Why do people seem to think that Guerilla Warfare isn't effective? Guerilla Warfare won the Vietnam war for the Vietnamese.
The US getting sick of the war and deciding to stop fighting it won the war for the North Vietnamese (who, it should be noted, were a sovereign nation backed by a major power, with no short supply of expendable troops).
Guerilla Warfare won Cuba and various other Southern American countries.
Militant movements backed by foreign powers knocked over two-bit dictators. Not nearly as romantic as it's played out to be.
Guerilla Warfare has kept the Americans held up in the Middle East for nearly ten years.
And it's not winning. It's surviving, but it isn't, and can't, win. We're occupying territory to prop up friendly governments until they can build up enough of a military to hold themselves up against the irregular militias, as well as to have a staging ground for targeting those militias (since, after all, they don't stand a snowball's chance in hell of dislodging US troops from the countries, but they could make things hell for a weak government with a half-assed military).
You just don't get it. A war with North Korea isn't going to be any more cut and dry then the war in Iraq or the war in Afghanistan.
You mean it will be a fell swoop followed by a protracted campaign of occupation to stop the ousted government from reclaiming power in the vacuum left by its removal/patchwork militias turning it into the next somalia? I assume the US would provide the fell swoop, and SK the military occupation, which would probably work quite a bit better given they speak the same language, and NK isn't as fragmented as the middle east.
Do you guys even realize that the Kandahar base is barraged by missile fire every day? This isn't Call of Duty. You don't just pinpoint the enemy, swoop in, and win the day. This is actually real. People die. On both sides. Only an idiot sits back in his chair and thinks "But we're so awesome we got jets and shit" before amassing soldiers from an already-stretched thin military and sending them to attack the fifth largest army in the world, which is actually only about a hundred thousand people smaller than your full force and are in their home element.
The US strategy of air superiority is specifically to cripple an opposed conventional army. Which it does
extremely well. Now, that does jack shit when your enemy is a pack of untrained kids with thirty year old AK-47s hiding in the middle of a slum, but it tears the living fuck out of the things you really need to worry about on a strategic scale, namely armor, transportation, lines of supply and communication, airfields, and fortified positions. You take those away, and that's one million fragmented, unsupported soldiers with nothing bigger than a tree to hide behind, against a coordinated, comparably sized army (assuming SK does the legwork), supported with armor, transport, and supply lines. And that's ignoring the potential impact of psyops before the actual invasion takes...