Category: US-ROK Alliance

This seems to be a trial balloon to judge reaction to possible future plans to be able to use U.S. forces in South Korea for rotational deployments in the great Indo-Pacific theater:

U.S. troops are concentrated in Northeast Asia and should be distributed to better respond to evolving security challenges, including China, a senior Pentagon official has said.

“We are heavily concentrated in Northeast Asia,” David Helvey, assistant secretary of defense for Indo-Pacific affairs, said, according to a news report by the U.S. Department of Defense news on Monday.

“We’d like to be able to make our presence more geographically distributed, more operationally resilient,” Helvey said. “Maybe, the future is going to be less about bases and more about places — being able to operate across a multiplicity of locations, which give us the flexibility and the agility to respond to a variety of different threats and challenges.”

His comments came when the U.S. has been pushing for greater “strategic flexibility” for its forces deployed around the world amid speculation that it could consider pulling some troops out of South Korea.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link, but maybe this could be a compromise in regards to the ongoing cost sharing issue. The U.S. could say that since South Korea does not want to increase funding to support USFK, the Pentagon will deploy U.S. troops stationed in South Korea to support larger regional security objectives. I guess we will see what happens in the coming years.

Even though the bilateral military exercise has been scaled down I suspect North Korea will still complain about it when it is executed:

South Korea on Sunday formally announced it will kick off combined military exercises with the United States on Tuesday, with drills to be scaled down this year as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.  
   
In a statement, Seoul’s Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) said the allies will conduct computerized combined command post training from Aug. 18 to 28, with “all relevant conditions, such as the Covid-19 situation, comprehensively considered.”  
   
The adjustments made to the drills, which the JCS said would be focused on maintaining the allies’ combined defense posture, signaled a major setback to South Korea’s timetable to retrieve wartime Operational Control (Opcon) of its forces.  
   
Seoul had strongly pushed for the summertime exercises in spite of the ongoing pandemic in order to conduct an assessment of South Korea’s full operational capability (FOC) — a necessary step in the Opcon transfer process which Seoul had envisioned to complete by the end of President Moon Jae-in’s term in 2022.  
   
But this month’s drills would only “partly” feature a rehearsal for how the allied command structure would operate with a South Korean general in command, the JCS said, hinting that the FOC assessment will not be completed. (……)

Military sources said the effective postponement of the FOC assessment this month was owed to U.S. reluctance due to the coronavirus, which has prevented U.S. troops stationed in Hawaii, Guam and Japan from joining the drills. 

Joong Ang Ilbo

You can read more at the link.

This poll shows how small the number of Koreans with anti-U.S. views are in the ROK:

Most South Koreans expressed support for the South Korea-U.S. alliance despite ongoing tensions over burden-sharing, a new poll found Monday.

According to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, 90 percent of respondents said they either strongly support or somewhat support the alliance, similar to the 92 percent in December.

The survey, conducted on 1,000 adults in South Korea from June 23-25, also found that a unilateral withdrawal of American troops from South Korea is likely to undermine public support for the alliance.

That’s because the U.S. commitment to defend South Korea is closely linked to views of the alliance as mutually beneficial.

Eighty-two percent of the respondents said they are very confident or somewhat confident in the U.S. commitment to defend South Korea. Of those who are very confident, 78 percent said the alliance is mutually beneficial.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link, but unfortunately the anti-U.S. leftists in Korea have a big megaphone which can make it seem they are larger than what they really are.

Since the North Koreans are already developing this capability it makes sense for the South Koreans to develop the same technology as well:

 South Korea announced Tuesday it has become able to develop solid-propellant space rockets under the new missile guidelines with the United States, saying the deal is expected to help sharply improve the military’s intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities and boost the space program of the private sector.

The allies agreed to lift the decades-old restrictions on Seoul’s use of solid fuels for its space rocket launch, effective as of the day, according to Kim Hyun-chong, deputy national security adviser.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

It doesn’t take an expert to know that the cancellation of the US-ROK military exercise will not motivate North Korea to want to discuss denuclearization when they have no intention to denuclearize:

Amid growing speculation that joint military exercises between South Korea and the United States are likely to be called off in a bid to prevent the spread of COVID-19, and appease North Korea, diplomatic experts believe a cancellation as an olive branch to Pyongyang is not a good idea, saying there will be no “reciprocity” from the isolated country.

