Tag: USFK

It seems too early in the negotiations to commit to any troop cuts within USFK, but if North Korea does take serious measures to eliminate their nuclear program I could see this happening at some point in the future.  I guess we will see what happens once the summit is complete:

Concerns are rising that U.S. President Donald Trump may use reducing the number of U.S. troops stationed in South Korea as a bargaining chip for a denuclearization deal with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.

Since taking office early last year, Trump has called for the need to scale down the U.S. Forces Korea (USFK), as he believes Washington is not properly compensated for maintaining the troops here.

Trump has, for this reason, urged South Korea to take a bigger share in paying maintenance costs for the USFK during the ongoing negotiation to renew the five-year defense-cost-sharing for the American troops here. Under his “America First” policy, he said Seoul should take on more of the burden when renewing the agreement which expires at the end of this year.

“Less publicly, but still privately, Trump continues to say he does not agree with the argument that U.S. troops in South Korea are strategically necessary, and he thinks the U.S. gets nothing back from paying to keep them there,” Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin said in a recent column, citing administration officials and those who have had conversations with Trump regarding the issue.

“He (Trump) often asks his generals to explain the rationale for America’s deployments in Asia and expresses dissatisfaction with their answers.”

The White House and Pentagon denied the possibility for Trump to bring the agenda of downsizing U.S. troops to the dialogue table on Tuesday morning when the historic Washington-Pyongyang summit takes place in Singapore.  [Korea Times]

You can read more at the link.

It looks like the UFG exercise this year will be very low key if the Kim regime continues to behave:

South Korea will conduct annual war games with the United States as planned but will avoid publicizing them to facilitate diplomatic efforts over the North’s nuclear weapons program, the defense ministry said Monday.

North Korea has sharply denounced joint military exercises, which it considers rehearsals for an invasion, ahead of an unprecedented summit planned between Kim Jong Un and President Donald Trump on June 12 in Singapore.

“We will be conducting the U.S.-[South Korean] joint military exercises normally in line with annual plans,” ministry spokesman Lee Jin-woo said during a press briefing. “But we’ll refrain from promoting the contents of the joint drills or opening them to the public as best we can.”

The comments came a day after North Korea criticized the South for planning to join upcoming international maritime drills in Hawaii known as Rim of the Pacific and a major joint exercise with the U.S. called Ulchi Freedom Guardian, which begins in August.  [Stars & Stripes]

Complaining about the RIMPAC exercise is pretty stupid considering it is held in Hawaii and involves many more countries than just the US and South Korea.

Here is the latest on the future of USFK according to Defense Secretary Mattis:

U.S. Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis says the fate of U.S. Forces Korea is not an issue to discuss with North Korea.

Mattis, who is attending the Asia Security Summit in Singapore, said the issue is not on the table for the North Korea-U.S., nor should it be.

He also vowed efforts to achieve complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization(CVID) of the Korean Peninsula.

During a speech at the security summit on Saturday, he said the U.S. will support unrelenting diplomatic efforts for this aim.

South Korean Defense Minister Song Young-moo also spoke at the summit and said the South will not pursue North Korea’s collapse or Korean unification through absorption or any artificial means, and vowed to gradually ease inter-Korean military tensions.   [KBS World News]

You can read more at the link.

As I have long said the long term goal of the Kim regime is to get USFK off of the peninsula and the ongoing nuclear negotiations appear to be trying to advance that effort:

Joint military exercises between South Korea and the United States are likely to become a key topic at the denuclearization talks between the U.S. and North Korea.

The Rodong Sinmun, the North’s mouthpiece newspaper, published an op-ed article claiming the drills as a major source of security concern in Northeast Asia.

“It is an international practice for two negotiating sides to refrain from any military activities,” the article said.

“When the U.S. deploys strategic nuclear weapons during the joint military exercises with South Korea, all the ongoing dialogue momentum will return to the original state.”  (…..)

The regime last week threatened to cancel a planned summit between Trump and Kim, expressing anger over the Max Thunder joint air force exercises.

As the drills ended their two-week run last week, the regime ramped up criticism of the Ulchi Freedom Guardian (UFG) exercises between Seoul and Washington, annually held sometime around August.

