Major General Pyo Chang-soo was removed from his post as a consequence in the DMZ after surveillance cameras caught a defector entering South Korea by using a storm drain that nobody has the foresight to note as a concern.

And 22nd Infantry Division, aka the Division Where Stars Go to Die, claim yet another victim...

That unit is cursed. Five generals in command of that division lost their jobs since 1980 because they screwed up royally.

• 1984: A certain PFC Cho, fed up with the hazing he received, threw three grenades into his barracks and shot other soldiers, killing 12 and injuring 11 soldiers in his own platoon. He defected to North Korea, killing three more soldiers that were chasing him. The division commander, the regiment commander, and the battalion commander were relieved of their commands.

• 1988: Pvt Lee fragged his barracks, killing two and injuring several others.

• 1998: Cpl. Kang smuggled a recoilless rifle shell from the range and attempted to take it apart in the enlisted lounge. The round exploded, killing 3 and wounding 5.

• 2005: A drunk fisherman drove his boat to North Korea from the 22nd division's area of responsibility. The North Koreans returned him to the South 18 days later.

• 2005: A retired sergeant stole two assault rifles, six grenades, and 700 rounds of ammunition pretending to be a higher-up. The regiment commander and the battalion commander lost their jobs.

• 2009: A South Korean civilian who was wanted by the police for assault defected to North Korea. The commanders of the division, regiment, battalion, and company in charge were relieved of their commands.

• 2012: A North Korean soldier crossed over to the South to defect. When no one from the south came to receive him, he walked unnoticed to a South Korean outpost and knocked on the door. When there was no answer, he walked to another outpost, knocked on the door again. This time, the South Korean soldiers manning the outpost took him into custody. The commanders of the division, regiment, and battalion in charge were relieved of their commands.

• 2014: Sgt. Lim Do-bin who was suffering from a toxic work environment shot and killed five and injured seven fellow soldiers. He deserted, armed with a rifle and dozens of rounds of ammo. After a two-day-long manhunt, he was arrested. The commander of the division was relieved of his command.

• 2020: A North Korean civilian defector jumped over the fence and walked down south unnoticed.

Edited by minseok42 on Mar 5th 2021 at 1:21:19 AM

More details courtesy of NK News:

Clearly, if the 22nd Division changes the name the curse will be lifted!

Special Forces Combat Diver Lino Miani talks about the time his team ran into a North Korean sub in the Yellow Sea:

coastguardsubmarine.gif

Air Force PT testing pushed back (again) to July. Also considering changes to scoring and some of the components of the test.

Regarding the 22nd Infantry Regiment: Freya's tits, and I thought Ft Hood was bad.

On a lighter note:

Someone finally made edible crayons for Marines

Couple of finds:

The Bundeswehr's Classix collection is full of Cold War-era gems, but my current favourite is this video on the Bo 105P/PAH-1 anti-tank helicopter, which showcases how nap-of-earth/pop-up tactics would've been used against enemy armour:

And DTIC has the book Sierra Hotel: Flying Air Force Fighters in the Decade After Vietnam, which chronicles the technological and tactical evolutions leading up to Gen 4 fighters. I'm particularly digging the description of how radar tech evolved in the era: they went from the old-school AN/APQ-120 on the F-4, where the WSO had to manually tune the gain to filter out ground clutter and noise, to the AN/APG-63 family on the F-15, where the computer did that automatically (though the first version apparently didn't have track-while-scan). And then there's this beauty:

Edited by eagleoftheninth on Mar 6th 2021 at 5:36:35 AM

https://globalnation.inquirer.net/194205/us-weapons-hardware-in-exchange-for-vfa

I'm not surprised by this. Basically, Washington DC appeased Duterte in return that he won't touch the Visiting Forces Agreement before he leaves office.

What kinds of aid are on the table? Are they going to send back the MAP Garands that the AFP returned to the US in 2017?

Likely military aid and/or reduced payments to make purchases in exchange for not canning the VFA. I know the PAF is due for more Black Hawks made in Poland.

The AFP is long overdue for modernization anyway and his critics really don’t want him to pivot to China/Russia.

Edited by Ominae on Mar 6th 2021 at 7:37:39 AM

https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20210306/p2g/00m/0na/026000c

Meanwhile, an Okinawan women's civic group has released a report condemning the USFJ's known crimes in Okinawa...

This Is The Pentagon's $27 Billion Master Plan To Deter China In The Pacific

*psst* Aegis Ashore in Taiwan

And meanwhile, in Russia: the Sokol Altius UCAV program is starting weapons testing this summer, after several delays.

Edited by eagleoftheninth on Mar 9th 2021 at 5:36:46 AM

Over in the space thread, we were debating the possibility that China might pose a threat to US space satellites, and whether we should develop a capability to oppose that (I'm going to condense a lot):

[Me]: I would say that a majority of US military analysts have concluded that there is a very significant possibility that in the event of an armed confrontation between the US and China (whatever the odds of such a confrontation are in the first place) that China will seek to destroy America's considerable advantage in reconnaissance satellites. It makes sense, because China has less capability to lose. If you simply eliminated everyone's military space assets, that country which invested in those kinds of assets the most (the US) stands to lose the most.

What the US intends to do in that scenario is mostly classified, but we can guess that they will follow two approaches: they will seek to reduce China's reconnaissance satellites as quickly as possible, so as to arrive at parity, and then replace the losses as quickly as they can, to arrive back at a strategic advantage.

[Silasw]: The capacity doesn’t have the come in the form of weapons platforms in space though, the capacity can come in the form of the ability use the defence procurement act to get new satellites built while drafting commercial rocket operators to stick the new satellites up into orbit. Hell, it doesn’t even need to be that.

