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North Korea celebrated its founding with a military parade featuring dump trucks modified to work as rocket launchers
(www.businessinsider.com)
this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2023
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I don't know why people are clowning this, pay 10M for one military grade truck or pay 10m for 200 civilian grade trucks that can have inherent camouflage...
Well, disguising military equipment as civilian vehicles just means any enemy is going to target civilian vehicles, but yeah can't argue with cost efficiency.
Unfortunately any large scale conflict with north Korea is probably going to require just that.
Probably wouldnt be too hard, with North Korea being as poor and hard hit with sanctions as it is, there are few motor vehicles in the country, and in a war time scenario they would likely be using almost every single one (except for the personal vehicles owned by party elites) in a military capacity.
NK already has mandatory military service for 10 years starting at 17 years old. If they went to war they could just draft literally everyone else. Doubt you could consider anyone but the children and the elderly "civilians"
It'll be very similar to how things went down in Japan during WW2 where they'd militarized all of their civilians
"unfortunately, there was just no way around it - they built their own weapons instead of buying them for billions each from Lockheed Martin, so the US government just had to murder hundreds of thousands of their civilians" said Spacemanspliff, ruefully taking a toke in memorial of the people who'd chosen to become victims of war crimes
The citizens of North Korea are already victims of crimes against humanity from their own regime. Not like the US is going to make it any worse for them.
just like the neutral-to-positive impact caused by some good ol' apple pie war crimes in Viet Nam, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc...?
Nice whataboutism, comrade.
under any coherent definition of "whataboutism", it would mean saying "any crimes against humanity committed by the North Korean government don't matter, because of [something an unrelated regime did]".
instead, I was responding to @Marsupial@quokk.au, who was saying that the US invading North Korea wouldn't make the citizens' lives any worse – to which, talking about the history of how US invasions have affected people seems, I don't know, extremely relevant?
unless your comment is meant to be satire about how "whataboutism" is coming to mean "any criticism of the US government whatsoever", in which case it's a beautiful job 👏
Civilian trucks are expensive decoys compared to balloon or plywood ones, but on balance probably not that bad given that unlike having to make and store pure military decoys, functional civilian trucks make money during peacetime.
This is a valid way to camouflage rocket artillery that was seen in Iraq by US armed forces.
It won't stop the US and S. Korea from also just bombing every garbage truck if it comes to it, but we then waste a ton of bombs on harmless garbage trucks trying to hit ~100 rocket trucks.
It's a good idea.
Isn't that a war crime?
No.
Destroying rocket launchers is a military objective. Killing civilians while trying to achieve a military objective is not a war crime. There is even a term for those civilians: "collateral damage".
However, killing civilians for its own sake, without a military objective, may be a war crime.
And after the West bombs those vehicles, NGOs will claim that the US were killing civilians. Genius!
Every country that has gone to war has killed civilians.
Maybe stupid but if it works, then it works!
Does it work, though?
World war 3 let's go
My point exactly. Why launchbrockets at your enemies when you can throw trash.
Probably because civilian trucks aren't as capable as military ones. Hence why none of the respectable militaries in the world go this route.
Well yes, kind of the point of guerilla asymmetric warfare is that you're not going to succeed using the same tactics as your enemy.
The might of the US military still lost to a Vietnamese army using lots of civilian gear and struggled to manage a bunch of Toyota Hiluxs with light machine guns bolted on in Afghanistan.
A military truck doesn't cost anywhere near 10M. Humvees cost $70-100K, a bigger military truck costs about twice that. Considering off-road capability, crew protection, and ease of repair, it's a far better investment than a dump truck (which costs $100-200K).
Of course those prices don't include the weapon systems, but dump trucks don't come standard with rocket launchers either.