16

The Strategic Architectures of the Korean War

Accepting the constraints of a limited war was the reality for the combatant coalitions fighting the Korean War. Their strategic architectures required them to prevent a regional war from engulfing the whole international system. Indeed, Gallup polling between July 1950 and September 1951 revealed that half of the American population believed that the fighting in Korea was the beginning of the next world war.1 No longer could the combatants view war as total in the sense that one side could comprehensively defeat the other—not with both sides possessing nuclear weapons. No one in 1950 understood what nuclear warfare might be like. Indeed, no one adequately knows to the present day how devastating a nuclear war would be except the inhabitants of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The preceding chapters on the Korean War show that the combatants had to draw clear boundaries around their policy, strategic, and operational choices during the conflict. The underlying reasoning of their policies for engagement, their choice of military strategies as the war became prolonged, and their execution of military operations show that the United States and the UN Command created a more realistic and effective strategic architecture, but at the terrible cost that by war’s end no one was prepared to call a triumph.

North Korean and Chinese (PRC) Strategic Architecture

Kim Il Sung’s aggression in June 1950 turned out to be a colossal misjudgment insofar as the expected geopolitical result of a Korea under a communist regime failed to appear. Like Hitler, he ignored Clausewitz’s axiom that no sane statesman starts a war without first being clear as to its political viability and military feasibility. He wildly underestimated Truman’s determination to resist. He equally failed to see that the United States would organize the resistance under the collective-security resolutions of an international organization. What had been at stake militarily between the combatants was the capacity to bear heavy costs in human lives and the ability of an Asian nation to match the technological superiority of the US Armed Forces. Mao, of course, knew the manpower demographics thoroughly. What distinguished Mao from his enemies was his willingness, like Stalin, to accept the calculus cold-bloodedly.

The Korean War was a war of miscalculation. Kim, Mao, and Stalin did not expect or plan for the speed, vehemence, and military effectiveness of the American reaction. Kim Il Sung underestimated the risks of invasion because he misconstrued Acheson’s initial omission of South Korea inside the US Asian defensive perimeter in the Far East. It remains unclear whether he ever became privy to the insights of Philby’s espionage. Stalin viewed Kim’s invasion of the South as low risk for drawing in direct Soviet participation or strategic vulnerability to American nuclear weapons. Stalin had two Asian communist proxies to undertake the fighting and the dying. The war became a contest of prolonged attrition until Stalin’s death in 1953.

The PLA successfully intervened after the first six months of the conflict in support of the routed KPA. They effectively combined Mao Tse Tung’s guerrilla warfare with main-force attritional combat and capitalized on Sun Tzu’s military concept of turning strengths into weaknesses. These tactics worked until Ridgway took over, restored defensive skills by focusing on infantry fundamentals, and regained the offensive initiative in early 1951.

US-UN Command Strategic Architecture

The Truman administration, after the June 1950 surprise attack, failed to think through what the geopolitical reality of a reunified Korea would require with respect to military resources and risks. The administration had reacted immediately to the North Korean aggression, quickly mobilized UN support, secured resolutions for the UN Command during the Soviet self-imposed boycott of the Security Council, and conducted a diplomatic campaign that obtained military support from twenty-two countries. US and ROK forces were the principal allied combatants. The president, senior diplomats, military commanders, and intelligence officers failed to anticipate the PRC’s reaction to a UN advance to the Yalu River.

Neither side had adequate intelligence of the other’s strategic geopolitical intentions, although Stalin, with superior HUMINT assets, understood and exploited Acheson’s reasons for not including Korea in the US Asian “defensive perimeter.” He accepted Kim’s assurances of a quick victory and was willing to take the risk and sustain communist combat losses if required. The United States never had clear insight into Stalin’s or Mao’s initial reluctance to enter the war or their early willingness to cut losses. Americans failed to read PRC diplomatic warnings correctly after Inchon. Lower-level SIGINT and COMINT military products were second-order effects, although they were tactically valuable to General Walker’s defensive deployments around Pusan and MacArthur’s execution of Inchon. The problem was that American military success after Inchon lacked a design for ending the war.

MacArthur’s dominance of the meeting at Wake Island preempted such strategic discussion. No one really addressed how the communist leaders might react.2 Mao was prepared to support Kim in a prolonged war of attrition.

Although many nations contributed manpower and matériel to the defense of South Korea, the United States and the ROK bore the brunt of the casualties and costs. Allied presence was not decisive because the Americans possessed technological advantages and, with the ROK Army, adequate combat manpower. However, the PLA’s entry into the conflict, with the continued support of the USSR, meant that the PLA and Kim could commit to a strategy of continual attrition using China’s large reserves of manpower.

