No delay in transfer of wartime control

By Kang Seung-woo

South Korea’s Defense Ministry reaffirmed Monday that wartime operation control (OPCON) will be transferred as scheduled from Washington to Seoul in December 2015, despite growing calls for a delay.

South Korea and the United States agreed in February 2007 that the transition would be carried out on April 17, 2012, but former President Lee Myung-bak and his U.S. counterpart Barack Obama postponed it in June 2010 until the end of 2015, after a North Korean submarine sank the South Korean frigate Cheonan in March 2010.

“Preparations for the OPCON transition are on-track as previously agreed,” Minister of National Defense Kim Kwan-jin said in a plenary session of the National Assembly’s Defense Committee.

“Before the transition, South Korea and the United States will evaluate the readiness on three occasions, so we will be able to review the calls for a delay.”

As North Korea has ratcheted up tensions on the Korean Peninsula recently, there have been rising voices for the South to renegotiate and delay the transition, including from retired generals.

Former U.S. Forces Korea (USFK) Commander Burwell Bell, who had said “the sooner, the better” in reference to the transition, sparked debate when he changed his stance last week.

The retired general, who headed the U.S. troops when the transfer agreement was signed, told the Voice of America Saturday that talks over the transition should be “permanently” postponed citing the North’s nuclear armament.

The minister said Bell’s remarks are based on personal opinion, although he took them into consideration.

MND spokesman Kim Min-seok also said what the former USFK chief said was his personal opinion, not U.S. government policy, and the OPCON transfer is based on a government-to-government agreement encompassing political and diplomatic issues.

“Leaders of South Korea and the United States reached an agreement for the OPCON transfer based on the bilateral alliance and trust,” Kim said in a briefing.

“As the two sides had agreed over nuclear umbrella and deterrence strategies, we will continue to cooperate to deal with North Korea's nuclear threat under the agreement.”

Korea handed over both wartime and peacetime operational control of its armed forces to the United States in July 1950, a month after the North started the three-year-long Korean War. Seoul regained peacetime operational control of its forces toward the end of 1994.