The Marmot’s Hole

By ANDY JACKSON
Marmot??s Hole Guest Blogger

First there’s the continuing Sino-Russian exercises going on just across the West Sea,

Now the Norks are miffed that the US and ROK are conducting their annual command exercise, Ulchi Focus Lens:

“We’re deeply concerned about the real U.S. intentions. It talks about peaceful coexistence at the six-way conference. But it engages in a massive war game in the backyard of its dialogue partner,” the spokesman was quoted as saying.

“We suspect that the United States is attempting to force its demands on us by carrying out a large-scale war game in the South just a week before the resumption of the six-way talks,” he said, warning about its serious fallout for the upcoming talks.

Of course the exercise would not being taking place just before the resumption of talks if the Norks had signed zee papers during the last session.

In any case, as this report at at GlobalSecurity.org states, Ulchi Focus Lens is primarily a command post exercise with the fighting limited to computer simulations. It is basically a big computer game.

In case you were wondering, yes the “Ulchi” in Ulchi Focus Lens is Ulchi Mundeok, who famously pounded a large invading Chinese army out of existance in 612. Considering the Sino-Russian exercises going on at the same time, Ulchi was a prescient name choice.