There is no doubt that Pyongyang would like to see a reduction or wholesale departure of the 28,500 U. S. troops deployed on the peninsula.
This story is being published by POLITICO as part of a content partnership with the South China Morning Post. It originally appeared on scmp.com on Aug. 23,2018.
August is usually a busy time of year on South Korean military bases. As commercial and military planes arrive throughout the South carrying United States military personnel by the thousands, barracks fill to the brim and troops spill into nearby hotels.
For two weeks, from sunrise to sundown and through the wee hours of the night, the bases typically buzz with the comings and goings of soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines all there for the same reason: to practice for the possibility of war with North Korea.
This year, however, the barracks will be empty, and business on bases will continue as usual, after the suspension of the Ulchi Freedom Guardian (UFG) exercise, which traditionally brings together some 70,000 U. S. and South Korean troops each autumn.
For decades, military commanders and diplomats have touted grand-scale exercises like UFG as pillars of the U. S.-South Korean alliance, citing military training and readiness as primary tools of deterrence against the North Korean regime.
It’s a message Pyongyang has received loud and clear, historically responding with streams of colorful invective: “The work of crazy war maniacs,” North Korean state media said last year.
The extent to which North Korea views the exercises as threatening is up for debate, but there is no doubt that Pyongyang — along with Beijing, its primary backer — would like to see a reduction or wholesale departure of the 28,500 U. S. troops deployed on the peninsula.
Experts say that China and especially North Korea likely regard the cessation of military exercises as a move in this direction. That’s why North Korean leader Kim Jong-un came to his meeting with U. S. President Donald Trump in Singapore in June with the joint exercises on his agenda.
When Trump, following that meeting, announced the indefinite suspension of major exercises — calling them “provocative” and suggesting that they were an obstacle to denuclearization — his words seemed to take South Korea and his own defense department by surprise.
But officials in Seoul and Washington quickly aligned with him, leading to this coming autumn as the first without a major bilateral exercise in more than four decades.
Government statements in both the U. S. and South Korea have played down the suspension’s potential impact on military readiness and effectiveness.
Defense experts, however, warn that the move could lead to the deterioration of crucial relationships and expertise. Further, with the present thaw in tensions still fresh — and at a time when denuclearization in the North is far from assured — they warn that the UFG cancellation might play too much into Kim’s hands.
“I continue to believe suspending the exercises was a mistake,” said James Stavridis, a retired U. S. Navy admiral who served as Nato’s supreme allied commander from 2009 to 2013. “North Korea benefits greatly from doing so because of a significant degradation in U. S. and [South Korean] war-fighting readiness.”
Stavridis, who now leads the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University in Boston, Massachusetts, has been an outspoken critic of the Trump administration’s decision, describing the suspension of military exercises as potentially negligent — and something that could lead to an otherwise preventable loss of life in the event of conflict.
Ulchi Freedom Guardian — named for a seventh century Korean general who defended the peninsula against invasion from the north — was first convened, under a different name, in 1976.
While day-to-day military operations are largely characterized by meetings, paperwork and logistical concerns, U. S. and South Korean military leaders say that, over the decades, exercises like UFG have provided commanders and their staff members with dedicated time to study and execute intricate war plans in a simulated environment.
Together with its partner exercise in the spring, Key Resolve, officials have long positioned UFG as a staple of the US-South Korea mutual defense treaty. As the U. S. defense department put it last August, the exercises “help to ensure peace and security on the peninsula, and reaffirm U. S. commitment to the alliance.”
The computer-driven exercises, coupled with troop movements in the field, test everything from basic knowledge of North Korean tactics to the integration of U. S. and South Korean computer networks, intelligence collection and exchange as well as a wide variety of combined military maneuvers.
