Seems like that piece in the Washington Times concerning troop reduction in South Korea is getting a fair amount of attention. Read it if you like, but if you’ve been keeping up with news here, it’s nothing particularly shocking.
UPDATE: Of course, the BS surrounding this issue never stops. Yonhap quotes USFK Headquarters as saying that “there is no discussion of troop reduction in Korea,” and that “there are no plans to redeploy troops from Korea to Iraq.” Meanwhile, the Chosun Ilbo quotes a “high-level diplomatic source in Washington” as saying that USFK is in for reorganization, with some troops rotating between Korea and the US every six months.
3 Comments
The six month rotation plan isn’t new. I remember hearing
something about it in the last year or so.
The plan I heard was USFK would cut back on the number of
soldiers able to bring over family, and they would send
to Korea whole units rather than individuals and rotate
them every 6 months.
Some Korean civic groups favorable to USFK didn’t like the
idea, and I thought they brought up a good point.
They said families provide stability, and USFK needed more
families in country rather than less. They said it would
cut down some on the problems between the community and
US soldiers if the soldiers had their wives or husbands and
kids with them to help with support.
For myself, I wondered how a six month rotation system would
not lower military capability?
It would seem to me that just as a soldier was started to get
used to the terrain and other military factors of how to
defend South Korea as well as getting ready to work with the
Korean military to prepare for a joint defense, the unit
would rotate out????
But I’m not a military man and have never been, so maybe
I don’t understand the capabilities of the contemporary
military.
Six months rotations would have some benefits for military readiness. As the system is setup right now, the continual arrival and departure of personnel means a large portion of any military unit is new and inexperienced, plus it creates issues with teambuilding. A rotational unit would be comprised of soldiers, airmen, or marines who trained together before the rotation and would remain together for the six months they were in the country.
I am sure a permanent headquarters which controlled incoming units would remain in place which would handle coordination between ROK and US forces. The issue of familiarity with terrain could be somewhat alleviated through simulations using Korean terrain for command and control purposes, though that is not a replacement for time spent on the ground.
i love some one