General Walker’s tenacious defensive battle at Pusan enabled MacArthur’s Inchon success. General MacArthur planned and executed a military masterstroke at Inchon and then suffered a humiliating defeat after his overconfident advance to the Yalu. The JCS failed to get a firm grip on MacArthur’s command autonomy and eventual confrontation with President Truman. The Truman administration failed to develop a coherent theory of bringing the Korean War to a satisfactory geopolitical conclusion except to restore the status quo, resulting in more than three years of costly fighting.

At the Wake Island meeting, Truman had an opportunity to review the strategic architecture in Korea and determine how to end the war. However, no one in a senior position was asking the right what-if questions and evaluating alternative outcome scenarios, particularly if the PRC intervened. Everyone accepted, however uneasily, MacArthur’s commanding, post-Inchon confidence that the war was over except for mopping-up operations in the North. No one focused on bringing the war to an early resolution. US decision makers assumed that the UN Command held the military advantage and could impose a settlement based on MacArthur’s seemingly total defeat of the KPA after the Inchon landing. Kim Il Sung and his PRC allies were not prepared to accept a US-ROK-reunified Korean Peninsula.

Initially, President Truman’s dispatch of US forces to Korea drew high public approval because the administration appeared to occupy the high moral ground bolstered by UN resolutions grounded in collective-security principles. The heroic defense of the Pusan Perimeter and the Inchon counterstroke happened within a four-month period, and opinion polling reflected high confidence in a victorious outcome. That was the kind of expectation to which Americans only five years before had grown accustomed. When the war became protracted and casualties mounted, the Truman administration’s strategic architecture of an attrition war was no longer sustainable. It had not prepared the American people for a long, limited conflict because, after Inchon, it did not expect one. That was a strategic mistake. A war without clearly defined military and political benchmarks, directed toward a nebulous outcome for an independent South Korea, is a difficult case to argue compellingly in the language of a police action. By 1953 as the Eisenhower administration was about to assume office, only 36 percent of the American public supported an unpopular war. This would be the first but not the last time Americans would grow weary of postwar conflicts.

By the spring of 1951, the Korean War was a military stalemate. General Van Fleet had by this time taken over command of 8th Army from Ridgway. General Van Fleet had created a reserve position north of Seoul, the “No-Name Line,” after the British 29th Infantry Brigade had fought a heroic stand along the Imjin River until they had to withdraw in April.3 The Chinese offensive momentum in the wake of Operations Ripper and Killer had been spent. Yet the PLA continued to reinforce failure. In April and May of 1951, Marshal Peng Te’ Huai launched a new offensive known as the Fifth Phase Offensive with a plan for two converging thrusts to break through the UN line and encircle the 8th Army divisions one by one. Mao and Marshal Peng were intent on winning more victories on the battlefield before serious cease-fire negotiations began. Carter Malkasian’s history points out that the communist willingness to enter into negotiations and fight a limited war marked their abandonment of Kim Il Sung’s goal of reunifying Korea. General Van Fleet’s success in stopping Peng’s Fifth Phase Offensive “laid the basis for a negotiated settlement to the conflict.”4 Along this front, with minor tactical changes at various locations limited to a few miles, the UN Command would hold the line for the remaining two years of the war.

Both sides had to acknowledge the changed military and geopolitical realities in Korea. Americans discovered a painful new lesson that would repeat itself a generation later: war can be waged doggedly and determinedly at a negotiating table while carnage continues to pile up on the battlefields of a country neither side regarded as strategic for national survival. Mao and Peng realized that the losses they had incurred since January 1951 meant that the UN Command could not be decisively defeated.

Given the strategy and tactics both sides were using, neither side could prevail militarily. The debacle of the 8th Army in driving north to the Yalu resulted from a failure to anticipate the probable behavior of the enemy and a failure of operational learning. After Ridgway stabilized the defensive line, the ensuing battles of attrition during the drawn-out armistice negotiations left both parties essentially with the same territorial domains with which the conflict began.

In July 1951, talks began at the communist-proposed site of Kaesong; by August 22, the talks had gotten nowhere, having been “dragged down into a morass of ideological rhetoric and empty irrationality.”5 The talks lasted five weeks, as both sides dug into defensive positions. The Chinese dug trenches and tunnels into the hillsides, over 155 miles from coast to coast across Korea, creating a front of fortified positions, manned by 855,000 men, that were nearly impregnable to artillery fire and assaults. Successive lines were constructed in some places between fifteen to twenty-five miles in depth. Talks began a second time at Panmunjom in a no-man’s land between the combatant forces. Van Fleet was ordered to desist from major offensive action and limit UN forces to defense of the MLR. Local attacks were permissible, but operations of more than one battalion required authorization from Ridgway.

