DPRK Military Tactics

vesicles

vesicles

Colonel
noone536 said:
3. also i do not agree with the part that pointblank said that the side with better military thechnology always win. ( this is not always the case because guerrilla fighting is very difficult especial against a country with a strong will to fight for their leader)
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I have to disagree with that. When someone has to go to guerrilla fighting, it means the territory has been taken. It's the last resort of anything. Guerrilla fighting cannot win a war because the side using the guerrilla fighting style has lost its ability to gather enough resources to push the occupation force out. I think everyone understands the importance of resources in fighting wars. When you lack food to eat, cloth to wear, manpower to fight and steel to make guns and even bullets, how can you win a war? It merely becomes an annoyance.

When we talk about guerrilla fighting, the famous CCP propaganda song comes to my mind: "if we don't have guns and cannons, enemy will make them for us..." So simply put, it is assumed that the guerrilla troops can steal resources from the occupational force. However, a PLA strategist debunked that myth when interviewed for a documentary and said that when the resource has been controlled by the occupational force, it's never possible for the guerrilla to gather meaningful resources to mount any meaningful attacks. His words: "when you steal one gun from your enemy, they force 100 of your own countrymen into slave labor and make 1000 more guns..."

The goal of a guerrilla fighting is to distract the occupational forces long enough for any meaningful conventional forces to gather and regroup, i.e. so called "trading space for time". If you don't have any conventional forces, guerrilla fighting won't get you anywhere. And in order to for this strategy to work, you have to equip your conventional forces with the technology that would more or less match that of the occupational force. WWII in China is a classic case for that. The Japanese advance was halted not by guerrilla fighting, but by conventional troops with more experience fighting modern battles and equipped with better weapons, also aided by foreign forces like the Flying Tigers. The contribution from guerrilla fighting was marginal at best. However, in the fighting between the Chinese Nationalists and CCP, the Nationalists were distracted long enough to allow CCP to grow and gather strength. The CCP also used the conventional forces to defeat the Nationalists. It was NOT the guerrilla fighting that finally pushed the Nationalists out to sea, but the conventional PLA did that. And they did that by acquiring advanced weapons mainly from the Japanese who left huge amount of their weapons in Manchuria when they pulled out. Again, technology was a key factor in the CCP's winning of the Chinese civil war. If they stuck with the guerrilla fighting style they employed 20 years before, they would have been eliminated long ago...
 
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solarz

solarz

Brigadier
vesicles said:
I have to disagree with that. When someone has to go to guerrilla fighting, it means the territory has been taken. It's the last resort of anything. Guerrilla fighting cannot win a war because the side using the guerrilla fighting style has lost its ability to gather enough resources to push the occupation force out. I think everyone understands the importance of resources in fighting wars. When you lack food to eat, cloth to wear, manpower to fight and steel to make guns and even bullets, how can you win a war? It merely becomes an annoyance.

When we talk about guerrilla fighting, the famous CCP propaganda song comes to my mind: "if we don't have guns and cannons, enemy will make them for us..." So simply put, it is assumed that the guerrilla troops can steal resources from the occupational force. However, a PLA strategist debunked that myth when interviewed for a documentary and said that when the resource has been controlled by the occupational force, it's never possible for the guerrilla to gather meaningful resources to mount any meaningful attacks. His words: "when you steal one gun from your enemy, they force 100 of your own countrymen into slave labor and make 1000 more guns..."

The goal of a guerrilla fighting is to distract the occupational forces long enough for any meaningful conventional forces to gather and regroup, i.e. so called "trading space for time". If you don't have any conventional forces, guerrilla fighting won't get you anywhere. And in order to for this strategy to work, you have to equip your conventional forces with the technology that would more or less match that of the occupational force. WWII in China is a classic case for that. The Japanese advance was halted not by guerrilla fighting, but by conventional troops with more experience fighting modern battles and equipped with better weapons, also aided by foreign forces like the Flying Tigers. The contribution from guerrilla fighting was marginal at best. However, in the fighting between the Chinese Nationalists and CCP, the Nationalists were distracted long enough to allow CCP to grow and gather strength. The CCP also used the conventional forces to defeat the Nationalists. It was NOT the guerrilla fighting that finally pushed the Nationalists out to sea, but the conventional PLA did that. And they did that by acquiring advanced weapons mainly from the Japanese who left huge amount of their weapons in Manchuria when they pulled out. Again, technology was a key factor in the CCP's winning of the Chinese civil war. If they stuck with the guerrilla fighting style they employed 20 years before, they would have been eliminated long ago...
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This is going off on a tangent, but guerilla fighting *CAN* win a war. Both Vietnam and Afghanistan attest to that.

