Pentagon Assesses Responses, Including a Possible Blockade

By THOM SHANKER

10/10/06 "New York Times" -- -- WASHINGTON, Oct. 9 — Now that North Korea seems to have made good on its threat with what appears to be a nuclear test, United States military commanders and civilian policy makers are refining plans in the event that President Bush orders a blockade of North Korean shipments to prevent the sale of a completed bomb or nuclear components.

Senior officers say Navy and Air Force combat and surveillance equipment are already in the region, and more could be deployed rapidly.

Still, any unilateral effort by the United States to cordon off North Korea by sea and air could founder along the country’s lengthy land border with China.

“This is a tough question,” one senior official with years of experience in military planning said Monday, speaking as did others on the condition of anonymity because he was discussing classified war plans. “The only good options were before North Korea got the bomb. There are no good options now.”

For five decades, the American military has written war plans and deployed forces for a worst-case situation in the Korean peninsula: a major artillery, missile and ground attack from north to south across the demilitarized zone.

But a conventional war is no longer the most pressing military threat. It is nuclear proliferation.

Many staff officers contend that North Korea’s ballistic missile and nuclear programs are not primarily intended as part of a plan for a land attack on South Korea.

If anything, North Korea probably regards its effort to develop a nuclear arsenal as a deterrent against an attack by the United States.

The North Korean nuclear efforts could also be intended to press South Korea for diplomatic and economic gain, and to hold Japan, another important American ally, at risk, gaining even more leverage against the United States.

Given that geopolitical geometry, American military officers and senior policy makers say, the Pentagon’s abilities in the region, along with those of South Korea and Japan, are sufficient against the shifting North Korean military threat.

While land combat is not an imminent threat, Pentagon and military officials say, the prolonged deployments of ground forces in Iraq and Afghanistan have doubtless complicated planning for the Korean Peninsula.

Should more ground forces be required for South Korea, only a handful of combat brigades stand ready in the United States, Pentagon and military officials say. To bolster the force, additional combat units now getting ready for tours in Iraq could be pointed to the Pacific instead, with troops already in Iraq staying there longer than planned.

Although the decision to move a full combat brigade of American ground forces from South Korea to Iraq in 2004 generated much public debate on the peninsula, the Pentagon more quietly has shifted substantial numbers of heavy Air Force bombers and attack aircraft from the United States to bases throughout the region to offset the decrease in ground forces. The Air Force’s stealth bombers, with intercontinental range, are also available from their base in the American Midwest.

Navy aircraft aboard carriers in the Pacific are on call, as are submarines equipped with a range of conventional and nuclear missiles. The most modern Patriot antimissile batteries have also been assigned to the region, as well as Aegis cruisers with abilities designed to track and shoot down missiles.

“Taken together, this has added a tremendous amount of capability more appropriate for the threat right now,” a senior Defense Department official said.

Pentagon officials acknowledge that the sustained deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan have heightened the risks that would be faced if there were a Korean conflict because important equipment is committed to the Middle East.

Weapons systems that officers call “enablers” are routinely in short supply and are heavily engaged in Iraq and Afghanistan; they include intelligence equipment like the pilotless Predator surveillance aircraft. Likewise, large stockpiles of precision-guided munitions have been placed within striking range of Iraq and Afghanistan. While those weapons are also in the Pacific arsenals, senior officials would have to weigh the risk to both military theaters and decide how best to allocate limited resources.

Even senior commanders agree that the commitments to Iraq and Afghanistan have imposed risks on the American military, an assessment contained in a classified report to Congress last year from the departing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Richard B. Myers.

General Myers wrote that the concentration of troops and advanced weapons in Iraq and Afghanistan limited the Pentagon’s ability to deal with other potential armed conflicts.

Major combat operations elsewhere in the world, if ordered by the president, still would succeed — but would be more protracted and would produce higher casualties among American forces and foreign civilians, General Myers wrote. A range of senior officers have said that assessment still stands.

One of the most significant and worrisome complications is that American intelligence agencies have no confidence that they can locate all of North Korea’s weapons depots, development laboratories, nuclear command centers and leadership hide-outs — though American intelligence abilities are said to have worried the North Korean leadership in the past.

American intelligence officials concluded that Kim Jong-il, the North Korean leader, went into hiding during the final buildup to the invasion of Iraq in 2003 because he feared that he, too, might be tracked and attacked.

After North Korea’s newest announcement, military analysts continued Monday to assess whether its announcement that it had tested a nuclear device, in defiance of international opinion, represented a calculation by Mr. Kim that he was less vulnerable now — or that he needed to join the elite club of declared nuclear powers to deter a possible American attack.

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company