QUANTICO, Virginia - The United States
military commander in South Korea is at odds with
top Korean defense officials on the critical issue
of transfer of forces to Korean command in wartime
and appears on his way to premature loss of his
post as a result.
General Burwell Baxter
("BB") Bell's upcoming transfer - and retirement -
in June reflects a paradox in US-Korean relations
over the past decade of left-of-center leadership
of the Korean government. It was South Korea that
initially demanded the authority over and all
troops in time of war while US officials wondered
how a South Korean general could take charge of a
panoply of highly complex systems, as well as air
and naval power, needed to wage a "second Korean
war".
As ideologically driven South Korean
governments pressed the
case, however, the Pentagon
shifted course under Donald Rumsfeld as defense
secretary, saying, in effect, "Let's do it by
2009". That response came as a shock to South
Korean generals and defense analysts, who said the
intricate transfer would not be technically
possible until 2012.
The US eventually
assented to the latter date, but now the incoming
South Korean government of president-elect Lee
Myung-bak wants to postpone the transfer of
command perhaps indefinitely while Bell, as
commander of US Forces Korea, remains committed to
carrying it out as planned.
At the heart
of the plan is the dismantlement of the Combined
Forces Command (CFC), an "integrated headquarters"
led by the US commander in Korea with the top
South Korean general in the role of deputy
commander. The CFC would cease to exist under the
plan for a South Korean general to assume overall
command in wartime.
Bell has been so
adamant about following through on the plan that
it upset South Korean generals who concluded they
could not get along. Bell, leaving after two years
in command in Korea, has seen his primary task as
carrying out a decision signed on by both
governments - one that the US had resisted, that
the outgoing government in Seoul sees as intrinsic
to sovereignty and that the incoming government
believes will compromise defenses against North
Korea.
Adding to the irony, US military
analysts appreciate the concerns of South Korean
defense officials while acknowledging that Bell
has been caught in a vice between conflicting
outlooks and policies in Washington and Seoul. "As
long as there's a North Korean threat, there
should be a CFC," said Bruce Bechtol, a former
intelligence officer with the Defense Intelligence
Agency who has served several tours in South Korea
and now is a professor at the Marine Corps
University at this historic base on the Potomac
River south of Washington. "They should not
dismantle CFC until there's no more North Korean
threat."
Bechtol, in his newly published,
Red Rogue: The Persistent Challenge of North
Korea, concludes the North Korean threat has
increased substantially with the production of new
and better artillery pieces within easy range of
the Seoul-Incheon megapolis, home of half of South
Korea's 48 million people, and of missiles capable
of wiping out bases and industrial centers
everywhere else.
Red Rogue suggests
the shift in South Korean outlook, quoting the
South Korean National Security Council as stating
boldly in April 2005, "We have terminated the
US-South Korea Combined Forces Command's efforts
to map out a plan, code named 5029, because the
plan could be a serious obstacle to exercising
Korea's sovereignty."
As the book notes,
however, "The decision-making process appears to
have been conducted entirely by the ROK [Republic
of Korea] National Security council - not the
Defense Ministry."
The election of Lee
Myung-bak has again given primacy to the Ministry
of National Defense, as opposed to the National
Security Council, and to conservative political
voices dedicated to the US-Korean alliance - and
to perpetuating the Combined Forces Command as
long as possible. As Bechtol put it, "A lot of the
base that got Lee elected think CFC is vital to
national security."
Lee is expected to
press for revision of the plan, meaning
postponement at least until 2020, when he sees
President George W Bush for their first summit
after South Korea's National Assembly elections in
April. Lee, who rode a conservative landslide over
his government-backed leftist opponent in
December's presidential election, believes
conservatives will gain a majority in April,
giving him a convincing mandate to carry out his
policies both at home and abroad, notably
vis-a-vis the US.
Pressure to strengthen
the US-Korean alliance - and to preserve the
Combined Forces Command - is intensifying with the
failure of North Korea to live up to terms of
agreements reached at the six-party talks last
year under which the North is to provide a
complete list of everything in its nuclear
inventory.
So far North Korea has shut
down its five-megawatt reactor at Yongbyon, where
technicians fabricated enough fissile material for
between six and 12 nuclear warheads with plutonium
at their core. The North, however, has resisted
demands to reveal details of efforts to develop
warheads with highly enriched uranium, the program
whose revelation in October 2002 triggered the
nuclear crisis that detonated the 1994 Geneva
agreement under which the North had shut down the
Yongbyon reactor in the first place.
US
negotiators are hoping North Korea will come
around to detailing its nuclear inventory when the
New York Philharmonic Orchestra performs in
Pyongyang on February 26, the day after Lee's
inauguration in Seoul.
US Secretary of
State Condoleezza is weighing the possibility of
flying to Pyongyang after attending Lee's
inauguration, joining William Perry, who served as
defense secretary when Bill Clinton was president
and wrote an elaborate review of US policy on
North Korea. Two former diplomats, Donald Gregg,
US ambassador to Korea under the first president
George Bush, and Evans Revere, former deputy chief
of mission of the US Embassy in Seoul, will also
go to Pyongyang in their roles as chairman and
president of the Korea Society in New York.
All these emissaries hope to sit down for
lengthy discussions with the North's chief nuclear
envoy, Kim Kye-gwan, emphasizing the need for
rapid action on living up to the six-party
agreements, but the North may prefer to see
whether Lee as president carries out what appear
to be a relatively hardline policy. The first test
will be whether Lee agrees to provide several
hundred thousand tons of food and fertilizer with
no questions asked, as Roh Moo-hyun, the outgoing
president, was accustomed to doing, or will follow
through on demands for "reciprocity", possibly in
the form of return of South Korean fishermen
kidnapped to the North.
The fear is, if
North Korea's leader Kim Jong-il fails to respond
positively, reconciliation could go into reverse,
another crisis, even war, could loom over the
Korean Peninsula, and US and South Korean
commanders would have to cooperate closely on
incredibly difficult issues of C4I, "command,
control, communications and intelligence".
"The infrastructure that the US brings to
the CFC is irreplaceable," said Bechtol. "It would
take at least eight or 10 years for them - the
South Koreans - to be able to do it."
South Korean troops, about 650,000 under
arms, facing off against 1.1 million North Koreans
might hold their own in a ground war. South Korea
is extraordinarily vulnerable, however, to updated
ballistic missiles that the North could shower on
the South in support of 100,000 fast-moving
special operations troops capable of inflicting
more than 200,000 casualties on Seoul on the first
day of attack.
"That's the threat the ROK
military is incapable of meeting," said Bechtol.
"You meet it with superior C4I systems and
airpower." As for "people who say the North
Koreans don't have the capability to attack," he
added, "They don't understand North Korea's
military."
Journalist Donald
Kirk has been covering Korea - and the
confrontation of forces in Northeast Asia - for
more than 30 years.
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