The Chinese contented themselves with a correct perception of war weariness among the United States and its UN allies. The negotiations ground on interminably through wrangling over each side’s treatment and return of prisoners, with embarrassing revelations of communist brainwashing of American POWs. General Van Fleet handed over command of 8th Army to General Taylor. Both generals were distinguished World War II veterans. To them, defeat and victory had been absolutes in their previous combat experience. Van Fleet expressed particular frustration because he believed that 8th Army had the combat power to breach the MLR and eventually roll it up. Between the summers of 1951 and 1953, under the strategic architecture of a limited war, that outcome was remote. Neither Washington nor the UN member capitals would entertain such a plan.

The PLA undertook a series of local attacks to test the UN Command’s will along the MLR as the Panmunjom negotiations reached the final phase. These attacks resulted in some of the war’s bitterest fighting, connected to names like “Old Baldy” and “Pork Chop Hill,” the former a hilltop in the middle of the Korean Peninsula that possessed no particular strategic significance during the summer and fall of 1952. A company-size position established in 1952, this outpost’s nickname came from its shape on a map. Pork Chop became emblematic of the combat actions fought during the war’s final eighteen months. The Chinese launched three major attacks in 1953 to take the outpost, and the third attack in early July was the heaviest. The 7th ID rotated five infantry battalions in five days through the position to hold it, with the assistance of tremendous amounts of artillery fire. With the Chinese apparently determined to take the outpost at whatever cost and the Korean War armistice imminent, General Taylor concluded that the cost of holding Pork Chop was not worth the price in small-unit casualties. He ordered the position abandoned two weeks before the armistice was signed.6

World War II veterans dominated the military leadership on both sides of the Korean War. General MacArthur was the dominant figure among them, but those who served under him or succeeded in senior positions had mainly served in Europe: Walker, Almond, Ridgway, Van Fleet, Clark, and Taylor. Senior marine officers, of course, had served mostly in the Pacific. Hastings quoted one unnamed senior officer, a veteran of both the Korean and Vietnam Wars, this way: “We went into Korea with a very poor army, and came out with a pretty good one. We went into Vietnam with a pretty good army, and came out with a terrible one.”7

The post–World War II downsizing produced deep deficits in manpower, combat readiness, training, leadership, and equipment. The recovery of the military initiative inside the Pusan Perimeter and at Inchon was a short-lived recovery from disaster. What happened to the 8th Army advancing to the Yalu and then retreating south of Seoul in less than three months set the stage for a second recovery by General Ridgway, who possessed the hardened experience of a World War II combat infantryman. As an airborne commander, he brought with him an obsession for better tactical intelligence. He peppered his staff with questions about the Chinese enemy: How many miles can they move at night? How flexible are their tactical plans once a battle begins? How much ammunition and food do PLA soldiers require per day? How long can they sustain an offensive? What he really wanted to know was how UN forces could shape the battle space to their advantage.8

Like Walker, Ridgway flew over the battle areas after Unsan in a small reconnaissance plane looking for the enemy. His discovery that they were invisible only increased his respect for them. He built a profile of how the Chinese operated and fought and how he intended to fight them. The PLA operated with significant logistical and communications deficits. The bugles, flutes, and loudspeakers in the middle of the night might be terrifying to inexperienced UN troops, but the fact that the PLA fought with the ammunition and food it could carry and was using musical instruments to communicate meant that they could not exploit sudden, unexpected changes in a tactical situation. The US Army could resupply its frontline units in a way impossible for the Chinese, who lacked an air force that could impose air superiority and who had few tanks and artillery. Equally advantageous, the UN forces could communicate in real time with radios and telephones that were interconnected to company, battalion, regiment, and division headquarters; airborne ground support squadrons; and offshore fleet bombardment units in ways inconceivable to the Chinese.

The 8th Army’s recovery, refusing to retreat when surrounded, ensuring that its flanks were covered, and paying attention to the details of coordinated moving, shooting, and communicating was the essence of a lethal World War II combat division in Europe. In these respects, according to Hastings, Halberstam, and Cumings, Korea was a dress rehearsal for Vietnam less than a quarter century later.

