Girding for 'Implosion'
North Korea may be collapsing. The risk of conflict isn't
SEOUL--The autumn night is calm and pleasant, except where some soldiers from the 1st Battalion, 506th Infantry regiment are standing. On an airfield about 20 miles south of the demilitarized zone that separates North and South Korea, the soldiers cling to the tops of humvees being rocked by hurricane-level winds from the rotors of Chinook helicopters overhead. As the 25-ton choppers--operating with lights out, as in combat--maneuver to within inches of their heads, the soldiers bob and lunge until they hook the humvees to the choppers with thick ropes.
The pilots then use night-vision goggles to ferry their cargo through the dark to a gap in the hills 10 miles away, where the battalion's D company rehearses a nighttime air assault against an "opposing force" of fellow Americans portraying North Korean invaders. With the real enemy poised just over the horizon, there's no lack of enthusiasm. "We're ready to blast [North Korean leader] Kim Jong Il and his Communist heathens back into the Stone Age," exclaims Lt. Col. Mark Milley, the bombastic battalion commander.
Such war-whooping and hard-core training have long been the norm on the Korean peninsula, where 37,000 of America's most combat-ready troops and their nearly 700,000 colleagues in South Korean uniforms prepare daily to defend against a North Korean invasion.
Hard landings. But with the north's old Communist allies defunct or preoccupied and its economy sinking into seemingly irreversible decline, many analysts now think North Korea will "implode" before it ever invades the south. Some diplomats have been speaking optimistically of a "soft landing" in which the north liberalizes its tenaciously anticapitalist policies and opens itself to external influence. As intelligence experts try to penetrate the thick fog of mystery that surrounds the unpredictable and isolated regime of "Dear Leader" Kim Jong Il, however, second thoughts are increasingly coming to the fore. The more U.S. and Korean military officials analyze the "implosion scenario," the less it looks like a quick ticket home for front-line troops like Colonel Milley's. While the conventional scenario of North Korea's launching an "invasion of Communist conquest" may be growing remote, many increasingly plausible scenarios could still involve U.S. troops in serious fighting. Collapse at best will produce a huge humanitarian crisis, at worst trigger all-out combat.
"One can no longer separate collapse from war," says a U.S. military planner in Seoul. "There will be plenty of hardness to go through to get to a soft landing." If war breaks out, plans call for roughly half of America's total air, sea, and ground combat forces to deploy to the region. Thousands of casualties would be expected.
Predicting how and when a state will fail is an inexact science. "Many would like to put a time line on it," says Gen. John Tilelli, the top U.S. and United Nations commander in South Korea. "That's frivolous." Yet all of the signs point to a North Korean regime well on its way to collapse. The north has few trading partners, and its gross domestic product has fallen by more than 30 percent since 1991. Factories produce perhaps 10 percent of their capacity and are being dismantled and sold for scrap. Years of poor farming practices, combined with floods and droughts, may already have caused tens of thousands of famine deaths, with conditions likely to worsen indefinitely. Food must be transported surreptitiously, to prevent food riots. Even the military--which, as Kim's top priority, consumes more than one fourth of the state's GNP--is so short of food and fuel that training has been seriously curtailed. Shortages have spawned black markets and illegal trade along the Chinese border--signs that people are trying to survive through means other than the north's tightly controlled command economy.
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