STRAT - Strategic Risk Assessment Talk: Global Threats and a World of Wars
Strategic Risk Assessment Talk delves into the complex geopolitical landscape, focusing on the evolving situation in Ukraine as North Korean troops are reported to be aiding Russian forces. Host Hal Kempfer, a retired Marine intelligence officer, provides a deep analysis of the implications of North Korea's involvement, including the potential impact on regional stability and the dynamics of the ongoing conflict. Kempfer highlights the psychological and operational characteristics of North Korean troops, particularly the indoctrination they undergo which may influence their performance in combat.
The episode also touches on the broader geopolitical ramifications, such as the response from South Korea and the potential shifts in military aid dynamics as the war progresses. As North Korea sends thousands of troops into the fray, the strategic chessboard in Europe becomes increasingly intricate, requiring careful monitoring and response from global powers. Kempfer's insights serve as a clarion call for understanding the multifaceted risks emerging from this development, emphasizing the need for a nuanced approach to international relations and conflict resolution.
Kempfer also explores the recent U.S. military actions against Houthi positions in Yemen, where B2 bombers were deployed to conduct precision strikes on deeply buried targets. Hal Kempfer discusses the significance of these military operations, not only in terms of their immediate objectives but also in light of their messaging to regional actors, particularly Iran and Hezbollah. The use of advanced stealth technology signals a commitment to maintaining strategic superiority and deterrence capabilities in the Middle East. Kempfer contextualizes these actions within the broader framework of U.S. foreign policy, examining how they fit into the ongoing tensions with Iran and the potential for escalation in the region. The discussion also reflects on the implications for U.S. allies and adversaries alike, reinforcing the idea that military readiness and capability remain critical components of international diplomacy.
The podcast concludes with a compelling analysis of the power shifts within Hamas following the death of its leader, Yahya Sinwar. Hal Kempfer outlines the immediate challenges Hamas faces in maintaining cohesion and effectiveness amidst significant losses in Gaza. The leadership vacuum left by Sinwar raises questions about the future direction of the organization, the potential for a ceasefire, and the implications for Israeli-Palestinian relations. Kempfer emphasizes the complexities of succession and the influence of external actors, such as Qatar and the UAE, in shaping the post-war landscape. He also considers the potential for a unified Palestinian front and the impact of international diplomatic efforts on the ground situation. The episode underscores the intricate interplay of local and international factors that define the current state of affairs in the region, highlighting the necessity for informed strategic assessments in navigating these turbulent waters.
Takeaways:
- Hal Kempfer discusses the implications of North Korean troops being sent to assist Russia in Ukraine, highlighting the potential consequences for the conflict.
- The U.S. has imposed sanctions on Chinese companies supplying military drones to Russia, indicating escalating tensions in the geopolitical landscape.
- The recent deployment of B2 bombers against Houthi positions in Yemen demonstrates the U.S.'s commitment to maintaining military capabilities in the region.
- The death of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar raises questions about the future leadership and strategy of Hamas amid ongoing conflict with Israel.
- Kempfer suggests that the involvement of North Korean forces in Ukraine might compel South Korea to reconsider its policy on arms to Ukraine.
- The podcast emphasizes the importance of deeper analysis beyond mainstream headlines to understand complex global risks.
Transcript
From the Mutual Broadcasting System, this is Strat Strategic Risk Assessment Talk.
Speaker A:Now, retired Marine intelligence officer and globally recognized risk expert, Hal Kaemfer.
Speaker A:Welcome to Strat.
Speaker A:Congrats, Strategic Risk Assessment Talk.
Speaker A:I'm Hal Kumfer and this is going to be basically, one could say, ripping from the headlines, if you will, but looking at some of the big things that are happening around the world.
Speaker A:Some of the wars, conflicts, dare I use the term megatrends, of what's happening out there and kind of breaking it down.
Speaker A:I'm going to cover a lot of things.
Speaker A:I'm going to talk about some things that are happening in the Middle East, I'm going to talk about some things that are happening in Europe and kind of fill in some other blanks, if you will.
Speaker A:And it's going to be a very busy time.
Speaker A:As always, I want to say, I always feel that twinge.
Speaker A:My Strat co host, Mark Mansfield.
Speaker A:We kind of came up with this whole thing way back when.
