A North Korea threat, and strategy after the 1990s

Korea’s military strategy, the notes write, has been kept centered on measures against a still-present North Korea threat, and will keep that basic form for as long as the threat remains. Even so, they say, change on the peninsula — in inter-Korean relations, in the alliance with the United States, in the country’s standing, and in the character of war — now asks for a fresh development of strategy. Military strategy, in their account, is a method for using force to reach a political aim, and it has to answer a changing security environment.

After the collapse of the Cold War system and a leap in information technology, they write, countries have been developing new strategic concepts since the 1990s. The United States, in their example, pressed military innovation that could make the most of its technical power, and on that base won large victories in the Gulf War, the Kosovo war, and the war in Afghanistan. A strategy set wrongly, they add, can mean decisive defeat before a war has even begun. France, they write, failed after the First World War to grasp German ideas of blitzkrieg with aircraft and tanks, and brought defeat on itself by leaning on the Maginot Line. Those campaigns and that reading stay in the years the notes name.

Maneuver war and paralysis war

Maneuver war, the notes write, is a form of regular war that uses superior mobility to paralyze the enemy, physically and psychologically, so that the enemy yields in spirit, and a victory comes in a short time with as little sacrifice as possible. Its aim is to break the will to resist. Its means are relative mobility and speed; its method is that physical and psychological paralysis.

Paralysis war, they continue, uses many means to paralyze an enemy state, again physically and psychologically, so that the state’s will to fight collapses and a political aim is reached, likewise in a short time and at a low cost in lives. The target is the enemy’s system, and the organized psychology of the state and the army. The means may be various; the method is still that double paralysis. Korea’s military strategy, they add, is closed in character and not much discussed in public, but a general discussion is still possible once the threat and the character of war are taken into account.

Warden’s five rings, and what strategy is for

The notes turn to the development of paralysis-war theory in Warden’s strategy, which puts first the strategic paralysis of a national system. If a state is paralyzed at that level, they write, field forces need not even be touched; they cannot be sustained, and they go down to defeat. To force strategic and operational paralysis, the enemy’s strategic center is read as five concentric rings: the command; organic essentials such as electricity, oil, food, and money; infrastructure such as roads, airfields, and sea lanes; the population; and field forces such as the army and the police. Priority, they say, should be set by thinking downward from the center, and pressure should fall first, and in parallel, on that innermost ring.

The old “principles of war,” they argue, do not sit well with paralysis-war strategy and should give way, at the strategic level, to rules for how an enemy state is paralyzed. The best fighting, in a line they record, is not to win a hundred battles, but to prevail without fighting: first by scheme, then by isolating the enemy through diplomacy, then by destroying the enemy’s forces, and last of all by storming cities. Strategy, they write, is there to serve national security and defense aims, and to shape a favorable situation for operational art. The same Korean report, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. The notes’ account of paralysis war, maneuver war, and Warden’s five concentric rings

Last updated: 14 November 2026