It has been nearly five years since the last trilateral meeting, so it is great to see this coordination happening again:
President Yoon Suk-yeol speaks during a luncheon meeting with a group of Korean War veterans at a Seoul hotel on June 24, 2022, one day ahead of the 72nd anniversary of the outbreak of the 1950-53 conflict. (Yonhap)
President Yoon Suk-yeol will hold a trilateral meeting with U.S. President Joe Biden and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida in Spain this week on the sidelines of a NATO summit, his office said Sunday.
The trilateral summit, set for Wednesday in Madrid, will be the first such gathering in four years and nine months since the last meeting was held in September 2017 on the margins of a U.N. General Assembly. No trilateral meeting has since taken place amid badly frayed relations between Seoul and Tokyo.
It is hard to believe that this week marks 20 years since the horrible military vehicle accident that claimed the lives of two young Korean school girls Shim Mi-son and Shin Hyo-sun. I was stationed in Korea at the time this accident happened and honestly was not surprised it occurred. With so many US and ROK military equipment on civilian roads surrounded by pedestrians and cars, an accident was bound to happen. You can read more about this tragic accident that shook the US-ROK alliance unlike anything else at the below link:
The aftermath of the accident led to many changes in South Korea and USFK. The accident empowered the anti-US movement in the ROK which ultimately led to a political nobody Roh Moo-hyun being elected to the Presidency partially on an anti-American platform. The anti-American movement would be energized for many years after the accident. It got so bad that a group of Soldiers were kidnapped off of a subway car, beaten, and forced to make false statements. I can remember my unit pulling security at Camp Red Cloud and seeing protesters holding signs with pictures of the crushed bodies of the two school girls. The politicization of these girls had to be truly horrible for their families.
Anti-US protests outside of Camp Red Cloud
The accident had an enormous impact on USFK and not all of it was bad. A positive thing that happened was that it did lead to much needed safety reforms on how the US military moves heavy equipment in Korea. For example heavy military equipment was no longer allowed to drive on civilian roads and were instead trucked to training areas.
Example of what it was like to move heavy military equipment through narrow Korean civilian roads.
Another big change was the loss of 2nd Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division from Korea. The brigade was pulled from South Korea by then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in reaction to the anti-US protests. The brigade was sent to Iraq from South Korea and faced heavy casualties in the city of Ramadi. The accident also reenergized the closing of 2nd Infantry Division camps and Yongsan Garrison and consolidating them at Camp Humphreys. Despite the best efforts of the anti-American activists to stop it, the relocation is complete today.
Today few people remember this accident and the impacts it had, but it did ultimately lead to positive changes in the US-ROK alliance. It is sadly unfortunate that it took the lives of two Korean schools girls to do this. Rest in peace Shim Mi-son and Shin Hyo-sun.
Highway 56 memorial to the 2 girls killed in the 2002 Armored Vehicle Accident
This is something that has been done in the past, but was suspended under the liberal Moon Jae-in administration. Now with a new President it appears restarting trilateral cooperation may soon become a reality:
Defense Minister Lee Jong-sup and his U.S. counterpart Lloyd Austin, pose for a photo before their talks on the sidelines of a security forum in Singapore, June 11. Yonhap
The defense chiefs of South Korea, the United States and Japan agreed Saturday to step up cooperation to counter North Korea’s missile threats through their combined regular security exercises, including missile warning drills, Seoul’s defense ministry said.
Lee Jong-sup and his U.S. and Japanese counterparts, Lloyd Austin and Nobuo Kishi, reached the agreement during their gathering held on the margins of the annual Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore.
This was actually quite a large grouping of fighter jets flying over the waters near Korea yesterday. Just the ROK itself flew 16 fighter jets. Unfortunately the ROK and Japan did not fly together, but instead in different groupings with American fighters:
South Korea and the U.S. engage in an air power demonstration, involving F-35A radar-evading fighters, over the Yellow Sea on June 7, 2022, in this photo released by the South’s Joint Chiefs of Staff.
The United States and its Asian allies flew dozens of fighter jets over waters surrounding the Korean Peninsula on Tuesday in a show of force as their diplomats discussed a coordinated response to a possibly imminent North Korean nuclear test.
The flights came as U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman traveled to Seoul for discussions with South Korea and Japanese officials over the gathering North Korean threat and warned of a “swift and forceful” counterresponse if the North proceeds with a nuclear test explosion, which would be its first in nearly five years.
