It will be interesting to see if General Brunson can pull this off. There is so much inertia to do things the way they have always been done in Korea to overcome:

The general suggested that the allies consider conducting exercises across a much broader geographical area rather than in fixed locations.

“What would it look like if we train from Jeju all the way up to Gyeonggi Province in the north?” he said. “So just imagine if we trained across the entirety of the peninsula.”

Brunson said the allies should take into consideration lessons from the war in Ukraine, where the widespread use of drones and other modern battlefield technologies has left forces operating from fixed positions vulnerable.

He stressed the importance of distributing forces across different locations to reduce their vulnerability to potential attacks. “We won’t be moored in place.”

Brunson also raised the possibility of conducting more training between the two major annual exercises, rather than focusing preparations primarily on those events.

Korea Times

You can read more at the link.

It looks like another Trump-Kim summit may happen next month:

U.S. President Donald Trump said Monday that he may meet North Korean leader Kim Jong-un during his upcoming trip to Asia, raising the possibility of renewed summit diplomacy between Washington and Pyongyang.

Asked by a reporter at the White House on whether he plans to meet Kim during the trip, Trump replied, “I may,” adding, “That’ll be exciting, won’t it? But I get along with him.”

Trump plans to attend the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in China, scheduled for November 18-19 in Shenzhen.

Korea Times

You can read more at the link.

It is a bit ironic that October 10th is the World Day Against the Death Penalty and the Pentagon recently announced it will be livestreaming the execution of mass murderer Nidal Hasan. It will be interesting to see if that actually happens. Anyway for its part South Korea hasn’t executed anyone since 1997 and this researcher is pushing for the ROK government to end the death penalty all together because the killers are old and regret what they did:

Every weekday before 1997, death row inmates in Korea braced themselves between 6 and 9 a.m. — the hours when executions could happen. If 9 a.m. passed uneventfully, they felt relief. Then they went to sleep wondering if the next morning would be their last.

No one has been executed since Dec. 30, 1997, but 56 people remain on death row — 52 in Ministry of Justice correctional facilities and four in military prisons. Kim Dae-keun, a research fellow at the Korean Institute of Criminology and Justice, interviewed 42 of them. 

“Most of them were ashamed, distressed or regretful about what they did,” Kim said in an interview with The Korea Times. “I imagine they were brutal and frightening when they committed their crimes. But many I met in prison now were older, frail men.”

Oct. 10 marks World Day Against the Death Penalty, an annual international observance calling for the abolition of executions as judicial punishment. In Korea, the day arrives with the death penalty still on the books but widely regarded as unenforceable. Most inmates now believe executions will not resume — a belief that has fundamentally reshaped how they live.

Korea Times

You can read more at the link, but this is just another example of suicidal empathy. In this article, this researcher shows a lot of sympathy for the criminals on death row, but does not mention one word about the impact these criminals have had on the lives of the families of the victims they killed.

It looks like there is still some serious concerns from the U.S. on sharing intelligence information with South Korea:

 A senior U.S. official said Friday that Washington expects Seoul to “uphold” the standards of their decadeslong alliance, amid heightened concerns over apparent friction in the countries’ intelligence cooperation.

“We expect the ROK to uphold the standards of our decadeslong alliance, in particular concerning matters of intelligence and counterintelligence,” the senior U.S. administration official told Yonhap News Agency in a written statement, referring to South Korea’s official name, the Republic of Korea. 

The statement was provided in response to an inquiry from Yonhap News Agency regarding the state of bilateral intelligence cooperation.

The remarks follow growing speculation over bilateral friction after South Korea’s National Intelligence Service acknowledged it was excluded from a June trilateral meeting, also involving Japan, on North Korean cyber threats. Local media reports indicated the agency was left out at Washington’s request.

South Korea and the United States have faced signs of friction in the intelligence field after Seoul Unification Minister Chung Dong-young’s public disclosure of a North Korean uranium enrichment facility in Kusong, North Korea in March.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

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