Korea

Using concepts of complex warfare from previous SWJ articles on China and Japan, this article applies the same holistic approach to Korean security strategies in the information environment, with comparisons to strategies from China and Japan. To discern how the Koreas wage complex warfare using both cooperation and confrontation today, we’ll start with world view, threat assessment, and combined effects strategy. Understanding these aspects of the information environment is critical to producing superior effects—the great-results test of any “power” or actor.

The difference between success or failure on the Korean Peninsula fell on the shoulders of the theater commander, US Army General Douglas MacArthur. His decision to execute Operation Chromite, a bold, combined arms, amphibious landing on the Korean west coast at Inchon, turned the tide of the war. Chromite successfully prevented a defeat at the Pusan Perimeter while cutting off vital North Korean lines of supply and communication through an amphibious envelopment. In order to understand the operational art and dynamics of Chromite’s success, it is necessary to frame the problem through a Cold War perspective militarily and politically, analyze the defense of the Pusan Perimeter to the planning and execution of Chromite, and evaluate how the operation successfully met strategic objectives through the creative and skillful employment of military forces while balancing the ends, ways, means, and risk.

One consistently wrong—but always convenient—prediction has been the improbability of ground wars and the declining utility of ground forces.