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Category: ROK Military

October 7, 2008

The Lewinsky Effect

NORTH KOREA SPY WON JEONG-HWA, who exchanged sexual favors for information from South Korean officers and who plotted to assasinate South Korean officials with poisoned needles, is awaiting sentencing.  The L.A. Times covers the story in considerable detail and publishes photographs of Won and her passport.  On a personal note, I realize that standards of beauty are subjective in any culture, but if there’s apparently not much to be said for Ms. Won’s personality, I remain unable to explain her...

Categories ROK Military/The Fifth Column
February 19, 2008

Honor, Delayed, Part 2

Kim Jong-Seon, who bitterly denounced Roh Moo Hyun’s appeasement-driven snubbing of memorial services for her husband and five other sailors killed in a 2002 naval battle with North Korean warships, has announced that she will return to South Korea. Now she has changed her mind, motivated by reports that president-elect Lee Myung-bak’s Transition Team and the Defense Ministry decided to upgrade the memorial service for the victims of the West Sea Battle to a state event. The ceremony has so...

Categories Appeasement/ROK Military
January 9, 2008

Honor, Delayed

President-Elect Lee Myung Bak will finally  honor six South Korean sailors killed in a North Korean attack on their patrol boat on  June 29, 2002.  The sailors’ surviving family members were embittered, believing that their government and outgoing  President Roh Moo Hyun had  snubbed  them to appease Kim Jong Il.  One young widow  even left South Korea for good: Kim Jong-seon, the widow of Petty Officer Han Sang-guk […]  turned her back on her homeland Sunday and boarded a flight...

Categories Appeasement/ROK Military
March 25, 2007

Anju Links for 3/25: N. Korea Threatens to Do Us a Favor, Money We Can’t Follow, the FTA Circus, and S. Korea’s Slavery-Loving Unions

*   No.Please.Stop.   North Korea is threatening to pull  out of the  dreadful (for us) February 13th Agreed Framework 2.0 over  the RSOI / Foal Eagle exercises. “This may entail such serious consequences as escalating the tension between the DPRK (North Korea) and the US and scuttling the six-party talks for the settlement of the nuclear issue on the Korean Peninsula, arranged with so much effort.”  [Channel News Asia] A KCNA statement wouldn’t be complete without a reference to...

Categories An Alliance?/Human Trafficking/ROK Military/U.S. & Korea/U.S. Military/UCMJ & SOFA
March 19, 2007

Chipyong-ni It Aint

[See also:   A very good,  thorough ROK Drop post, and a dissent from Andy Jackson.] Reporting from Kurdish Iraq, Michael Totten  says the  only booms are economic, and that the Kurds are leveraging peace and prosperity into de facto  independence.  It’s a long, interesting, occasionally fretful post, and well worth reading.  Along the way,  Totten  notes how Kurds view the South Koreans’ “sacrifice” for a democracy in Iraq: Iraqi Kurdistan is technically occupied by a foreign power, but this...

Categories An Alliance?/ROK Military/U.S. & Korea
February 27, 2007

Bomb Kills U.S. Soldier, S. Korean Soldier in Afghanistan

Still not  many confirmed details yet, but it was a suicide bomber at Bagram, and he was trying to get Dick Cheney: There were conflicting reports on the death toll. Provincial Gov. Abdul Jabar Taqwa said 20 people were killed, but NATO said initial reports indicated only three were killed, including a U.S. soldier, a South Korean coalition soldier and a U.S. government contractor whose nationality wasn’t immediately known. NATO said 27 people were also wounded…. Associated Press reporters at...

Categories ROK Military/Terrorism (NK)/U.S. Military
February 26, 2007

The Death of an Alliance, Part 65: Beyond Dependency, Toward Reunification

[Update:   In the course of a whiney tirade about how America “betrayed” South Korea, Kim Dae Joong also calls for a national conversation about South Korea becoming more self-sufficient in its own defense.  I’d suggest to Mr. Kim that it’s a wee bit early to declare South Korea fully abandoned by America while we still have 29,000 of our people there.  Kim also  admits that the (elected) South Korean government got the deal it wanted, and in light of...

Categories An Alliance?/Reconstruction/ROK Military/U.S. & Korea/U.S. Military
February 23, 2007

U.S., ROK Ministers Agree on OPCON Date

[Update:   But we’re demanding benchmarks!   Gates apparently  shares my fears and has demanded ROK assurances that the date won’t slide yet again.  He’s also demanding “tangible moves,” such as “establishing a military command that would take charge of troop control, and an earlier start to drawing up new military strategies once Combined Forces Command is dismantled.”  Those sure do  sound a lot like “benchmarks,” although that term was understandably avoided.   I think the value of a promise made...

