There was a marked shift in politics in South Korea by 1993, but also profound changes in the larger world, which were causally related. The Berlin Wall had fallen, the German Democratic Republic had dissolved, and Germany had reunified under a capitalist economic system, betokening, it seemed, a model for Korean reunification, in which the DPRK would surrender and willingly accept absorption into the ROK. More significantly, the USSR had thrown in the towel, and the Warsaw Pact had dissolved. The Cold War was over and capitalism had won. Or so it appeared.
These tectonic shifts ignited a crisis in the Left around the world. Communist parties dissolved, or abandoned communism for social democracy. Social democrats abandoned social democracy and embraced austerity. The threat of the Left to the established order melted away, allowing governments that had been on the frontline of the war against movements for self-determination and people-centered economies to scale back the politically repressive functions of the state. If there’s no Left to repress, the full armamentarium of repressive instruments need no longer be deployed. And since military rule, dictatorship, and concentration camps provoked embarrassing comparisons to Nazism, these institutions could be happily placed in storage, pending future eruptions of leftism.
Hence, by 1993, the context of global developments allowed political space to open up in South Korea. The military was no longer needed to repress the Left, now in a period of retrenchment. Military rule—from the point of view of the empire-builders in Washington and their collaborators in Seoul—could be shelved and replaced by civilian rule. Of course, the National Security Law would remain to keep the Left reined in, and the secret police would continue to function, carrying out their mandate of penetrating and undermining leftist groups, while shaping the ideological space by covertly funding academic journals, conferences and mass media. But secret police and anti-communist laws would operate in the background. The integument of the South Korean state would become liberal democratic, but the underlying tissue would remain viciously intolerant of the Left.
At the same time, it would no longer be necessary for Washington to maintain operational control of the ROK military at all times. In 1994, South Koreans were granted command of their military, but during peacetime alone. At a time of war, command would revert to a US general.
There is an important question of sovereignty here. A country whose military is under foreign command can hardly be said to be sovereign. Indeed, no less than a former commander of US forces in Korea, General Richard Stilwell, described US operational control as the “most remarkable concession of sovereignty in the entire world.”1 Many South Koreans were embittered by their country’s flagrant abnegation of sovereignty to the United States, and the transfer of peacetime operational control of their military was a concession to them—though one of limited significance.
A military exists to wage war. War-making can be defensive, what it’s supposed to be, or aggressive, what it shouldn’t be, but almost invariably is where the United States is concerned. Andrew Bacevich, a US historian and retired career US Army officer, points out that the function of the US military is not self- defense, but “power projection”—the use, or threat, of violence to impose Washington’s will on other countries. Self-defense is what Homeland Security does.2 Washington’s granting the ROK control of the South Korean military in peacetime, i.e., when it’s not fulfilling its primary power projection function, is tantamount to the United States yielding control of an asset when it’s not in use but insisting on full command when it’s needed. In other words, Washington’s ceding peacetime operational control of its East Asian army in reserve—a military which has been historically used as a US auxiliary power projection force in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq—was nothing more than a sop to mollify South Koreans.
Promises were made to grant South Korea full control of its military by 2015, including during times of war, but as the date neared, it was pushed off by South Korea’s military chiefs to the future—sometime in the mid-2020s.3 But as Tim Beal has pointed out, it is inconceivable that the Pentagon would ever allow its forces to fall under the command of a South Korean general. If US forces remain on the peninsula in large numbers, operating conjointly with the ROK military, the combined forces will always be under US command, whether openly or covertly. The United States leads military coalitions, even if leadership is provided from behind, as in the NATO war on Libya or the Saudi war on Yemen, or in placing military advisers with local combat forces. The only conceivable circumstance in which wartime control of ROK forces would devolve to an ROK general, is that in which the United States decided to sit out a war, either because its forces were not necessary to achieve victory, the war did not comport with US objectives, or Washington had abandoned the ROK as a political project. This might explain why transfer of operation control is regularly postponed—because no one of consequence realistically expects it’s ever going to happen, or wants it to.