As for China, I think you underestimate the importance of the CCP in the Sino-Japanese War. The quote: "when you steal one gun from your enemy, they force 100 of your own countrymen into slave labor and make 1000 more guns..." is flawed. It assumes that China has the manufacturing capability (and will!) to support the Imperial Japanese Army. If that were true, Japan's economy would not have been stretched near the breaking point by the end of WW2.

There are many ways for guerilla troops to disrupt, destroy, or capture enemy equipment. Ambushing supply trains is one such tactic. That's the other flaw with your quote: it assumes that production is instantaneous. Sure the Japanese can *try* to produce that much equipment again, but doing so takes both time and resources, even if you are using slave labor. Meanwhile, the newly equipped CCP forces will be able to conduct even more raids!

The CCP also never used guerilla warfare exclusively. "People's War" does not equate guerillas only! The Eighth Route Army was a conventional army, and the CCP was able to build it up largely because of support from guerilla militia troops.

However, the reason I don't think NK will be able to conduct a successful guerilla campaign is because:
1- SK has ample manpower to match NK manpower
2- NK forces simply has no motivation to undertake a guerilla campaign against SK. Should the Kim regime fall, most NKeans would gladly join with the SKeans.
 
MwRYum

MwRYum

Major
Should the story that even the KPA suffers under the current condition (in N.Korea, military gets the top priority in all things, including fuel and rations allotments), that their average nutrition consumption and training intensity have dropped below the par standard, even if the Kim regime decided to go to war against all odds, they'd run out of fuel before they know it...or worse, the Chinese will step in to behead the Kims so-to-speak.

Despite all the rhetoric, the Chinese is at best "tolerate" the Kim regime's existence, so long they do anything less then provoking another war (you just have to hear the complaints the Chinese made whenever the Kim visit China, the disruption to the train schedules is just one of them). If they start something "hot" the Kims are no longer any use to the Chinese, better to snuff it out themselves than let it steamroll into rekindle the Korean war (officially, the war never ended, it was a half a century long ceasefire).

Also, believe it or not, people at Pyongyang (at least the better-do ones) are getting the taste of capitalism, thanks to China the black market is filled with creature comforts and other things that the state can't and won't provide. If their elites just dance the tunes to keep the state from their backs, would there be any effective guerrilla campaign waged at all, without leadership from educated ones? Even Iraqi insurgents are led by veterans who can't find job in the new Iraq...if in the event of the war the S.Korea don't repeat the extremist moves of shooting every communist they caught (well, in N.Korea you can't separate people and the state from the party, anyway), and be generous with the promise of the better life under ROK...the biggest problem that the ROK gov't going to face is to find jobs for their long-lost relatives, millions of them - y'know, many weren't equipped with the knowledge and skill to survive outside the regime. S.Korea will have to face the problem the West Germany faced 20 years ago, on top of the economic and property disruption from the hostilities...

But at least there's a bright side - Seoul might get flattened, but the property price would finally be within reach of the general population again.
 
vesicles

vesicles

Colonel
solarz said:
This is going off on a tangent, but guerilla fighting *CAN* win a war. Both Vietnam and Afghanistan attest to that.
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Well, technically, Vietnam did not win the war in a military sense. The US pulled out for political reasons. And Afghanistan also did not win a fight against the US, who is still occupying the nation.

solarz said:
As for China, I think you underestimate the importance of the CCP in the Sino-Japanese War. The quote: "when you steal one gun from your enemy, they force 100 of your own countrymen into slave labor and make 1000 more guns..." is flawed. It assumes that China has the manufacturing capability (and will!) to support the Imperial Japanese Army. If that were true, Japan's economy would not have been stretched near the breaking point by the end of WW2.
Click to expand...

China at the time had pretty big manufacturing capability. The Manchuria was a huge industrial center in Asia. Even the Soviets wanted to control Manchuria after the Japanese surrendered. In fact, everyone, the Soviets, the US, Chinese CCP and Nationalists, wanted Manchuria for its manufacturing abilities. And Japan benefited tremendously from owning the Manchuria during WWII.

