Category: Uncategorized

The South Korean government is trying to smooth things over with General Bell by saying they will only delay the Camp Humphreys relocation until 2012 now:

South Korea is studying ways to expedite the relocation of U.S. bases, which is expected to be delayed about five years from the original target year of 2008, officials at the Defense Ministry said Monday.

Some have interpreted the move as an effort by Seoul to soothe the United States, which has protested the delay.

“We are reviewing ways to advance the timetable for the relocation at least one year from the expected year of 2013 under the direction of Defense Minister Kim Jang-soo,’’ an informed ministry official said on condition of anonymity.

The ministry will soon finalize the study on the relocation timetable and propose it to the United States, the source said.

You may remember USFK Commander, General Bell’s "fighting words" to the Korean government last month over the announced delay.  After General Bell’s statement the Korean government came back with this lame response.  This latest announcement it along with the cutting of funds by the Korean government for the relocation while sending over a billion dollars to North Korea this year, is a clear sign that South Korea is committed to dragging this out as long as possible and then hope a change in the US administration in 2008 will bring in a change of policy in regards to the transformation.  As much as some sectors of Korean society complain about the US troop presence in South Korea, it is their own government making sure that the status quo remains the same.  Its all about keeping the USFK gravy train rolling.

With the Koreans committed to delay tactics, I think General Bell should explore the possibility of setting a goal to either have the personnel from Yongsan Garrison or the 2nd Infantry Division move to Camp Humphreys by 2009.  This would be at least be a start to breaking the status quo in USFK.  At least move something by 2009.  If General Bell wants to see an expanded Camp Humphreys built in record time announce that only Yongsan Garrison will relocate to Camp Humphreys and that the 2nd Infantry Division will redeploy back to CONUS by 2009.  That will cause a reaction in South Korea that is sure to show that the government here that the US military is committed to transforming the force on the peninsula.

Where is Andrew Sullivan now?  I would love to hear him defend his "civilians" again after reading this.

An anti-US activists being investigated for spying?  Say it ain’t so:

The Seoul police have announced that it is investigating a photographer on suspicion of military espionage.

The Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency announced on January 24 that it has been conducting a investigation on Mr. Lee (40), a photographer, for several months after obtaining a wiretap warrant. The police said it launched the investigation after receiving a tip that Lee had photographed weapons at U.S. military bases in Korea and had given the photos to the media.

Lee is under suspicion of leaking military intelligence, the police said, such as revealing the U.S. Forces Korea’s chemical weapons deployment status, to the public through news articles and contributions to the media. Lee took the photos while a reporter for a progressive internet media site.

However, a representative of the progressive internet media site for which Lee worked said, "We did run an article with a picture of a nuclear submarine docked at Jinhae Port. But the picture was taken by some other environmental group. At the time, Mr. Lee was not able to take a picture of the nuclear sub." The representative also said that Mr. Lee wrote the special report under question on the chemical weapons status of the U.S. Forces in Korea being revealed to the public "based on the information the U.S. military disclosed in accordance with their Freedom of Information Act."

First of all his claims of the US having a chemical weapons stockpile on the peninsula I have found nothing to corroborate this story.  However, the South Korean government did build a chemical weapons stockpile that I’m willing to bet these anti-US groups are trying to blame USFK for.  South Korea signed a treaty in 1997 banning chemical weapons and has been in the process of slowly destroying their chemical weapons stockpile.  One more spy down and a whole lot more to go. 

I think it is great that more and more sailors are signing up to transfer over to the Army, but I have to wonder about this guy:

Guevara, who left the Navy in 2006 after eight years, said he received a $2,000 bonus to join the Army, but his major reason for switching services is the Navy made it much harder for him to advance from E-4 to E-5.

“I love my job, I love to help people,” he said. “I became a corpsman because I wanted to help injured Marines, or anybody, and the Army offered me the same job and I jumped right on it.”

I admittedly don’t know a whole lot about the Navy, but I have to wonder about someone who can’t make the E-5 rank in 8 years.  In the Army soldiers usually make the E-5 rank in 3-4 years of service sometimes even quicker.  Does anyone know if it is that hard to make E-5 in the Navy?

The South Korean Unification Minister Lee Jae-joung is now clearly with out a doubt a useful idiot.  His first signs of ascending to useful idiot status was when he claimed North Korea built a nuclear program because they are poor.  One Free Korea had the best take on this claim by Lee:

Now Lee is coming out and saying that North Korea is not using the money given to North Korea through inter-Korean projects for their nuclear program:

South Korea’s unification minister on Friday denied that North Korea has diverted cash it earned through inter-Korean economic cooperation for the development of its nuclear weapons.

