USFK Commander Says Troop Withdrawal Comments Were “Completely Taken Out of Context”

Here is what the USFK commander General Abrams recently had to say to Yonhap News after the end of the Dong Maeng exercise:

(…….) On Tuesday, Seoul and Washington wrapped up their new weeklong Dong Maeng command post exercise, which replaced the usually two-week Key Resolve drills. Dong Maeng is the Korean word for alliance.
The allies introduced the exercise, seen as a truncated version of Key Resolve, to back diplomacy for lasting peace on the peninsula. But conservatives here voiced concerns that the smaller-scale exercise could harm military readiness when Pyongyang has yet to take any substantive steps toward denuclearization.

The hard-bitten commander, who has led the USFK, U.N. Command (UNC) and South Korea-U.S. Combined Forces Command (CFC) since November, stressed that his troops “train at every level to develop mastery-level skills.”

“I have been doing this for 37 years … I consider myself an expert (at a) mastery level of operational art in training and readiness,” he said. “If I tell you that what we are doing is meeting the requirements for us to have a trained and ready force, you need to take that to the bank.” (………)

‘USFK presence has nothing to do with peace treaty’

The commander reiterated that the American troop presence in South Korea has nothing to do with any potential future peace treaty with North Korea.

Commenting on his recent controversial congressional remarks seen as signaling the possibility of the U.S. troop withdrawal — or drawdown — in the event that a peace treaty is signed with Pyongyang, Abrams said that it was “completely taken out of context.”

“That one sentence did not take into context the entire interchange I had with that particular senator,” he said. “Our troop presence is an alliance decision that has nothing to do with any potential future peace treaty.”
In response to a senator’s question on Feb. 12, he said the 28,500-strong USFK will stay on the peninsula “until there is a peace treaty, because we still remain in a state of armistice, a cessation of hostilities.”

Yonhap