Categories An Alliance?/ROK Military/U.S. & Korea/U.S. Military
January 12, 2007

Beyond Empty Threats

  Yes, Stealth fighters have some value in deterring a North Korean  first strike, if we think that’s a possibility, but I do not believe that any weapon in the U.S. military arsenal (with this possible exception) can deter or prevent a North Korean nuclear test.  The threat of a direct, large-scale  use of force by either the United States or North Korea against the other  is an empty threat.  The conventional Korean War has been a standoff since 1953. ...

Categories An Alliance?/NK Military/Resistance/ROK Military/U.S. Military
January 10, 2007

Be Sure the Survivors Stay Buried

The South  Korean government is going all out to find the remains of its  Korean War dead:  The Defense Ministry has set up a task force to retrieve and identify the remains of the dead from the 1950-53 Korean War, officials said Wednesday. The team of 85 is modeled after the U.S. Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command. Its mission is to excavate remains and identify them through DNA analysis, they said. Col. Park Sin-han, chief of the team, said they would...

Categories Abductions/Appeasement/Korean War/ROK Military
December 22, 2006

Roh Learns Bitter Lesson About the Futility of Appeasing Implacable Foes

… inside his own party. The president also laid into three aspiring candidates in next year’s presidential election, describing his appointment of the moderate Goh Kun as his first prime minister as “a failure. “I chose Goh in the hope that he would become a bridge bringing me closer to conservatives, but it alienated me and the government from them instead,” Roh said. His decision to appoint Uri Party hopefuls Kim Geun-tae and Chung Dong-young as health and unification ministers...

Categories An Alliance?/Korean Politics/ROK Military/U.S. Military
December 2, 2006

The Death of an Alliance, Part 61: S. Korea’s Withdrawal from Withdrawal

I agree with GI Korea on this: Iraq won’t even miss the Zaitun “division.”  Although numerically large, Korea’s contribution was militarily nil. The troops did not patrol, conduct raids, or guard anything except their own base, which sat in the most secure area of Kurdish Iraq. The deployment was a translucent veil for Korea’s ingratitude for the sacrifice of other nations, chiefly that of the United States, for its own survival. Locals joked that South Korea was a member of...

Categories An Alliance?/ROK Military/Terrorism/Iraq
October 23, 2006

So Much for a Nuclear-Free Korea

Update:   A well-informed reader says the Pentagon denies this story. This should get their attention in Beijing.  As ye sow: Seoul and Washington will add use of nuclear arms by U.S. forces in response to North Korean atomic weapons in a joint operation strategy codenamed OPLAN 5027, sources said Thursday. That would mean the return of U.S. tactical nuclear weapons to South Korea 15 years after they were pulled out in 1991. At the 28th Military Committee Meeting (MCM)...

Categories An Alliance?/ROK Military/U.S. & Korea/U.S. Military/WMD
September 22, 2006

The Death of an Alliance, Part 52: Thirty Days

The Air Force, via  USFK Deputy Commander Lt. Gen. Garry Trexler,  speaking at a public lecture, has given the South Korean Defense Ministry thirty days to find it some training range space, or see the air component relocated.  I’ll go that one further:  if the air cover leaves, the ground forces leave, too.  With the exception of small Special Forces and SEAL teams, the U.S. military fights combined arms warfare.  Take away the air cover and we go home.  I...

Categories An Alliance?/Korean Politics/ROK Military/U.S. & Korea/U.S. Military
September 21, 2006

The ‘C’ Word, Part 2: Yu Gi Joon Is a Vicarious Thug

[Update: Great minds think alike Oh, and did I forget to mention that Yu is spokesman for his party? Shoulda mentioned that.] I’ve previously stated — and will now restate — that it’s time for the United States government to condemn, in some appropriate but unambigous manner, any suggestion of a coup in South Korea. I yield to no one in my distaste for Roh Moo Hyun, who I believe will eventually share culpability for the needless deaths of many...

Categories Korean Law/Korean Politics/ROK Military/U.S. & Korea
September 18, 2006

Uri Goes Wobbly

… on troop control. Twenty members of the Uri Party issued a statement Monday calling for flexibility in the handover of wartime operational control of Korean troops to Seoul. “There has to be a structure allowing for flexibility in the timetable, with respect to South-North relations, the North Korean nuclear issue, and the state of affairs in Northeast Asia including security on the peninsula,” they said. It was the first time ruling party voices have publicly called for linking the...

Categories An Alliance?/Korean Politics/ROK Military/U.S. & Korea/U.S. Military