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The government asked the United States at a Security Policy Initiative meeting in September to start negotiating a handover of wartime operational control of the military. In an address on Armed Forces Day on Oct. 1, President Roh Moo-hyun said by exercising command in case of a war on the peninsula, ¡°our military will be reborn as a sovereign and independent armed force."
Operational control of Korea¡¯s forces rests with the Korean Joint Chiefs of Staff in peacetime and with the U.S. Forces Korea in wartime. The big decisions -- whether to defend Seoul to the death, whether to advance across the armistice line -- are made through consultation between the supreme commanders, the presidents of South Korea and the U.S. The USFK commander then issues operational orders to carry out these missions. Decisions on composition of troops and duties of personnel also belong to command, which is above control and lies with the supreme command.
Thus to declare the handover of such limited operational control as synonymous with ¡°becoming an independent armed force¡± betrays an insufficient understanding of the concept, or the presence of ulterior motives. NATO too confers operational control to the NATO commander, a U.S. general. But NATO countries like Britain, Germany and Italy have never called for the retrieval of their military sovereignty.
There are two ways of retrieving operational control. Military experts think that if the Korean forces take over operational control from the U.S., the USFK will be slashed drastically, and we cannot expect any great increase in their number in wartime. Or else the present setup would transformed into a parallel arrangement, whereby Korea controls its armed forces and the U.S. its own -- the end of combined forces. Either case would mean a decisive change in the USFK, the pillar of our national security.
Taking back operational command may sound splendid, but the price we would pay is a fatal security risk. If the defense reform budget of W289 trillion (US$289 billion), is premised on the retrieval of operational control, the country will shoulder far greater costs than it needs, to pay for the phrase "independent armed force." If not, we have to be prepared for huge additional costs for the sake of retrieving operational control. Does the government feel that our national security and public finances are capacious enough to permit us to get drunk on a phrase?
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