Speaker A:Tragically, he passed away last Christmas and we'd actually just got through recording a series of strap podcasts before that happened, and it just caught us all by surprise.
Speaker A:And so every time I do this, it's a little bit of remembrance to Mark and certainly a tribute to his wisdom, knowledge, his ability to convey all of that, and certainly the huge impact that he made in the world, particularly to those of us, his friends, who knew him as family more than anything else.
Speaker A:And so just want to say that before we move on.
Speaker A:So with that said, and Mark and I would probably move on in this direction, let's talk about what's happening in Europe, and that specifically is the war in Ukraine.
Speaker A:When I say the war in Europe or Europe, it's getting a little more complicated than that one.
Speaker A:You may have seen, just as a side note, that the US has put sanctions on a couple of Chinese companies who weren't just selling components to the Russians that could be turned into weapons, but they were actually full sized drones, more war fighting drones, if you will, or drones for warfare purposes that were sanctioned.
Speaker A:And that is kind of upping it a little bit.
Speaker A:With China, of course, that's upping it more than a little bit in terms of our sanction regime there.
Speaker A:But the thing I really want to talk about is next door to China, a country that borders Russia.
Speaker A:And that of course is North Korea.
Speaker A:And the thing that's been dominating the news is a series of satellite photos, if you will, reports, all sorts of intelligence coming out that North Korea is not just sending weapons and ammunition to Russia.
Speaker A:To use against the Ukrainians.
Speaker A:They are now sending North Korean troops.
Speaker A: ppears about somewhere around: Speaker A:First off in eastern Russia and then they're being moved closer to the border and inside Ukraine to do operations against the Ukrainian military.
Speaker A:Eventually this is supposed to grow to about 12,000 plus North Korean troops that they're going to send that direction.
Speaker A:Now there are reports that about there was some initial group and about a dozen North Korean troops got close to the border of Ukraine and they deserted.
Speaker A:Which is really kind of a surprise in so much as to desert is a very dangerous thing to do.
Speaker A:North Korea is one of the most oppressive autocratic despotic regimes, maybe the most in the on the planet.
Speaker A:Kim Jong Un I think has no shred of empathy or human understanding.
Speaker A:They're a country that is in desperate shapes.
Speaker A:They are.
Speaker A:Every time there's any sort of natural disaster it has an amplified effect in North Korea because on any given day when things are going great, it's horrific.
Speaker A:They recently had massive floods throughout North Korea.
Speaker A:And Kim Jong Un's response, which really is, it's Kim Jong Un's responsibility and it's his inability to plan, prepare to lead, to do anything.
Speaker A:But he rounded up reportedly somewhere between 40 plus.
Speaker A:I don't know if you want to call him managers, emergency managers, whatever people who had positions of responsibility with the floods and reportedly had them summarily executed to make a statement to everyone that you, you can't let floods happen.
Speaker A:As if they could somehow control mother Nature or if they had any influence in mitigating what eventually happened through allocating resources to something other than building nuclear warheads and ballistic missiles as Kim Jong Un is wont to do anyway.
Speaker A:With that said, any, any North Korean soldier that goes into Russia to fight in Ukraine needs to be very concerned that they do everything right.
Speaker A:Less their family come under a threat back in North Korea by this despotic regime.
Speaker A:Nonetheless, about a dozen of their troops took off.
Speaker A:Not to go to Ukraine at least as far as we know.
Speaker A:But it looks like they were trying to head the general direction of Europe and Russians were dispatched to try and track them down.
Speaker A:I don't know where that has landed itself right now, but it is interesting.
Speaker A:I don't know if the follow on troops are going to so inclined to try and desert as well, but we shall find out.
Speaker A:Now the North Korean Special operations forces or special Forces, that's a different thing.
Speaker A:Those one could say that, you know, certainly North Koreans in general are pretty much brainwashed by the regime.
Speaker A:All they know their entire lives is what the regime has been telling them.
Speaker A:So when they go in the military, that brainwashing gets turned up even more.
Speaker A:And if you go into the Special Operations or Special Forces realm, it is truly, it's overwhelming the psychological, the psychological warfare on their own, if you will, that they engage in to try and indoctrinate them completely.
Speaker A:For one of the things that they.
Speaker A:I don't know if they still do it, but for years, certainly a understood.