And about "stretching to the limit". Every capability has a limit. Even the US, with the industrial capability that it has now, may feel that it's been stretched thin when it's fighting multiple enemies, albeit the small sizes of those enemies. So even with Manchuria and China's other industrial center in hands, Japan managed to stretched itself to the limit by fighting on multiple fronts and also against an enemy that's simply too huge (China).

solarz said:
There are many ways for guerilla troops to disrupt, destroy, or capture enemy equipment. Ambushing supply trains is one such tactic. That's the other flaw with your quote: it assumes that production is instantaneous. Sure the Japanese can *try* to produce that much equipment again, but doing so takes both time and resources, even if you are using slave labor. Meanwhile, the newly equipped CCP forces will be able to conduct even more raids!
Click to expand...

I do not doubt that guerrilla fighting can be effective, but questioning the objective for using it. The guerrilla warfare is more of a tactical thing, not a strategic thing. You can use it to disrupt the enemy a little, but cannot use it to win a war. The initial comment, to which I was responding, suggested that one can use guerrilla fighting to win a war. I disagree with that.

Further, manufacturing things is a lot easier than stealing things by force. When someone has to use guerrilla style to obtain resources, they have to maintain mobility, which means the force has to be small in number. How many guns and cannons can you physically carry? Not to mention you will have to sacrifice men and guns and ammo to get those guns and cannons. Losing people will be a huge blow to a force that is already small in size. This compares with the manufacturing capacity of even a small factory? No comparison. Plus, stealing things can never be a reliable source for anything.

solarz said:
The CCP also never used guerilla warfare exclusively. "People's War" does not equate guerillas only! The Eighth Route Army was a conventional army, and the CCP was able to build it up largely because of support from guerilla militia troops.
Click to expand...

This actually helps my case. The CCP eventually went with the conventional force because they knew that guerrilla fighting wouldn't get them anywhere.

And it was not because of their initial guerrilla fighting that helped them building up. They were about to be completely wiped out in the mid 1930's. If it weren't because of the Japanese, the Nationalists would have finished them off easily, with their guerrilla militia or not. It was the Japanese who distracted the Nationalists and pulled the KMD from the Northwest. This actually allowed the CCP to survive and gave them enough time to build up. During WWII, the CCP was pretty much left alone. And they were able to get help from the Soviets to obtain all those weapons left by the Japanese in Manchuria. That was THE biggest factor in CCP's eventual rise. Mao said himself that without the weapons in Manchuria, the CCP would be completely useless against the Nationalists. And even with the weapons, they lost battle after battle after battle in Manchuria in the initial phase the civil war. The CCP propaganda emphasized how amazing Lin Biao was in Manchuria. the fact was he was beaten to the bone by the Nationalists. He got a break when Jiang made a critical mistake of pulling his most capable generals from the front line and disassembled his most elite forces when he should have finished off the CCP. This mistrake allowed Lin Biao to regroup and what followed would be history.

solarz said:
However, the reason I don't think NK will be able to conduct a successful guerilla campaign is because:
1- SK has ample manpower to match NK manpower
2- NK forces simply has no motivation to undertake a guerilla campaign against SK. Should the Kim regime fall, most NKeans would gladly join with the SKeans.
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I agree with this!
 
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bladerunner

bladerunner

Banned Idiot
vesicles said:
Well, technically, Vietnam did not win the war in a military sense. The US pulled out for political reasons. And Afghanistan also did not win a fight against the US, who is still occupying the nation.
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You can also consider the Naxalites. They've had a armed struggled far longer than the CCP (40+yrs) and are no closer to achieving their goals.
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solarz

solarz

Brigadier
vesicles said:
Well, technically, Vietnam did not win the war in a military sense. The US pulled out for political reasons. And Afghanistan also did not win a fight against the US, who is still occupying the nation.
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The US withdrew from Vietnam because they could not afford (politically or otherwise) to keep fighting. The Vietnamese Communists ultimately achieved their goal of unification, so they won the war.

As for Afghanistan, I was referring to their fight against the Soviets, but I don't think the US is going to "win" there either. If anything, I'm 90% sure that the Taliban will outlast the US in that country.

China at the time had pretty big manufacturing capability. The Manchuria was a huge industrial center in Asia. Even the Soviets wanted to control Manchuria after the Japanese surrendered. In fact, everyone, the Soviets, the US, Chinese CCP and Nationalists, wanted Manchuria for its manufacturing abilities. And Japan benefited tremendously from owning the Manchuria during WWII.