Moon pressed ROK commanders to assume wartime operation control, or op-con. The commanders balked. Moon persisted. Eventually Washington stepped in to rein in the South Korean president. As the Wall Street Journal explained, many South Koreans “see the lack of military control as an embarrassment that exposes the country to criticisms from Pyongyang that South Korea is a puppet state of the U.S.” Accordingly, Moon pushed the United States to allow South Korea “to take control of its own military forces should war break out on the Korean peninsula.” But Washington wasn’t “inclined to relinquish control,” the newspaper reported, adding that US officials had concluded that, “Seoul isn’t ready.” Said one US official, “I don’t think anyone [in Washington] is eager to see op-con transfer.”4 Washington’s denial of Moon’s op-con demand—indeed, even the fact that the South Korean president has to petition the United States for control of the South Korean military—proves a point Pyongyang makes almost daily and which embarrasses South Koreans: the ROK is a puppet state.
The ROK military is certainly capable of defending itself against the DPRK without US assistance. Compared to the DPRK, Seoul can draw on twice the population and many times the GDP to meet its military needs; hence, compared to its northern neighbor, the ROK is capable of fielding a much larger military and sustaining a much larger military budget and therefore of purchasing much more lethal weaponry. South Korea’s planned 2018 military budget was $38.4 billion, up from $35.9 billion in 2017.5 The DPRK, in contrast, spends from $3.4 to $9.5 billion on its military, 75-90 percent less, and about as much as the City of New York spends on its police force.6 The ROK has 600,000 active-duty service members, backed by 3.5 million reservists. It’s not clear how large the KPA is, but a “number of scholars both inside [South Korea] and in other countries have concluded that the [KPA] is composed of around 700,000 soldiers”,7 according to the South Korean newspaper, The Hankyoreh. Despite a rough parity in the number of active service personnel between the two militaries, ROK forces have far more sophisticated and deadly weaponry. For example, the ROK air force is equipped with F-15 and F-16 jetfighters, while the KPA has obsolescent MiG fighter jets which are often hors de combat for lack of aviation fuel or parts.8
The ROK’s military superiority over its DPRK rival was acknowledged in 2017 by the country’s president. Moon Jae-in reassured South Koreans that ROK forces had “the power to destroy” the DPRK “beyond recovery.”9 Our “economy has been stronger” than the DPRK’s, he said, “since the 1970s and our military expenditures have topped theirs for decades.”10 With comparative advantages like these, only sheer incompetence could put the ROK at a disadvantage in a head-to-head contest with the KPA.
Military weakness, then, is not the reason the United States maintains operational control of South Korea’s armed forces. The ROK military remains under the command of a US general because it is, and always has been, an extension of the Pentagon, and an instrument of US power projection, which continues to have utility in connection with US foreign policy goals. It was established by the United States, its officers are trained by the United States, its units are equipped by the United States, its component parts are integrated into the military of the United States, and its general staff is under the command of the United States. To be sure, ROK service personnel defend their country, but the ROK itself is an extension of the Pentagon. Therefore, the defense of the ROK is equivalent to the defense of an instrument of US foreign policy. Should South Korean soldiers perish in battle, they will die as cannon fodder sacrificed to the defense of the largest US power projection platform in the Pacific,11 and not in defense of the welfare, dignity, and self-determination of Koreans.