Currently, the government is in a quandary over whether to cancel the annual drills as the COVID-19 pandemic shows no sign of abating. The exercises will bring hundreds of American troops here, raising concerns over possible new infections.

In addition, further deepening Seoul’s calculations is the possibility of military retaliation from the Kim Jong-un regime, as the totalitarian state describes the exercises as hostile action by the U.S. against the North. 

The government also wants the exercises to be focused on assessing the Korean military’s relevant capabilities on its way to regaining wartime operational control (OPCON) from the U.S. by 2022. Either a delay or a cancellation of the drills could disrupt the timetable for that. 

“If the military exercises are canceled or postponed, it is possible North Korea will relent and agree to an eventual working level meeting, in response to recent U.S.-South Korea requests to resume negotiations. I doubt, however, that the cancellation or postponement of the exercises will motivate the North to resume working-level negotiations, given that it has refused to meet with the U.S. or ROK since late 2019,” Joseph DeTrani, a former U.S. special envoy to the six-party talks, told The Korea Times, referring to South Korea by its formal name, the Republic of Korea.

Korea Times

You can read more expert opinions at the link.

It looks like what was once called UFG will not happen again this year:

 South Korea and the United States appear increasingly likely to scale back or even call off a major combined exercise again due to the new coronavirus, after indefinitely postponing their annual springtime drill earlier this year, sources said Saturday. 

The repeated skipping of annual exercises, if realized, is feared to affect the joint combat posture between the two countries, as well as South Korea’s planned takeover of the wartime operational control (OPCON) of its forces from the U.S.

“Both sides share the need to stage the summertime exercise as planned, and we’ve continued consultations on the matter. But things are highly flexible due to the COVID-19 situation,” a defense ministry official said.

Seoul and Washington usually carry out major combined exercises twice a year — in around March and August. But they postponed this year’s springtime exercise due to COVID-19, and it has not been held to date, as the health crisis continues.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link, but basically it comes down to not being able to logistically test and quarantine the thousands of servicemembers who would come to Korea for the exercise.

I figured that South Korea would take notice of President Trump’s threat to pull U.S. troops out of Germany. However, I would not be surprised if the Moon administration would welcome removing half of U.S. troops:

U.S. President Donald Trump said Monday he will cut the number of U.S. soldiers in Germany by about half, fueling concerns in Seoul he could make similar reductions to American troops in Korea.    
   
“One of the only countries that hasn’t agreed to pay what they’re supposed to pay is Germany,” Trump said to reporters at the White House in Washington. “So I said, until they pay we’re removing our soldiers, a number of our soldiers, by about half. And then when we get down to 25,000, we’ll see where we’re going.”  
   
Trump claimed that Germany was “delinquent” in payments to NATO and has been treating the United States “very badly on trade.”    
   
He added, “And I’m not only talking about Germany, by the way; I’m talking about plenty of other countries,” without specifying further.   

Joong Ang Ilbo

You can read more at the link.

A temporary deal has been reached to get Korean employees back to work on U.S. bases:

 The United States and South Korea agreed to a $200 million stopgap measure allowing more than 4,000 local base employees to return to work after months of unpaid leave, despite the allies’ failure to reach a broader defense cost-sharing deal.

The Pentagon said Wednesday that it has accepted Seoul’s proposal to fund the labor costs for all South Korean employees of U.S. Forces Korea through the end of this year amid stalled talks on reaching a new contract known as the Special Measures Agreement.

“This decision effectively ends the partial furlough,” USFK commander Gen. Robert Abrams said in a separate statement. “We expect our entire workforce to return back to USFK within the next few weeks.”

Stars & Stripes

You can read more at the link, but it appears there is still no long term cost sharing deal that is going to happen any time soon.

Leave it to the usual suspects to be upset that the THAAD battery in South Korea is getting updated missiles to better protect the country:

 The defense ministry stuck to its flat-out denial Monday of any upgrades to a U.S. THAAD missile defense base in South Korea after a series of reports suggested that last week’s transport of military hardware into the base was aimed at upgrading or strengthening the unit.

On Friday, the U.S. Forces Korea brought new interceptor missiles as well as other military hardware and equipment for facility construction onto its Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system base in the central town of Seongju by ground, according to the ministry. 

Officials here made it clear that the missiles were to replace expired ones and that no additional launchers were brought in. They also stressed that the transport has nothing to do with the U.S. project to upgrade the batteries.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.