Speaker A:I wouldn't say rumor, but I think it was pretty much verified that they would.
Speaker A:Routinely, if you went through that training, your.
Speaker A:Your graduation exercise was to do an actual infiltration of South Korea and with some sort of objective, and then you were to exfiltrate and get back to North Korea.
Speaker A:And if you did that, then you got the patch for being Special Forces.
Speaker A:Well, this was going on for quite some time.
Speaker A:In one case, years back, they were doing a submarine, mini submarine insert.
Speaker A:The mini submarine ran aground.
Speaker A:They couldn't get it off.
Speaker A:And the commander of the Special Operations or Special Forces killed the navy crew, killed all of his own personnel, and then killed himself.
Speaker A:That is the sort of dedication you see with Special Forces.
Speaker A:That's the sort of dedication, I think, that makes everybody take pause when they think about these troops showing up in Ukraine and the sort of havoc that they could possibly entail using that sort of mentality, if you will, that focus, and going after the Ukrainians, particularly when they.
Speaker A:Their.
Speaker A:Their other option, their.
Speaker A:Their only other option, if they surrender, which is probably not going to happen, or if they desert would be to put their families at risk back in North Korea.
Speaker A:So you get the idea of what, what that's running into.
Speaker A:The other thing I'd point out is that North Korea has been mobilizing, recruiting, whatever you want to call it.
Speaker A:It's within that bizarre North Korean context, raising an army of over 1.2 million.
Speaker A:They have one of the largest standing armies in the world.
Speaker A:Very small country, relatively speaking, but this huge standing army.
Speaker A:My question when I, when I saw this latest mobilization effort was how are you going to pay for all these people to be in uniform?
Speaker A:You're not in a war.
Speaker A:They're.
Speaker A:Your economy is bereft of any outside way of making money.
Speaker A:All they do is they make, it seems, nuclear warheads and missiles.
Speaker A:That's about it, unless you're raising a large army to basically rent them out to another country, in this case Russia.
Speaker A:So we're just seeing you know, 12,000, maybe 15,000 troops now that may be going that direction.
Speaker A:It's not inconceivable.
Speaker A:We could be seeing tens of thousands more, perhaps 100,000 or hundreds of thousands more.
Speaker A:And this, of course, would help Putin because he wouldn't have to try and raise or conscript this large army, which there's been a requirement to do so for some time.
Speaker A:But he's afraid to do that because if he does, afraid the backlash within Moscow and St.
Speaker A:Petersburg might be such that it could unhinge his regime.
Speaker A:So now he's got, you know, door number three, which is bring in a bunch of, I know sounds strange, Communist mercenaries from North Korea to be his troops.
Speaker A:And as, and what they're doing is they're outfitting him in Russian clothes, Russian equipment, Russian uniforms, I should say Russian equipment.
Speaker A:There's even some inference that they're getting Russian ID identification, military id.
Speaker A:That way if they're killed on the battlefield, it makes it more difficult to say that they're actually North Korean as opposed to say, you know, somebody who is ethically from East Asia that's Russian, in order to, you know, kind of ham handily hide the fact that a lot of North Korean troops are going to be killed in Ukraine.
Speaker A:This is something that is probably going to have a big hit in the European theater.
Speaker A:And I think we have to watch this closely.
Speaker A:One of the unintended consequences or one of the things that they're going to have to look at is what will South Korea do?
Speaker A:Right now, South Korea has a moratorium on sending arms to a country in actual warfare and conflict.
Speaker A:So whereas they make absolutely top line tanks, planes, artillery, you name it, they are one of the great armaments producers of the world at this point.
Speaker A:They can't send anything because of their own law and their own policies to Ukraine because it's a, it's a country under war.
Speaker A:Now, North Korea, the belligerent to the north, sending troops, not just armaments, but troops to Ukraine.
Speaker A:There's a very good chance that South Korea may be revisiting that entire policy, that entire legal sanction, if you will, and making changes.
Speaker A:And that could be a real boon to Ukraine if they can get those weapons in there.
Speaker A:And I think that would be, that may offset whatever comes out of the election.
Speaker A:I mean, it's not a secret that former President Trump is not a big fan of more aid going to Ukraine.
Speaker A:And certainly Ukraine is going to be looking for other sources of aid, particularly armaments, ammunition, etc.
