Stardate 20021218.1238

(Captain's log): Doug writes:

It was another very interesting post on North Korea. I do have a question about one of your comments about possible kill ratios if there is a war there.

If I understood your comments correctly, you said that there could be a casualty rate of 5:1 or 10:1 if there is a war. Since the lives of the North Koreans don't matter as much to their leadership (although they obviously do to their families), this ratio may be acceptable to the political leaders.

My very limited understanding of the Korean War is that the difference in munitions and equipment between the two sides wasn't significant. That is, although the Allies were slightly better equipped, the difference wasn't enormous and the terribly cold weather tended to even out the differences.

However, now I would imagine that the differences in equipment and training would be considerably heavy in the Allies' favour. Not only are all the Allies' weapons current, but they have been tested in battlefield conditions. Obviously, the terrain is different between Afghanistan and North Korea, but absolute air superiority would result in similar tactics.

Therefore, I'm curious (as opposed to critical) about the 5:1 or 10:1 ratios. Is it possible that they're a bit conservative? That said, of course, it's not clear that a 10:1 or 25:1 ratio make any real difference to the US strategy.....

Trying to calculate combat effectiveness is very complicated, because so many factors enter into it. The general idea is that not all men on the battlefield are equally effective, and that man-for-man the soldiers of one army, or one particular unit in that army, may be more dangerous and better fighters than those of a different unit or different army. The differences can be quite stark.

The purpose of such a calculation is to try to get some sort of handle on just how many men of one army would be needed to counter a given threat by the other. It's crude but it at least gives you some kind of idea of the situation.

When we attacked Iraq in 1991, the Iraqi military actually outnumbered the coalition force which attacked it. And fairly large parts of the coalition force were pretty useless. The real fighting was done by the British and Americans; the Arab force and the French contingent were along for the ride but didn't really contribute anything important.

If you judged the battle on the basis of the press briefing that Schwarzkopf gave after it was clear that we'd won, you'd get the idea that everyone had done a lot of fighting, but Schwarzkopf was being a good General and helping his commander-in-chief win politically as well as militarily, and it was necessary to stroke some of those allies by lying about them. And if you really judge the way he designed his battle plan, and the way it was actually fought, it becomes clear that he didn't really trust anyone except the British, and made sure that every assignment given to anyone else was either led by or heavily supported by reliable American troops who could make sure to win even if the allies broke and ran. So, for example, all the Arab forces were formed into two corps and placed on the right flank, with the eventual assignment of liberating Kuwait City. But they flanked two Marine divisions and an American armored regimental combat team, and it turns out that the Marines did all the fighting. The Arabs are shown in all the film reports as being the first to enter Kuwait City, but they only did so after the Marines chased the Iraqis out.

So the core of our force was maybe a third the size of the Iraq force in terms of raw numbers of men, but I think it's obvious that they were far more effective man-for-man, and the result was one of the most lopsided battlefield victories in the history of modern warfare.

There are a lot of things which contribute to making an army more effective, and by far the most important are morale and training. I can't emphasize this enough. You don't fight a war with weapons, you fight it with soldiers, and the best equipped army in the world whose soldiers don't want to fight is a useless waste of time. It should be pointed out that "morale" means more or less the will to fight and stay engaged in combat, and it doesn't necessarily come from loyalty and belief in the cause. It sometimes comes about because the soldiers are brainwashed, and it sometimes happens because they fear their own leaders more than they fear the enemy. When you study the Red Army in WWII, that's the kind of thing you find. The men were fighting for Mother Russia, and because they hated the Germans, and because they really feared what would happen to them if they didn't fight.

But using negative means to gain battlefield effectiveness can easily backfire and you're better off with troops who fight because they care about winning and believe in what they're fighting for. And another factor in morale is if they believe that they're good and believe that they have a good chance of winning, for few want to die in a lost cause.

Training is at least as important especially when you're trying to prepare a peace-time military, because the first encounter men have with real combat, especially for the infantry, is very disturbing. Combat is chaos and fear, with men screaming and dying all around you and everything seeming to go wrong, and it's easy to become disoriented and simply not know what to do. When you're well trai