Tag: ROK Navy

Just another sign of warming relations between South Korea and Japan:

A South Korean naval vessel took part in Japan’s international fleet review on Sunday for the first time in seven years amid escalating nuclear and missile threats from North Korea.

South Korea was one of 12 countries, including the United States, Canada and Australia, to take part in the review that took place in Sagami Bay off Kanagawa Prefecture, about 40 kilometers southeast of Tokyo.

Sailors aboard South Korea’s 10,000-ton logistics support ship Soyang saluted toward Japan’s helicopter carrier Izumo carrying Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, as sailors from other participating countries do while passing the carrier.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

It is good to see this trilateral cooperation restarting again after it was stopped when former President Moon Jae-in was elected:

 South Korea, the United States and Japan will kick off a combined ballistic missile defense exercise in waters off Hawaii this week, informed sources said Sunday, amid their stepped-up security coordination against North Korea’s evolving military threats.

The biennial Pacific Dragon exercise is scheduled to take place from Monday through Aug. 14, according to them. In addition to the three countries, Australia and Canada will join the exercise in this year’s edition. 

Featuring the mobilization of eight warships and two aircraft, the exercise is aimed at enhancing cooperation among the participating countries in detecting, tracking and reporting ballistic missile targets. 

The exercise has been arranged as the defense chiefs of South Korea, the U.S. and Japan agreed to reinforce their security coordination during their trilateral gathering on the margins of the annual Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore on June 11.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

It looks like the ROK military has another high profile sexual harassment case:

An allegation was raised against a Navy field officer who asked a female soldier, “Are you out of your mind?” and tried to silence her when she tried to report sexual harassment. The Ministry of National Defense launched an investigation following the belated allegation. The victim, who was sent to another workplace shortly after her report, later suffered secondary victimization from other senior officers and eventually chose to leave the Navy.

According to the Kyunghyang Shinmun coverage on January 27, A, a female soldier of a lower Navy unit was sexually harassed by Sergeant B, her supervisor, several times from July 2017 to January 2018. Sergeant B rolled up his short pants and showed his underwear to A in the office where the two were alone. When A spent the night off base, B even told her to report where, with whom, and how she spent the night. A argued that B also instigated bullying within the unit and tormented her in addition to the sexual harassment.

In March 2018, A sought the counsel of the chief master sergeant on this issue, but had to suffer disadvantages. The officers in charge of the unit transferred A from her previous workplace, the executive office, to a small lounge next to a food waste collection area. The lounge was not equipped with any office equipment, such as a telephone and a printer, and it had no heating or air conditioning. Meanwhile, her assailant B continued to work in his office, subject to no personnel measures.

On May 8 that same year, A made an official report and asked Lieutenant Colonel C (battalion commander) who was the commanding officer of the unit at the time, to report her case to the upper unit and punish Sergeant B. 

Kyunghyang Shinmun

You can read the rest at the link, but the battalion commander proceeded to try and prevent the victim from reporting. Ultimately she was able to report and her harasser was removed from the military. However, now the battalion commander and the operations officer are being investigated for trying to prevent her reporting.

It will be interesting to see if this frigate ends up doing the same maritime DMZ duty as its predecessor:

 South Korea on Tuesday held a ceremony launching a new frigate named after a warship torpedoed by North Korea in 2010, the Navy and state arms procurement agency said.

The ceremony for the 2,800-ton frigate, Cheonan, took place at the shipyard of Hyundai Heavy Industries Co. in Ulsan, some 410 kilometers southeast of Seoul, as the Navy still has potent memories of the North’s deadly attack.

The 1,200-ton corvette Cheonan sank near the Northern Limit Line, a de facto western inter-Korean sea border, in March 2010, after a North Korean midget submarine fired a torpedo at it, killing 46 sailors.

The unveiling of the Cheonan carried a symbolic meaning for the survivors of the attack and bereaved families who have wished to see the new warship named after the ill-fated corvette and commissioned to fulfill its unfinished mission of safeguarding the maritime border.

Yonhap

However the prior Captain of the Cheonan did not attend the ceremony for this reason:

Striking a sour note, Choi Won-il, the captain of the corvette at the time of the sinking, said he would not attend the event in protest over the state-run communications standards panel’s recent decision not to take issue with social media video clips raising conspiracy theories behind the cause of the sinking.

Choi does have a point because the Moon administration has been busy throwing conservative journalists in jail for so called “fake news”, but will not take action against fake news in regards to the sinking of the Cheonan. This is likely because they don’t want to upset the Kim regime which is behind a lot of the misinformation put out about the sinking of the Cheonan.

You can read more at the link.

The Korea Herald has a good in-depth look at what happened with the ROK Navy ship that had most of its crew become infected with the coronavirus:

A seaman first exhibited cold-like symptoms on July 2, a day after the destroyer had made a four-day supply stop at a port. But he was treated with cold medicine and not tested for COVID-19, even though many others began to show similar symptoms. The medical staff had allegedly overlooked COVID-19 symptoms.

What made the outbreak more lethal was the wrong COVID-19 self-test kits Cheonghae packed upon leaving Korea. The unit left with antibody test kits, which take much longer time to detect infection than antigen test kits. It was just plain mistake, the Navy admitted.

“It was days later when we brought in local medical specialists to administer the industry-standard PCR tests,” one Cheonghae officer said, adding his unit began to enforce strict quarantine procedures after the test, which found the first six COVID-19 patients.

That was the first case of infection, which Cheonghae confirmed on July 15, and three days later, the military flew aircraft to airlift the entire crew back home. Many service members who had tested negative for COVID-19 using self-test kits were believed to have been infected.

“We just dropped the ball there,” a military official said.

Korea Herald

You can read more at the link, but there is a clearly a cover up going on within the ship because they are trying to blame contaminated food for infecting the ship. Passing of the coronavirus from surface contact or eating food has been found to be highly unlikely. The vast majority of people are infected by airborne contact with the virus. The crew is claiming they were not in contact with anyone during their 4-day port call in Oman which appears to be unlikely.

“It’s highly unlikely that it came from food. I suspect there may have been people-to-people contact, though the seamen deny there was,” he said, adding the crew should be honest with whom they had come into contact.

From a strategic perspective it really makes no sense for the ROK to participate in a naval exercise in the Black Sea:

The United States fully respects South Korea’s decision to skip a multinational naval exercise, a Pentagon spokesman said Tuesday, also adding Seoul’s decision does not affect the South Korea-U.S. alliance in any way.

“It’s a sovereign decision by a nation state. And they’re certainly entitled to make that decision and to speak to that decision and we absolutely respect it,” the spokesman, John Kirby, said in a press briefing.

South Korea earlier said it had been invited to take part in the U.S.-led exercise, Sea Breeze 21, in the Black Sea that involves some 5,000 troops from 32 countries, including NATO members, but that it has decided not to take part.

The multinational exercise got under way this week and is scheduled to end July 10.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link, but South Korea will be participating in the Talisman Sabre multinational exercise with Australia which makes more sense for them strategically to participate in.

It looks like South Korea is still working out the kinks with their new type 214 submarine:

A defective inverter module was found to have been the cause of an error message that led to a new 214-class submarine having to be towed in the East Sea earlier this month, Navy officials said Sunday.

The Navy decided to inspect all 214-class submarines to ensure that no such problems would happen again, after finding that a defect was reported in the same part of another submarine of the same type two years ago too, officials said.

The latest incident happened on Jan. 23 when the submarine was in waters off the southeastern port city of Pohang. An error message popped up in the vessel’s propulsion system, and officials decided to get the sub towed by a civilian vessel.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.