Speaker A:And South Korea might be able to help fill that void.
Speaker A:The other thing is if this is really kind of real politic, but if the North Korean military is tied up and broiled, getting basically decimated in a war in Ukraine, that in some ways one could argue reduces the threat that South Korea sees on its northern border along the dmz.
Speaker A:Because simply North Korea just doesn't have the military resources it would have normally had to engage in belligerence along the dmz, let alone try to launch some sort of attack or something like that.
Speaker A:Doesn't take away from the nuclear threat at all, but it does say something about the conventional threat.
Speaker A:So anyway, that's enough on that.
Speaker A:Let's talk about something else that's happened in the news here.
Speaker A:As the US struck Houthi territories in Yemen with U2s, U2s with B2 bombers, B2 stealth bombers.
Speaker A:This is not the B21 Raider that you may have been seeing in the news, but These are the B2s that were developed some time back.
Speaker A:What little known originally the B2 literally came out of a Cold War development thing.
Speaker A:It was a stealth bomber, if you remember the old 117 program with the stealth fighters.
Speaker A:Well, this was the stealth bomber and of course designed to drop nuclear warheads designed to go after the Soviet Union.
Speaker A:Originally.
Speaker A:There's a country that no longer exists in the O's, the latter O's.
Speaker A:There was recognition that to be relevant in the modern battlefield, it had to be able to deliver something in the conventional realm that actually had, could be useful.
Speaker A:And it was designed or redesigned, retrofitted if you will, to design to basically drop these massive ordnance penetrator munitions.
Speaker A:These things are huge.
Speaker A:£30,000 of bunker busting bomb is dropped from the back of these things.
Speaker A:And that is reportedly what they used to attack these Houthi positions.
Speaker A:The Houthis have been there for quite some time.
Speaker A:Many of the ordnance bunkers where they keep the rockets and missiles, the anti ship missiles, and assuredly some drones are deeply buried underground where there is rock, probably concrete protecting it, and they're more difficult to strike.
Speaker A:There's a limited array of munitions that can be put on strike aircraft coming off of aircraft carriers.
Speaker A:And they needed something bigger, something that could hit the ground, go into the ground and then have enough explosive force, enough energy that it could collapse those underground tunnels, bunkers, ammunition cache, whatever you want to say, those, those facilities underground.
Speaker A:And that is a, dare I say, a MOP mission.
Speaker A:And so they use the B2s to go in there.
Speaker A:The other thing too is they're Stealth, they're tough to pick up on.
Speaker A:They're tough to see.
Speaker A:That's a little.
Speaker A:And of course, they probably want to see what would happen within the air defense radar envelope, if you will, that the Houthis had where they could even pick up on the fact they were there, whether they would react.
Speaker A:It's a good chance to.
Speaker A:I mean, it's a little bit of risk, but it's a very good chance to test whether these things would actually do what they want to do.
Speaker A:And so they did this big strike.
Speaker A:The other thing beyond that, and they hit about five different target sets over there and apparently had a high degree of success from all reports.
Speaker A:The other thing it's doing is it's sending a message to the region.
Speaker A:Keep in mind, Israel is going to strike back at Iran at some point.
Speaker A:You May recall around October 1st, Iran did another big strike against Israel with a bunch of ballistic missiles.
Speaker A:About 180 plus missiles didn't really get through the Iron Dome very well.
Speaker A:Some of the missiles, some of the warheads actually did get through, didn't hit their intended targets, but they did hit the ground.
Speaker A:They made some craters.
Speaker A:One landed, I think, within 500 yards of Mossad headquarters.
Speaker A:And that's certainly very disturbing to see something like that.
Speaker A:A couple of warheads landed at an air base where there's F35 fighter bombers, which is the most advanced fighter bomber that we provide the Israelis.
Speaker A:And so there was concern that they need to do some things to plug that hole.
Speaker A:You may have seen that the US Sent over a Thaad battery, that's a terminal high altitude air defense system, and also sent US Troops with it to run it.
Speaker A:And that was to help plug that ballistic missile hole.
Speaker A:But the other thing is that they're looking at the strike, if you will, against Iran.
Speaker A:Well, let me just back off a little bit.
Speaker A:The US did not bomb Iran, despite what you may have heard in an old Beach Boys song.