“South Korea is making a fuss that it does not have plans to downsize UFG drills in August,” the propaganda newspaper said. It said the exercises are the root cause of breaking up peace and stability on the peninsula, urging their suspension in line with the ongoing dialogue momentum.  [Korea Times]

You can read more more at the link, but cancelling Key Resolve, UFG, and other joint exercises will impact the readiness of USFK.  These drills are especially important in a theater where many of the US troops rotate out in a year causing constant turnover.  North Korea appears to be trying to get the ROK to advocate to the US to cancel the upcoming UFG exercise.  If the ROK pushes hard to cancel the exercise this will likely cause tension within the US-ROK alliance which is what the Kim regime wants.

There is a new curfew policy that was recently implemented by the 2nd Infantry Division:

A 2nd Infantry Division policy memo published Tuesday says soldiers are required to be on base, at a residence or inside a hotel room by the new deadline, instead of the U.S. Forces Korea standard of 1 a.m. followed until Monday.

The curfew, which officials called a “readiness recall,” still ends at 5 a.m.

2ID did not identify any specific incident that sparked the change to the policy, but said readiness of the unit’s 12,000 troops was its main concern. South Korean police outside of Camp Casey and Camp Humphreys said Wednesday they had not noticed a significant increase of incidents involving U.S. personnel.

“The recall readiness time was moved one hour earlier in order to ensure that the division is consistently and completely in compliance with the U.S. Forces Korea readiness recall policy,” 2ID spokeswoman Lt. Col. Junel Jeffrey told Stars and Stripes Wednesday.  [Stars & Stripes via a reader tip]

You can read more at the link, but the change by one hour to a midnight curfew is not the biggest issue I see with this memo.  The policy memo also states that commander must account for 100% of personnel to the 2ID command staff on non-duty days by 12:30 AM.

It seems to me requiring servicemembers to sign in to the CQ desk each night would be the easiest way of doing this.  However, a 12:30 AM report time hardly gives units any time to consolidate a report after curfew which means people would likely need to sign in earlier than the curfew time.

I would be interested to hear from 2ID servicemembers in the comments section on how they saw units meeting this requirement over the long holiday weekend.

Here is another likely example of the Moon administration sending their left wing activists groups to advocate against USFK on their behalf:

South Korea is shouldering 73 percent of the cost for stationing U.S. troops here, a civic group claimed Tuesday, citing data from the governments of both nations.

Solidarity for Peace and Reunification of Korea (SPARK) said South Korea covered 72.6 percent of the costs for keeping 28,500 U.S. troops here in 2016, after analyzing defense expenditures of both South Korea and the U.S.

According to official announcements by Seoul and Washington, the total costs of the U.S. Forces Korea (USFK) presence here add up to around $2 billion (2.17 trillion won), of which South Korea pays 42 percent.

However, the civic group stated taking into account the sites South Korea provides for military bases, the percentage rises above 70 percent.

The group said South Korea paid around 3.39 trillion won in direct and indirect expenses for the USFK last year, according to data from the defense ministry.

Direct costs paid by South Korea for the USFK were 1.81 trillion won. This included 944.1 billion won in costs paid under the Special Measures Agreement (SMA), 666.7 billion won in expenses for relocating personnel to Pyeongtaek and 184.3 billion won for repairing military facilities. Also included in the expenses were managing the Korean Augmentation To the United States Army (KATUSA) and conducting environmental studies on bases.

Indirect costs totaled 1.57 trillion won ― most of which accounted for South Korea providing land for U.S. military use. The civic group said the land value exceeds 1.16 trillion won.

It also looked into expenditures of the U.S. Department of Defense to reach the conclusion the cost-bearing ratio is 72.6 to 27.4.

“The U.S. government must stop forcing South Korea to raise its portion of costs, and must immediately return accumulated funds and illegally reaped interest earnings,” the group said.

It also demanded the U.S. stop calling for Korea to cover more costs of deploying U.S. strategic assets and maintaining a THAAD battery here.  [Korea Times]

By not including the cost of deploying US strategic assets to the peninsula this totally discredits what this group is claiming.  They are more than happy to include indirect costs for Korea in their analysis, but not indirect costs for the US military.  Imagine how much their analysis would change if the cost of an aircraft carrier or stealth bombers when they are deployed to the peninsula is included.  Better yet what about the cost of all the space based assets that USFK uses to protect South Korea that they get the benefit of and don’t have to pay for?