Lee Jae-joung, Seoul’s point man on the communist neighbor, also stressed that North Korea earns such money "in a transparent and legal manner," saying the government will expand and deepen inter-Korean economic cooperation in the future.

First of all I would love to see Lee pull out an audit report of all the money given to North Korea by the ROK to prove his claims.  I won’t hold my breath waiting for that to happen.  Secondly, even if the money isn’t used directly in the nuclear program, it will instead be used to buy the Dear Leader and the regime elite mansions, booze, luxury cars, etc. which are in violation of the UN resolution prohibiting this. Additionally the money given by the South Korean government to ensure the lifestyle of the regime elite means that money brought into North Korea from other sources can be used for the nuclear program instead.   To Lee Jae-joung’s credit, he still has a long way to go to reach the useful idiot status of former Unification Minister Chung Dong-young.

I have posted before that the long term readiness of the ROK Army will be affected if the Korean government does not do more to professionalize the force.  I say this because in the past, completing your mandatory service in the ROK military was considered a gate you passed to become a man in Korean society.  People who did not do their national service were looked down upon.  Today though it is the complete opposite, mandatory service is something at best to be avoided.  What has changed this attitude so drastically over the course of only a decade?  First all living standards have increased where people don’t want to spend two years of their lives living in a cramped barracks getting beat down by superiors for a next to nothing pay check.  Secondly and most importantly in my opinion is that the youth being conscripted into the ROK military do not see the North Korean threat as a legitimate threat to the nation.  The progressives in the South Korean educational system have successfully indoctrinated an entire South Korean generation into the bogus belief that North Korea is just some misunderstood uncle that doesn’t mean any harm to South Korea.  Don’t believe me?  Then read this.

This announcement by the ROK military is at least one small baby step towards professionalizing the force if it comes to pass:

The military is considering hiring about 40,000 “salaried volunteer soldiers” between 2011 and 2020 to help overhaul the military conscription system, sources at the Defense Ministry said Monday.

Under the plan, those who volunteer to remain in the military for an additional year after their two-year mandatory service would be paid an annual salary of about 15 million won, they said.

The ministry initially announced that it would maintain about 20,000 salaried voluntary servicemen but is considering increasing the number to fill the possible manpower gap from the reduction in service period, the sources said.

The Defense Ministry needs these volunteers because of the national government’s plan to reduce national service from 24 months to 18 months for most conscriptees.  It is speculated the ruling party is doing this just to score political points in this year’s presidential election with Korea’s youth population, which is probably the case, but I like the possible unintended consequence of having the military recruit volunteers instead of relying on draftees.

The pay of approximately $15,000 for that extra year is actually pretty competitive with the pay of an American military E4 with 2 years of service which comes out to $20,976.  You consider the cheaper of cost of living in Korea and it is pretty much even.  Plus if living conditions and treatment of the soldiers improves this may be appealing to many youths.  However, a professional military requires budget increases, which many in the government don’t want to give:

“We are in close consultation with related government agencies about the increase in the salaried soldiers as an alternative to the cut in the service period,” a ministry official said on condition of anonymity. “But the budget planning agency now opposes it, citing the whopping additional budget required.”

The Ministry of Planning and Budget estimates that about 1.2 trillion won of additional budget on top of the 621 trillion of defense spending for the Defense Reform 2020 scheme would be required only for soldiers’ payment, he said.

That is why I dislike the draftee system because the politicians can keep getting away with sending over a billion dollars to North Korea while Korean youths for two years are treated no better than a Kaseong slave labor worker.  I find it ironic that the amount of money needed to fund this voluntary service program is nearly equal to the amount of money being sent to North Korea this year.  If Korean youths really wanted to make a difference in this next election they should vote for someone who is going to legitimately work to create an all volunteer military so no one will have to be conscripted in the first place instead of the demagogues looking to score cheap political points at the expensive of national security and the welfare of their citizens.

I really hope not:

South Korea recently asked the U.S. to consider selectively unfreezing at least five of North Korea’s 50 accounts with the Macau-based Banco Delta Asia, saying part of the US$24 million North Korean accounts were acquired legitimately, it emerged Monday. The issue has been the main sticking point in international efforts to resolve the North Korean nuclear crisis.

A U.S. official on Monday confirmed a Yonhap report that a senior official from Seoul explained the five accounts in detail to John Negroponte, the director of National Intelligence and deputy secretary of state-designate. As the man in charge of intelligence, Negroponte is hardly the standard diplomatic channel in the State Department. The U.S. official did not reveal who the Korean official was, but strongly hinted he was among a group who recently visited the U.S.

