UFG16 Military Exercise Begins In South Korea
|The games are on and no I am not talking about the Olympics:
The U.S. and South Korea kicked off a new round of war games Monday despite protests from the North, which threatened a pre-emptive nuclear strike.
The annual Ulchi Freedom Guardian exercises come as relations between the two Koreas have sharply deteriorated since North Korea conducted its fourth underground atomic test in January. Tensions spiked again last week when Seoul confirmed that a senior North Korean diplomat had defected from his post at Pyongyang’s embassy in London.
About 25,000 U.S. servicemembers — including 2,500 from areas off the peninsula — and 50,000 South Korean forces will participate in the nearly two-week drills, which are mainly computer simulations.
The U.N. military armistice commission gave the North Koreans advance notice about the exercise, which runs through Sept. 2, and stressed its “nonprovocative nature,” the Combined Forces Command said in a statement. [Stars & Stripes]
You can read more at the link, but it will be interesting to see what provocation North Korea tries for this UFG.