And about "stretching to the limit". Every capability has a limit. Even the US, with the industrial capability that it has now, may feel that it's been stretched thin when it's fighting multiple enemies, albeit the small sizes of those enemies. So even with Manchuria and China's other industrial center in hands, Japan managed to stretched itself to the limit by fighting on multiple fronts and also against an enemy that's simply too huge (China).
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Here's an article I found:

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Japan, while making strides in Manchuria, never met its goal of economic self-sufficiency. Tied down in China by a military quagmire it had neither the time nor the surplus resources to invest in creating the self-sufficient empire it so desired.

...

Prior to the China Incident Japan had some success in achieving its economic aims in Manchuria. By 1931 Japan had spent 1.5 billion yen in Manchuria an amount rising to 3.7 billion yen by 1936. This was more than the total Japanese budget for any one year. Japan was able to invest in railroads, highways, hydro-electric plants and improve the area's harbours and navigable rivers. Useful amounts of iron, aluminium and other minerals were also discovered. In contrast output of synthetic oil and coal production were modest at best. Both were vital industries where Japan was heavily reliant on foreign sources of supply. The failure of Manchuria to replace these sources was thus a huge disappointment.

...

If Japan was able to make some headway in Manchuria it could make little in China proper. Japan entered the China Incident in July 1937 with plans for a three month campaign involving three divisions costing a hundred million yen. By the spring of 1938 the scale of Japan's miscalculation meant that its entire army was readying for indefinite war, twenty new army divisions were being created and 2.5 billion yen had been appropriated. Large scale warfare of this kind made it impossible for Japan to exploit China's economic resources. Japan could gain any real estate it desired but little popular support. If the average Chinese had remained indifferent, Japan could have manipulated the situation in its favour economically. Instead of indifference most Chinese were however openly hostile to the Japanese as evidenced by widespread guerrilla activity against Japanese military and economic targets. This activity forced Japan to station a large number of troops in the rear of China to protect railroads, bridges and other important economic assets. The sheer size of China meant these troops could only ever be spread thinly and therefore they were deployed either in the cities or to put down the numerous flare ups in resistance. Japan could benefit economically from its position in China only through the use of its military, a military insufficient in size for the job.

...

Manchuria's and China's vast natural resources were considered critical for Japan's continued economic growth and for its ability to fight a total war. Simultaneously the rise of Chinese nationalism and increasingly protectionist trading partners helped to persuade Japan that military action was necessary to achieve its long held dream of an economically self-sufficient empire. This goal Japan spectacularly failed to achieve. While some progress was made in Manchuria, this was short lived and completely undone by Japan's latter invasion of China. By 1940 Japan was more reliant than ever on the West for the resources of war, a West more inclined to side with China than with Japan.
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I do not doubt that guerrilla fighting can be effective, but questioning the objective for using it. The guerrilla warfare is more of a tactical thing, not a strategic thing. You can use it to disrupt the enemy a little, but cannot use it to win a war. The initial comment, to which I was responding, suggested that one can use guerrilla fighting to win a war. I disagree with that.

Further, manufacturing things is a lot easier than stealing things by force. When someone has to use guerrilla style to obtain resources, they have to maintain mobility, which means the force has to be small in number. How many guns and cannons can you physically carry? Not to mention you will have to sacrifice men and guns and ammo to get those guns and cannons. Losing people will be a huge blow to a force that is already small in size. This compares with the manufacturing capacity of even a small factory? No comparison. Plus, stealing things can never be a reliable source for anything.
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I disagree. The Japanese relied on a hostile and unskilled population (in NW China) to produce supplies for a modern army. The CCP relied on a friendly and skilled (in guerilla warfare) population to steal those same supplies.

Also, don't forget that Japan's bottleneck resource wasn't in guns and cannons. It was in soldiers! The largest production capability won't do you any good if you don't have loyal troops to make use of it!


This actually helps my case. The CCP eventually went with the conventional force because they knew that guerrilla fighting wouldn't get them anywhere.

