Aware of that.

Has anyone data on the use of stimulants in the NKorean pol-mil leadership and the armed forces?

No, they are not meth addicts. North Korea looks weird to outsiders. North Korea certainly act irresponsibly on the international stage. But they are not crazy drug addicts. The NK leadership has one goal, the survival of the regime.

I highly recommend North Korea/South Korea: U.S. Policy at a Time of Crisis by John Feffer for anyone who want to discuss NK rationally to gain a basic understanding of NK history and society.

It should be a reminder of what obsolete weapons can do in capable hands. On paper, K9 is superior to anything in the North Korean arsenal.

An F-22 carries only 6 AMRAAMs, good for 3 BVR kills maybe and even an F-22 would not want to get into a WVR combat because the kill ratio drops to 1:1 in that case.

So it it was 100 F-22s vs 500 PLA jets(300 obsolete types and 200 Flanker types), then the Chinese would win because the F-22 force must decide to stay and fight an IR missile dogfight after depleting its AMRAAMs, or flee the scene and let the Chinese gain the control of the air space.

This is how the “Fighter wave attack” that RAND corporation described in 2008 works. While losing 300 fighter jet pilots in a day maybe unacceptable to the USAF, it is perfectly acceptable to the PLA, and may even be considered a small price to pay to defeat the Americans.

At this point, Taiwan may well give up on its air force and invest heavily in SAMs.

This is exactly what the ROKAF’s doing to counter the Chinese fighter wave attack; they are building a KL-SAM system with two interceptors, one for ballistic missiles and the other one is a dual-seeker ducked rocket SAM with a range of 250 km+. The idea is that they would try to cut down the number of Chinese fighters entering the Yellow Sea as much as possible with KL-SAMs, then let its fighter jet take on the survivors.

If Taiwan could do some similar by developing its own long range SAMs(The US doesn’t have one to sell, so Taiwan must develop its own) to cut down the number of Chinese fighters crossing the Taiwan Straits by half, then the USAF and JASDF(Japanese government recently announced that Taiwan was within the operating areas of the SDF) may be able to stop the Chinese fighter wave attack.

Read the Rand report again, it is not saying that China will overwhelming US and Taiwanese air forces by sheer number of fighters. The key to the strategy described in the report is China’s ability to shut down or partially shut down hostile airbases with ballistic missile strikes (not sure if that’s a valid assumption, but let us assume it is). With more operations bases within range of the conflict, China will be able to maintain a higher sortie rate, thus achieve local numeric superiority and win a war of attrition. The key component of this scenario is not the number of Chinese fighters, rather the large number of ballistic missiles. There your analogy of “human-wave” attack applied to air warfare is completely off the mark. A better analogy would be using heavy artillery to interdict enemy reinforcement thus gaining local superiority on the front line.

Off topic, the cliche of Chinese human wave attacks is also largely a myth, but this is the wrong forum to discuss that subject.