Speaker A:No, there was no intention to bomb Iran.
Speaker A:But it does remind Iran, and it also reminds Hezbollah that has a lot of underground bunkers where they keep missiles and rockets and ammunition ordnance, that the US does possess a unique capability in this realm where we can reach out and touch somebody.
Speaker A:In fact, the Pentagon pretty much made that clear in its statement that this is demonstrating the capability that the US has globally to go out and do things like this.
Speaker A:Not saying that Iran, are you paying attention per se, but certainly Iran is paying attention because the Houthis are their proxy and they're seeing what's being done.
Speaker A:And you can bet that all the battle damage assessment that comes out of the Houthi area will also get transmitted over to Iran to say, this is what hit us, this is what it did.
Speaker A:And Iran will take that into consideration.
Speaker A:Big consideration.
Speaker A:Because Iran has deeply buried nuclear facilities.
Speaker A:And certainly if something was ever to be done on an international level on that, the US May very well become involved.
Speaker A:And we, of course, have a unique capability to address that with the ordinance I just spoke about.
Speaker A:So that's what happened over in the Houthi area.
Speaker A:Big message.
Speaker A:A huge message.
Speaker A:Now, you may recall that Yahya Sinwar, the head of Hamas, is dead.
Speaker A:I almost feel like going back to Chevy Chase and starting out live in the 70s when Francisco Franco was reported that he died, and there was reported that he wasn't dead.
Speaker A:And then it was reported he died.
Speaker A:And they finally did that famous broadcast where they said, it's been confirmed, you know, that Francisco Franco is still dead.
Speaker A:Well, that was kind of becoming almost like Yaya Sinwar.
Speaker A:There was a period there for weeks where he'd been completely out of contact with any of the Hamas negotiators in Doha and Qatar or basically had had any communication.
Speaker A:So there were all these reports coming out that nobody had talked to him for weeks.
Speaker A:And there was a lot of speculation that maybe one of those big strikes, airstrikes that the Israelis had done in Gaza, maybe it collapsed the tunnel that he happened to be in.
Speaker A:It was a bit of a question.
Speaker A:And then there was stuff coming out that indicated, no, he's probably still alive.
Speaker A:And the Israelis never came out and said he was dead at that time.
Speaker A:They just said they're assessing, he's still alive, but he is not communicating with anybody now.
Speaker A:He is very much dead.
Speaker A:Wasn't a.
Speaker A:And it wasn't some big special operation, and it wasn't some big airstrike that did it.
Speaker A:I'm not discounting the impact of a number of airstrikes, but basically it was regular troops, infantry with armor, tanks, if you will, cordoning off an area in Rafah down the south, and then tightening that cordon, building by building, tunnel by tunnel, reducing that cordon down tighter and tighter.
Speaker A:And eventually that just happened to be where he was.
Speaker A:He popped up out from under a tunnel, from underground, and he was trying to escape by running from building to building.
Speaker A:And the troops, IDF troops saw him, took him under fire, took.
Speaker A:Took him under tank fire.
Speaker A:And eventually he got into a building where he got up to the second floor, and he was seriously wounded.
Speaker A:I'm not, in fact, looking at the wounds.
Speaker A:I'm not sure if he just.
Speaker A:He had one arm disabled from a severe wound or if he was actually possibly missing a hand.
Speaker A:It wasn't quite clear, but he was up there sitting on a big chair, and they sent in a little tactical drone that flew into the room.
Speaker A:I was looking at him, he turned his head, kind of tried to throw a stick at the.
Speaker A:At the drone, and the drone flew out of there.
Speaker A:And they hit the building again with fire.
Speaker A:And I'm presuming they hit it with.
Speaker A:They hit it.
Speaker A:I know they hit it with a tank round and.
Speaker A:But I'm also presuming they hit it with possibly machine gun fire, because when they found him, they assessed that his death was caused by a bullet round that went right through his head.
Speaker A:So probably machine guns were being used as well, and he happened to get caught in that.
Speaker A:But anyway, he is dead.
Speaker A:Now the big question is, does this change things?
Speaker A:Well, obviously there's a bit of a succession thing.
Speaker A:They're trying to figure out who's going to take over for him.
Speaker A:That's a big issue.
Speaker A:But it was interesting to hear the Biden White House and President Biden himself talk about this as an opportunity.
