Author: GIKorea

This is a stupid take in the Washington Post:

Rep. Song Young-gil, chairman of the ruling Democratic Party of Korea (DPK), Wednesday, struck back at tweets by a Washington Post columnist saying that South Korea would be like Afghanistan if the U.S. forces leave the Korean Peninsula.

In addition, he added that Seoul needs to take advantage of the Afghanistan crisis to regain wartime operational control (OPCON) of South Korean forces from Washington.

On Monday (local time), Marc Thiessen, a former speechwriter for former U.S. President George W. Bush, tweeted, “If South Korea were under this kind of sustained assault, they would collapse just as quickly without US support. There’s virtually no American ally who could defend themselves without us.”

Korea Times

You can read more at the link, but the ROK military will fight and not capitulate like the Afghan government that was corrupt and unpopular. South Korea is a developed democracy with a first world military with equipment far better than anything North Korea has. There is no way the ROK military would abandon their posts and rush to Osan Airbase to cling to fleeing C-17’s.

Here was the last time U.S. troops were murdered by the North Koreans:

Service members from the U.S. and South Korea on Wednesday afternoon paid tribute to two American soldiers who were axed to death by North Korean troops 45 years ago. 

On Aug. 18, 1976, Capt. Arthur Bonifas, a Joint Security Force company commander, and 1st Lt. Mark Barrett, a platoon leader, were slain while trimming a tree at the Joint Security Area of the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea.

Stars & Stripes

You can read more about this incident from my prior posting that can be accessed below. Of interest in the Stars & Stripes article is that CPT Bonifas’ grandson is currently serving in Korea:

Bonifas’ legacy continues through his family. His daughter, who was 6 years old when he died, reached the rank of captain in the Army’s nursing program. 

Bonifas’ grandson, Spc. Andrew Arthur Bonifas, joined the Army in 2019 and serves as petroleum supply specialist with the 1st Squadron, 6th Cavalry Regiment, out of Fort Riley, Kansas.

“I wanted to join the military to follow my grandfather’s and my mom’s footsteps,” Andrew Bonifas said to Stars and Stripes in a phone interview Wednesday.

Andrew, who is currently stationed in Camp Humphreys, South Korea, visited Camp Bonifas during the July 4th weekend.

“It’s just really surreal,” he said.

Here is the latest on the ongoing CCPT exercise:

South Korean troops conducting a joint, computer-simulated exercise with their American counterparts were all vaccinated and tested for COVID-19 before training began, a military official said Monday. 

A South Korean Ministry of National Defense official speaking on the customary condition of anonymity told Stars and Stripes that due to service members being in close proximity with each other, “it was very important for all of them to get vaccinated.”

The two countries are conducting a combined command-post training Aug. 16 to 26. Rather than a large-scale field exercise involving thousands of combat troops, this exercise will primarily focus on computer simulations.

U.S. Forces Korea spokesman Col. Lee Peters, citing the command’s policy, did not comment on whether American forces participating in the joint training were all vaccinated. 

However, Peters said USFK “can reassure you that we remain aligned with [the defense ministry] on aggressive COVID mitigation measures including conducting training with minimal essential personnel and in distributed locations.”

Stars & Stripes

You can read more at the link, but the most interesting thing I read in the article was that 93% of the 550,000 ROK troops have received the vaccine though it is voluntary.

Only the hedgefunds are supposed to game the market, not the little people:

A group of retail investors here have dropped their plans to conduct a mass buying of a certain stock on the Seoul bourse, which was initially supposed to take place this month to protest against short-sellers, most of whom are foreign and institutional investors.

The Korea Stockholders Alliance (KSA) announced Sunday that the decision was made after taking into account the advice from its legal advisers and the predictable scenarios.

“Our campaign has been described as a form of speculation aiming for a short-term margin, and above all, short-sellers’ interruptions that rattled the market have created negative public sentiment toward us,” one of the alliance’s managers wrote on its website.

The group had tried to emulate U.S. social media platform Reddit’s WallStreetBets internet forum users, who sparked a short squeeze of the GameStop stock on the New York Stock Exchange in January through a mass-purchase of the American video game retailer’s stocks.

The campaign conducted by retail investors surprised global market insiders at that time, because an unexpected hike in the GameStop stock price caused large losses to several hedge funds that had bet on the price fall.

Korea Times

You can read more at the link.

Here is the latest on the Dokdo front:

South Korea strongly protested the inclusion of a map indicating South Korea’s easternmost islets of Dokdo as Japanese territory in Tokyo’s newly created defense white paper for children, the foreign ministry said Monday.

Lee Sang-ryeol, the director-general for Asia Pacific affairs, and Kim Yong-gil, minister at the South Korean Embassy in Tokyo, lodged a protest to Naoki Kumagai, deputy chief of mission at the Japanese Embassy in Seoul, and Taisuke Mibae, deputy director-general of the Japanese foreign ministry’s Asian and Oceanian affairs, respectively.

“They said that in light of our position that Dokdo is our inherent territory historically, geographically and by international law, (the map) can never be accepted, and they urged Japan to immediately delete the document,” the ministry said in a text message to reporters.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

At least it appears that the most of the ROK embassy was able to get evacuated before the current chaos unfolded at the Kabul Airport:

Sunday’s rushed evacuation of the South Korean Embassy staff in Afghanistan proceeded smoothly with the help of friendly countries, including the United States, a foreign ministry official said Monday.

South Korea has temporarily closed its embassy in the war-torn country and evacuated most of its diplomatic staff to a third country in the Middle East amid the Taliban militant group’s faster-than-expected advances to retake full control of Afghanistan.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link, but the ROK Embassy still has three personnel and a civilian stuck at the Kabul Airport because of the chaos. Here is what is going on at the Kabul Airport right now:

Chaotic scenes unfolded at Kabul’s airport on Monday as thousands of people rushed the tarmac in desperate attempts to flee Afghanistan following a takeover by the Taliban, which swept into the capital in a stunningly swift overthrow of the Western-backed government.

Videos posted to social media from Hamid Karzai International Airport showed Afghans clinging to a departing U.S. Air Force C-17 transport plane. Others showed people falling from the wheel well of a jet just before takeoff.

Other planes were seen overloaded with Afghans who flooded across the runway to board them.

Yahoo News

You can read more at the link, but people are literally being killed grasping the sides of C-17 aircraft that are departing. What an avoidable disaster.