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Professor Lee has written an important article (as he always days). This article should be read and pondered.  Unfortunately I have to take some exception to what my friend has written and disagree with him on the OPCON transfer issue.  He may be right in almost every aspect of his discussion of OPCON transfer (and please read his analysis in detail) except the foreign commander aspect.  First many of us have worked under foreign commanders and have gladly done so.  I think keeping the ROK/US CFC intact with a Korean general as commander is more important to the alliance than dissolving the command.  Yes it may turn out like Professor Lee says and a year from now it all crumbles (which I think was actually Secretary Rumsfeld's intent when he really initiated this who process in 2003 when he said US forces in Korea were a waste because he could not employ them in the war on terror  - though a year later he withdrew an entire brigade combat team from Korea and deployed it directly to Iraq - it of course never returned).   But it does not have to turn out the way that Professor postulates.  If we understand our interests in Northeast Asia and the necessity of our military presence and the effectiveness of combined military capabilities against at least one specific threat we can and must make what is outlined in the 50th SCM work.

Excerpt:

Almost immediately in the wake of the signing of an end-of-war declaration, the UN Command, shorn of its mission to defend the peace in the peninsula, would be dismantled. Moreover, OPCON transfer, now envisioned to be completed by 2020, would defang and dismantle the Combined Forces Command. Why? Despite protestations to the contrary, no U.S. commander would submit his command over U.S. forces-the preeminent military in the world-to a foreign commander in the actual prosecution of war. The joint communique of the recently concluded 50th U.S.-ROK Security Consultative Meeting (SMC) states that the two sides, following OPCON transfer, shall "maintain the current CFC structure" and that the post-OPCON transfer CFC shall "have an ROK four-star general as the Commander and a U.S. four-star general as the Deputy Commander" (Paragraph 9). It's a proposition that sounds as credible as Richard Nixon's promise to Park Chung-hee that no U.S. troops will be withdrawn just a year before the withdrawal of an entire division of twenty thousand soldiers.


From an article I am working on:

The 50th SCM finally put to bed a long simmering alliance challenge - the so-called OPCON transfer.  Beginning in 2003 the general plan had been to dissolve the ROK/U.S. Combined Forces Command (CFC) into a supported warfighting command under the ROK Joints Chief of Staff and the establishment of a supporting command, "US KORCOM."  This would have sacrificed all the benefits of decades of interoperability training to maximize the capabilities of both militaries to deter and defend against the North.  The members of the SCM have made the bold decision to not only sustain the ROK/U.S. CFC but to make the next commander a ROK General Officer with a U.S. deputy commander.

A ROK general will command the finest combined military force in the modern era.  With the Military Committee intact and made up of senior leaders from both nation's national command and military authorities to provide strategic guidance and operational direction there will be no concern with the customary "Pershing Rule" which says U.S. forces will not be placed under the command of foreign commands.  While the ROK/U.S. CFC will have operational control of both ROK and U.S. military forces since the commander answers to the Military Committee he actually answers to both countries equally.  The U.S. does not give up command in the new arrangement and continues to share it equally with the ROK government.



