Tag: US-ROK Alliance

At some point I would not be surprised if the Moon administration plays the anti-US card at some point to get the American negotiators to back down on increased cost sharing demands. In the past the usual suspects would already be out there protesting like crazy about something like this, but clearly the Moon administration has them in check for now:

Alarm has started to spread in Seoul over reported demands by the United States that Korea contribute to the upkeep of U.S. military forces beyond the Korean Peninsula. 

According to Rep. Yoon Sang-hyun, chairman of the National Assembly’s Foreign Affairs and Unification Committee on Thursday, Washington’s chief negotiator in negotiations with Seoul over the Special Measures Agreement (SMA), James DeHart, told Korean lawmakers and government officials in a meeting that Korea should pay approximately $4.7 billion in alliance upkeep costs – around five times the amount it currently pays to keep U.S. forces stationed on its soil. 

Yoon told a local broadcaster that this amount includes labor and logistics costs for the U.S. Forces Korea (USFK) – which Seoul is already paying – but also maintenance and deployment costs for U.S. strategic assets on Korean soil and at U.S. military bases abroad, possibly in Guam, Hawaii and around the Indian Ocean. 

Other expenses demanded from Korea include the costs of conducting combined military exercises and upkeep for civilian attaches to the USFK.

Joong Ang Ilbo

You can read more at the link.

General Bell is speaking out against the OPCON transfer to South Korea:

A former commander of the U.S. Forces Korea (USFK) on Friday expressed his opposition to the planned transfer of wartime operational control, or Opcon, from the United States to South Korea, citing significant threat stemming from North Korea’s nuclear weapons development.

Gen. Burwell B. Bell, a U.S. four-star general who commanded the USFK from 2006 to 2008, said in a written interview with a Korean correspondents club in the United States earlier this month that he opposed the wartime Opcon transfer based on recent assessments that Pyongyang has made great strides in its nuclear weapons program that has made a conventional weapons-based deterrence model obsolete.  

Only the United States, he said, possessed the nuclear weapons and deployment capability to respond to the North Korean nuclear arsenal, and this capability can only be effectively planned and exercised in a wartime contingency if the U.S. command stands at the helm of the alliance. In terms of combat operations on the Korean Peninsula, the wartime Opcon transfer was unlikely to be realized, he added. 

Joong Ang Ilbo

You can read more at the link, but from a military perspective General Bell is correct. Does anyone think that in a real contingency on the Korean peninsula a ROK general is going to be directing U.S. stealth bombers, space assets, nuclear weapons, and other strategic capabilities that only the U.S. has?

However, the OPCON transfer is not a military issue for the ROK, it is a political issue. All the issues that General Bell brings up, the ROK left could care less about. They don’t think North Korea would ever attack the ROK and that the U.S. military is actually a barrier to reunification. The OPCON transfer is one of the things they need to move towards the removal of U.S. troops from South Korea and seeking their confederation with North Korea.

I don’t think the argument is whether South Korea is free riding but rather if their current cost sharing amount is adequate:

Former U.S. Ambassador to South Korea Mark Lippert on Friday rejected the notion that South Korea is free-riding on the United States’ troop presence in the country, saying the two nations are “very, very strong allies.”

Lippert, who served as the last U.S. ambassador to Seoul under former President Barack Obama, made the remark as negotiations on renewing a burden-sharing deal between South Korea and the U.S. got under way this week. (…………….)

n supporting his case, the former ambassador listed three factors: mandatory military service for all able-bodied South Korean men, South Korea’s shouldering of more than 90 percent of the cost of expanding Camp Humphreys, the U.S.’ largest overseas military base, and Seoul’s increase of defense spending by 4-8 percent each year.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

I don’t think a technocrat is going to change President Trump’s mind that the ROK needs to pay much more for the upkeep of the US-ROK alliance, but I guess we will see what happens:

The government is considering naming a non-diplomat official, such as a financial technocrat, to head negotiations with the U.S. on sharing the cost for the upkeep of American troops, sources said Friday.

That would mark a departure from the tradition that officials from either the foreign or defense ministries have led the Special Measures Agreement (SMA) aimed at determining how much South Korea should shoulder the cost of U.S. troop presence in the country.

The two sides expected to launch the negotiations around mid-September amid widespread indications that the United States could ask for a massive raise in Seoul’s share of the cost of the stationing of the 28,500-strong U.S. Forces Korea (USFK).

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

It seems that President Trump does not have a high opinion of the recently concluded joint US-ROK military exercise:

U.S. President Donald Trump has called the recently concluded South Korea-U.S. combined military exercise “unnecessary” and a “total waste of money” despite heightened tensions caused by Pyongyang’s recent launches of short-range projectiles.

During the Group of Seven summit in France on Sunday, Trump also told reporters that Pyongyang’s projectile launches do not represent a breach of his agreement with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un that involves nuclear and longer-range ballistic missile tests.

Pyongyang tested what it claims to be a “new” super-large multiple rocket launch system Saturday — the first such projectile launch since the allied exercise ended Tuesday, and the seventh since July 25 when the North started firing missiles and projectiles in protest in the runup to the exercise.

“I’m not happy about it. But again, he’s not in violation of an agreement,” Trump said before his bilateral talks with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on the sidelines of the G-7 summit in Biarritz, according to a transcript released by the White House. (………..)

“I said that to all of my people. I said, ‘I don’t want to interfere because I think if you want to do them, you can do them, if you think it’s necessary. But I think it’s a total waste of money,'” he said.

Trump went on to say, “I think it was unnecessary to do, frankly.”

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

Here is some more Korean media criticism about the US-ROK cost sharing talks from Oh Young-jin in the Korea Times:

U.S. Forces Korea (USFK) is under attack not by enemy but by its own commander-in-chief, President Donald Trump.

Trump is prioritizing the size of the bill host Korea pays toward upkeep and is indulging himself in an unwarranted bromance with the head of the enemy. 

The risk is bringing confusion to the mission and raison d’etre of the peacekeepers and freedom fighters who have stood ready for decades to throw down their lives to help protect Koreans from North Korean invasions and assert a U.S.-led balance of power in the region where interests of big powers often clash. So a blow to the USFK credibility is feared. 

Already, Trump’s first defense secretary, James Mattis, the soldier of the soldiers, called it quits over Trump’s acts of belittling the allies, calling them freeloaders being piggybacked by the U.S., and his boss’s readiness to sleep with enemies like the North’s young dictator Kim Jong-un and Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

Korea Times

Here is the most humorous line from the article:

One commentator wondered aloud whether if Korea pays what the U.S. reportedly demands, it would make GIs mercenaries that work for money with no regard to common cause and purpose. 

First of all hardly any soldier in USFK even knows or cares about the on going US-ROK cost sharing talks. Secondly if and when a new deal is struck it is not like USFK soldiers are getting a cut from whatever the Korean side pays.

Regardless of how much Korea pays it makes absolutely no difference to the average USFK soldier and thus it is total hyperbole to claim that USFK soldiers would begin feeling like mercenaries because the ROK pays more for the upkeep of the alliance.