The government is in talks with U.S. Forces Korea (USFK) about having the site of Yongsan Garrison’s Dragon Hill Lodge returned to South Korea in exchange for an alternative plot of land, sources said Monday.
According to foreign and defense ministry officials, the two sides have been in negotiations to return a 105,000 square-meter site hosting Dragon Hill Lodge, situated next to the presidential office in central Seoul, to the South Korean government.
In return, Seoul will provide a plot of land at a different site.
The sources said the two sides are expected to reach an agreement in the near future.
Seoul and Washington had previously planned to retain a U.S. military base at the Dragon Hill Lodge site to host a liaison office for USFK and the United Nations Command as well as a front office for the ROK/US Combined Forces Command in the wake of the U.S. forces’ relocation to Pyeongtaek.
The THAAD has been in South Korea now for five years and still the environmental assessment has not been completed and protesters continue to block the road. This clearly has little to do with the environment and everything to do with politics. It will be interesting to see if the Korean left tries to mobilize around the THAAD issue and launch Braveheart style attacks against ROK police if and when they try and remove the protesters like they did at Camp Humphreys years ago:
Defense Minister Lee Jong-sup talks with troops at a boot camp in Nonsan, 213 kilometers south of Seoul, on May 23, 2022, in this photo released by his office.
South Korea will expeditiously push for the “normalization” of a U.S. THAAD missile defense unit here, Seoul’s defense minister said Monday, as it has been in the status of “temporary installation” due to an environmental assessment and other reasons.
Lee Jong-sup made the remarks as Seoul and Washington are striving to sharpen joint deterrence against Pyongyang amid growing concerns about possibilities of the regime’s additional provocations, like a long-range ballistic missile or nuclear test.
“The normalization of the THAAD unit should have been done (earlier),” Lee said in a meeting with reporters. “We will push for it (to materialize) at an early date.”
If President Yoon wanted to show President Biden where close integration between the USFK and the ROK Military happens, the KAOC is good place to start:
President Yoon Suk-yeol and U.S. President Joe Biden meet with South Korean and American troops at the Korean Air and Space Operations Center at Osan Air Base in Pyeongtaek, 70 kilometers south of Seoul, on May 22, 2022. (Yonhap)
President Yoon Suk-yeol and U.S. President Joe Biden visited an Air Force operations center Sunday on the last stop of Biden’s three-day trip to South Korea, underscoring the allies’ readiness against threats from North Korea.
The two visited the Korean Air and Space Operations Center (KAOC), which is situated in an underground bunker and serves as a key command post for air and space operations at Osan Air Base in Pyeongtaek, 70 kilometers south of Seoul.
Yoon described the center as a symbol of the South Korea-U.S. alliance and a key site where the two countries jointly respond to “continually advancing nuclear and missile threats from North Korea.”
It looks like Key Resolve and UFG exercises could be coming back:
President Yoon Suk-yeol and U.S. President Joe Biden agreed Saturday to begin discussions on expanding joint military exercises between the two countries amid growing nuclear and missile threats from North Korea.
The two reached the agreement during their first summit in Seoul, which took place as both countries believed a nuclear test or intercontinental ballistic missile launch from the North was imminent and could even happen while Biden was touring the region.
“Both leaders agree to initiate discussions to expand the scope and scale of combined military exercises and training on and around the Korean Peninsula,” a joint statement on the summit said.
This claim has long been hinted by Trump himself due to the cost sharing issue with South Korea. Trump wanted the ROK to pay more for USFK which the Moon administration declined to do. The media now is trying to sell this as a new story when it is actually an old one:
Mark Esper, the former secretary of Defense under President Trump, says that the former president proposed a number of “outlandish” foreign policy proposals while he was in the White House, including pulling troops out of South Korea and shutting down embassies in Africa, according to an excerpt from Esper’s upcoming memoir.
In a new excerpt, shared by Politico, Esper wrote that shortly after he was hired to be the new Pentagon chief in 2019, Trump was railing against NATO and corruption in Ukraine, two personal issues that the rest of the national security and foreign policy team tried to tamp down because they weren’t considered leading concerns at the time.
Trump also said he wanted a “complete withdrawal” of forces from South Korea and that he wished to “bring our people home” from embassies in Africa, according to Esper.
