Tag: ROK Army

It looks like that the ROK and U.S. militaries have decided to join the North Koreans in waging war on the East Sea’s fish:

South Korean and US forces fired eight missiles Monday in response to North Korea firing the same number of missiles a day earlier, the allies said Monday. 

For about 10 minutes from 4:45 a.m. Monday, the South Korean military and the US Forces Korea fired eight surface-to-surface Army Tactical Missile System missiles into the East Sea as a response to North Korea’s military provocation made Sunday.

The exercise used one missile from the US Army and seven from the South Korean military. 

Korea Herald

You can read more at the link.

Not only is this officer likely going to jail, but the cryptocurrency he received has dropped by more than half its value now:

A special operations officer in the South Korean army allegedly traded military secrets to a North Korean hacker in exchange for nearly $70,000 in cryptocurrency, according to a South Korean military affidavit.

The army captain, identified in the redacted affidavit only as Kim, his surname, was arrested April 6 and charged with violating the National Security Act, military prosecutors state in the document.

The allegations against Kim are “absolutely shameful,” said a former South Korean special forces officer and former commander of a joint support group.

“In my 19 year-career in the military, this is the first time I’ve heard this kind of news,” Lee Kwan Woo, a former commander in the Eighth Army’s U.S.-South Korea joint support group, told Stars and Stripes by phone Wednesday. “Special forces officers and noncommissioned officers are trained on security — all of those members are trained very seriously to keep security.”

Kim attended South Korea’s school of infantry in 2015, according to military records cited in the affidavit. He then served as a platoon leader for a reconnaissance company in 2016 and five years later became a company commander in the 13th Special Mission Brigade, according to Lee a special operations group specifically trained to capture or kill leaders in North Korea.

In March 2020, an unidentified former classmate approached Kim with an offer of money in exchange for military information for a third party, according to the affidavit. Kim declined the offer, saying such an act is illegal, the affidavit states.

Around six months later, Kim, now in financial straits due to online gambling, accepted his classmates’ offer, the affidavit said. The classmate introduced Kim to Boris, a man who claimed to be an ethnic Korean living in China.

Stars & Stripes

You can read more at the link, but it is not surprising that the North Koreans were targeting someone with a bad gambling habit. It makes me wonder how they knew he had a bad gambling habit? Did they hack into the online gambling websites to monitor who has gambling problems that they might be able to exploit?

I would not be surprised if this is an old landmine that may have been washed out of the ground by rain:

A South Korean soldier in a frontline Army unit was wounded due to an unidentified explosion during a border defense mission earlier this week, officials said Wednesday.

The blast occurred Tuesday when the soldier was conducting a land clearing operation to ensure visibility near a general outpost of the Army’s First Corps that lies just south of the Demilitarized Zone separating the two Koreas.

He is currently receiving treatment for an injury to his toes, the officials said.

The military authorities are trying to ascertain the exact cause of the explosion, including the possibility of a stray landmine blast.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

It is amazing how long it has been taking for the Koreans to figure out how to domestically produce one of their key defense systems:

South Korea’s arms acquisition agency has decided to equip third batch of K2 Black Panther main battle tanks with a German transmission system, a part of the tank’s power pack that includes a locally developed engine.

The decision is a blow to a 15-yearlong effort to replace the German RENK transmission system with an indigenous one, which local industry expected would pave the way for exporting the tank. (…….)

The failure in local transmission development has also caused setbacks for the tank’s deployment in the South Korean Army.

The Black Panther was co-developed by the state-run Agency for Defense Development and Hyundai Rotem, a defense business arm of Hyundai Motor, to replace M48 Patton tanks and earlier models of K1 tanks that have been service since the 1980s. Prototypes were unveiled in 2007.

Mass production of the first 100 units was approved in 2011, with deployment scheduled for the following year, but the effort was delayed over a faulty engine and a lack of progress on a locally produced transmission. The government then decided to use the German-made power pack consisting of the MTU 883 diesel engine and RENK transmission system for the first batch.

The tanks entered service in 2014, and in that same year, local developers announced they succeeded in developing a 1,500-horsepower power pack that could be installed on the second batch of 100 tanks. However, the deployment of the second batch also faced delays, as the S&T Dynamics-made transmission system repeatedly failed to prove its reliability and durability under transmission production standards, which require a system to run without issue for 320 hours. The second batch of K2s were eventually delivered in 2019.

Defense News

You can read more at the link, but ROK Heads may remember that South Korea has been trying to export the K2 to Turkey. Due to the various delays, Turkey decided to instead conduct a technology transfer with South Korea to develop their own tank.

In a South Korean Army barracks environment a massive spread event like this is likely if just one person gets sick considering how close the soldiers sleep to one another in open bays:

Sixty newly enlisted soldiers tested positive for the new coronavirus at an Army boot camp in the central border town of Yeoncheon on Wednesday, the defense ministry said.

They underwent virus tests after one of their colleagues showed symptoms and tested positive earlier in the day, even though he tested negative in an initial test taken upon his entrance into the camp, according to the ministry. 

They all joined the military on Nov. 10. 

The figure is feared to grow, as the authorities are conducting tests for around 860 new enlistees.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

This is really something more Korean troops should take part in because the NTC is some of the best training I have ever done in the Army:

Dozens of South Korean troops visited a U.S. military training center in California and staged combined training exercises with American service members, officials said Wednesday.

Around 50 Army members, including those from a reconnaissance unit, carried out various joint maneuvers with the U.S. troops at the U.S. Fort Irwin National Training Center (NTC) for about a month from mid-October, according to the officials.

They returned home Tuesday and have been quarantined for the new coronavirus, they added.

Initially, the Army was scheduled to send troops to the training center earlier this year, but the plan was postponed due to the global COVID-19 pandemic. The NTC had been closed for months to prevent the spread of the new coronavirus.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

No apology will ever make the Korean left happy on this issue. Just like with the comfort women issue, they need to keep this issue alive to bash their political enemies with. So in the grand scheme of things this apology is meaningless to the Korean left:

Army Chief of Staff Gen. Nam Yeong-shin apologized Friday for the military’s brutal crackdown on protestors during a 1980 pro-democracy uprising in the southwestern city of Gwangju, vowing to fully cooperate with an ongoing probe into the case. 

This is the first time in 40 years that an Army chief officially apologized for the bloody incident.

“I believe that the military’s involvement in the May 18 Democratization Movement is gravely wrong,” Nam said during a parliamentary audit of the Army on Friday. “I’d like to offer a sincere apology to victims and bereaved families.”

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

It looks like President Moon is cycling the Defense Minister position among all the military services:

President Moon Jae-in has nominated Army Chief of Staff Gen. Suh Wook as new defense minister, Cheong Wa Dae announced Friday.

If appointed after a National Assembly confirmation hearing, Suh would replace Jeong Kyeong-doo. If so, he would become the first defense chief with an Army background under the Moon administration.

Moon’s first defense minister was a retired Navy admiral, Song Young-moo, and Jeong is a former fighter pilot who served as Air Force chief.

Korea Times

You can read more at the link.