On 24 May 1997, The Boston Globe published an op-ed by Bernard E. Trainor entitled "Worst Case Scenario: Suppose North Korea Starts a War." General Trainor (USMC, ret.) offers a scenario in which a desperate regime in the North initiates a second Korean war with the objective of forcing a political change on the peninsula that would somehow resolve their hold on power. Beginning with long range missile and commando attacks on key ports and air bases, the North Koreans would launch a massive ground invasion across the length of the DMZ. Although Trainor agrees that South Korean defensive preparations for such an attack are extraordinarily good, he insists that North Korea could break through if they concentrated enough mass in an all-out offensive. With a breakthrough of the South's defensive line the North could take Seoul, and with Seoul in their possession, Trainor believes the Northern generals would establish a strong defensive line to its south and hand that "victory" over to their political bosses and diplomats with which to negotiate a peace favorable to the North's objectives. Trainor admits that this outcome of a new Korean war is unlikely, but he points out that frustrated and desperate rulers have taken similar risks in the past.

What is odd about Trainor's worst case scenario in Northeast Asia is that it stops short of the war's concluding chapter. As General Trainor surely knows, should a major war break out South Korea and its allies have plans to counter-attack and destroy the North Korean regime. At this delicate moment on the Korean peninsula American citizens should pay special attention to this climatic part of the scenario.

The first thing we should consider is that today's Allied policy is the mirror image of the Cold War Soviet policy; Soviet policy was first and foremost to avoid war, but if a general war broke out the Soviet generals planned to go all out to push the US off the European continent. Soviet capabilities caused great fear in Europe and in the US; so much so that the US and its allies adopted war plans to quickly escalate war violence to the nuclear level in a "desperate" scheme to deter the Soviets from their war plans.

The second thing to consider is that the old Soviet plan was framed as a "counter-attack," just as are Allied plans to invade North Korea today. It wasn't the semantic difference between "counter-attack" and just plain "attack" that concerned the West, but the capabilities the Soviets amassed to implement their war plans. Professional military officers in NATO had to prepare to counter Soviet capabilities then, just as today professional military officers in North Korea prepare to counter the capabilities of South Korea and its powerful ally, the US.

If we want to decrease the small, but plausible, likelihood of desperate North Korean war behavior we must pay special attention to how they are likely to perceive the increasing military advantage of South Korea and the US. With their economy in shambles and their social cohesion beginning to unglue under the pressure of famine, North Korean military leaders must take seriously their vulnerability to invasion. Without relaxing our guard in the South we should quietly reassure the North that we do not threaten them with invasion. We can signal this to their military leaders by decreasing the deployments in the region of those Army, Navy and Air Force units most suitable for Allied counter-attack or invasion and by a compensatory increase in the deployment of units optimized for defense of key places and assets in South Korea (especially the ports and bases that figure in Trainor's scenario.) We must avoid the temptation at this delicate moment to increase Allied military pressure on the North with the vain idea that pressure will somehow deter desperate behavior. We can learn from our own reaction to Soviet defense doctrine that such postures increase tension and make desperate solutions seem more rational.

Citation: Charles Knight, General Trainor's Korean War Scenario Is Only Half the Story, Project on Defense Alternatives. Cambridge, MA: Commonwealth Institute, 04 June 1997.
http://www.comw.org/pda/trainor.htm

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