Walter "Skip" Sharp

Title: Former commander of U.S. Combined Forces Command & USFK.

Views: He's been retired for two years, but that hasn't muted Skip Sharp's support for a tough "kinetic" response to North Korean provocations. The four-star Army general, who spent years mapping out war scenarios on the peninsula, raised eyebrows last month when he advocated "strongly punishing North Korea" militarily if it struck anywhere in South Korea. "We've got to change the dynamic," he told an audience at the Center for Strategic and International Studies on March 21. "There needs to be action taken that will make a next attack more difficult both technically and from a risk-benefit calculation for Kim Jong Un." When the Huffington Post's David Wood noted that such a strike greatly risked further escalation, Sharp held firm, arguing that Pyongyang has gotten away with provocations with "very little response" and that the United States needs to target a strategic asset deeply valuable to the regime. (See Sharp's remarks at CSIS here.)

James Inhofe

Title: U.S. senator and ranking member of the Armed Services Committee.

Views: Inhofe has never been a huge fan of international diplomacy, but last week he leaped ahead of his conservative colleagues in advocating preparations for a pre-emptive strike on North Korea "right now," he told The Steve Malzberg Show. "In terms of the capability we have out there with the F-22s and the battleships...a pre-emptive strike from something like that would get their attention," Inhofe said. He also landed a few jabs on Kim Jong Un: "[He] is just as bad as his daddy was. He's not reliable in terms of what he might do, what he might say, but he is capable of doing it because he's deranged."

William Perry

Title: Former secretary of defense

Views: Ashton Carter isn't the only Democrat who's staked out aggressive positions on North Korea: His former boss in the Clinton administration, William Perry, who led the Pentagon at the time, actually took steps to prepare for war during the 1994 crisis. Perry was the co-author of Carter's 2006 article on preemptively striking North Korea's missile site and his 2002 article emphasizing the "powerful" reasons for risking war with Pyongyang. Since his party has come into power, Perry has been relatively quiet on the issue of war with North Korea, but his trail of op-eds paint a fairly consistent picture of where he stands on North Korean provocations, despite the fact that he's a reliable voice on nuclear disarmament. (Efforts to reach Perry were not successful.)

Jon Kyl

Title: Former U.S. senator and minority whip.

Views: Inside and outside of government, Kyl has been steadfast in his determination to "get tough" with North Korea. Last year, Kyl signed a letter accusing Obama of "embracing a policy of appeasement with Pyongyang" for his decision to provide 240,000 tons of food aid to North Korea in exchange for promises to temper its nuclear program. (The deal ended up falling through.) He's been just as active outside government, writing a Wall Street Journal op-ed last month chastising Obama for his "antipathy" to missile defense, which he said leaves the United States "vulnerable not just to attack, but also to nuclear blackmail and proliferation." Kyl advocates beefing up the country's missile defenses, and he specifically called out Obama for canceling the final phase of the Europe-based missile-defense system, which he said "will please Russia." (For honorable mention: Sens. Marco Rubio, John Cornyn, and James Risch also signed the "appeasement" letter.)

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