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By Norman Friedman, author, Naval Institute Guide to World Naval Weapons Systems
The U.S. Air Force's new C-17 wide-body airiifter made its first flight on 15 September 1991. Four more C-17s w ill join the test program.
Air Force C-I7 Takes Off
North Korea Remains Intransigent
As mentioned last month in this column, the U.S. initiative to reduce drastically its tactical nuclear weapon inventory might have an unexpected consequence in Korea. By mid-November, the U.S. government was trying to apply diplomatic pressure, through countries such as Japan, to force the North Koreans to dismantle any nuclear weapon program they might be developing. The North Koreans initially agreed, but then backed away, imposing more and more onerous conditions as they did so. Their demands included not only the withdrawal of U.S. weapons from South Korea but also the withdrawal of any U.S. guarantee to support the South with nuclear weapons in the event of an attack.
The problem is not simply that North Korea might choose to vaporize targets like Seoul; it runs much deeper. Since the end of the Korean War, the North Korean government—still run by Kim il Sung—has maintained its aim of unifying the peninsula under its flag; concrete evidence of its resolve abounds, especially in the Demilitarized Zone that straddles the 38th parallel, where the North Koreans have built tunnels under the truce line between the two Koreas. As long ago as 1969 the North Koreans began extensive seaborne infiltration of the South, causing the South Korean Navy to buy 95-foot Coast Guard cutters from the United States.
There have also been more dramatic operations, such as the North Korean bombing of the South Korean Cabinet members at Rangoon and the destruction of a Korean Air Lines airplane. The South Korean government also blames North Korea for fomenting the recent student demonstrations in the South.
It is true that both Korean governments have recently discussed possible reunification, but the record shows many abortive contacts of this sort in the past. It seems unlikely that the South Korean government considers recent North Korean advances as much more than a cover for more aggressive action, either by direct invasion or by further subversion. There may even be a perception that the North Koreans’ plan was to use Political demonstrations to raise interest in reunification (more or less on North Korean terms), then maneuver the South Korean government into disrupting reunification talks in such a way that a stage-managed mvolt in the South would seem plausible to foreigners and to many South Korean civilians. Certainly it is far too early to judge events to date as major steps away from military confrontation on the peninsula.
The South Koreans have always feared that the North Koreans would ultimately move south in force. North Korea has a large standing army, nnd manufactures much of its own equipment. It even exports arms, such as Silkworm antiship missiles and its own version of the Scud ballistic missile. Although it has received aid from other communist countries, 11 has been capable of mounting a major operation on its own. The North might have found it difficult to sustain a land war for very long, but until recently its leaders might well have hoped that the Soviets and the Chinese would not allow it to lose once the war had begun.
Like other communist states. North Korea finds itself in chronic eco- n°mic problems. Aid from the Soviet Union helped, but there is no longer any Soviet treasury upon which to draw. The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait emonstrates the most obvious solution: what amounts to international ank robbery, this time in the form of seizing the rich South. That would not be the first time the North Koreans had been driven to a desperate exPedient; in the late 1970s, there were persistent reports that their diplomats Were using the drug trade to obtain foreign currency for their country.
Line other factor may animate the North Koreans. China remains their ®nly prospective ally. Within China, there is a widespread feeling that ®ng has no obvious successor, indeed that upon his death his several a tentative successors will all enjoy sufficient military backing to com- I*ete on more or less even terms. Should China disintegrate into war- lordism of this sort, it would hardly be able to influence events in Korea. It is also possible that a Soviet disintegration in the Far East might focus Chinese interest enough to preclude Chinese involvement in Korea.
Unfortunately for South Korea, the single dominant fact of its geography is that Seoul, the capital, is very close to the North Korean border. Moreover, Seoul represents a very large fraction of the overall South Korean economy, so much so that its capture might well end a second Korean War. As in the case of Israel, the best (perhaps the only) way to deal with a lack of strategic depth is to preempt an enemy attack.
Preemption is easy only if warning is unambiguous, which is to say virtually never. North Korea is a closed society, and there have been enough intelligence surprises (not least the recent revelations about the bomb program) to convince most observers that South Korea cannot expect much warning of an attack. On the other hand, if South Korea attacked the North without clear provocation, the results might well be disastrous.
Having U.S. nuclear-armed forces in South Korea seemed to solve this problem. North Korean troops would come into contact with them virtually at the border, and the North Koreans could never be sure that the U.S. troops would not use their tactical nuclear weapons almost immediately to save themselves from destruction. That would not have corresponded to the situation in Europe, where NATO Uoops armed with nuclear weapons faced similarly armed Soviet troops.
In Europe, the first side to fire nuclear weapons would suffer the results of similar weapons fired in retaliation; nuclear weapons would not make for clear-cut results. In Korea, however, the North would not be able to retaliate. There was a very good chance that the two major communist powers in the region. China and the Soviet Union, would not escalate to support a North Korean attack. Such intervention became even less likely as both countries became friendly to South Korea, largely
VMGR-452, based at Stewart International Airport, New burgh, New York, will get two of the aircraft, which are 15 feet longer than standard KC-130s.
Marine Reserves Get Stretched KC-130T-30
in hopes of economic assistance.