I have to wonder what the US will get in return for doing this?  If the US negotiators think this will lead to any breakthroughs in the nuclear talks I think they will be disappointed.  The only way I see the North Koreans working out a deal is if they do not have as much nuclear material to base a nuclear program around as everyone believes. 

If you ever wanted to debate the merits of the word "gyopo" here and here are the place to do it.

Former Clinton Administration Defense Secretary William Perry is once again advocating starting a war with North Korea by bombing it’s nuclear reactor:

Former U.S. Defense Secretary William Perry proposed Thursday that the United States should consider military action against North Korea if China and South Korea refuse to prod Pyongyang to end its nuclear weapons program, according to a report by Agence France-Presse (AFP).

Although the move is dangerous, there is no alternative left if China and South Korea, the two key economic lifelines to North Korea, do not join any U.S.-led “diplomatic coercive’’ action against Pyongyang, he told the Foreign Affairs Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives in Washington, D.C.

AFP quoted Perry, the Pentagon chief under former president Bill Clinton, as saying that the U.S. should consider destroying a large reactor under construction in North Korea capable of making about 10 nuclear bombs a year.

Remember Perry was the same guy who co-authored a Washington Post editorial before July’s North Korean missile test that advocated bombing North Korea’s missile program. I said then that it would be ridiculous to bomb the missile sites because the US had more to gain from the North Koreans firing the missiles compared to if the US attacked North Korea. By firing the missile the US was able to accurately gauge exactly how far along the North Korean missile program was, which ended up being no where near advanced as thought. The US would have never learned this by bombing North Korea. Plus the test continued the isolation of the Kim regime with additional sanctions put on the country and Kim becoming even more of an international pariah.Â

Compare that to a bombing campaign that would have put Kim Jong-il in a more sympathetic light. Remember their were people who were sympathetic with Saddam Hussein, don’t think Kim Jong-il won’t get the same treatment. Cindy Sheehan and her ilk would be toasting Kim Jong-il in no time. The media would show images of killed civilians from the bombing campaign over and over again while ignoring all the civilians dying right now in North Korea, as I type this, due to the Kim regime’s systematic starvation program. Even more dangerous than the political and diplomatic consequences would be the military consequences of a full scale war breaking out on the Korean peninsula. Any war on the Korean peninsula would cause casualties that would dwarf the Iraq War. Especially US casualties with the 2nd Infantry Division continuing to remain located near the DMZ.Â

The consequences of bombing Kim’s nuclear program today would be the same as what I listed above for bombing Kim’s missile program. However, fear not, there will not be a bombing campaign on North Korea and Perry knows it. Remember he was the guy in charge of the Pentagon during the 1994 nuclear crisis when the Clinton Administration decided not to bomb North Korea. He knows President Bush cannot attack North Korea for the very same reasons President Clinton didn’t, which makes it easy for him to come out looking like a hawk on this issue. The Democrats have long been viewed as weak on defense so in order to build their defense credentials, they are looking to take hawkish positions on issues that they know President Bush cannot act upon. North Korea is the best example. Notice you see no one from the Democratic Party advocating bombing Iran which is a much greater danger to the US than North Korea. What’s the difference between advocating bombing Iran compared to North Korea? The only difference is that there is a very real possibility that President Bush may bomb Iran in the future compared to North Korea.Â

Many Democrats are only hawkish when they know they don’t need to act on it. Another example of this was for the past two years the Democrats have been all over TV advocating for more troops in Iraq and made sure to keep bringing up General Shinseki’s name every time they did. They did this to bolster their defense credentials because they didn’t think President Bush would ever actually act upon it. However, Bush did act and sent more troops to Iraq and what did the Democrats do? Condemn Bush for sending more troops to Iraq and threaten to cut funding for the soldiers there. Perry’s latest article is just another example of a long line of Democratic demagoguery of national security issues.

HT: Nomad

Anyone want to sign up for this contest?:

How many U.S. troops will be killed in Iraq in the next year?

Submit your best estimate here…

I’ll keep track–our memories are long–and we’ll notify the "winner" one year from today.
<…>
Our collective prognostications might just serve as a public declaration that the Commander-in-Chief cannot make Iraq into a crapshoot with our kids.

So submit your estimate here. Put a number to it. On January 10, 2008, how many additional men and women in the U.S. services, do you think, will be dead for this cause?

What is wrong with these people?  This is a perfect example of how detached people are from what is going on in Iraq.  It sickens me when I saw people in the media almost giddy when the Iraq casualty number hit 3,000 right before New Year’s.  Then the constant updates of troop casualties is treated like a basketball score and that is all this war has become; a game to most people.  It is that attitude that causes behavior like what you see above.

HT: Greyhawk