The US’ capacity to deal with a war with China where China attacks satellites systems exists in the form of the US military not being wholly dependent on said systems and having the ability (especially with the international support it would get if China took out the entire global satellite network) hold down the Chinese navy while causing the Chinese economy to collapse due to the loss of trade capability China would suffer from a war on its doorstep.

That and nukes, there’s always nukes.

The US military will have a plan for dealing with a conflict with China where China decides to take out global satellite capabilities. There’s no requirement for that plan to involve costly space-based weapons platforms being developed well in advance of such a war.the plan might involve developing weapons if conflict looks to be on the horizon, it might well just consist of winning such a war without satellite capability, it might even consist of avoiding such a war happening by ensuring that the global situation is such that it’s not worth it for China to start such a war.

[Me again]: In general, I find that your proposals take too much for granted. How do you know that we can effectively monitor the Chinese military space program? What if we get it wrong? Similarly with not letting "shit" escalate—is that entirely under our control? What if the next US president is a war-monger? What if the next Chinese Premier is? Nations have ended up in armed confrontation without really intending to in the past, how do we know that won't happen to us? Or with regard to economic warfare: how do you know we could effectively blockade China? What if they broke the blockade? Would a blockade of their coasts be enough to pressure them? What if the EU decided to ignore our blockade, would we be willing to attack their shipping? What if they decided, like the British in WWII, to just simply endure it and fight on? And the nuclear option was tabled a long time ago—the US does not rely on nuclear intimidation to pressure other countries into changing their policies, it's too risky (not to mention that it would make us an international pariah). It would be relatively easy to envision a scenario in which the the US and the Chinese were at risk of a direct military confrontation, but one in which the stakes aren't quite high enough to justify a nuclear response (an invasion of Taiwan comes to mind).

I'm not saying that we can't or we shouldn't pursue many of these options anyway, but these are not mutually exclusive choices. The nice thing about military technology is that you can have a reasonably clear understand of their capabilities, and what you can realistically do with them. They are much less ambiguous than these other options, which is why military planners have a tendency to over-rely on them. But in this particular case, I think you can see how a cautious perspective toward protecting US national interests in the Pacific can develop a coherent justification for both believing that the Chinese may be planning to attack our orbital assets, and that we should develop a like capacity to be able to deal with that. It would be another option in our tool box, and planners like that (so do decision makers).

Sorry for the wall of text.

I think that if the US anticipates a potential Kessler Syndrome situation, they should have a fallback reconnaissance method to spy satellites. Reviving/improving the SR71, for example. As far as I know, that's still the fastest plane ever built.

Edited by petersohn on Mar 10th 2021 at 5:17:55 PM

It's also SAM and MiG-31 bait at this point.

We've got the U2 and drones for spy plane purposes.

Edited by LeGarcon on Mar 10th 2021 at 11:18:25 AM

I don’t know for sure that the US can monitor China’s space program, I’m making an educated guess as a laymen based on what’s know about US strategic priorities.

It’s something that should be monitored (and with redundancies to catch if people get it wrong) and it makes a lot more sense as a miltiary expenditure than boondoggle space weapons.

As for not letting things escalate, it’s partly under US control, or at least if escalation catches the US off-guard is.

As for war-mongers, yeah you’d act if that happens, but plan of “make a detailed plan if China looks to have a warmonger get close to power” is perfectly sufficient for that. There won’t be a plan for if the US elects a warmonger, because militaries tend to get in political trouble if they make plans based a premise of “my current boss is replaced by someone with a dramatically opposed ideology to him or any other mainstream political group in the country”.

You’re getting way to into the weeds, effective planning doesn’t mean planning for every tiny possibility, it means building a plan that can adapt and spawn detailed plans at the appropriate time.

There are probably vague plans for all those possibilities, but having a vague plan is enough, you don’t need or want to spend a ton of money preparing weapons for a scenario that is highly unlikely and can be seen coming well ahead of time.

I don’t think there’s any serious evidence to back up this assertion. Yes if China was actively planning (or even actively considering planning) an attack on US satellite networks then the US should develop response technology. But the US already has anti-satellite missile technology, it developed it back in the ‘50s and keeps it up to date (a naval test was done in 2008 on an anti-sat missile).

Edited by Silasw on Mar 10th 2021 at 7:48:06 PM

China has been on the ASAT path since the 60's, with a with a lot of development in that regard. Whether there's any larger warplanning on that realm is difficult to evaluate at the best of times.

Also as an aside, why is this some new thing having to do with China?

ASAT warfare has been a pretty known quantity since the Cold War.

We already have plans to deal with satellites being down and how to conduct our own ASAT operations because the Soviets were already ahead of where the Chinese are now.

Short video by the FDF talking about the Finnish local defence system (English captions):

I maintain my position that ASAT warfare is something that we should at least try to regulate by treaty. Even with kinetic kill vehicles to reduce the risks of Kessler syndrome, the chances of things going wrong are unacceptable in an era where the whole world depends on satellite-based communications for its day-to-day functioning. And the single biggest security issue of the century, climate change, is going to require us to keep our climate research and monitoring sats functioning if we're going to have any hope of solving it.

At the same time, it's going to be very difficult to enforce in practice, since ASAT doesn't have the same tech bottlenecks that nukes have, being an outgrowth of regular rocket tech. And the other alternative for disabling satellite systems, cyberwarfare, is an equally massive can of worms.

Edited by eagleoftheninth on Mar 10th 2021 at 3:16:08 AM