The U.S. view is that withdrawal of the tactical weapons on the ground will have little real significance, since B-52s from Guam can still strike North Korea. From the Korean perspective, however, the change is dramatic: U.S. troops on the ground, armed with tactical nuclear weapons, might actually fire those weapons in self-defense; similar weapons delivered from distant bases could be authorized only by the U.S. government. The reality, of course, is that the ground troops cannot fire without government approval (they cannot undo the locks on their weapons), but the perceptions on the peninsula do not equate a B- 52 strike with an artillery-delivered projectile.
Thus the South Koreans must see their major military option, preemptive attack on the North, slipping away at the same time that the other major deterrent option, the U.S. tactical nuclear threat against the North, is also declining. Presumably they suspect that they have about a year to solve their strategic problem. U.S. forces in Korea, there to deter the North, also block any preemptive attacks by the South. For example, the U.S. command will undoubtedly detect any South Korean mobilization, eliminating the degree of surprise necessary for it to succeed against the North. In the post-Cold War rundown, however, the U.S. troops inevitably must be withdrawn.
The South Koreans are left with a few options. One is to expedite the withdrawal of the U.S. troops so as to leave them freedom to mount a preemptive strike to the North. Another option is to develop a bomb of their own, so as to retain an effective deterrent without U.S. control. A third option is a limited strike designed to destroy the North Korean bomb program without igniting a new Korean War.
One other point is worth making. Japan traditionally has considered the Korean peninsula a dagger pointed directly at its home islands, and the Koreans as a whole have very real grievances dating back to the period under Japanese colonial control, which ended only in 1945. The descendants of many Koreans imported to Japan as laborers, for example, still do not enjoy Japanese citizenship; they are treated—very badly— as resident aliens.
Korean hostility has not been a very important issue for a long time, mainly because the two Koreas were mainly concerned with their mutual threats, and also because the richer of the two. South Korea, did not wish to upset the United States by taking on a major U.S. ally, Japan.
Now, however, the politics of the region may be changing. The United States may find it increasingly difficult to justify stationing substantial forces in Japan and South Korea. It may even seem to be in both Asian countries’ interests for us to leave; the South Koreans in particular may feel that they can then settle their own problems with the North (and the nuclear issue may impel that settlement).
The resulting reunified Korea might well be nuclear-armed within a few years. It would find itself in a peculiar position: for the first time, the country would actually be more powerful than Japan, albeit less prosperous. Economic issues might come to the fore if the world economy itself, on which both countries depend so heavily for export sales, slows drastically (e.g., because of protectionism in the European Community). What then for Japanese pacifism?
All of this suggests that—in the Far East as in Europe—world politics may be much more interesting in the next decade than in the last.
The two Korean governments signed a treaty of reconciliation and nonaggression on Friday 13 December 1991. But in this analyst’s view, this will have little effect on the outcome.
Japanese Develop Naval Radar
The new Japanese shipbuilding program includes a 4,200-ton weapon system test ship, designated ASE. It is, in effect, a combination of the U.S. Navy’s old Norton Sound (AV-11), an antiair warfare test ship, and the USS Glover (AGDE-1), an ASW sensor test ship. A published sketch of the ASE shows a four-faced radar on her foremast, a small vertical- launcher cell forward of her superstructure (presumably for Sea Sparrows), and a massive keel sonar array ending in a bow bulb.
The foremast array is the new FCS-3 fire-control system; the missile version of the older FCS-2 was broadly equivalent to the U.S. Navy’s Mk-92. The FCS-3 apparently combines search and fire-control functions, like the Aegis SPY-1, but without any separate illuminators. Unlike the SPY-1, it uses active rather than passive arrays, a technology first deployed in a Japanese search radar designated OPS-24.
A passive-array radar, like the SPY-1 and virtually all other operational phased arrays, passes radar energy, which is generated centrally, through numerous separate phase changers (typically ferrites) on the antenna. Each phase changer feeds an antenna with a very broad beam. The combination of all those beams, at different phases, is the narrow pencil beam the radar emits. The phase changers are electronically controlled, and they are now both reliable and relatively cheap.
An active-array radar consists of a large number of small radar transmitters, each of which feeds a single broad-beam antenna. Phases are adjusted at the transmitters. The great argument in favor of an active- array radar is that it has no single point of failure, since even the failure of many of the small transmitters does not completely eliminate the radar as a whole. This sort of radar exploits the recently developed technology of solid-state radar transmitters (a conventional radar can use a large number of such transmitters, ganged together, to replace a single conventional high-powered tube transmitter). The single high- powered transmitter tube is the least reliable element of a conventional radar.
The counterargument is that the conventional tubes are already quite reliable and need replacement, on average, only once a year. Moreover, moving the transmitters up to the antenna requires water cooling at the antenna or masthead level. For example, the OPS-24 antenna is flanked by a pair of heat exchangers, which surely represent a considerable weight.
At this time there is no Western equivalent to either FCS-3 or OPS- 24; the closest is probably the experimental British MESAR-TRISAR rotating phased array, which may be adopted for the big air-defense ship currently under consideration. Thus the most interesting feature of the two new radars (FCS-3 and OPS-24) may be that, for the first time since World War II, they represent a distinctly Japanese initiative not related to other navies’ developments.
The big hull sonar probably incorporates a long conformal array, perhaps like the one the British tested on board HMS Matapan in the 1970s- It might be used for very low frequency directional transmission, perhaps in conjunction with a towed-array receiver.
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