The Marmot’s Hole

This government-military mess is getting worse and worse. I’ve been meaning to post on it since last week, but Defense Minister Cho Young-kil’s statement before a National Assembly plenary session Saturday definitely deserve comment. From the Joongang Ilbo:

At a National Defense Committee hearing on Saturday Korea’s defense minister, Cho Young-gil, has told the National Assembly that the Korean Navy purposely omitted in its reports on a recent incident in the Yellow Sea that the North Korean Navy had responded to radio calls from the South. A North Korean vessel sailed across the sea boundary on July 14; a Seoul ship fired warning shots during the incursion.

It was unclear just why the defense minister was making public a part of the investigation into the incident that had not been made public earlier. The naval commander, Vice Admiral Kim Seong-man, told investigators earlier that he had not forwarded information on the radio contact to his superiors because he feared that he would not be allowed to fire warning shots to drive the vessel away. He also reportedly told investigators that he also believed the North could use the incident for political purposes.

Apparently in a bid to mend the widening rift between the military and the country’s political leadership, the Blue House issued relatively light reprimands despite the admiral’s decision to withhold the information. Earlier, after military complaints that they were being made a scapegoat in the incident, a lawmaker of the governing Uri Party suggested that the military leadership was mostly beholden to past military governments for their current leadership jobs. The defense minister’s comments threw fuel on that fire.

Cho’s suggestion that the omission of information was intentional, rather than simply the result of carelessness, conflicted with the announced results of a Defense Ministry investigation into the matter:

This is a story that completely contradicts the official announcement made on Friday by the government joint investigation team that said, “The navy strategic commander considered the North Korean transmission as an attempt to deceive, and did not report it to the Joint Chiefs of Staffs (JCS).”

Let me start off by saying that if certain military officers were playing vigilante, they need to be punished severely. Warnings just won’t do. In a democracy, one would hope the military is accountable to elected officials. Regardless of either how admirable the military’s intentions or how incompetent the commander-in-chief may be, for the military to lie to the president is a severe — and dangerous — breach of discipline that cannot be permitted, and certain newspapers — including, ahem, ones with big buildings near the Central Government Complex — have been doing a real disservice to their readers by defending guys who might be pushing rather close to mutiny.

Having said that, there is another problem here that won’t go away by sacking a couple of officers. This mess has revealed an uncomfortable amount of mistrust between the government and the military, and blame goes both ways. Chatting with one blogger, it was pointed out to me that it might be reasonable for leaders who have had rather unfortunate experiences with the military to shoulder a fair amount of distrust of military men. Fair enough. But at the same time, civilian governments have a responsibility to back up their fighting men if they send them into potential combat situations. In 2002, the ROK 2nd Fleet — the very same fleet at the heart of this controversy — lost six of its men when one of its patrol boats was bushwhacked by North Korean warships — one of which was the ship that crossed over the NLL this time around. The Kim Dae-jung administration, however, gave the Navy the screws — it moved quickly to cover up the incident that has now passed into common recollection as an “accident,” and not only did DJ fail to show up at the fallen sailors’ funeral, his government didn’t even bother to contact the families of the bereaved either. Even in this latest incident, given that the Navy apparently handled itself properly, why would it feel the need to lie to the higher-ups? Perhaps telling is that the government has yet to say a thing about the fact that the North Koreans not only violated the NLL, prompting the South Korean Navy to fire warning shots, but also used communication channels to lie about it. At this point, one wonders why the government even sends the 2nd Fleet out in the first place if it’s not prepared to back them up when the North Korean Navy picks fights with them.