Post #652190

South Korea had years of pain from China after the US placed THAAD air defence missiles in South Korea in 2017. The landowner of the THAAD site, Lotte, had 79 of its 99 China supermarkets close after a quasi-government boycott. K-dramas were banned in China, which simply meant their viewers moved to piracy, but this cost South Korea billions. Guess what's happening now that some Middle Eastern countries have burned through their stocks of air defense missiles? Yep, the THAAD system in South Korea is being removed. A bitter lesson for South Korea. All that cost, and still no protection from North Korean ballistic missiles. (As for people who might think "South Korea should have built its own missiles", go and look up the time it took to develop the simpler K9 artillery system. That's a design with intentionally no US parts covered by the Wassenaar Arrangement, so the US cannot intervene to stop counter-battery fire if Seoul is fired upon. The result is maybe the best artillery system in the world (it competes with the German PzH 2000 artillery system), but getting there took decades of sustained work by some of the world's best manufacturers and universities.) #auspol