Former USFK Commander General B.B. Bell Speaks Out Against ROK OPCON Transfer
General Bell is speaking out against the OPCON transfer to South Korea:
A former commander of the U.S. Forces Korea (USFK) on Friday expressed his opposition to the planned transfer of wartime operational control, or Opcon, from the United States to South Korea, citing significant threat stemming from North Korea’s nuclear weapons development.
Gen. Burwell B. Bell, a U.S. four-star general who commanded the USFK from 2006 to 2008, said in a written interview with a Korean correspondents club in the United States earlier this month that he opposed the wartime Opcon transfer based on recent assessments that Pyongyang has made great strides in its nuclear weapons program that has made a conventional weapons-based deterrence model obsolete.
Only the United States, he said, possessed the nuclear weapons and deployment capability to respond to the North Korean nuclear arsenal, and this capability can only be effectively planned and exercised in a wartime contingency if the U.S. command stands at the helm of the alliance. In terms of combat operations on the Korean Peninsula, the wartime Opcon transfer was unlikely to be realized, he added.
Joong Ang Ilbo
You can read more at the link, but from a military perspective General Bell is correct. Does anyone think that in a real contingency on the Korean peninsula a ROK general is going to be directing U.S. stealth bombers, space assets, nuclear weapons, and other strategic capabilities that only the U.S. has?
However, the OPCON transfer is not a military issue for the ROK, it is a political issue. All the issues that General Bell brings up, the ROK left could care less about. They don’t think North Korea would ever attack the ROK and that the U.S. military is actually a barrier to reunification. The OPCON transfer is one of the things they need to move towards the removal of U.S. troops from South Korea and seeking their confederation with North Korea.
Maybe it is time to start pulling US troops out. With Moon wanting to downsize the army, it doesn’t seem like it should be the US to be the primary form of defense. And the way things are going, if the north were to attack the south, somehow it would wind up to be Trump’s fault.
… if the north were to attack the south, somehow it would wind up to be Trump’s fault.
“During an Asan Institute for Policy Studies security forum held in Seoul, Tuesday, Bruce Bennett, a senior defense analyst at the Washington-based RAND Corporation, claimed that since the failure of the summit between Kim and President Donald Trump in Hanoi in March last year, Kim Jong-un has increased his nuclear destructive potential about 50 percent.”
“Bennett estimated that North Korea now has about 45 nuclear weapons, something the Asan Institute confirmed.”
Trump’s negotiations lead to more North Korean warheads
Stephen wanted Trump to attack and destroy North Korea, which would have nuked Seoul and killed an estimated 6 million South Koreans… and for what? The US was never going to invade North Korea with ground troops, so whomever remained in Pyongyang would have still had nukes and been pissed off enough to keep building them and using them…
I like Ike on this issue.
Eisenhower ordered Project Solarium that proposed containing communism through building alliances, primarily in Europe … and also in Japan and Korea.
WWII completed his transformation. He smelled the rotting flesh of battlefields and wrote to thousands of grieving mothers and wives. (Thomas, Ike’s Bluff)
He learned to hate war and dedicated the rest of his career to world peace. But he did not embrace pacifism and appeasement. He forged a middle ground between these positions and warmongering.
Ike would only go to war if a vital national interest was threatened. Even then, war was the last resort until all other tools were exhausted. (Waging Peace, 1953: Fighting to End All War)
He had two other conditions for going to war: Congressional approval and an international coalition consisting of core allies and the countries of the region. (Johnson, Modern Times)
But yeah, Trump knows more than Ike …
Trump canceled visit to DMZ after learning it wasn’t …
Stephen, the http://www.duffelblog.com is a satire site. I can’t tell if you were being sarcastic.
“Trump’s negotiations lead to more North Korean warheads”
Actually, time did that; because they were going to do it no matter what anyone did.
It doesn’t matter anyway, it’s almost 10pm and GEN Bell says everyone needs to go to bed early to get a good night’s sleep.
What amazes me most about this is that Trump is to blame for a 200 year old war between the Turks and Kurds, choosing not to fight a NATO ally’s entire army with 25 counter-insurgency troops but telling them not to go too far lest there be economic sanctions. Trump is also to blame for Korean-Japanese racial hatred going back to the 16th Century (if not earlier), the intransigence of pro-nork Moon and the anti-American attitudes of the EU (formed to counter America economically). Trump is even responsible for a communist dictator doing what he and his family have been doing since 1945 (except for the ending of ICBM and nuke testing, that’s irrelevant).
That Trump is one bad dude.
… the ending of ICBM and nuke testing
“Last weekend, North Korea suspended its nuclear tests and shut down the site where the last six detonations took place: underneath Mount Mantap, in the country’s northeast.
The reasons are ostensibly diplomatic, pointing to a thaw in relations between Kim Jong-un’s regime and South Korea and the West but two separate groups of Chinese scientists now say Mount Mantap did in fact collapse after that detonation.
The test of the 100-kiloton bomb, which led Chinese seismologists to register a 6.3 magnitude earthquake, apparently opened up a hole of up to 656 feet in diameter.”
A hole? A hole foreign policy ended nork nuke testing?
It’s like a Stephen King novel … or tweet.