The NYT looks at USFK’s transformation and changes in U.S. strategy to deal with a potential conflict with our friendly neighbors to the North:
American commanders are making significant changes in their plans in the event of a military conflict with North Korea, to rely in large measure on a new generation of sensors, smart bombs and high-speed transport ships to deter and, if necessary, counter that unpredictable dictatorship, the senior United States commander in South Korea says.
The shift in strategy is being undertaken even as the United States cuts the number of troops here by one-third and begins moving the remaining soldiers farther from the demilitarized zone, to improve their chances of surviving any North Korean offensive.
Read the rest on your own.
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The U.S. and Korea should develop Robot soldiers. I like to see the report of 100,000 NK soldiers killed by 2,000 Robots.
Talk about technological superiority.
On another thread, I responded to a comment about silencing the pro-collaborator hunters by saying that I don’t want them silenced, but I don’t hear a wide section of Korea fighting against that group.
One reason I have no hope for positive change in the US-SK relationship is the fact that those who see good value in the relationship are nowhere close to being as active short or long term as those against it.
And my point here is
usinkorea, earlier this year pro-American groups have had demonstrations downtown number into the tens of thousands. Does that not count for anything? How about the pro-US banners up around Yongsan?
A lot of the problem is that you don’t always read this stuff in the Korean or Western media, which likes to depict conflict.
The pro-US people vote. In the last election, 90%+ of the voters chose a candidate who said they felt the US presence was important and that the US-ROK relationship was important. Since then the winner has put his foot in his mouth, and people responded by putting his personal ratings in the crapper and they’re waiting for the next election, but the fact is that the pro-American masses came out in large numbers and voted accordingly.
I wrote up the pro-US rally, and it was good to see that the opposing forces to the trend in Korea could muster as large a crowd as the anti-US groups did in 2002 and early 2003. And I do recognize that most Koreans have more things to do than protests - for or against.
But, that is part of the problem, whether understandable or not.
And the trend is heading toward the anti-alliance side.
And from my experience, even in the pro-alliance keeping masses, they don’t really have significantly different opinions about most of the basic issues — like the SOFA, GI crimes, camp town culture, US economic pressure, environmental crimes, bully America, and so on. Where they differ is on what should be done about it and when.
And maybe that is part of the reason those who favor keeping the alliance, which is the majority opinion in Korean society, don’t get motivated enough to consistently counter the anti-US trend. I mean, would be hard for me to get the drive to counter the anti-US forces if I believed they were basically close to the truth when it comes to the evil, colonial SOFA agreement, and how the US military is destroying land with no concern for the health of the Korean environment, and thought GIs were killing Korean bar girls every year only to go unpunished.
And the media does help out, as you noted, by not giving much play to the pro-US Koreans. Especially the groups that are fairly active and as combative as the anti-US younger Korean civic groups — the Korean veterans. I don’t know how it plays to a Korean audience, because I can’t remember talking about it with my adult classes, but it seems to me the Korean media plays the veterans group as right wing wackos —- but the radical students and labor union groups ripping down fences in Pyongtaek come off as neutral or fighting the good fight though perhaps a little too enthusiastically. But, again, that is my impression of how it comes off as I try to imagine how it looks to Koreans. I’m not teaching in Korea anymore, so I can’t see what they think about it firsthand.
Lastly, I do expect to see the veterans groups and local business leaders to spearhead a counter-anti-US movement centered on the Pyongtaek protests in the near future —- if the government is near the point it will have to remove by force those Koreans who refuse to relocate off the land.
This will be too big an issue for these other groups, and the media, to wait out.
The media is going to have to take sides too. I looked for some Korean articles in the Korea Times Korean edition on the Pyongtaek riots in August, July, and May, but I didn’t find any. (I could have missed it because my Korean isn’t good), but I did find MBC video clips on it — rather short ones.
This is an issue where the Korean media usually loves to give much exposure to the opinion of the anti-US groups, but the media (at least before now) has avoided encouraging movements it really thought had a chance of pushing USFK out or causing an anti-Korean backlash in the US….
It will be interesting to see what message they put out and how strong with the Pyongtaek issue.
Because, I think it will be the kind of issue the anti-US civic groups won’t need the mainstream media to help with……
I think we are on the threshold of a key period that will shape the future of the US-SK relationship one way or the other….
I forgot, when is the next big election in the National Assembly?
Off-topic, but an interesting article from the subscription-only site East Asia Intel:
China and Russia have been emphatic in denying that their recent, first-ever joint military exercise was targeted at neighboring countries.
However defense officials in Tokyo and Seoul said one purpose of the massive war games was to prepare contingency responses to the eventual collapse of the North Korean regime.
China and Russia held their first joint military exercises, code-named Peace Mission 2005, from Aug. 18 to Aug. 25. The one-week maneuvers, which involved 10,000 troops from the two countries, started in Vladivostok in Russia’s Far East bordering North Korea’s northeast region, and later moved to China’s Shandong Peninsula, west of North Korea.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the joint exercise was not targeted at any third party, concerned the interests of any third country, or posed a threat to any country. He said the drills were meant to boost both countries’ capabilities in responding to possible threats to the region, including attempts by terrorists to acquire powerful weapons.
But military and defense officials in Japan and South Korea said the Russia-China games rehearsed the joint occupation of North Korea in case of political turmoil in the troubled communist country.
“The militaries of China and Russia intended to use their joint drills to examine their capabilities to occupy North Korea in case of its collapse ahead of joint forces between the United Sates and South Korea,” a Japanese Defense Agency official was quoted in the Nihon Keizai Shimbun daily.
Russia and China said the military drills were based on a scenario in which the two countries, acting under UN authority, aimed to stabilize a country plunged into violence by ethnic strife. This could refer to possible conflicts between North Korea and U.S.-backed South Korea.
“The scenario could be used in the event of sudden disappearance of Kim Jong-Il from the political leadership,” the Japanese defense official said.
Nam Joo-Hong, a strategy expert at Kyonggi University in Seoul, said the Russo-China war games were largely aimed at boosting their joint capabilities in responding to possible turmoil in North Korea and Taiwan.
The military drills were originally planned to take place in China’s western region to combat Islamic extremism and separatism in Central Asia, Nam and other analysts said. But later the venue was changed to China’s Shandong Peninsula across the Yellow Sea from North Korea and Russia’s Vladivostok, which borders North Korea.
“The two nations changed the sites for their military exercise to boost their joint efforts to counter the U.S.-led allies in East Asia,” said Kim Sung-Han, an analyst at the Institute of Foreign Affairs and National Security, a government think tank in Seoul.
According to other sources in Seoul, China’s People’s Liberation Army had moved more than 30,000 troops to border areas with North Korea last month in an apparent exercise to stem the inflow of North Korean refugee-seekers or to occupy the country in case of emergency.
U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld downplayed the war games as not threatening, but said Washington was monitoring the exercises.
Adm. Gary Roughead, commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, said the Navy was “very interested” in the military exercise, particularly in what systems the parties used and how they handled command-and-control issues.
The U.S. Pacific Command sent EP-3 surveillance aircraft and two Navy surveillance ships to waters near the exercises.
The question in my mind is this - would ROK counter-invade to fight off a combined Sino-Russian attempt to take over a North Korea in chaos? If the Chinese get involved, I can’t believe they will take on the attendant risks and costs without annexing North Korea to China.