Speaker A:Maybe we get a ceasefire into place.
Speaker A:Of course, Hamas and Bibi Netanyahu came back, said, no, there's still a war, it's still going on.
Speaker A:And right now it's very difficult for anyone in Hamas to make any agreement on a ceasefire because of what did happen and the fact that, well, they're in a war, they're losing very badly.
Speaker A:There's not as many Hamas members left as there were before.
Speaker A:By a long stretch, their chain of command, at least in Gaza, has been truly decimated, if not destroyed.
Speaker A:And so they're just kind of sticking to the last game plan they have, which is just to keep fighting.
Speaker A:But now they're trying to figure out who's going to place them.
Speaker A:And it might be some folks in Doha and it might be some folks in Gaza.
Speaker A:If it's Gaza, it kind of leans toward Mohammed Sinwar, his brother, who is just as radical, if not more radicalized than Yahya Sinwar was.
Speaker A:And if that's the case, don't expect anything to happen.
Speaker A:And then the other side is the Doha side.
Speaker A:And then the question is, if Doha signs a ceasefire, makes an agreement, will the actual Hamas fighters, the leaders of the tactical leaders, if you will, of Hamas in Gaza, listen to whatever the Doha folks tell them to do?
Speaker A:And that's an unknown as well.
Speaker A:So a lot of questions are coming up in that.
Speaker A:Interestingly in all this Netanyahu reached out to the two basically Hamas soldiers or fighters, whatever you want, terrorists directly and said that if you come decide to bring hostages to us, we will let you, we will let you live on if you will will and kind of implied that he'll let them go to some third country or something like that.
Speaker A:So absolutely fascinating situation with that.
Speaker A:The US working with the uae, Saudi Arabia as and it's a UAE led concept of a post war arrangement for peacekeeping and stuff in Gaza are pushing that forward and it might be something that involves a multinational Arab country with uae, Saudi Arabia probably involved with some sort of refashioned Palestinian Authority actually controlling things like ground.
Speaker A:They're pushing that initiative.
Speaker A:That's got a long way to go before anybody ever agrees anything close to that.
Speaker A:But it is rather interesting to see that out there.
Speaker A:And of course the Chinese have trying to get Hamas and Fatah, which is the, which is part of the plo, which is the other side of the Palestinian Authority to get Hamas and Fatah to unify.
Speaker A:Not the first time that's happened but if it does in this case I think that would neutralize the ability of the Palestinian Authority as certainly as it's currently fashioned to do much of anything.
Speaker A:So I will leave that now.
Speaker A:With that said, I'm not going to get into all the depth of Hezbollah but I am going to mention one thing that's interesting and it's floating around the news and I don't know if it's entirely accurate but it is fascinating to see that there is a there was documents or intelligence leaked on Telegram, the social media platform Telegram supposed to be top secret US intelligence talking about the Israeli strike on Iran and that it maybe this was if it's real, which it may very well be.
Speaker A:It says that the US is looking very closely at isra, which I'm sure Israel is not that comfortable that we're, we're doing that much intelligence work on Israel and also compromising whatever Israel is planning to do.
Speaker A:I don't know if that's real, but I will say that's something we have to look at over the next week or so.
Speaker A:That is a huge problem.
Speaker A:If US intelligence has been penetrated and top secret intelligence on this war, if you will, can get out and then get posted globally on a social media platform like Telegram.
Speaker A:That is a huge, huge problem that's going to have to be addressed anyway.
Speaker A:It's been a lot of topics covered.
Speaker A:We've covered a lot of territory across the board.
Speaker A:And with that said, I want to thank you for taking your time to listen to Strategic Risk Assessment talk.
Speaker A:Listen, go a little bit beyond the headlines, if you will.
Speaker A:Get a little more in depth.
Speaker A:You know, one of the problems that I always run into with doing my on air stuff with broadcast news is we always have a very strict timeline on what we can talk about, and we just don't have time to get into some topics.
Speaker A:There are some things we literally have to just not talk about at all because we don't have time about it.
Speaker A:But in this podcast, we do have time to talk about.
Speaker A:And I thank you for taking the time to be a little bit better informed and spend some time with me, kind of going through some of these issues.
Speaker A:So thank you again and hope you have a great week.
