Tag: USFK

I am surprised USFK did not already have a unit dedicated to doing human intelligence analysis already:

The U.S. troops in South Korea are pushing to set up a unit that will be charged with gathering and analyzing human intelligence on North Korea, local authorities said Sunday.

Human Intelligence, known as HUMINT, is intelligence gathered by means of interpersonal contact.

The move comes as the North’s development of communications security technology is increasingly making signals surveillance of the country’s internal communications more difficult.

According to the authorities, the U.S. Forces Korea (USFK) plans to create a specialized unit around October under the 501st Military Intelligence Brigade of the Eighth U.S. Army. The new unit will be called the 524th Military Intelligence Battalion, they said.

In the brigade, the 532nd Military Intelligence Battalion is in charge of human intelligence affairs, but its main duty is analyzing intelligence, not directly gathering it.  [Korea Times]

You can read more at the link.

You can read more at the Korea Herald via a reader tip.

As I figured the statement made by President Trump in regards to South Korea paying for THAAD is related to upcoming US-ROK cost sharing negotiations:

National Security Adviser Gen. H.R. McMaster said Sunday that the U.S. will indeed pay for the roughly $1 billion THAAD missile defense system in South Korea, amid neighboring North Korea’s repeated ballistic test launches.

“What I told our South Korean counterpart is until any renegotiation, that the deals in place, we’ll adhere to our word,” McMaster told “Fox News Sunday.”

He spoke days after President Trump said South Korea should pay for the anti-missile system and hours after Seoul said that McMaster had assured its chief national security officer, Kim Kwan-jin, about the deal.

“The last thing I would ever do is contradict the president of the United States,” McMaster also told Fox News. “And that’s not what it was. What the president has asked us to do, is to look across all of our alliances and to have appropriate burden sharing-responsibility sharing. We’re looking at that with our great ally South Korea, we’re looking at that with NATO.”  [Fox News]

You can read more at the link.

Another sign that Yongsan Garrison is getting closer to being shutdown:

The U.S. Army at Yongsan Garrison, central Seoul, began base relocation in earnest to Pyeongtaek, Gyeonggi Province Tuesday, to what will be its largest overseas base.

The large-scale relocation project began with a historic ceremony to mark the relocation of the Gen. Walton H. Walker monument, hosted by the Eighth U.S. Army in front of its headquarters.

Gen. Walker was the commander of the Eighth Army when it was deployed to the Korean Peninsula with the outbreak of the 1950-53 Korean War on June 25, 1950.

“The Gen. Walker statue will be moved from Yongsan to Camp Humphreys in Pyeongtaek,” the Eighth Army said in a release, noting that this event will mark the beginning of the Eighth Army’s relocation.  [Korea Times]

You can read much more at the link.

How long has the ROK been saying this?  However, this time with a President Trump in office I wonder if he will call their bluff or not on this issue?:

Moon Jae-in, South Korea’s leading presidential candidate, on Sunday announced a set of policies on North Korea and national security, including an early recovery from the United States of wartime operational control (OPCON) of South Korean forces.

At a press conference in the National Assembly, Moon, candidate for the Democratic Party, said he and his government “will take back the wartime OPCON early” and enhance deterrence against North Korea’s nuclear and missile threats.

“We will take charge of our defense ourselves by all intents and purposes,” Moon said.

The OPCON transfer, which was previously set for 2015, was deferred amid Pyongyang’s provocations. Seoul and Washington have agreed on the “conditions-based” transfer, which observers say could come sometime in the 2020  [Yonhap]

A U-2 ultra-high altitude reconnaissance aircraftlands at the the U.S. air force’s Osan air base, south of Seoul, after a mission on April 24, 2017, one day ahead of the anniversary of the foundation of the North Korean army. Concerns are mounting on the possibility of the North’s sixth nuclear test on the occasion of the anniversary. (Yonhap)

According to the article the conclusion of the land transfer to USFK allows the US military to expedite preparations to deploy the THAAD missile defense system to the site:

South Korea and the United States completed the regulatory process needed for Seoul’s provision of a base site for a U.S. missile defense battery, the foreign ministry said Thursday.

A bilateral committee on the status of U.S. Forces Korea (USFK) approved the plan for land transfer, allowing the U.S. military to begin work for the deployment of a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system in the some 300,000-square-meter land in the southeastern county of Seongju.

