https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_F-15_Reporter

During their operational lifetime F-15As, mostly operating from bases in Japan, were responsible for most of the aerial maps of North Korea used at the start of the Korean War. These photographs were to prove extremely valuable, as it was not until the arrival of Marine photo-reconnaissance F7F-3P in late 1950 that additional photographs of the peninsula could be made, and then only under constant threat from attacking North Korean MiGs.[2]

It was a very one-sided fight when the respective sides had things going their way–The conflict was very asymmetrical in that regard. The Chinese/NORK forces were very manpower-intense, with highly skilled light infantry forces that could roam the hills around the UN forces and outmaneuver them at will. On the other hand, the UN had all the firepower, and whenever they were able to have things their way, the Chinese and NORK forces got slaughtered in job lots by firepower.

I’m of the opinion that with better-trained troops and having them in better condition for the war, we’d have done a lot better than we did. Root problem was that whole “linear battlefield” mentality we allowed to develop across the forces. Nobody operated as though anything behind them could ever be a threat, and never took precautions against things happening in their rear. The reality is that you only control what you’re standing on, and if you allow yourself to get panicked thinking that the enemy is in your nonexistent “safe zone”, you are going to have your ass handed to you by him.

The Chinese and NORK forces weren’t anything profoundly special–They had their foibles, and they had their strengths. What they did have going for them was mostly in the heads of the UN leadership and what that leadership allowed to grow up in the minds of their troops. Once professionals showed up on the scene, and the troops got seasoning, things decidedly shifted against the Communist forces.

People make a lot about how mobile and inured to suffering the Chinese were, but the intel reports are rife with reports of finding Chinese troops suffering the results of exposure and poor leadership. There were entire Chinese platoons encountered who were so thoroughly out of it from the cold and lack of food that they were virtually catatonic. You can imagine for yourself what UN troops did to them in those conditions…

Whole thing just points to a surfeit of wishful thinking and a total fantasy-land idea of how war is conducted on the part of the US military. All the hard-case Army and many of the Marine officers were sidelined in favor of the perfumed princes that all bought into the whole mentality of “push-button warfare”, where there would never be a need for the shellback types ever again.

An awful lot of this played into far too many decisions of the era–You look at everything, including the procurement of the 7.62 NATO and M14, and the rest of the nut-and-bolt Army, and what you’ll find behind a lot of it all is that the people who were in charge were pretty much convinced that they’d never need any of it, ‘cos nukes. I think that’s one reason why the M14 was chosen, because the people making the decision thought that they’d only ever have to use them on the ranges at Camp Perry.

In a way, it’s an awful lot like the vaguely feudal military forces of the late Middle Ages–The pretty-pretty knights were there, in all their martial glory, but the actual reality was that they weren’t doing much of the fighting–It was all down to those guys with the cannon and so forth. The people running those forces were pretty sure they’d never really need the knightly horsemen again, and so they neglected to make sure they were actually, y’know, up-to-date and fit for combat. Plus that, they had no respect for those filthy commoners and their peasant weapons… Which is how Zizka managed what he did.

I think you can argue for a similar syndrome being prevalent in the US military, post-WWII.

Successful generals like to fill in the blanks of how they out-figured the opponent.