North Korea

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A powerful message from Trump

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/18/world/asia/aircraft-carrier-north-korea-carl-vinson.html

The Carl Vinson is now on a northerly course for the Korean Peninsula and is expected to arrive in the region sometime next week, Defense Department officials said.
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Donald Trump has already dispatched the giant USS Carl Vinson, powered by nuclear reactors, carrying almost 100 aircraft and accompanied by destroyers, a cruiser, and a submarine to the region. It is pictured (right) on Friday in the Indian Ocean alongside USS Michael Murphy (left) and USS Lake Champlain (centre)



[h=1]US 'sends two more aircraft carriers to Korean Peninsula' after Trump warns that Kim Jong-un has 'got to behave'[/h]

• US has already sent USS Carl Vinson steaming towards the Korean Peninsula
• Reports claim USS Ronald Reagan and USS Nimitz also sailing to Sea of Japan
• Comes as Donald Trump warned North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un to 'behave'

 

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The US is sending two more aircraft carriers towards the Korean Peninsula, it has been claimed.
Donald Trump has already dispatched the USS Carl Vinson, powered by nuclear reactors, carrying almost 100 aircraft and accompanied by destroyers, a cruiser, and a submarine to the region.
Reports in South Korea claim the US President is bolstering the deployment by sending the USS Ronald Reagan and the USS Nimitz to the Sea of Japan next week.
It comes as Trump warned North Korea that it needs to keep its nuclear ambitions in check, telling dictator Kim Jong-un he has 'got to behave'.

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The US is sending two more aircraft carriers, including the USS Nimitz (pictured), towards the Korean Peninsula, it has been claimed

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Reports in South Korea claim the US President is bolstering the deployment by sending the USS Ronald Reagan (pictured) and the USS Nimitz to the Sea of Japan next week

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US President Donald Trump (left) has warned North Korea that it needs to keep its nuclear ambitions in check, telling dictator Kim Jong-un (right) he has 'got to behave'

USS Ronald Reagan is currently stationed in Yokosuka, Japan, according to Yonhap News Agency while the USS Nimitz is undergoing 'final pre-deployment assessment' off Oregon.
Like the USS Carl Vinson, both vessels are more than 1,000ft long, and capable of carrying more than 90 aircraft.
News of their possible deployment comes days after North Korea staged a huge military parade as part of a day of celebrations to mark the 105th anniversary of the birth of the country's founder Kim Il Sung.

 

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There are fears Pyongyang is preparing to carry out a sixth nuclear test.
This morning, US Vice President Mike Pence assured Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe Tuesday that America is ready to work closely with its Asian allies in the region to achieve 'a peaceable resolution and the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.'
'We appreciate the challenging times in which the people of Japan live with increasing provocations from across the Sea of Japan,' Pence said after arriving from Seoul for talks with Abe.
[h=3]USS RONALD REAGAN[/h]Length: 1,092ft
Aircraft: 90 fixed wing and helicopters
Speed: 30+ knots
Weight: 103,000 tons
Crew: 5,680
Home port: Yokosuka, Japan
Commissioned: July 2003

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[h=3]USS NIMITZ[/h]Length: 1,092ft
Aircraft: 90 fixed wing and helicopters
Speed: 31.5 knots
Weight: 101,600 tons
Crew: 5,680
Home port: Kitsap, Washington
Commissioned: May 1975

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Donald Trump has already dispatched the giant USS Carl Vinson, powered by nuclear reactors, carrying almost 100 aircraft and accompanied by destroyers, a cruiser, and a submarine to the region. It is pictured (right) on Friday in the Indian Ocean alongside USS Michael Murphy (left) and USS Lake Champlain (centre)

'We are with you 100 percent,' the visiting vice president said. President Donald Trump earlier warned that North Korean President Jong Un has 'gotta behave.'
At the outset of their meeting, Pence reiterated to Abe his statement in South Korea that the United States has run out of patience with Pyongyang's moves.
'While all options are on the table,' Pence said, 'President Trump is determined to work closely with Japan, with South Korea, with all our allies in the region, and with China' to resolve the problem.
'We seek peace always as a country, as does Japan, but as you know and the United States knows, peace comes through strength and we will stand strongly with Japan and strongly with our allies for a peace and security in this region,' Pence added.
Abe said: 'It goes without saying that it is a matter of paramount importance for us to seek diplomatic efforts as well peaceable settlements of the issue.'
[h=3]USS CARL VINSON[/h]Length: 1,092ft
Aircraft: 90 fixed wing and helicopters
Speed: 30+ knots
Weight: 102,900 tons
Crew: 6,062
Home port: NAS North Island San Diego, California
Commissioned: March 1982