The land was formerly owned by a Lotte Group affiliate and used as a golf course.  [Yonhap]

You can read more at the link.

What would be an interesting piece of information is what is the pollution to the ground water in other areas of Seoul around Yongsan Garrison?  I find it hard to believe that Yongsan is the only place in Seoul with polluted ground water:

A contaminant detected in groundwater beneath a U.S. Forces Korea (USFK) garrison in Seoul was above the permissible level, a government report showed Tuesday.

The U.S. Army base in Yongsan, central Seoul, has long been suspected as the source of oil that has contaminated the nearby water and land.

The Seoul Metropolitan Government has been conducting a purification project since 2001, but petroleum-based contaminants above the standard level have continued to be detected in water near the base.

According to a joint probe conducted by the environment ministry and the USFK in May 2015, 2.440 milligrams per liter of benzene was found at an observation well at the base, which is 162 times higher than the allowable level of 0.015 milligrams per liter.

Among 14 monitoring wells of 15 to 20 centimeters in diameter, four had benzene levels some 20 to 162 times higher than the standard, the report showed. A total of seven wells showed above standard levels of benzenes.  [Yonhap]

You can read more at the link, but this pollution issue has long been one that South Korean leftists have used to stoke anti-US sentiment and the Korean government uses to get additional money out of USFK for clean up expenses which according to the SOFA they don’t have to pay.

We will see how this all plays out just like when the camps in Area 1 closed out back in 2004.

There is a reason that Northeast Asia has been stable since the end of the Korean War after decades of conflict and that is the US military presence in the region.  Doug Bandow from the libertarian Cato Institute disagrees:

But that world disappeared long ago. The Korean Peninsula has lost its geopolitical significance, South Korea its helplessness, and America’s Korea commitment its purpose. While there is much to criticize in the approach of Donald Trump’s administration to the rest of the world, the president correctly sees the need for a foreign policy that more effectively protects America’s interests. A good place to start shifting course is the region home to the world’s newest and least responsible nuclear power.

The Koreas are no longer a proxy battleground between superpowers. There was a time when U.S. withdrawal from a confrontation with a Soviet ally in Asia would have, analysts believed, signaled weakness a continent away in Europe. But the Soviets are long gone and the cause for American commitment with them. An inter-Korean war would be tragic and the body count enormous, but absent American involvement the fighting would largely be confined to the peninsula. The continued presence of U.S. forces, by contrast, virtually guarantees the spread of conflict.

South Korea’s defense no longer requires Washington’s presence. The South’s economy began racing past its northern antagonist during the 1960s. Democracy arrived in the late 1980s. By the 1990s, when mass starvation stalked Pyongyang as Seoul’s economy boomed, the gap between the two Koreas was already huge and growing. The South’s military potential is correspondingly great though as yet unrealized — in part because dependence on the U.S. presence has affected strategic choices.  [Foreign Policy]

You can read the rest at the link as well as read my prior analysis of why USFK withdrawal will not happen any time soon at this link.

The Sea of Japan/East Sea issue has come back up again:

Shortly after North Korea’s ballistic missile launch on Wednesday, the U.S. military issued a statement that may add to the anger of Koreans over the naming of the waters between the peninsula and Japan.

In a five-paragraph document posted on its website, the U.S. Pacific Command (PACOM), headquartered in Hawaii, confirmed the North’s firing of a missile, saying it flew nine minutes before falling into the “Sea of Japan.”

Almost simultaneously, the U.S. Forces Korea (USFK) here uploaded a statement on its own homepage with mostly the same content.

The only differences were the time, as PACOM’s version is based on Hawaii time and the USFK’s notes Korean standard time, and the name of the waters, which Koreans call the East Sea.

The USFK’s statement said the missile landed in “waters East of the Korean Peninsula.”

Some South Korean journalists stationed at the defense ministry’s press room complained about PACOM’s use of the Sea of Japan alone in the official document directly involving Korea and read by many people in the key regional ally.  [Yonhap]

You can read the rest at the link, but USFK admitted they modified the naming in their statement which makes sense since their statement is directed more towards a Korean audience.  PACOM on the other hand makes statements directed towards a regional audience that includes Japan, so of course they are going to use the internationally recognized naming convention for the body of water between the two countries which is the Sea of Japan.