Nikolaz72 said:
America has 200.000 Up to date and highly trained troops.. The rest has pretty much just gotten through bootcamp and earned a little clap on the behind. I know that might be undercutting it a bit but with the way that SOME private companies earn a lot on weapons and therefor ínvest a lot of money in private research probably results in more effective weapons pretty fast. Keeping millions of soldiers equiped with that is pretty expensive. Also when you take into consideration that the US is in a /pretty big/ debt to China and probably also owes a bit to others. They just cant afford the advanced equipment you speak. Which is why they limitt the troops with that kind og gear to a couple of hundred thousand while giving the rest your standard weaponry that other country's even the quite poor ones could easily attain. I mean in Iraq you have heard of US Soldiers dropping their own gun for the Insurgent weapons (And thats ment as, theirs are sometimes even better) Which means that Standard Issue equipment in US is pretty much the standard issue equipment of everyone else. And the training of standard US troops, while high. Does still not make them into supersoldeiers.
America's weaponry (missiles, aircraft, vehicles, etc.) is currently, overall, the most technologically advanced in the world, so I don't know what you were going on about the States not being able to afford to make technologically advanced equipment--the US already has, even if there's been no persuasive reason for it to issue it to every GI. The F-22, for example, is a crazy-advanced (though fragile) fighter jet, but production on it was ceased because it was too advanced--there was no threat sufficient for it, so spending that money was pointless. Moving from there, the US debt to China would not affect its ability to defend itself for a few reasons, most noticeably the fact that if it came down to it the US could cancel its debt to China, or stop funding Social Security, welfare, and education, and start making weapons (all of which can be produced within US borders).
Secondly, I would seriously dispute your unsourced claim that America's military forces have only 200,000 troops who would be able to participate in combat. Consider the fact that ~200,000 American forces have been in Iraq since 2003, ~30,000 in Afghanistan in 2001, both of which are combat zones. This completely discounts combat-ready troops in South Korea and on the high seas. Certainly, American
does not have 2 million soldiers ready and armed to fight right now--that's a logistical impossibility for any country. NK doesn't have 9 million troops ready to go to combat, for instance. There are significant reserves of materiel, however, and it has the potential to mobilize that number since, as I mentioned, in a time of national emergency the USA's ability to equip its soldiers would meet that minimum level.
And, as a matter of fact, I haven't heard of American troops in Iraq dropping their weapons for insurgent weaponry. Presumably there are many reasons for that, and I certainly wouldn't deny that, in terms of firearms, the US is more advanced; a gun is a gun is a gun, at some point. In most other ways, however, such as battlefield intelligence, personal body armor, camouflage, gun sights, the US combat trooper's equipment is far beyond a North Korean's, much less an insurgent's. Facing an aggressor (contemporary NK troops) from a strong defensive position (which the US would have if NK invaded) then it would be somewhat pathetic for NK to have a go.
Now, give it a half a century, we can talk then, but it's really difficult, if not impossible, to imagine things changing so fast that NK becomes a credible threat within twenty years.
