Tag: ROK military

Its official, UFG has been suspended:

South Korea and the United States have decided to suspend the Ulchi Freedom Guardian (UFG) exercise slated for August, Seoul’s defense ministry said Tuesday, amid dialogue efforts to denuclearize North Korea.

Shortly after his Singapore summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un last Tuesday, U.S. President Donald Trump unveiled his plan to stop “provocative, inappropriate and expensive” war games with the South, which Pyongyang has decried as an invasion rehearsal.

“Following close cooperation, South Korea and the U.S. decided to suspend all planning activities for the UFG, the defensive exercise slated for August,” the ministry said in a text message sent to reporters.  [Korea Times]

You can read more at the link, but remember these joint exercises like UFG can be turned right back on if the North Koreans shows signs of not negotiating in good faith.

This is one way for the ROK to conduct a military exercise that won’t get North Korea upset:

It looks like the UFG exercise this year will be very low key if the Kim regime continues to behave:

South Korea will conduct annual war games with the United States as planned but will avoid publicizing them to facilitate diplomatic efforts over the North’s nuclear weapons program, the defense ministry said Monday.

North Korea has sharply denounced joint military exercises, which it considers rehearsals for an invasion, ahead of an unprecedented summit planned between Kim Jong Un and President Donald Trump on June 12 in Singapore.

“We will be conducting the U.S.-[South Korean] joint military exercises normally in line with annual plans,” ministry spokesman Lee Jin-woo said during a press briefing. “But we’ll refrain from promoting the contents of the joint drills or opening them to the public as best we can.”

The comments came a day after North Korea criticized the South for planning to join upcoming international maritime drills in Hawaii known as Rim of the Pacific and a major joint exercise with the U.S. called Ulchi Freedom Guardian, which begins in August.  [Stars & Stripes]

Complaining about the RIMPAC exercise is pretty stupid considering it is held in Hawaii and involves many more countries than just the US and South Korea.

It will be interesting to see how reliable the drones will be in the mountains during the winter months if they do move forward with this plan:

The Defense Ministry says it plans to use drones to transport military supplies to mountainous areas.

A South Korean military official says starting this year, the military will begin testing drone transport of common military items like ammunition and first aid equipment.

Drones are far cheaper and can reach difficult or denied areas.

If the testing works out, all branches of the military would eventually adopt drone transport technology and the military would aim to commercialize it within five years.     [KBS World Radio]

So does this mean that the US Fires Brigade will no longer be needed?:

South Korea plans to set up a new guided missile unit that can take down North Korea‘s long-range artillery sites.

Local broadcaster KBS reported that the South Korean army will combine its first and third military headquarters to launch a new ground operation command in October.

Under the new command, an artillery force will be established and armed with tactical ground-to-ground guided missiles that are capable of striking large targets within a short period of time.

A single launch pad can fire four missiles in a matter of seconds, with the rockets capable of traveling more than 93 miles.

Equipped with a precision guidance function, the missiles are said to be ideal for targeting North Korea’s long-range artillery concentrated along the military demarcation line.

Experts say the artillery brigade will also be able to curb enemy threats at an early stage and thermobaric weapons attached onto the warheads could potentially incinerate everything inside a targeted mineshaft. [UPI]

You can read more at the link.

It is stressful enough that Korean men have to do mandatory military service, but now they may have to continue to have a travel ban in place just to appease small business owners that profit from the travel ban:

The South Korean military is reconsidering its initial plan to completely lift the travel ban for soldiers following opposition to the move from representatives from military-heavy regions.

According to the ministry, Vice Minister Suh Choo-suk held a meeting on Wednesday with the mayors or county governors from the inter-Korean border areas and agreed to come up with an “improvement scheme” regarding the plan to abolish the restriction on the areas soldiers can visit during their leave.

The ministry plans to announce a revised plan within the year, considering various factors, including military readiness, military personnel’s basic human rights and economic impacts on the border regions.

Last month, the military accepted a proposal from an internal reform committee to lift the restrictions to guarantee soldiers their human rights. However, the governments and small business owners in the border regions have protested the measure, saying it will negatively affect the regional economies.   [KBS Global]

Members of South Korea’s ninth rotational contingent of peacekeeping troops to South Sudan raise their fists in a show of solidarity at a send-off ceremony in Incheon, west of Seoul, on March 5, 2018. South Korea has been participating in the U.N. peacekeeping mission in South Sudan since March 2013, rotating their contingent every eight months, to help with the country’s reconstruction. (Yonhap)

We had an interesting post in the Open Thread about the mandatory service military obligation for dual US-ROK male citizens.  This posting from Ask A Korean highlights what the issue is about:

