Earlier this month, Senator Lindsey Graham said that if the United States goes to war against North Korea, it would be, “an all-out war against the regime; there is no surgical strike option.” It would be bloody, he conceded, “but don’t ever lose sight of how this war ends… we win it.” Yet is that a safe assumption? Seventeen years of laser-focus on counterinsurgency (COIN) fights and small-scale special operations have left the United States dangerously unprepared for major conventional combat.
If the cost in terms of blood, treasure and international consequences were irrelevant, then it is a certainty that if the United States chose to, it could wipe out North Korea. The price of a war, however, is far from irrelevant. If Washington chose to launch a preventive war to remove North Korea’s nuclear capability and it turned into an all-out regime-changing battle, it is far from certain the United States could win the war at a price the nation could afford.
There is a gravely misplaced belief among most in Washington’s foreign policy elite that combat experience is combat experience; that because U.S. service personnel have had almost two decades of experience fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, that the experience is transferable to any type of combat.