The Two Koreas_ A Contemporary History - Don Oberdorfer [177]
As tension continued to rise over the unresolved nuclear inspections and defueling of the North Korean reactor, the U.S. Command and the Pentagon moved ahead with military preparations. The first shipment of Patriot antimissiles arrived in Pusan in mid-April and were deployed before the end of the month. A battalion of U.S. Apache attack helicopters were brought in to replace the older Cobras, with more on the way. Additional heavy tanks, Bradley fighting vehicles (the modern replacement for armored personnel carriers), advanced radar tracking systems to pinpoint North Korean artillery, aircraft spare parts, and new ammunition-loading equipment arrived. About a thousand more troops landed quietly with the additional weapons, bringing U.S. forces up to their full authorized strength of 37,000. More heavy combat gear was loaded aboard American ships, to be within easy reach of Korea if additional troops were needed.
I met with the then-CINC (commander in chief) of U.S. forces in Korea, General Gary Luck, for the first time on May 3 at Yongson, a sprawling former Japanese Army base in the heart of Seoul that had been headquarters of the command since the time of the Korean War. In the mid-1980s, Luck, 56, had commanded the Second Infantry Division in Korea and led the Eighteenth Airborne Corps into action against Iraq in Operation Desert Storm. Wearing fatigues with his four stars sewn on the collars and his sleeves rolled up showing his impressive muscles, the gray-haired, crew-cut general had the physique and disarming country-boy drawl that marked him as combat leader. Given his appearance and bearing, I was not surprised to learn that he often jogged with his troops and lifted weights, but I would not have guessed, and only learned much later, that Luck had earned a Ph.D. in business administration from George Washington University.
The situation in Korea, Luck told me, is "much more dangerous now than a year or two ago," because of a slow-paced but constant military buildup in the North and especially because of the nuclear maneuvering, which he called "the catalyst for a more tension-filled drama." Luck's intelligence officers had coined the phrase "incremental normalism" to describe the creeping buildup and improvement of Pyongyang's forces, so constant that it was now taken for granted. In 1994 roughly 65 percent of North Korean forces, including 8,400 artillery pieces and 2,400 multiple rocket launchers, were estimated to be stationed within sixty miles of the DMZ, compared with 45 percent a decade earlier. U.S. estimates were that in case of war, North Korea could pound Seoul with five thousand rounds of artillery within the first twelve hours, causing havoc, death, and destruction in the capital despite the fierce counterattack planned by U.S. and ROK forces.
At the same time, Luck was impressed with the fundamental weakness of the North Korean capacity to sustain a long war. Privation was taking a serious toll on its military, despite the fact that Pyongyang was estimated to be spending about 25 percent of its GNP on maintaining its huge force of 1.1 million troops. North Korean military pilots had long been able to fly only a few hours a year because of the desperate shortage of fuel. Food was scarce, even for the military. Luck was particularly struck with the condition of two Korean People's Army soldiers, 19 and 23 years old, who had been captured in the South earlier in the year when their small boat had drifted across the sea border. The North Koreans