By Jung Sung-ki
Staff Reporter
The military will slow down its planned troop reductions over the next decade due to budget shortfalls and the lingering threat of the North Korean army, the Ministry of National Defense said Monday.
Additionally, the ministry unveiled plans to overhaul its Defense Reform 2020 plan initiated by the previous Roh Moo-hyun administration in 2005.
The liberal Roh government pushed ahead with the 15-year military modernization program aimed at building a ``self-reliant'' military less dependent on the U.S. Forces Korea (USFK).
The gist of the plan was to cut manpower by 180,000 to 500,000 by 2020 while acquiring high-tech weapons systems to back up the shortage and improving the welfare of soldiers.
``The final troop numbers by 2020 can be changed a little bit around the 500,000-level in a flexible manner, but it's difficult to anticipate the exact numbers now,'' Kim Gyeong-deok, chief of the ministry's defense reform bureau, said, briefing reporters on a draft revision of Defense Reform 2020.
The revised version calls for acquiring required weapons systems prior to troop cuts and streamlining of the military structure, Kim said. He was apparently referring to recent changes in planned major arms procurement programs, such as the K2 Black Panther tanks, in the wake of budgetary constraints brought on by the global financial crisis.
The military recently decided to downscale the budget for producing the indigenous main battle tanks. About 600 K2 tanks, built by Hyundai Rotem and the state-funded Agency for Defense Development, were to be manufactured between 2009 and 2017, but the military has decided to reduce this to 400.
``The target year of 2020 for the defense reform plan remains unchanged,'' Col. Shin Gyeong-cheol at Kim's bureau said.
He said the ministry will try to implement the troop cuts and use its defense budget as flexibly as possible to meet the target year, declining to specify budget projections in the future.
The South Korean military now maintains about 650,000 troops with some 40,000 having been slashed since 2005.
The budget scale for the defense reform has been questioned. The reform package was estimated to cost 621 trillion won based on the assumption that the country's gross domestic product (GDP) and government expenditure would grow in parallel at roughly 7.1 percent per year from 2006 to 2020.
In other words, the Roh government anticipated the defense budget would grow by 9.9 percent a year from 2006 through 2010, then about 8.8 percent per year from 2011 through 2015, and then on average 1 percent per year from 2016 through 2020.
But the estimate has been proven wrong. The GDP did not grow at the rates projected over the past two years, maintaining an average of 4 percent.
Some defense analysts say the planned 621 trillion won defense budget will be short by 110 trillion won as a result.
In August, Kim said the budget for next year was expected to grow at around 6.9 percent, down 3 percentage points from the original estimate.
Meanwhile, the draft reform plan includes measure to prepare the launch of South Korea's independent theater command by 2012 in line with Seoul's takeover of wartime operational control of its troops from the USFK.
It also calls for boosting defense capability against North Korea's nuclear threat. The roles of the Capital Defense Command in Seoul will be expanded to those of an Army Corps under the plan, ministry officials said.