Welcome to the Showdown Over South Korea's Seoul

The National Interest · by Sung-Yoon Lee · November 5, 2018
Fateful Alliances of the Past
When the Chinese troops crossed the Yalu River into Korea and dramatically altered the fortunes on the battlefield-repelling their foes southward and confining them largely to the southern half of the peninsula-not a single decisionmaker in Beijing could have predicted the vicissitudes of national fortune to befall all the combatant nations and the consequent collapse of their own state a mere half century later. It was early 1593.
The Imjin Waeran of 1592-98, commonly referred to in English as "Hideoyoshi's invasions," is the most spectacular manifestation of Korea-China-Japan triangular tensions in history. The Japanese warlord's ambition of conquering Ming China first called for an invasion of Joseon Korea, the natural pathway for advancing into the Celestial Empire. The conquest of Korea was achieved handily, but the unexpected Chinese intervention and subsequent reinforcement of troops by both sides vastly complicated Japan's campaign. In 1598, after years of feral fighting and drawn out peace negotiations, the Japanese troops withdrew. The war ended in an unsatisfactory draw; sans surrender, sans indemnity, sans ceded territory, sans victory parades, and Korea devastated.
A Sino-Korean "alliance" forged in blood was born. Yet, it died a mere thirty years later in the wake of two devastating Manchu invasions of Korea, the first in 1627 and the second in 1636. Joseon, caught between a declining Ming, to which it owed allegiance and a major debt, and a rising semi-nomadic power in Manchuria that Confucian Korea regarded as barbarian, chose to side with the fading Ming while alienating the ascendant Manchus, the would-be founder of Qing China. The result of Korea's "misreading" of the strategic environment was the two punitive Manchu invasions and thereafter a protracted period of decline, even as the dynasty endured for more than three hundred years. The Korean monarchy closed itself off from most foreign intercourse except for that with the Qing dynasty and intermittent contact with the isolationist Tokugawa Japan.
Like Tokugawa Japan, Korea became self-contained, choosing to remain indifferent to the sea and the world beyond the Pacific. But unlike Japan, Korea would pay a dear price for its solipsistic national policy once it was pulled into an entirely new world order in the mid-nineteenth century, marked by gunboat diplomacy, unequal treaties, and a life-and-death race for colonies. Unable to adjust to the radically new environment and unable to secure any ally, Joseon Korea, abandoned by all, fell to Japanese control in 1905 and colonial rule five years later. The humiliating historical memory of state collapse, colonization, and Japanese atrocities still  cloud the U.S.-South Korea-Japan quasi-alliance today.
Alliance in War and Peace
When the Chinese troops crossed the Yalu River into North Korea in 1950, few, if any, decisionmakers in Beijing could have foreseen with certainty the vicissitudes of national fortune to befall the major combatants-in particular, that the war would presage the vastly enhanced stature of the People's Republic of China, not quite one year old at the time, from a backward agrarian revolutionary state to the world's third most powerful state. That the nascent PRC had fought the United States, the preeminent military power in the world, to a draw would transform Beijing's stature in the eyes of the region, the Third World, and, pointedly, the United States. Despite the enormous casualties, China, by proving its mettle in war, had resurrected itself as a major world power.
And so had the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, unbeknownst to Americans at the time, resurrected itself from the brink of state collapse to become in due course a major regional player. North Korean leader Kim Il-sung, even in failing to achieve his ultimate goal-liberate the South and unify the peninsula under his rule-profoundly "revised" the geostrategic importance of the Korean Peninsula from a minor, forgotten outpost on the tip of the Asian mainland to a major powder keg on a key strategic strip of land in Northeast Asia. For the next forty years, generous aid poured into Pyongyang from China and the Soviet Union in seeming competition, in spite of, or because of, Kim Il-sung's aggressive purges of pro-Soviet and pro-Chinese officials in the 1950s and limited-but-lethal provocations against South Korean and the U.S. troops in the South in the 1960s. The more "unhinged" Kim acted, threatening war and killing South Korean and U.S. troops in premeditated lethal attacks, the more prone were his patron states to placate him with bigger blandishments.
It was in this new peninsular environment of the wholly dependent client state, by virtue of threatening to entrap the bigger patron state in a new or prolonged war, that the United States-Republic of Korea alliance was born. Without doubt, had it not been for South Korean President Syngman Rhee's "strategic" antics during the Korean War, for example, threatening to withdraw from the UN Command and resume hostilities on his own once a ceasefire was reached, and backing up his intention to prolong the war by unilaterally releasing in June 1953, a month before the armistice was reached and much to the ire of the Chinese, Chinese and North Korean prisoners of war who opposed being sent home, the Eisenhower administration would not have agreed to a mutual security pact that so one-sidedly favored the ROK.
In effect, the much-touted U.S.-ROK alliance, the single greatest factor in the preservation of the de facto peninsular peace since the Korean War armistice of July 27, 1953, was the product of what may be characterized as "Pyongyang-style" diplomacy the client state yanking the patron state around. In varying degrees, Kim Il-sung, Syngman Rhee, and Mao Zedong all benefited from the devastating war; that is, the exigencies of war and the new entangling alliances that ensued once the ceasefire took effect.
Disentangling an Alliance
The 1953 U.S.-ROK alliance has enabled the "long peace" in Korea over the past sixty-five years and South Korea's impressive economic development. At the same time, the alliance has gone through some rough periods of "adjustment." For example, there was the unexpected notification by Richard Nixon to Park Chung Hee in May 1970 of his decision to withdraw twenty thousand U.S. troops from South Korea, in spite of having reassured Park in person in San Francisco in August 1969 that he "rejected" such an "idea." Also, there were the  seething tensions between "anti-American and probably a little crazy" Roh Moo-hyun and George W. Bush on North Korea policy and, in particular, the timetable for transfer of wartime operational control (OPCON) of American and South Korean forces from the United States to the ROK. Today there are the increasingly  diverging views between Seoul and Washington on the nature of the North Korea threat. While Seoul sees the DPRK as fundamentally reactive and, thereby, unthreatening entity, the U.S. views it as a fundamentally revisionist and, thereby, threatening state.
