By Jung Sung-ki
The government plans to put a halt to a reduction of the Army’s mandatory military service period to 18 months and instead keep it at 21 months, the defense minister said Monday.
The previous Roh Moo-hyun government reduced the Army conscription period from 26 to 24 months and then set in motion another reduction to 18 months by 2014.
The service periods for the Navy and Air Force were also to have been shortened by six months to 20 and 21 months, respectively, on an incremental basis.
The liberal administration believed such a move would maximize the use of manpower as the country’s population ages and birthrates remain low. But critics have argued that this overlooked the seriousness of North Korean threats as well as a potential manpower shortage in the military amid budgetary shortfalls.
Defense Minister Kim Tae-young revealed the plan in a policy coordination meeting with ruling Grand National Party lawmakers belonging to the National Assembly Defense Committee.
“It’s realistically difficult to increase the service period to 24 months,” Kim said. “So we’re positively considering putting a halt to the reduction at 21 months.”
Under the plan, the Army’s conscription period will remain at 21 months, while the service periods for the Navy and Air Force are to be 23 and 24 months, respectively.
Experts say a personnel shortage in the Korean military will be evident in the coming years due to the country’s declining birthrate and the planned troop reductions under the defense reform package.
Bruce Bennett, a senior analyst at the RAND Corporation, a private U.S. defense think tank, said,
“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.”
He said Korea’s birthrates have fallen seriously since the 1970s, and as a result, only 318,000 young Korean men turned conscription age in 2008.
“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.
Statistics Korea 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.
By 2035, the conscription age group will total less than 200,000, half the 1977 to 2002 levels.