The combatants fielded different kinds of armies during the Korean War. The North Koreans sent a Russian-trained-and-equipped conventional force into the South across the 38th parallel. The Chinese People’s Liberation Army that entered the conflict six months later bore striking similarities to the kind of army Sun Tzu imagined. Ridgway’s 8th Army had to relearn the World War II infantry fundamentals. It was not the same army that had triumphed in 1945. It was a downsized, peacetime, garrison army that had to relearn the lessons that its predecessors had learned the hard way in Europe and the Pacific. Know the enemy and the weaknesses of his tactics. Study the terrain of the battle space. Walk; don’t ride near or on a battlefield. Take and hold the high ground. Dig in everywhere. Leverage combined-arms assets and practice the orchestration of moving, shooting, and communicating.

Diplomacy was a weak contributor to the development of a coherent American Korean War strategy. Early UN Security Council resolutions were ambiguous on specific war aims. Resolutions 82 and 83 condemned the DPRK’s aggression, called for an immediate cessation of hostilities, and proposed that UN members “repel the armed attack and restore international peace and security in the area.” Joseph C. Goulden points out that in the early days the Truman administration in both its public and private declarations displayed no desire to take the war beyond South Korea. Truman told the National Security Council (NSC) on June 29, 1950, that he “wanted it clearly understood that our operations in Korea were designed to restore peace there and to restore the border.” As the American military commitment deepened, debate developed about whether the United States could use defeat of the KPA as an opportunity to enforce postwar UN resolutions on Korean unification. The State Department was divided on this issue. This debate was never subjected to focused discussion and argument to force resolution. A State memorandum of July 25 asserted, “It is unlikely that the Kremlin at present would accept the establishment of a regime which it could not dominate and control.” It further warned that UN military action north of the parallel might “result in conflict with the USSR or Communist China” and foresaw a reluctance of UN member states to attempt unification. After identifying these downsides, the memo muddied the issue by recommending that no unification decision be made until the military and political situations clarified.9

When President Truman dispatched US forces to Korea in June 1950, 78 percent of Americans said they approved of the decision, and 15 percent disapproved. By February 1951, with the 8th Army pushed back south of Seoul, public support had eroded. When Americans were first asked about the Korean War in August 1950, 65 percent supported the war. By January 1951, public opinion had shifted dramatically: nearly half thought the war was a mistake, only 38 percent said it was not, and 13 percent had no opinion. A data plot of eight opinion polls thereafter indicated considerable fluctuation, with the “it was a mistake” percentage ranging from 37 percent (April 14, 1951) to 50 percent (February 26, 1952) and dropping to 36 percent (January 9, 1953) as President Eisenhower was about to assume office.10

The protracted nature of the attrition warfare after the spring of 1951, the frustrations of the truce talks, and the resulting military stalemate created limited opportunities for the Truman administration to design a winning strategic architecture for fighting a limited war. Truman’s police-action phraseology was not the basis for a compelling architecture. MacArthur’s “there is no substitute for victory” declaration became for many an emotional leitmotif that persists to the present day.

Ending the Korean War

The Korean War finally ended in July 1953. Left in its wake were four million Korean casualties, 10 percent of the population. Five million more became refugees. Korea’s industrial base was wiped out. North Korea’s armed forces lost six hundred thousand men in the fighting, in addition to two million casualties. The Chinese suffered one million casualties. Losses to the ROK armed forces are estimated at 70,000 killed, 150,000 wounded, and 80,000 captured, the majority of whom died from starvation or mistreatment. One million South Korean civilians were killed or injured. The armed forces of the United States lost 33,600 Americans, 103,200 wounded.11 Several historians, including Hastings, Halberstam, and Leckie, described it as the “forgotten war”; Cumings described it as the “unknown war.” Whatever the description, it was a limited war, fought for limited purposes, and it resulted in a limited outcome. Given the high casualties on both sides, it was difficult for many to assert flatly for many years after the armistice that the conflict was worth even a small fraction of those lives.

In the decades after the Vietnam War, the pessimistic view of the deficits of the Korean War began to change profoundly. The communist regime that survived in the North is now regarded almost universally as an international pariah with an impoverished, undernourished population. South Korea has evolved into one of the most successful democratic, capitalist nations in the world, with a population of nearly fifty million free and prosperous citizens, a record of constitutional and peaceable changes of government, and a $1.85 trillion GDP in 2015,12 exporting products that are household names globally. For those who fought and died there, these geopolitical facts must now weigh in the historical scales. Fighting to a stalemate in the Korean War yielded a geopolitical success. The Republic of Korea nearly seventy years later is a sovereign, prosperous “tiger” on the Pacific Rim. South Korea’s security is still dependent on the presence of the armed forces of the United States deployed there.