By Jung Sung-ki
Here is some bad news for young men in Korea. The government is seriously thinking of reversing the mandatory conscription period back to 24 months amid fears over declining military manpower within the next decade.
A personnel shortage in the military will be evident in coming years due to the country’s declining birth rates and the planned troop reductions under the Defense Reform Plan (DRP) 2020.
Defense officials and experts say, in that context, readjusting the duration of the military service is inevitable for strengthening national defense. What will be required is the political will to bring about that change despite a public backlash.
Bruce Bennett, a senior defense analyst at the RAND Corporation, a renowned U.S. defense think tank, cited several reasons that the Korean conscription period should be put back on its original track. Bennett is known to have long researched the DRP 2020 and manpower structure in the Korean military.
“ROK birth rates have fallen seriously since the 1970s. As a result, while 400,000 or more young ROK men turned conscription age each year from 1977 to 2002, except for 1997 and 1998, by 2008 only 318,000 turned conscription age,” the researcher said in an e-mail interview.
“This reduction in the pool of young men has meant that the ROK military has been decreasing in size. More seriously, these reductions will continue in the future after a rebound around 2014,” he said.
In particular, the Korean Statistical Information System (KOSIS) says that 312,000 young men will turn conscription age in 2020, 223,000 in 2025, and 215,000 in 2030.
This age group reduction from 400,000 to 312,000 could gradually cut the size of the ROK military by 22 percent, affecting the number of available officers and noncommissioned officers (NCOs), as well as the number of conscripts, Bennett said.
By 2035, the fact is that the conscription age group will total less than 200,000, half the 1977 to 2002 levels.
“Because the ROK military is primarily made up of conscripts and almost all men are drafted, the reduction in these age groups means that the size of the ROK military will decline,” he said.
Former President Roh Moo-hyun initially reduced the Army conscription period from 26 to 24 months, and then set in motion another reduction to 18 months by 2014. It was also decided that the service periods for the Navy and Air Force would be shortened by six months to 20 and 21 months, respectively, on an incremental basis.
The rationale behind the policy, dubbed “Vision 2030, 2+5,” was that young people, in particular first-time job seekers, should enter the labor market two years earlier and the retirement age should be extended by five years.
The Roh government believed such a move would maximize the use of manpower as the population ages and the birthrates remain low. But the liberal administration overlooked or downplayed the seriousness of North Korean threats as well as potential budget shortfalls.
“Reducing the conscription period from 26 to 18 months could cut the number of the ROK conscripts by 31 percent, or the overall size of the ROK military by about 24 percent since it would not affect the number of officers or NCOs,” Bennett continued. “These reductions would be on top of the age group reductions. The total impact could be to reduce the size of the ROK military by 40 percent in 2020.”
Rep. Song Young-sun of the minor opposition Future Hope Alliance called a 24-month conscription program “scientific and reasonable.”
“What the military wants is not just a headcount, but rather more trained, professional troops,” said Song, a member of the National Assembly’s Defense Committee.
It takes at least nine months to train infantry troops, and about 11 to 17 months for artillery gunners, 15 to 21 months for mechanized troops, she said.
The military should maintain a 50 percent ratio of trained soldiers at all times, so that it can keep its combat capability at a proper level, said the lawmaker.
“With the current conscription periods of 18, 20 and 21 months, the military is not able to maintain trained soldiers,” she noted.
To fill the potential manpower gap, Bennett said, the military should push ahead with increasing its number of officers and NCOs to 40 percent under the DRP 2020.
He also said the transfer of conscripts to the National Police and other organizations should be terminated given that there is no longer a surplus of conscripts compared to during the 1990s and early-2000s.