A New War Footing.

• Author: Emord, Jonathan W.
• Position: WORLD WATCHER

NORTH KOREA continues to build an arsenal of nuclear weapons capable of reaching the U.S. and our allies. It intends to use threats of imminent attack to intimidate Western states into conceding to its demands for resources. The regime functions in a thuggish, uncivilized manner. Its actions invite both a conventional and an unconventional response. Pres. Donald Trump can learn much from Winston Churchill, who faced a comparable threat from the Nazis as prime minister and dealt with it brilliantly, relying not just on conventional, but on unconventional, means. That adaptation is the best way to overcome the rigid command-and-control regime that is the dictatorship of Kim Jong Un.

In Churchill's Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare: The Mavericks Who Plotted Hitler's Defeat, Giles Milton records how Churchill relied upon a group of war-minded thinkers and warriors to prepare for the Battle of Britain and wreak havoc behind enemy lines throughout the war. The effects of those efforts were critical to Allied victory and to reducing the loss of Allied life. Trump would do well to adopt the same framework in his dealings with the hermit kingdom.

On the conventional side, the U.S. must do everything it can to encourage South Korea and Japan to adopt a war footing, to educate their citizenry that a war with North Korea is coming, and to accept a burgeoning of U.S. and allied military operations within South Korea and Japan, including added American military; installation of new ballistic and anti-ballistic missile systems under U.S. control; and an expansion of allied air presence over South Korea and Japan, as well as a more thorough allied naval presence in the Yellow Sea and the Sea of Japan. In short, we must convince South Korea and Japan that the issue no longer is if North Korea will go to war, but when.

In turn, we need to strengthen--substantially and rapidly--our offensive and defensive capabilities in the region until we are confident that annihilation of North Korea is achievable with minimal loss of allied lives. In that regard, we need to implement "ungentlemanly warfare," by which I mean clandestine and unconventional operations to interfere with the ability of North Korea to exist and to maintain command, control, and communication. We need to rely on innovative and clever means of overwhelming the ability of the dictatorship to dictate.

We indeed are fortunate that our North Korean enemy is one of the most-brutal totalitarian...