A North Korean government collapse would have serious consequences, including a humanitarian disaster and civil war. The Republic of Korea and the United States can help mitigate the consequences, seeking unification by being prepared to deliver humanitarian aid in the North, stop conflict, demilitarize the North Korean military over time, secure and eliminate North Korean weapons of mass destruction, and manage Chinese intervention.

Within the U.S. defense community, there is no agreed-upon perception of how warfare is evolving. This report presents the results of war gaming and analysis on the future of warfare. It structures its findings around four issues: (1) warfare will be dominated by uncertainty and variability; (2) adversaries will seek new patterns of warfare to effectively oppose the United States; (3) asymmetrical battles will characterize war; and (4) weapons of mass destruction cast a shadow over almost all future contingencies. It proposes that analysis and modeling must evolve to: (1) reflect the significant differences in the warfare environment that will exist between theaters; (2) focus on strategic and operational events, variations, and uncertainties; (3) adopt a "counter-capabilities" approach to defining military threats; (4) adopt a new approach of developing simple but more comprehensive models; (5) address issues associated with the regional shadow of weapons of mass destruction; and (6) develop new procedures for presenting the uncertainties of analyses to decisionmakers.

An analysis of the Republic of Korea (ROK) defense reform plan (DRP), this paper discusses the background of the DRP and the manpower problem it needs to address. It presents the author's estimates of the force changes that would occur and how those forces appear to fit the force requirements the ROK will likely face in the coming years. It concludes by recommending steps the ROK could take to manage the key risks identified.

The Defense Department's 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review expressed concerns about emerging chemical and biological (CB) weapon agents and the ability of U.S. defenses to counter them. Scientific advances that facilitate the development of new and novel CB agents and the difficulties uncovering such work suggest that adversary programs could acquire new CB agents years before U.S. defense planners recognize those agents. Once these CB agents are recognized as threats, the United States will probably need many more years to establish a comprehensive defense against them, and even these defenses are unlikely to protect the civilians, contractors, and allied military personnel essential to modern U.S. military operations. Such gaps in CB agent defense capabilities pose a potentially serious risk to U.S. military operations. To best mitigate this risk, the U.S. Chemical and Biological Defense Program (CBDP) needs to augment current work with enhanced efforts to dissuade adversary CB agent development and to deter adversary use of new CB weapons. Successful initiatives in dissuasion and deterrence will depend on CB defensive programs that appear dynamic, progressive, and integrated with other Defense Department and national-level efforts in counterproliferation. The CBDP could add a second track to the current agent-specific science and technology effort to focus on the mechanisms of CB agent effects and interactions with the environment. The goal of the resulting robust combination of CBDP defense, dissuasion, and deterrence is to induce great doubts in adversaries about the value of employing any CB agents or developing new CB agents.

For years, the Republic of Korea (also known as South Korea) has pursued a policy of peaceful reunification with North Korea. This report examines what could be done to convince North Korean elites that unification would be good for them.

Examines the asymmetric strategies that future adversaries might employ and identify potential U.S. vulnerabilities and methods to address them.

North Korea's leaders have sought to dominate the Korean Peninsula since then failure to conquer the Republic of Korea (ROK) in tine Korean War. However, they have lacked the economic, political, and conventional military means to achieve that dominance, having instead come to rely on their nuclear weapon and ballistic missile programs, Today, North Korea's nuclear weapons pose an existential threat to the ROK, and they might soon pose a serious threat to the United States; even a few of them could cause millions of fatalities and serious casualties if detonated on ROK or U.S. cities. The major ROK and U.S. strategy to moderate this threat has been negotiating with North Korea to achieve denuclearization, but this effort has failed and seems likely to continue tailing. North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, despite committing to denuclearization, has continued his nuclear weapon buildup. The authors of this Perspective argue that there is a growing gap between North Korea's nuclear weapon threat and ROK and U.S. capabilities to defeat it. Because these capabilities will take years to develop, the allies must turn their attention to where the threat could be in the mid to late 2020s and identify strategies to counter it. Doing this will help establish a firm deterrent against North Korean nuclear weapon use. The authors conclude that North Korea will be most deterred if it knows that any nuclear weapon use will be disastrous for the regime-that these weapons are a liability, not an asset. Book jacket.