Further complicating matters is Donald Trump's propensity to suspend preemptively  series of combined military exercises with the ROK in an attempt to induce North Korea's denuclearization, President Trump's occasional threat to remove U.S. troops from both South Korea and Japan in order to compel these allies to increase financial support for the costs of stationing U.S. forces in their respective countries, and President Moon Jae-in's impulse to return to the kind of  sanctions-busting, massive  inter-Korean economic projects that were the hallmark of Seoul's North Korea policy under Moon's former boss, President Roh Moo-hyun, when the Roh administration gave the Kim Jong-il regime  $4.4 billionfrom 2003 to 2008.
Such convoluted peninsular dynamics prompt some thorny existential questions: In view of South Korea's economic, political, and soft power and, all the more, the dramatic inter-Korean rapprochement in 2018, is the U.S.-ROK alliance approaching the end of its utility? While no responsible official would raise such a question in public, what is the raison d'etre of the alliance in this brave new world of inter-Korean rapprochement and growing perception gap on the nature of the North Korean state?
For example, is it time for an "end-of-war declaration," as the two Koreas  profess, even though such a declaration would likely spell the dismantlement of the UN Command? Is it finally time for the relevant parties to negotiate a peace treaty or "a permanent peace regime on the Korean peninsula," as the September 19, 2005,  Joint Statement of the Six-Party Talks and the February 13, 2007,  Joint Statement of the Six-Party Talks call for? Would a peace treaty between the United States and the DPRK not create a crescendo of calls for the complete, verifiable, irreversible dismantlement of the  Combined Forces Command , withdrawal of U.S. troops from the South, and perhaps even the abrogation of the U.S.-ROK alliance?
Alliances, like marriages, cannot be assumed to last forever. On the present heady course of inter-Korean "rapprochement," with Seoul pledging to resume large-scale subvention schemes couched as  "inter-Korean cooperation" in violation of  UN Security Council and  U.S. sanctions , the United States can either accept South Korea's compromising actions or keep a distance from its ally. The Moon administration's insistence on brokering an end-of-war/peace declaration followed by peace treaty between Pyongyang and Washington threatens both the  legal and  political rationale for the U.S.-ROK alliance. The question that Washington must raise with Seoul is, "Is this an acceptable risk for the ROK?"
Almost immediately in the wake of the signing of an end-of-war declaration, the UN Command, shorn of its mission to defend the peace in the peninsula, would be dismantled. Moreover, OPCON transfer, now envisioned to be completed by 2020, would defang and dismantle the Combined Forces Command. Why? Despite protestations to the contrary, no U.S. commander would submit his command over U.S. forces-the preeminent military in the world-to a foreign commander in the actual prosecution of war. The  joint communique of the recently concluded 50th U.S.-ROK Security Consultative Meeting (SMC) states that the two sides, following OPCON transfer, shall "maintain the current CFC structure" and that the post-OPCON transfer CFC shall "have an ROK four-star general as the Commander and a U.S. four-star general as the Deputy Commander" (Paragraph 9). It's a proposition that sounds as credible as Richard Nixon's promise to Park Chung-hee that no U.S. troops will be withdrawn just a year before the withdrawal of an entire division of twenty thousand soldiers.
A peace treaty between the United States and the DPRK, a long-held goal by North Korea, would call into question rationale for maintaining U.S. troops in South Korea. If and when such a treaty comes into effect, then the question "Why are the troops there, in South Korea, when the U.S. and North Korea have a peace treaty?" would be raised repeatedly by politicians and the public in Seoul and Washington, not to mention Pyongyang, Beijing, and Moscow.
Once the U.S. forces leave South Korea, the bilateral alliance will be that only in name. Beyond the loss of credible U.S. commitment to the defense of the ROK, the virtual abrogation of the alliance would leave some glaring holes in the ROK's defense capabilities, for example: Surveillance-reconnaissance-signal intelligence capabilities, early warning and missile defense, counter-battery fire and sensitive military technology procurement abilities, just to name a few. The political ramifications of no longer nestling under an "ironclad" alliance with the United States also would be significant, as Seoul would lack the politico-military clout to resist sanctions and censorship by Beijing, Moscow, or Pyongyang, or even whitewashing of historical crimes by Japan. China's unabashed wielding of the  stick on South Korea for its missile defense deployment, even with staunch support from the United States, is a lesson that should not be forgotten.
South Korea today, in its unhedged bet to embrace the Kim Jong-un regime, would be well served to remember the lessons of the Korean past: alliances gone askance, misjudgment of the strategic environment, and finding itself abandoned, vulnerable and stateless.
Sung-Yoon Lee is Kim Koo-Korea Foundation Professor of Korean Studies and assistant professor at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.
Image: Reuters


De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Personal Email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com
Web Site: defenddemocracy.org
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
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FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.


If you do not read anything else in the 2017 National Security Strategy read this on page 14:

"A democracy is only as resilient as its people. An informed and engaged citizenry is the fundamental requirement for a free and resilient nation. For generations, our society has protected free press, free speech, and free thought. Today, actors such as Russia are using information tools in an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of democracies. Adversaries target media, political processes, financial networks, and personal data. The American public and private sectors must recognize this and work together to defend our way of life. No external threat can be allowed to shake our shared commitment to our values, undermine our system of government, or divide our Nation."