korea apparently already has a small arsenal of functioning warheads and its missile tests show an ability to reach the continental U.S. It's too late to turn back the clock. Let's try to keep Kim in a box and focus on not getting into the same pickle with Iran. (Although some of us think that's inevitable as well.)

The second is to reinvent the wheel and come up with a form of statesmanship that will succeed where decades of other policies have not. Bill Clinton tried carrots (oil and aid). George W. Bush tried sticks (sanctions and opprobrium). Barack Obama tried something called "strategic patience," which was as ineffective as it was rhetorically nonsensical. Donald Trump's approach, unsurprisingly, has been all over the place, but mostly centers on nasty tweets and undermining his own secretary of state.

To be fair, some people have been thinking outside the diplomatic box. Last week, this column featured eminent law professor and former White House staffer Philip Bobbitt, who argued that the U.S. and China should cut a bilateral deal in which Beijing would take North Korea under its security umbrella in return for Kim putting his nuclear program in mothballs. Others call for revivifying the moribund six-nation talks, or for letting the North keep its fissile material but give up its long-range missiles, or a long term plan of "deterrence and gradual rollback."

As for the third option -- a military solution -- it's been pretty much discarded as a nonstarter. Even if we somehow avoided a nuclear exchange, the damage to Seoul from North Korean artillery be would so vast as to render the idea unthinkable. Or would it?

This week I tracked down somebody who has actually been thinking quite a bit about it: retired Air Force General Merrill "Tony" McPeak. McPeak has the distinction of being the only person to have served as both Air Force chief of staff (from 1990 to 1994, during Operations Desert Storm and Desert Shield) and also as the service's acting secretary. Prior to that, he was commander of all Pacific air forces, so he knows a thing or two about what a "hard target" North Korea is. With a three-volume memoir of his military career finally completed, McPeak took time to share his contrarian views on how both diplomacy and hard power could finally break the logjam with the Kim Jong-un regime. Here is an edited version of our chat:

Tobin Harshaw: Tony, we first met in early 2003 in the run-up to the Iraq invasion, and there was a big debate at the time over whether airpower alone could win a war -- remember Shock and Awe? You said something to the effect that that, yes, airpower could win wars, but the one place where it absolutely couldn't was North Korea. And I think we're learning that lesson again today, right?

Merrill McPeak: Well, I'm not sure I will give you the same answer today -- airpower has changed a good bit in the last 15 or so years. We are much more precision-oriented now as far as munitions go.

The real problem that I had in the early 21st century was the guns that are dug in on the reverse slope of the hills just above the DMZ. There are thousands of them; they're on rails and they've got blast doors. They can run them into a cave, close the doors, load and cock, open the doors, run them out and shoot, run them back in. So they are tough targets to attack. And some subset of the whole actually ranges Seoul, which means millions of people and, what, two-thirds of the net worth of South Korea. So my concern was that Seoul would be very, very badly damaged in the opening minutes of any encounter.

Yet the advantage that those guns have -- being in caves and protected by blast doors -- it also has a big disadvantages. They're not mobile; other than a few feet to get in and out of a cave, they're not going anywhere. And they are at known positions. We know the coordinates of every gun. Nowadays, we can drop GPS-guided ordinance on coordinates with a miss-distance of just 10 meters. A 10-meter miss with a 2,000-pound conventional bomb means that gun is out of action, because the blast doors would cave in. The people inside will likely be out of commission for a while. This is a different kind of a threat to those guys.

I still think that in the opening moments of any aerial campaign against the North there will be some damage in Seoul, probably considerable. But I no longer think that you have to go in and take those guns out with ground forces. I think you could probably silence the guns pretty rapidly from the sky, especially those that range Seoul.

TH: Of course, those guns aren't the whole shooting match.

MM: Yes. In the meantime, you have to go after the nuclear infrastructure as a very high priority. And also you have to go after the command-and-control, including decapitating the major national command authority at Pyongyang. And I'm a little less confident about some of those targets because they are mobile. Kim himself is mobile. And the last rocket shots I saw from their nuclear program were mounted on mobile platforms. So we're going to depend on a lot of intelligence that has to be real-time, whereas the coordinates of these artillery pieces are not going to change.

TH: So what would taking out the nuclear-weapons infrastructure involve?

MM: It involves everything from beginning to end in their nuclear-munitions category and in the transportation category. The rocket-production infrastructure and the bomb-production infrastructure. That is a target set that is end-to-end attackable. Some of it may be deeply buried, which means you probably can't get at it, but you don't need to break every link in the chain, just enough that it stops production. You want to attack launch-pads, you want to attack the warehouses that the rockets are in, you want to attack the factories that are producing rockets, you want to attack them en route to a launch site.

So there's an end-to-end target chain that you can interrupt at any point and disable the whole system, but it depends on real-time intelligence, and to some degree that means intelligence that's not under Air Force control -- a lot is CIA.

TH: Would this require things other than air power like Special Forces on the ground?

MM: No. Special Forces are really good, although a lot of times they get in trouble and then you've got to divert everything else you've got to save them. But I believe we can put together an air campaign that A) brings an end to the artillery threat to Seoul rather rapidly and B) disrupts and disables their nuclear-munitions delivery capability rather rapidly. And that can be done totally by air. I'm not talking about just U.S. Air Force, but Navy air and Marine air -- everybody has got an air force, the CIA has its own air force -- so we are going to have to cooperate here.

TH: Assuming there is no nuclear exchange, is there any way of estimating how bad the damage to Seoul would probably be?

MM: I think it depends on how skillful we are at handling this problem. And that's a whole other thing, because we're not showing a lot of cleverness these days.

One idea would be to say to Kim, "OK, we are setting a deadline here" -- say it's next January -- "and by the end you will either be dismantling your nuclear capability under international inspection or we will help you dismantle it." If you give that kind of deadline, in the meantime you continue all your diplomatic efforts, all your economic sanctions, the effort to get the Chinese and the Russians to help, and everything else. All the other instruments of national power need to be brought to bear on this problem before we resort to military attack.