Here is the latest update on the ever changing location of the CFC headquarters:
The United States told the Moon Jae-in administration that it wants to move the Korea-U.S. Combined Forces Command from its planned relocation site in Yongsan District, central Seoul, to Camp Humphreys in Pyeongtaek, Gyeonggi, government sources told the JoongAng Ilbo on Wednesday.
Joong Ang Ilbo
“General Robert Abrams, the commander of U.S. Forces Korea and the commander of the Korea-U.S. Combined Forces Command, recently told Korean Defense Minister Jeong Kyeong-doo about the change of plans,” the JoongAng Ilbo quoted a government source as saying in its Thursday edition. “The Ministry of National Defense is currently reviewing the proposal.”
The newspaper also said multiple government sources confirmed the U.S. military’s relocation plan. Originally, the United States planned to keep the Combined Forces Command (CFC) in Yongsan.
Other top U.S. military offices – the headquarters of the U.S. Forces Korea, United Nations Command and Eighth Army Command – have been relocated away from Yongsan to Camp Humphreys in Pyeongtaek.
According to the sources, General Abrams had considered two options for relocating the CFC. One was to move it inside Camp Humphreys and the other was to keep it inside the U.S. military base in Yongsan until the United States completed the process of handing over wartime operational control of Korean troops to Korea.
Seoul and Washington originally agreed to keep the CFC inside the compound of the Korean Ministry of National Defense in Yongsan. During a lecture on Jan. 4 last year, General Vincent Brooks, then the commander of the Korea-U.S. CFC and U.S. Forces Korea, said the CFC will remain in Seoul.
You can read much more at the link, but this is all coming down to who is going to have to commute. According to the article General Abrams is having to commute twice a week to Seoul from Camp Humphreys to execute his CFC duties. Additionally he says it is hard to find good staff officers to serve in CFC if they have to commute from Camp Humphreys where their families are.
Moving the CFC headquarters to Camp Humphreys means all the Koreans living in Seoul would be forced to commute down to Camp Humphreys. Additionally there is concern of having the CFC headquarters on a US military base after operational control of forces in Korea is supposed to be handed over to the ROK by 2022.