By Donald Kirk

SEOUL – The drama over United States and South Korean war games in the seas off the coasts of South Korea is about to enter its second act. The South Korean navy plans to stage military exercises next week in the Yellow Sea near where one of its ships was sunk in March with the loss of 46 sailors.

The United States, after yielding to Chinese pressure not to send its own warships into the Yellow Sea, is holding out the option of also joining next week’s exercises. But the US will join regular
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monthly war games that both sides have agreed to stage in response to the sinking of the South Korean corvette the Cheonan.

In the face of Chinese and North Korean protests, the threat of regular air and navy exercises promises to raise the level of vituperation if not confrontation in Northeast Asia, even as all sides profess to want to return to negotiations on North Korea’s nuclear program.

The deal for more exercises means the US and South Korea are now committed to a recurring show of force that they will be able to regulate and time in accordance with responses from China and North Korea. The US is not likely to send the carrier George Washington into future exercises as it did in this week’s war games off the South Korean east coast, but the mere presence of the 98,000-ton ship in the general region serves as a reminder of the potential for reprisals against any North Korean attack.

United States commander in South Korea General Walter Sharp made the case, declaring after this week’s exercises that they were “designed to send a clear message to North Korea that its aggressive behavior must stop”.

That message, however, may be lost on North Korea as well as China. The North is not about to challenge the US militarily while counting on China for more trade and aid after signing an agreement on economic and technical cooperation. That agreement counters US resolve, announced by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton during her visit to Seoul last week, to strengthen economic sanctions that South Koreans claim are freezing Dear Leader Kim Jong-il’s foreign accounts.

Secure in the sense of Chinese support, North Korea will rely for now on shrill diatribes to denounce American and South Korean efforts at intimidation in war games. The rhetoric from all sides is likely to become routine, so much so that it may be hard to recall why all the fuss about staging the games at all.

As a reminder, however, the games this week ended with the spectacle of 20 American and South Korean ships firing on targets submerged to simulate submarines while warplanes bombed and strafed from above. Then, after the smoke had cleared, the ships sailed off and the planes flew away amid memories of the echoes of their guns – and half-forgotten North Korean commentaries about “all-out war” and “nuclear deterrence”.

Critics see the games as a provocation that can only worsen tensions on the Korean Peninsula and between China and the United States, South Korea and Japan. Such criticism, though, ignores two realities that suggest the rationale for close coordination between US and South Korean forces if South Korea is to survive and prosper, as it has for nearly six decades since the end of the Korean War.

Military experts note that “Invincible Spirit”, as the games were called, provided a tremendous opportunity for the Americans and South Koreans to work together with extremely complex equipment and delicate interrelated command functions.

It’s not easy, they point out, for pilots and gunners and sailors to operate increasingly technical controls on the basis of training and periodic missions. They have to be able to find and fire at targets, which in this case included the hull of a decommissioned submarine and other submersibles, with the accuracy needed to deter an attack. The best way to perfect those skills, short of actual war-time conditions, they say, is to do it regularly.

The need for close coordination is all the greater, American and South Korean commanders argue, considering that in 2015 the US will have completed the difficult process of transferring war-time operational control (OPCON) entirely to South Korean command.

That date for OPCON is three years beyond the deadline of April 17, 2012, originally set for the transfer, but commanders still worry that time is running out. They say they have to work swiftly and carefully to make sure all is in order by then. For this reason alone, they believe that monthly air and naval exercises are definitely needed.

The second reason for such exercises is that it’s obvious to anyone who’s been following the push and pull of negotiations in recent years that North Korea is not going to come to terms on its nuclear weapons or on anything else. The lure of reconciliation remains strong, but there’s no realistic chance of getting the North to reverse course and live up to any deal that calls for abandonment of its nukes. To critics who say the chances for reconciliation were greatly diminished by the exercises, the answer is they were already non-existent.

Nor is it necessarily accurate to say the war games raised the level of confrontation with the Chinese. China is already an expanding power in Northeast as well as Southeast Asia. The Chinese have staged their own air and naval exercises in the Yellow Sea, which they clearly view as within their sphere of influence, and will go on doing so.

Chinese outcries over US and South Korean plans to conduct war games in the Yellow Sea in the wake of the sinking of the Cheonan led the Americans and South Koreans to move them to the East Sea, aka the Sea of Japan. The shift was a major concession that some South Korean military people believe was not necessary. The US and South Korea could have called China’s bluff, they believe, by holding the war games in the Yellow Sea.

The Chinese may think they’re masters of the seas around the Chinese mainland, but they have no sovereignty over this vast body of water between China and the Korean Peninsula. South Korean commanders plan to make this point in future exercises. The Americans no doubt are hesitant, but South Koreans say the US should also send warships into the Yellow Sea.

American and South Korean military people insist that US and South Korean coordination on war games may be the only way to convince the North Koreans to hold off on any aggressive designs of their own. The North Koreans, they say, need constant reminders that US and South Korean forces are able to respond with tremendous firepower to attacks such as the one on the Cheonan.

The counter-argument, however, is that the North Koreans may choose to respond by test-firing more missiles and staging their third underground nuclear test. Beijing’s responses so far suggest the Chinese will do little or nothing to stop them. The question is whether the North Koreans would have been as likely to go ahead with these schemes without the exercises? The likelihood of North Korea going on with tests of its deadliest weapons, as far as South Korean commanders are concerned, makes US and South Korean war games all the more essential.

The name “Invincible Spirit” was chosen as a reminder of the alliance that was forged in the early dark days of the Korean War when North Korean forces nearly overran South Korea. As dangers slowly rise in the region, repetitive exercises are aimed to reinforce an alliance that seems as relevant now as it was then.

Donald Kirk, a long-time journalist in Asia, is author of the newly published Korea Betrayed: Kim Dae Jung and Sunshine.

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