South Korea, US to draft plan for future alliance command

The South Korean and U.S. militaries will soon formalize a plan to create a new combined command, which will become effective when Seoul regains its wartime operational control (OPCON) of the country's troops, the Ministry of National Defense said Thursday.

The allies plan to approve the scheme in their annual Military Committee Meeting (MCM) and Security Consultative Meeting (SCM) later this month, it told lawmakers.

The MCM is an annual session involving the chairmen of the allies' joint chiefs of staff (JCS). This year's meeting will be held in Seoul on Oct. 27, a day before the ministerial SCM.

"(The two sides) will authorize the creation of the future command of combined forces during the MCM and the SCM," the ministry said in a report for a regular parliamentary audit of its affairs.

The allies will then draw up a specific scheme to establish a system to have a South Korean commander and a U.S. deputy commander, it added.

The current Combined Forces Command (CFC), formed in 1978 as the headquarters of joint military operations, is led by a four-star U.S. commander. A four-star South Korean general serves as deputy commander.

The left-leaning Moon Jae-in administration, which took office in May, has pushed for an early OPCON transfer. The U.S. is reportedly supportive of the initiative, although South Korea needs to meet some preconditions, including the strengthening of its own defense capabilities.

In a related program, the ministry said it will speed up the ongoing establishment of the "three-axis" defense platform against North Korea's nuclear arsenal and other weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) -- the Kill Chain pre-emptive strike system, the Korean Air and Missile Defense (KAMD), and the Korea Massive Punishment and Retaliation (KMPR) scheme.

The ministry is pushing for a new director general-level post specializing in handling the North Korea issue, such as the assessment of its WMD program, policy measures and inter-Korean military talks.

It will consider expanding the JCS' WMD response center to an organization, tentatively named Strategic Command, in connection with the OPCON transition plan.

South Korea handed over its OPCON to the U.S.-led U.N. forces during the 1950-53 Korean War.

South Korea was supposed to regain its wartime OPCON at the end of 2015. But the transfer was postponed indefinitely as the allies agreed to seek a "conditions-based" shift, instead of setting a deadline, amid growing North Korean military threats. (Yonhap)