USFK To Officially Open Its New Headquarters at Camp Humphreys Next Week

This has been a long time coming:

The U.S. military’s main command in South Korea will officially open its new headquarters next Friday in Pyeongtaek, 40 miles south of its current home in Yongsan District, central Seoul, marking a major milestone in the relocation of the U.S. Forces Korea.

Seoul’s Ministry of National Defense announced Thursday that the opening will be celebrated with a ceremony at the new headquarters compound, in which South Korean and U.S. military officials will participate. The ministry did not disclose the list of invitees, but U.S. Secretary of Defense James Mattis arrives in Seoul next Thursday for a meeting with his South Korean counterpart, Song Young-moo, and local media assumes he’s on it.

The relocation of the headquarters follows a years-long process of moving the U.S. Forces Korea from the Yongsan Garrison in central Seoul to Camp Humphreys in Pyeongtaek, a rural city in Gyeonggi. The 8th U.S. Army relocated its headquarters from Yongsan to Pyeongtaek in July 2017.

Seoul and Washington agreed to the transition in May 2003 and set a deadline for 2020. Local authorities plan to build an ecological park at the garrison site in Yongsan once the transition is complete, with the hopes of opening the park for public use by 2027.

The new headquarters is composed of a four-story main building and a two-story annex, taking up 240,000 square meters (59.3 acres) in total. A ministry official said some other buildings on Camp Humphreys were still under construction, but are most likely to be completed by the 2020 deadline.  [Joong Ang Ilbo]

You can read more at the link, but how much of Yongsan Garrison do people think will actually become an ecological park?