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'But at the same time,' the prime minister said, 'dialogue for the sake of dialogue is valueless and it is necessary for us to exercise pressure North Korea so that it comes forward and engages in this serious dialogue.'
Trump, in Washington, and Pence at the tense Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea earlier, have signalled a forceful U.S. stance on North Korea's recent actions and threats. But no one was predicting what might come next.
Behind the heated rhetoric, in fact, Trump's strategy in the region looks somewhat similar to predecessor Barack Obama's - albeit with the added unpredictability of a new president who has shown he's willing to use force.
Pence on Monday had travelled to the tense zone dividing North and South Korea, where he warned North Korea's leaders that after years of testing the U.S. and South Korea with its nuclear ambitions, 'the era of strategic patience is over.'
The unannounced visit at the start of his 10-day trip to Asia was a U.S. show of force that allowed the vice president to gaze at North Korean soldiers from afar and stare directly across a border marked by razor wire.
As the brown bomber jacket-clad vice president was briefed near the military demarcation line, two North Korean soldiers watched from a short distance away, one taking multiple photographs of the American visitor.
Pence told reporters near the Demilitarized Zone on Monday that Trump was hopeful China would use its 'extraordinary levers' to pressure the North to abandon its weapons program, a day after the North's failed missile test launch.

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Vice President Mike Pence said in South Korea that America's era of 'strategic patience' with Pyongyang has come to an end

 

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The message to NK is crystal clear

 

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Commentary​

[h=1]WHY MATTIS VERSUS KIM JONG-UN WILL END BADLY FOR US ALL[/h]VAN JACKSON
APRIL 20, 2017

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Inadvertent war in Korea is more likely now than at any point in recent history. Whereas a second Korean war has always been possible, clashing U.S. and North Korean “theories of victory” — beliefs about what it takes to successfully coerce and control escalation — now make it plausible, even probable.


Patterns of bluster and brinkmanship have of course long characterized affairs on the Korean Peninsula. For “Korea watchers,” there’s a perverse comfort in the predictability of a situation that, to the uninitiated, sometimes looks anything but stable.


So on some level, the rhythm of recent saber-rattling between the Trump administration and North Korea recalls the perverse comfort of typical Korea policy. On a recent visit to South Korea, Vice President Mike Pence cited U.S. attacks in Syria and Afghanistan as indications of U.S. resolve against North Korea. This statement followed numerous officials confirming that the administration is contemplating preventive strikes against the North, and a recent policy review on North Korea yielding one overarching imperative: “maximum pressure.” North Korea’s rhetoric and posturing has been no less confrontational and no less familiar. As Pence departed Alaska for South Korea, North Korea attempted a submarine-launched ballistic missile test that failed. Upon news that a U.S. carrier group was headed to its neighborhood, North Korea responded that “a thermonuclear war may break out at any moment” and that it’s “ready to react to any mode of war desired by the U.S.”


These words and deeds themselves are more heated than usual, but unremarkable in the context of all that’s come before. North Korea routinely threatens war, often summoning images of a future mushroom cloud. The United States routinely dispatches aircraft carriers, bombers, and other strategic military assets in hopes of signaling resolve while actually registering little more than displeasure with North Korean behavior. The notion of “maximum pressure,” moreover, only differs from the approach of past U.S. presidents in the ambiguous adjective “maximum.” Pressure is the historical mean of U.S. policy toward North Korea. My concern is not with these observable dynamics to date, but rather with what lies beneath them, and what may be coming soon as a consequence.


It’s getting harder to ignore that the Pentagon, under Secretary Jim Mattis, may have a coercive theory of victory that largely mirrors that of North Korea under Kim Jong-Un. The danger is in the fundamental incompatibility of these disturbingly similar sets of strategic beliefs.


