"An Ohio-class guided-missile submarine, the 560-foot-long Michigan carries as many as 154 Tomahawk cruise missiles plus a mini-sub for transporting Navy SEAL commando teams ashore. To put that into perspective, Trump’s April 6 missile strike on Syria’s Sharyat air base—retaliation for the Syrian regime’s use of chemical weapons—involved just 59 Tomahawks." -- David Axe, writing "This Submarine Could Attack North Korea" in the Daily Beast. You'll recall that the 59 Tomahawks that attacked Syria's Al Sharyat airfield put it out of commission for one day. North Korea's armed forces are many times more formidable than Syria's, and many of its facilities have been placed in hardened tunnels, including aircraft, artillery and missiles; 154 Tomahawks won't make much of a dent, at least not for long. Clearly, it would unleash a bloody, open-ended war and a barrage on Seoul by the North that would decimate that metro area with 25.6 million residents, so any comparison with the pinprick attack on Syria is idiotic.
While saying that sending the USS Michigan to Korea "is a big deal," Axe acknowledges that the USS Michigan would "probably need help," an understatement if there ever was one. However, in an article unfortunately larded with some chest thumping quotes by Navy and military "analysts" on the Michigan's capabilities, the most cavalier, jaw-dropping observation is this:
"The Trump administration is apparently trying to achieve decisive results on the Korean Peninsula before South Korea’s May 9 election...... if Trump plans to pre-emptively attack North Korea—an act that, to be clear, could plunge the world into wide-ranging, catastrophic warfare—then he probably needs to do so before May 9." (emphasis added)Yeah, no problem, let's do it before the South Korean elections, because we don't want the people of South Korea to have a say. Also, they'd probably be cancelled anyway because, you know, war.
