POTD: Republic of Korea Special Warfare Command Soldiers

@Uniform223 Even more interesting question would be how do they compare to the DPRK special warfare guys. Since they're mysterious and everyone assumes that their training allows huge loses and complete disregard for human life or health, their reputation has been beefed up over decades like some kind of unstoppable supermans.

Plus they did infiltrate all the way to the ROKs presidential's residence and then managed to battle the entire ROK army and retreat north (the 1968 Blue House Raid).

Kinda like the western Spetsnaz GRU cult following, except that Spetsnaz has collapsed during the 1990s Russia economical collapse, while DPRK doesn't care about being economically collapsed.

@Ondřej Tůma Given that the DPRK special forces have limited funding and no combat experience outside of a few raids where most of them ended up dead (including the Blue House raid where they had 97% casualties), I doubt they're much of a threat no matter how dedicated they are.

@ARCNA442 It appears to me Sun Tsu would beg to disagree.

Do you think special forces competence could be measured by dollars spent per head or combat experience versus untrained rebels? In that case, the best SF in the world are probably Vatican's Swiss guards :D

@Ondřej Tůma in 1968 NK had a higher standard of living than SK
If they made it this far today they'd probably turn their guns on themselves after seeing that South Koreans have a society far beyond what they've known as cloistered NK.

@SP mclaughlin Well, now were getting further and further from military prowess, well into sociology and dynamics of authoritarian regimes, but... Not neccesarily. Before 1989, a lot of defectors from the Eastern bloc actually came out seriously depressed, many committed suicide or even returned back to the Warsaw Pact states despite knowing they will be punished. Much more than would be explained by the homesickness.

It turned out that despite the claims about equality in the Socialist countries, the opposite was true to much bigger extent than in the West - if you were a ranking officer or even a low-level Party bureocrat, you were Someone in the Eastern bloc. While in the capitalist countries, even factory worker could have had better car than you, everyone had the same level of luxury and the defectors suddenly dropped to Nobodys.

In DPRK, the most elite troops are now quite Someones. They most probably wouldn't trade it for being Nobodys in the ROK even if it meant significantly better material luxury.

@Ondřej Tůma They sent 30 guys, 1 of them got arrested, 1 managed to get back to North korea... Rest died.

And they didn't even manage to kill the one (1) guy they went out to kill. Your run of the mill American nutjob has a better track record.

@iksnilol If anything, this could be compared to the Operation Red Wings, as the DPRK commandos were detected already on their way in, and still they continued with their mission to push further.

They managed to outrun the search for them, infiltrate the enemy capital city, evade or pass all checkpoints and armed forces hunting for them, and only failed the very last checkpoint. Then they managed to further evade or push trough the entire armed forces of Seoul on their way out, and evade or battle combined ROK and US. Army for further 3 to 7 days before they were wiped out.

The only battle against such odds is the incredible flight of the Masin brothers across the Eastern Germany into the West sector, but these guys had some incredible luck (IIRC the GDR soldiers pissed on the tree trunk they were hiding in) and the GDR forces didn't have a positive ID on their location. And they were just 3.

@Ondřej Tůma Sorry, I don't remember the chapter in the Art of War saying that "toughness" beats training, equipment, leadership, and combat experience - quite the opposite actually.

The fact that you think the DPRK special forces are "unstoppable supermans" based on one failed raid (against largely unprepared conscripts) that saw them wiped out almost to a man over half a century ago while the the most lavishly funded and supported units in the history of warfare with decades of successful real life combat experience (against literal religious fanatics living off the land - the very definition of insanely dedicated and tough people, I might add) are nothing, says all anyone needs to know about your argument.

@ARCNA442 I meant the part of Art of War speaking against underestimating your enemy. "That guy is beggar, he cannot be a serious threat" ranks in the the Top Last Words list.

If you didn't notice, I wrote exactly about training - more harsh training than normal armies have.

And as for the combat experience - do you really insist that untrained, ignorant, uneducated and often low-IQ fanatic is equal threat as an intelligent, trained soldier educated in tactics, weapon handling, small unit movement etc.?