U.S. Signaling Antagonism


Senior U.S. military officers have repeatedly and publicly claimed that “Deterrence=Capability x National Interest x Signaling.” This aggressive formula is at odds with best practices from deterrence theory, as I discuss in my forthcoming episode of “Pacific Pundit.” Placing direct causal emphasis on using the military to signal resolve toward an adversary is mistakenly provocative, even antagonistic. It risks goading an adversary into aggressive actions, thereby bringing about deterrence failure. It ignores how and why military signals are taken seriously by adversaries, which has less to do with the wielding of a weapon than the history of proven willingness to use it. And it wrongly implies the need to take positive military action — for example, by deploying assets that would be necessary for prosecuting a war, like an aircraft carrier — just for stability to hold, to say nothing of what it might take to coerce your adversary into doing something they might otherwise not do. When signaling is treated as a cause and deterrence as an outcome, virtually any offensive action can be logically justified on the grounds that it helps buy the United States the deterrence it already has.


So, if moving ships and bombers around on a map were the full extent of U.S. plans to apply “maximum pressure” to North Korea, then U.S. policy might struggle to achieve its aims, but it would be no more dangerous than usual. In the context of this distorted formula, however, there are two interrelated differences that give reason to worry. First, the most direct reason that past crises with North Korea have not bubbled over into war was American restraint. The historical record of U.S.-North Korea relations reveals the surprising extent to which North Korea was poised to automatically retaliate and escalate in response to U.S. uses of force that never took place. Second, numerous administration sources have conveyed that the Trump administration is willing to launch preventive strikes in response to unspecified North Korean provocations, potentially even in response to non-violent actions like nuclear testing. This would be unprecedented. The United States has almost never threatened offensive action against North Korea; retaliatory action in response to violence sure, but never threatening to draw first blood. As crazy as such a move sounds, it would be consistent with a more offensive theory of victory that believes it necessary to do something more than uphold defense commitments. As I outline below, the preventive use of force— which is logically justifiable when signaling is mistakenly believed to be a cause of deterrence — clashes rather explosively with North Korea’s own theory of victory.

The Pentagon’s belief that sustained deterrence rests on communicating resolve through military posturing rather than through upholding commitments is in keeping with an expectation that war in Korea would be Kim Jong-Un’s responsibility, not America’s. A U.S. general assigned to Korea recently told the press, “Our biggest concern is that he’s going to miscalculate. That’s always our concern.” This kind of thinking overlooks the interdependence of North Korean strategic decision-making with our own. A North Korean attack is most likely in response to it misinterpreting America’s aggressive signaling as something more dramatic or imminent than Washington intends.


In fairness, the U.S. military’s faith in the ability to signal resolve through military assets predates the Trump administration. Some version of the deterrence formula above was occasionally espoused by military counterparts when I served in the Pentagon during the Obama administration. The difference is that the Obama administration was notoriously risk-averse, and the White House micromanaged the Department of Defense, allowing it very little discretion on policy matters. But the Trump administration appears to be a much more permissive — even enabling — environment for such coercive beliefs, if only because of Mattis’s reputation as a hawk and the prominence of the Pentagon in President Trump’s national security policy to date.


Clarifying North Korea’s Theory of Victory


America’s more assertive theory of victory is not, on its own, a recipe for war. And in contexts outside Asia, seeking deliberate friction might be useful. For example, in situations where adversaries doubt U.S. resolve, where military signals don’t risk being mistaken for war, and where adversaries lack the ability to meaningfully retaliate against U.S. interests, such an assertive stance could be productive. But none of that applies to North Korea. The acute danger of offensively oriented U.S. thinking about coercion is that North Korea thinks in largely the same way, and has a massive, diverse retaliatory capability at its disposal.


I recently reviewed two newly translated documents from Soviet archives, obtained by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. They relayed conversations between senior North Korean officials and their Soviet counterparts on the day after North Korea shot down a U.S. EC-121 reconnaissance aircraft, killing all 31 Americans on board. The documents were written by the Soviet ambassador to Pyongyang, reporting conversations with senior North Korean officials. These documents strongly suggest that North Korea has a highly offensive, highly reputational theory of victory toward the United States, believing that

military force has political value, escalation is a reliable means of de-escalation, provocations help deter “US aggression,” and retaliating when attacked is essential to maintaining credible deterrence.
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In other words, North Korea’s formulation for how to deter war places high emphasis on offensive signaling through low-level violence, provocations, and retaliation if attacked. Extrapolating how an adversary thinks from evidence dating to 1969 would normally be difficult to justify, but in this case the documents are simply illustrative, reinforcing a mounting body of analysis that suggests North Korea’s theory of victory is disturbingly escalatory.


