Carl,
Just curious, by your own reporting, these are an incredibly hardy people used to living on very little in best of times. Just how much "external support" do you think they will need to wage a resistance?
Now, perhaps, DPRK government takes full responsibility for the hardships of living in North Korea, so that the populace will welcome as liberators any invading foreign military forces. But I suspect that is not the case. I suspect this is a populace that will see foreign military presence as just that, a foreign invasion of their homeland, and they will logically resist.
We have a bad habit of thinking that what we offer is so good, and that those who we oppose are so bad, that of course their populaces will be immediately grateful for our efforts to remove their government and then occupy their country while we give them new, better government, coupled with development and all manner of modern goodies.
Yet we caused a resistance insurgency in Iraq that bled us hard for several years. President Obama's plan for curing Afghanistan, as promoted by General Petreaus, has been making the resistance insurgency stronger in Afghanistan with yearly growth numbers he wishes he could replicate in his programs designed for improving our economy at home. Seems it is easier to grow an insurgency than it is to grow an economy. Bottom line is that it is human nature to resist, and North Koreans being human will likely resist as well.
As to "sanctuary" that will come from within the very populace that is resisting us. Will we be willing to employ the hard measures such as used by the Germans in WWII to reduce such internal sanctuary? No. I hope not. Instead we will attempt to bribe the support of the populace, and through our very largess will become the primary supporter of the very insurgency we are attempting to quell.
Likely we will blame China or some ideology for the insurgency, and not be able to realize that it is our very presence that is driving it, or that the very people who smile and accept our aid by day are passing it on to the fighters by night.
If we have learned anything about insurgency over the past 10 years it should have been that we don't know anything about insurgency. Like most governments faced with some form of insurgency we do not accept our own causal role and instead see the insurgents as somehow distinct from the larger populace they emerge from and blame the fighting elements on malign actors, foreign agitators and radical ideologies. Historically, the best governments at COIN have been those that recognized their causal role and that focused on fixing the broken aspects of governance rather than the "broken" aspects of the populace. The US is not among "the best governments at COIN," at least not in our foreign efforts.
Any assumption other than the expectation that any regime change forced upon the DPRK will be met with revolution; and that any foreign occupation of the DPRK will be met with resistance is dangerous. There is no earthly reason to ever place an American boot on DPRK soil. This is a mission best left to the ROKs, and even they will find a violent welcome, I suspect. Best we let this sleeping dog lie. Conditions will evolve in time of their own accord, and there is far more risk than gain from any thoughts of rushing that inevitable day along.
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