Someone at the Pentagon involved in the cost sharing talks should run all these numbers to counter what the left wing group SPARK is putting out.

A group of people stages a rally in front of the Foreign Ministry in downtown Seoul on May 21, 2018, calling for revision of the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) and denouncing U.S. forces for the environmental contamination of U.S. bases in South Korea. (Yonhap)

Here is a really messed up story involving a USFK soldier who had his wife cheat on him, get pregnant, then falsely claim the child was his, and then falsely claim the baby died at child birth:

A South Korea-based soldier has been entangled in a monthslong drama complete with a cheating spouse, long-distance lies and kidnapping charges.

Sgt. Steven Garcia, 24, is a patrol supervisor with the 142nd Military Police Company at Yongsan Garrison in Seoul. In January, he was told that his wife, Marina Garcia, had given birth to a daughter back home in Arizona who died during childbirth.

“When my sister called me about that, it was pretty emotional,” Garcia told KVOA News in Tucson. “We cried quite a bit together over the phone. It was devastating.”

But he soon learned it wasn’t true.

On Feb. 5, an Arizona highway patrolman pulled over an out-of-state vehicle for speeding north of Willcox, Ariz., according to court documents. Inside was a Texas couple and a newborn.

Upon questioning the couple – Alex Hernandez, 33, and his wife, Leslie Morin Hernandez, 41 – the trooper learned that neither was a biological parent of the 3-day-old infant, the documents said.

Further questioning at the police station revealed that Alex Hernandez had fraudulently signed the birth certificate as the father after Marina Garcia arranged to give the child to them.

The Hernandezes were taken into custody, and the baby, who relatives said is named Leo, was handed over to Arizona’s Department of Child Safety.

Later that day, detectives questioned Marina Garcia, who was living in Sierra Vista with her boyfriend, an Army specialist. She admitted to conspiring with the Hernandezes and planned to travel to Texas to sign away her parental rights after recovering from delivery, according to court documents obtained by Stars and Stripes.  [Stars & Stripes]

You can read more at the link, but Sergeant Garcia unsurprisingly wants a divorce.  He also wants custody of the baby even though it is not his because he was a child that was adopted.

As unfortunate as this story is, I could not help, but think about this article after reading it.

Via a reader tip comes this AFN report from last year about a KATUSA soldier that was reportedly the first to marry an American woman while still completing his mandatory service obligation:

All the best to the couple.

Here is who is reportedly replacing General Brooks as the next USFK commander:

The Donald Trump administration is expected to name Robert B. Abrams, a four-star Army general, as the new U.S. Forces Korea commander, according to a diplomatic source Wednesday.

Abrams will replace Gen. Vincent Brooks, who will leave his post as commander of United States Forces Korea (USFK) possibly as early as this summer. An official announcement naming Abrams, currently commander of the U.S. Army Forces Command, as the new head of the USFK is expected to come at a later date, and the replacement is expected to take place in July or August.

The White House is also expected to soon officially name four-star Adm. Harry Harris, the outgoing chief of the U.S. Pacific Command, as ambassador to Seoul, a long-vacant position. A diplomatic source well informed on the matter told the JoongAng Ilbo, “The duo of Harris, a four-star Navy admiral, and Abrams, a four-star Army general, stand at the front line in the case of any problems arising amid the rapidly changing situation on the Korean Peninsula.”

Their appointments would complete the Trump administration’s reshuffling of the diplomatic and security lineup over the Korean Peninsula. Abrams, 57, is the son of a 1950-53 Korean War veteran, Gen. Creighton W. Abrams Jr., a former Army chief of staff and commander in Vietnam who is known for legendary exploits in World War II. His two brothers are also in the military.

Abrams was born in 1960 in Germany and has spent more than 30 years in active service. A graduate of the United States Military Academy, Abrams received a master of science degree from Central Michigan University and a master of strategic studies degree from the United States Army War College. He has led units in countries including Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Abrams also previously served as a senior military assistant to the secretary of defense and a strategic war planner for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He became the 22nd chief of United States Army Forces Command in 2015, commanding some 229,000 active duty soldiers. The Army Forces Command includes some 776,000 soldiers and 96,000 civilians.  [Joong Ang Ilbo]

You can read more at the link.