Attempting to stem that tide, on April 22, 1951, the CCF launched its great spring offensive, sending some 250,000 men and 27 divisions into the attack along a 40-mile front north of Seoul. It was the largest battle of the war, but by May 20 the CCF, after some initial gains, had been turned back with terrible losses. As Time magazine put it, ‘The U.S. expended ammunition the way the Chinese expended men.’ After that success, the United States was in good position to retake the offensive and sweep the CCF from Korea. But Washington ordered EUSA to maintain its defensive posture, for U.S. military policy had changed from rollback and liberation to containment. That ruled out battlefield victory, for the best possible result of defensive operations is stalemate.

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On July 10, 1951, armistice talks began between the U.N. Command and the CCF/NKPA. After the front line stabilized in November 1951, along what was to become the new demarcation line, the fighting over the next 20 months degenerated into a bloody battle for terrain features like Old Baldy, Heartbreak Ridge and Pork Chop Hill. The U.S. forces suffered some 63,200 casualties to gain or retain those outposts. With victory no longer in sight, public support for the war plummeted, and in 1952 Truman decided not to run for re-election rather than risk almost certain defeat. With the signing of the armistice agreement on July 27, 1953, the war finally came to an end.

Dwarfed by the total U.S. victory in World War II, the negotiated settlement in Korea seemed to many observers to be a defeat and at best a draw. Certainly it seemed no model for the future.

As indicated previously, it was Eisenhower’s strategy of massive nuclear retaliation that dominated the immediate postwar era. Conventional forces, like the Korean War itself, were dismissed as irrelevant. Even when the atomic war strategies were challenged by the John F. Kennedy administration’s policy of flexible response, conventional forces were still ignored in favor of the ‘new’ counterinsurgency war. Vietnam would be its test case.

The Vietnam War, like the Korean War, was pursued on the strategic defensive–the United States still not realizing that the best result possible was stalemate. In Korea, U.S. forces kept the external enemy at bay while giving local forces responsibility for counterguerrilla operations. But in Vietnam, this strategy–the only one with any hope of success–was regarded as ineffective, even though the Korean War objective of preserving South Korea’s independence had been attained.

Only in the wake of an unqualified failure in Vietnam, where Saigon fell not to guerrilla attack but to a Korea-style cross-border blitzkrieg by the North Vietnamese army, did the limited validity of both nuclear war and counterinsurgency operations become evident. The most probable future conflict was still a war fought with conventional weapons in pursuit of limited political goals–in short, another Korea.

That was exactly what happened in the 1990-91 Persian Gulf War, and what the Pentagon is now prepared for with its policy of being able to fight two regional conflicts almost simultaneously.

One of those potential regional conflicts is Korea. As President Bill Clinton told the Korean National Assembly in July 1993, ‘The Korean peninsula remains a vital American interest.’ As proof of U.S. resolve, almost a half century after it was decimated at Kunu-ri protecting EUSA’s withdrawal from North Korea, the 2nd U.S. Infantry Division currently sits astride the Seoul invasion corridor as a tripwire guaranteeing certain U.S. involvement in any future conflict there.

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