The unintended consequence of the 2010 law that, all of a sudden, it created a large number of Korean dual citizenship holders who did not even know that they were dual citizens. If you are a draft-eligible age, and you realized only recently that you were in fact a dual citizen, you cannot even renounce your Korean citizenship because of the 2005 law. The result:  we have a messed up situation in which diaspora Koreans, who may have never visited Korea and not speak a lick of Korean, may be draft eligible for Korean military. He can enter Korea freely, but may get stopped at the airport on his way out of Korea, like all other draft-eligible male Korean citizens.  [Ask A Korean]

Someone who is a dual citizen definitely faces the possibility of getting detained at the airport in South Korea because they have not done their mandatory military service.  I had to go deep into the ROK Drop archives to find this, but there have been examples of dual US-ROK citizens being detained at the airport in Korea despite being enlisted in the US military:

The Defense Ministry and the Military Manpower Administration may have to wait for years before they can get their hands on two Koreans who violated the military service law by enlisting in the U.S. Army.

The two Koreans aged 21 and 22 who have U.S. citizenship and residence respectively but retain their Korean nationality volunteered for the U.S. Army without performing their mandatory military service here, the MMA said Friday. Both were supposed to join the Korean armed forces in 2004 but both enlisted with U.S, forces instead. One instead went with them to Germany and both are now ironically with the U.S. Forces Korea as privates first class.  (…)

The first came to Korea on leave last June, and the travel ban stopped him from returning to his unit in Germany. He was indicted here the same month but the indictment was suspended because he serves in the U.S. military. He then transferred to the USFK. The MMA says it will make both of them serve in the Korean forces as well. Article 71 of the Military Service Law says those with dual nationality who violate the law must perform their military duties in Korea before they turn 35.

This dual citizenship issue should definitely be a concern for anyone with male children that may be considered dual citizens.  However, there is a way to renounce ROK citizenship at age 18 to ensure that the male child is not detained at the airport to do their mandatory military service in South Korea.  Here is the information posted on the US Embassy website for the Republic of Korea on this issue:

All malecitizens of the Republic of Korea (ROK), including dual nationals, have military service responsibilities in accordance with the Korean Constitution and the Military Service Law.

I think no matter what the evidence says this was something that was going to happen regardless because this is more about politics than fact finding:

South Korea’s defense minister offered an official apology Friday for the military’s brutal use of force against pro-democracy protesters in Gwangju in 1980.

“As the minister of national defense, I offer a sincere apology and (words of) comfort to Gwangju citizens that our military has left suffering in the process of the May 18 Democratization Movement 38 years ago,” Song Young-moo said in a statement.

It came two days after the ministry’s special fact-finding team announced the results of five months of investigation into suspicions about the military’s role in the suppression of those protesting against the junta of Chun Doo-hwan.

The civilian-government panel said the Army launched helicopter gunship attacks on citizens in the southwestern city, with fighter jets armed with bombs on standby as a backup. The findings were based on the review of documents and interviews on witnesses.  [Yonhap]

You can read more at the link, but I always recommend people read Linda Lewis’, Laying Claim to the Memory of May: A Look Back at the 1980 Kwangju Uprising for a good analysis of what happened back in 1980.

The Moon administration had previously said that they wanted to take over wartime operational control (OPCON) of military forces in the early 2020’s.  Now the defense minister is saying they want to speed up the change over:

Defense Minister Song Young-moo urged the military’s top brass on Tuesday to hasten preparations to take back Korea’s wartime operational control from the United States.

“The transfer is crucial to realize a reliable national defense suitable to Korea’s power and military capabilities,” Song said during a meeting at the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “and to defend the peace and stability of the Korean Peninsula.”

He also urged the military to create a combined defense system with the United States under Korean leadership. The meeting was attended by about 200 senior officers of the Ministry of National Defense, Joint Chiefs of Staff, Army, Navy and Air Force as well as key operational units of the military.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff said it has focused on preparing a command structure that will be used after the transfer and that it has worked to improve the military’s capabilities so it can lead combined operations with the United States, which is one of the agreed-upon prerequisites for the transfer, in addition to a stable environment and an ability by Korea to counter North Korean nuclear and missile threats. To verify that these prerequisites have been met, one preliminary evaluation and three assessments are required, but the Ministry of National Defense presented a plan last week to speed up the transfer by skipping the preliminary evaluation, which is scheduled for 2019, and beginning immediately with the first assessment that same year.

Reporting to Prime Minister Lee Nak-yon on Friday, the ministry said it will update its plan and discuss it with the United States at the Security Consultative Meeting in October.

Song’s request echoes the sentiment of President Moon Jae-in, who has pushed for an early transfer since taking office in May. In his summit in July with U.S. President Donald Trump, Moon made an agreement with Trump to continue working to “expeditiously enable the conditions-based transfer of wartime operational control.”  [Joong Ang Ilbo]

One of ROK President Moon’s top priorities after taking office was to push for the early transfer of OPCON to ROK forces.  The US government has pretty much told him that if he wants it he can have it, but the US side of the command will be downgraded to a three-star general.