When Theories Collide


We have in Korea a clash of strategic beliefs that will make it hard to avoid locking into what scholars describe as a “spiral model” of conflict: A scenario in which punitive action intended to deter the adversary leads to adversary retaliation or even more aggressive behavior. Conflict spirals are historically rare, but so are the conditions found on the Korean Peninsula. If both sides believe too fervently in the value of military signaling to achieve deterrence, then both are primed to respond to the signals of the other with still more provocative signals. The underpinning intention of both may be defensive, but because of what they believe about shows of resolve, each is primed to respond adversely to the other.


The alternative need not be unqualified appeasement. Recent research on the history of failed rapprochement with North Korea expects that accommodating an adversary is much harder than many foreign policy doves expect. Instead, stability is more likely if the United States adapts its deterrence posture to account for North Korea’s coercive theory of victory — retaliating when attacked but not attacking first — and remembers that making good on threats and promises over time has a much more meaningful impact on preventing adversary aggression than military signaling alone ever will.


I hope I’m wrong about the Pentagon’s theory of victory. But if I’m not, and the United States is going down a more offensive path with North Korea, where does it end, and how?



Van Jackson, PhD is a Senior Editor at War on the Rocks and host of the Pacific Pundit podcast series. In June, he joins Victoria University of Wellington as a Senior Lecturer in International Relations. In addition to previously serving in the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the U.S. Air Force, he is author of the unusually expensive book Rival Reputations: Coercion and Credibility in US-North Korea Relations (Cambridge University Press, 2016). The views expressed are his own.

 

[superbeets]

WHY MATTIS VERSUS KIM JONG-UN WILL END BADLY FOR US ALL

It ends bad when NK gets a ICBM.

It ends good when NK is destroyed as a military threat.

 

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. Van Jackson‏ @WonkVJ Apr 14More



Let's be clear: If we strike North Korea in response to a nuke test, we're the aggressor--that's a preventive (not preemptive) first strike



ointer:

 

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Hello NK is developing a ICBM.


Waiting while NK strikes US in the future with a ICBM and then and only then retaliating is NOT AN OPTION.


Striking NK to prevent a ICBM ever striking the USA is the only option.

 

[ScottL]

Some people like to play Volleyball. I prefer Newcomb!

I see!

 

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North Korea has nearly completed work on its advanced submarine missile program, UN experts claim

• A United Nations report suggests North Korea has made 'rapid developments'
• It is believed the country is developing submarine-launched ballistic missiles
• North Korea has said missile tests will be carried out at least once a week

Read more:

• Sinpo South Shipyard: Is the GORAE Set to Sail? | 38 North: Informed Analysis of North Korea
• North Korean Submarine Missile Program Advances

 

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US sends its nuclear 'sniffer' plane on 'emergency sortie' in Korea amid fears of new nuke test by Kim Jong-un

• The aircraft is designed to test for radioactive debris following a nuclear bomb
• It could be a sign North Korea has detonated a device, according to reports
• South Korea has said Kim Jong-un could detonate a nuclear weapon at any time

​Read more:

• U.S. sends nuclear sniffer plane to Korea: source

 

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25mJeffrey Lewis‏
@ArmsControlWonk
[h=1]ICYMI: @DuitsyWasHere on why North Korea is closer to a solid-fueled ICBM than you think.[/h]


DPRK Wound Filament Airframesarmscontrolwonk.com

 

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[h=1]Russia sends troops to North Korea border as tensions escalate [/h]


Russia sends troops to North Korea border as tensions escalateuk.news.yahoo.com

 

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North Korea has issued a statement threatening 'nuclear war' against the United States if it is attacked


Shush()*

 

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A Foreign Ministry spokesman accused mounting tensions in the region on the Trump administration and said that they would start nuclear war if they are attacked. Pictured is a submarine-launched ballistic missile displayed during a 'Day of the Sun' military parade

 

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North Korea has threatened Australia with nuclear war in a blunt message reminding Malcolm Turnbull that the nation is in range of a catastrophic strike


dbanana0-9

 

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Kim Jong-un's rogue state warned Australia against cosying up to the US - saying that following US moves in the region would be a 'suicidal act'



!

 

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The warning comes as US Vice-President Mike Pence is in Australia, where his visit has been dominated by discussion on the threat of North Korea's nuclear weapons and missiles programs


Thankyou)(&

 

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Mr Pence said the rogue state is an 'urgent and most dangerous' threat to peace and security in the Asia Pacific region