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U.S. Army Secretary Pete Geren, inspecting the status of the U.S. Forces Korea recently, told the Armed Forces Network there is "currently" no plan to withdraw any unit of the USFK for good. The remarks evidently stress the will of the U.S. to defend the Korean Peninsula.
But we need to look closely at these remarks at a time when the U.S. administration is in transition to Barack Obama. When the stress is placed on the word "currently," we must prepare for a possible new policy when the new U.S. administration is launched next year.
The U.S. Defense Department maintains 28,500 troops in Korea under an accord reached at a summit in April. The problem is that the validity of the agreement expires on Jan. 19, 2009, the eve of President Obama's inauguration. The USFK announced last month that a battalion of Apache helicopters will be completely withdrawn and temporarily replaced with A-10 aircraft.
Chances are the budget adjustment by the incoming Obama administration, necessitated by the economic crisis in addition to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, will affect the scale of the USFK. Obama said, "We are going to go through our federal budget, as I promised during the campaign, page by page, line by line, eliminating those programs we don't need and insisting those that we do operate in a sensible, cost-effective way." Predictions are that the Pentagon's "dinosaur budget" of approximately US$700 billion a year will be the first target. And it will not be military bases on the U.S. mainland linked to electoral district interests of senators and representatives, but American forces stationed abroad that take the hit.
Obama pledged in his campaign to reduce the excessive role of U.S. forces overseas. A report on a re-deployment of American troops abroad including the USFK may already be being drafted in a corner of the Pentagon.
There is a sense that the role of the USFK is up for review. A series of meetings were held privately in Washington, D.C. a while ago with Korean and American policy makers, politicians and think tank members attending.
One U.S. government official reportedly told a meeting many in the Pentagon wondered why as many as 28,500 American troops have to be stationed in South Korea. Here, after all, the sound of gunfire has long ceased, whereas 4,000 U.S. soldiers have died in Iraq and 500 in Afghanistan.
But the time has gone when more U.S. troops stationed in South Korea meant better defense. Based on faster transport and state-of-the-art weaponry, American forces are being turned into rapid-reaction units. If the scale of the USFK is readjusted to an appropriate level, there is no need to take read this as a flagging American will to defend the Korean Peninsula.
But if talks about the USFK go ahead without sufficient discussion with our government, the public could feel offended and a wrong signal could be sent to North Korea. I wonder what our government is planning to do then. We do not need a repeat of the incident in 2004 when 4,000 U.S. troops were suddenly re-deployed to Iraq, or when the Korean public was dumbfounded at the announcement that 12,500 U.S. forces would be withdrawn.
The column was contributed by Lee Ha-won, the Chosun Ilbo's correspondent in Washington.
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