And it was not because of their initial guerrilla fighting that helped them building up. They were about to be completely wiped out in the mid 1930's. If it weren't because of the Japanese, the Nationalists would have finished them off easily, with their guerrilla militia or not. It was the Japanese who distracted the Nationalists and pulled the KMD from the Northwest. This actually allowed the CCP to survive and gave them enough time to build up. During WWII, the CCP was pretty much left alone. And they were able to get help from the Soviets to obtain all those weapons left by the Japanese in Manchuria. That was THE biggest factor in CCP's eventual rise. Mao said himself that without the weapons in Manchuria, the CCP would be completely useless against the Nationalists. And even with the weapons, they lost battle after battle after battle in Manchuria in the initial phase the civil war. The CCP propaganda emphasized how amazing Lin Biao was in Manchuria. the fact was he was beaten to the bone by the Nationalists. He got a break when Jiang made a critical mistake of pulling his most capable generals from the front line and disassembled his most elite forces when he should have finished off the CCP. This mistrake allowed Lin Biao to regroup and what followed would be history.
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The CCP didn't "eventually go with conventional forces", the 8th Route was there from the beginning! If anything, it's the other way around: they went from conventional forces toward a greater reliance on guerilla warfare.

As for the 1930's, that's not really relevant to the issue, as the CCP wasn't even engaging in guerilla warfare at the time.
 
vesicles

vesicles

Colonel
solarz said:
I disagree. The Japanese relied on a hostile and unskilled population (in NW China) to produce supplies for a modern army. The CCP relied on a friendly and skilled (in guerilla warfare) population to steal those same supplies.

Also, don't forget that Japan's bottleneck resource wasn't in guns and cannons. It was in soldiers! The largest production capability won't do you any good if you don't have loyal troops to make use of it!
Click to expand...

The environment where the CCP was in was not as friendly as you would think. Many Chinese helped the Japanese for their own interests. And no matter what, stealing is never a reliable source of anything, while the Japanese had the normal manufacturing base and transportation and supply line. No matter how much of that can be disrupted by a few bands of guerrilla fighters, the normal supply line is always more effective than the stealing done by the fighters.

If the stealing can be effective, why would China spent so much time and energy and sacrifice so much to build and keep the Yunnan-Burma highway open? The purpose of the highway was to keep the supply line open. According to your theory, the Chinese could simply forget about any opening to the outside world and start stealing from the Japanese. However, they didn't do that. They fought hard to keep the Burma highway open (search "the Chinese expeditionary force). Later when that failed, thousands of pilots gave up their lives to air-drop supply into China. If stealing can be effective, why did they sacrificed so much to do anything other than stealing?

solarz said:
The CCP didn't "eventually go with conventional forces", the 8th Route was there from the beginning! If anything, it's the other way around: they went from conventional forces toward a greater reliance on guerilla warfare.
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The 8th army and the new 4th army were pretty much a joke. They might be there from the beginning, but they had done almost nothing. The ONLY battle that the CCP was involved in the WWII was the so-called "hundred-regiment battle" and the CCP had about 1 or 2 regiments in the whole engagement. That was it. All the 4th and 8th armies did was blowing up a couple check points, pretty much what the Iraqi insurgents are doing now. It's a joke. We are hearing so much about how "brave" the CCP armies were because the CCP eventually won the civil war and the CCP propaganda is extremely powerful and effective. remember that the history was written by the victors.

If you look at the casaulties in the WWII, you'll find that the CCP had almost none while they hide and gather forces while Nationalists suffered most of the casualty when they took the Japanese head-on. Starting from 1941 and all way to the end of the war, the Nationalists fought the Japanese to a stalemate in some of the biggest and most ferocious battles fought in the entire WWII.

Many of the old PLA veterans interviewed in a documentary about the Chinese civil war mentioned that at the beginning of the civil war in 1947, the PLA was consistently and decisively defeated by the Nationalists because PLA seriously lacked battlefield tactics. Su Yu (one of the 4-star generals in the PLA and one of the most famous generals in the PLA) said this:"they (the Nationalists) were so much more superior in battlefield tactics, fighting skills and discipline while we (the PLA) had only one thing, our courage." Why did the PLA lack fighting skills? Because they did not fight in the WWII while the Nationalists gained huge amount of experience when fighting the Japanese. Thus, the 4th and 8th armies were simply there doing nothing.

solarz said:
As for the 1930's, that's not really relevant to the issue, as the CCP wasn't even engaging in guerilla warfare at the time.
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It was the 1930's when the CCP first started doing guerrilla warfare because, well, they got nothing else left. As I said before, they were almost completely wiped out by the mid 1930's. Mao started using guerrilla warfare in the mid and late 1930's, which made him famous. However, no matter what, the CCP did not win the war with guerrilla warfare, but with PLA. And they did it by engaging in major battles, not by stealing a few guns and cannons.
 
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