KoreaToday S. Korea should be more self-reliant for command change in 2015
By Jung Sung-ki
Staff reporter
The Republic of Korea armed forces have gained a three-and-a-half year breathing space to prepare for taking over wartime operational control (OPCON) from the U.S. military, as the leaders of South Korea and the United States agreed Saturday to delay the planned transfer to December 2015.
The agreement comes as the ROK and U.S. militaries have come to share the view that Korea will not be fully prepared for the OPCON transfer in April 2012, due largely to the lack of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities against North Korean forces practicing conventional and asymmetrical warfare.
Following the deal, South Korea must do more than has it done for the past three years after the original 2007 agreement was made. However, without an increase in defense expenditures, Seoul's efforts to build a "self-reliant" military will likely come to a standstill, a U.S. defense expert says.
"Because the ROK military budget is so low, investments in military equipment have been limited, forcing the military to leave some gaps in its defenses," Bruce Bennett, a senior defense analyst at the RAND Corporation, a private U.S. defense think tank, told The Korea Times.
"It just has not had the resources to cover every threat that North Korea can pose," Bennett said, calling the sinking of a South Korean warship in March in the West Sea a "wake-up call" that the Seoul government was not providing enough defense funding.
"But many of the gaps are more serious in a peacetime situation because they allow North Korea to carry out successful provocations, like the sinking of the Cheonan," said the expert on Korean affairs.
In wartime, the United States would bring more of its military power to bear and thereby reduce some but not all of the gaps in the ROK military, he said, but in peacetime, the U.S. presence in Korea is very limited, and ROK forces need to be more self-reliant, he advised.
He continued, "So the question is: Will the ROK government decide to increase its military self-reliance, and thereby strengthen its abilities to both counter provocation and win if a major war occurs? Note that strong ROK capabilities in these areas will also tend to deter North Korean attacks: North Korea is unlikely to pursue provocations where it anticipates being soundly defeated."
Deputy Defense Minister for Policy Jang Kwang-il was wary of any controversy over Seoul's financial burden following the delay of OPCON transition.
"The agreement (between Presidents Lee Myung-bak and Barack Obama) doesn't demand any financial burden on South Korea," Jang told reporters.
Seoul's defense budget has failed to meet its yearly targets for the Defense Reform 2020 initiative.
When the defense reform plan was originally formulated in 2005, the budget for 2010 was projected to be about 33 trillion won ($28 billion). But reductions from the planned budgets leave 2010 instead at only about 29.6 trillion, a substantial difference.
Bennett said these reductions have caused a number of South Korean acquisition programs to be postponed.
"I am told the 2010 reduction, in particular, was so serious that it caused a military wage freeze in 2010," he said.
For the 15 year period from 2006 to 2020, the original Defense Reform 2020 plan had a 621 trillion won budget ― for all costs, including equipment, personnel, and operations and maintenance ― with 75 trillion won included to acquire advanced weapons to offset the manpower reductions by 2020 cause by ROK demographics.
By the 2009 review of DRP 2020, the Ministry of National Defense's aggregate 15-year budget had fallen to 599 trillion won, said Bennett.
Based upon the low budget increase in 2010, and before adjustments for the Cheonan incident, the 15-year total would be more like 540 trillion won, an 80 trillion won shortfall from the original plan, he noted.
That shortfall would affect equipment acquisition and also efforts to make the ROK military more professional something that is needed to properly use modern, sophisticated equipment, he added.
"From a U.S. perspective, transferring OPCON to the ROK encourages greater ROK military self-reliance while demonstrating U.S. confidence in ROK capabilities," Bennett said.
"Many in the ROK audience have argued that OPCON transfer should be postponed because the ROK is not yet ready," he said. "The United States wants to see a sincere ROK effort to increase its military capabilities."
ROK-U.S. Marine efforts
Bennett analyzed the ulterior motives behind the sinking of the Cheonan frigate.
He said the sinking reflected the regime's concern about internal instability. Above all, North Korean leader Kim Jong-il wanted to divert the attention of the North Korean elite to a focus on external enemies and thereby support the succession of Kim Jong-un, his youngest son.
"I believe that the ROK-U.S. should respond to the Cheonan sinking and also deter North Korean escalation of its provocations by following the advice of the ancient Chinese philosopher Sun Tzu: 'Thus, what is of supreme importance in war is to attack the enemy's strategy.'"
He elaborated that the traditional ROK-U.S. responses through sanctions or other actions have caused little pain directly to Kim Jong-il, because they give him what he wants and do not hurt him much.
Besides enhancing defenses against possible North Korean provocations, Bennett suggested, South Korea prepare for a North Korean collapse.
For example, a collapse will lead to little food being available for most of the North Korean population, and the roads across the Demilitarized Zone are inadequate to carry all of the food aid that would be needed in such a condition.
So in addition, "President Lee should task the ROK and U.S. Marines to prepare to deliver food and other humanitarian aid along the coasts of North Korea," he said.
"ROK and U.S. Marines should exercise for the delivery of humanitarian aid along the ROK east and west coast, film these exercises, and broadcast/send pictures and films into North Korea as part of the media campaign the ROK will do," the expert said.
The objective is to show the North Korean people and even the military elite that the ROK and U.S. are not their enemies, and instead are preparing to help them if their government fails, he said.
To make the ROK-U.S. Marine efforts work, he added, President Lee should ask the U.S. government to base several thousand U.S. Marines at Pohang with the ROK 1st Marine Division.
The U.S. and ROK Marines work very well together, and should have a permanent U.S. deployment in Korea to provide enough capability for prompt delivery of humanitarian aid to the North after a collapse, the scholar argued.
"By making such a move, the U.S. government would also demonstrate increased support for the ROK, reducing the concerns of conservatives that the U.S. was moving to abandon the ROK," he said. "All of these measures directly attack Kim Jong-il's diversionary strategy, by showing the North Korean people that the ROK and the U.S. are interested in their welfare and are not their enemies.''