What does it mean by simaltaneous missile provocation? Edit: I think it's referencing a previous tweet?
The cycle of America utterly ravaging other countries and then citing the resulting disfunction in those countries decades later as justification for further intervention(North Korea, Iran, Afghanistan, like every Latin American country) has to stop somehow.
Saddest modern part of the separation is that Korea is running out of people with living memory of unification; each successive generation has less and less desire to tackle the financial and logistical challenge of reunification.
Kim going to fuck around and find out. They're on their own in a situation like this, China isn't stepping in to help. Might even aid the West/Japan.
They'll probably cut off the cooperative economic zone for a bit and beef up patrols in the Peninsula, but doubt it goes further than that. NK has no ability to legitimately threaten either the ROK or Japan without Chinese support, and they won't get it if they unilaterally strike. China most likely sanctioned the test, but with the current situation in Ukraine, they won't risk anything else that strains their ties with the West or other Asian trade partners.
North Korea itself is not particularly concerning, but I am wondering if this is a deliberate ploy encouraged by China to distract the rest of SE Asia’s attention. If they do decide to make a move on Taiwan, it wouldn’t surprise me if they use NK as a red herring to pull resources away.
I think they are way to far away from a heavy lift perspective to make a move on Taiwan anytime in the next few years. Taiwan has a ton of antiship missiles and we have now demonstrated the ability to create trailer loaded antiship and antiradar missiles which Taiwan will probably purchase and deploy. Those trailer mounted anti ship missiles have shown to be fairly effective against RU equipment and I would expect it to be a strong deterrent for Taiwan. Taiwan also has a couple of the Patriot missile systems and while China could fly in a ton of paratroopers, getting heavy equipment to the island would be a challenge today. Most think it will be a few years until they have the naval capacity to do the heavy lifting. Its coming though. I am interested to better understand what happened when the missile overflew Japan as I believe we have a Carrier group off the coast which means the missile overflew that as well or at least was fairly close to overflying it. I am curious if we recognized the flight path wasn't a threat or if we were unprepared to shoot it down. We normally wouldn't want one of our carrier groups in the flight path of these missiles.
As an update, looks like The Drive wrote an article on why they didn't engage it here: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zo...-intercept-the-north-korean-ballistic-missile
Actually watched a good RealLifeLore video about it last night that said it would take a force of 500-600k to establish a beachhead. That’s four times bigger than D-Day.
Do we even have proven short-mid range anti-ballistic interceptor capability? Would be embarrassing and provoking all at once if we missed.
We have not demonstrated a consistent ability to take out inbound ballistic missiles. We have had some successes but it’s an incredible feat and we keep some of our capabilities (anti missile satellites, etc) very classified. The real challenge is we are extremely limited in our number of interceptors so it would not be difficult to overwhelm them in a real situation where someone wanted to make sure “some” hit their targets. Drones will simply compound that issue. We have created simulations where our tactics are to overwhelm their air defenses to the point they run out of defenses and then fire our primary munitions. It’s a complicated challenge.