In 1949, after the Pentagon had withdrawn its combat troops from the peninsula (before rushing them back a year later), the journalist Marguerite Higgins remarked on how the advisers the United States had left behind became “a living demonstration of how an intelligent and intensive investment of 500 combat-hardened American men and officers can train 100,000 guys to do the shooting for you.”12 The 100,000 guys would eventually become 600,000 men and women, with a reserve force of 3.5 million, but the principle is the same. As we’ve seen, the United States puts this principle to work around the globe, using special operations forces to train local militaries to do the shooting for them in over eighty countries.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, hundreds of thousands of ROK troops were deployed to Vietnam, where they were integrated into the US military command as mercenary soldiers in a war to crush a communist-led national liberation movement. In effect, South Korean combatants were employed in Vietnam to do what they had already attempted to do under US command in Korea a decade earlier—thwart an anti-colonial struggle for independence. Indeed, the ROK military has only ever been used in campaigns to put down movements to eject US occupation forces.
In exchange for helping the United States wage a war of empire against an East Asian anti-colonial independence movement, the ROK received injections of cash and economic perks that contributed significantly to South Korea’s subsequent economic take-off. Most accounts of the ROK’s stellar growth conceal this dirty secret.
Washington injected about one billion dollars into the ROK from 1965 through 1970 (equal to nearly $8 billion in 2018) to cover the cost of ROK troop deployments to Vietnam. These payments accounted for an estimated 7 to 8 percent of South Korea’s GDP from 1966 to 1969 and almost one-fifth of its total foreign earnings.13 In addition, Washington accoutered the ROK military with billions of dollars of equipment and opened up Vietnam to South Korean businesses as a market and sphere of investment.14 Vietnam became a cornucopia of profits for Korean firms, as US officials showered Korean corporations with contracts to support the US war effort. Under US direction, Vietnam soaked up more than 90 percent of the ROK’s steel exports and half of its transportation equipment exports.15
The South Korean army took on the role of the Pentagon’s East Asian army in reserve. Rather than acting as a means of ROK self-defense, it was deployed as an auxiliary force in the US fight against revolutionary nationalism in Vietnam.16 In the mid-1960s, Washington said it needed 50,000 US troops in Korea to defend the ROK, but arranged to ship hundreds of thousands of South Korean troops from the peninsula to Indochina. It didn’t add up.
More recently, the ROK has deployed its armed forces to serve under US command in wars of empire in Afghanistan and Iraq. From 2003 to 2008, Seoul sent 20,000 troops to Iraq to help Washington engineer, by force, a transition from a socialist economy under an Arab nationalist government to a capital-centered, foreign-investment-friendly economy, under a government beholden to Washington. From 2001 to 2014, 5,000 ROK military personnel participated in the US-led war on Afghanistan.
The KPA, in contrast, has never fought beyond Korea’s borders and has never engaged in an aggressive war. Since the latter point challenges a popular misconception that North Korea initiated a war of aggression against a sovereign state on the Korean peninsula in 1950, it is fitting to recapitulate points made earlier on this matter. First, the question of which state initiated the attack ignores the reality that both states had been engaged in a series of reciprocal attacks for months in advance of June 25, 1950, and that most of the attacks were initiated by the ROK. Second, the question of which side opened a general offensive has never been settled and remains a matter of historical uncertainty. The UN determination that it was the North Korean side that was the first to strike was based exclusively on US and ROK reports, hardly unbiased. The DPRK has always hotly contested this claim. Third, an invasion across the 38th parallel by either side was a matter of no moment, since no one recognized the parallel as an international border. A North Korean push to the south could not have been an invasion any more than a South Korean push to the north would have been. Koreans cannot invade Korea. The notion, then, that the KPA initiated a war of aggression in 1950 is without foundation. The only war the KPA has ever fought has been within its own country to establish sovereignty over territory it arguably has the sole legitimate claim to. In contrast, ROK forces have waged four wars (Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq), all under US command, and all in defense of US occupations and against forces of national liberation.
Emblematic of the epistemology of ignorance is the accustomed portrayal of the DPRK as belligerent and the ROK as fairly peace-loving, when exactly the reverse is true. So it is that The Diplomat, a publication which covers the Asia-Pacific region, could describe the Republic of Korea as a state that “has rarely deployed troops outside its borders” (only three times!) while at the same time referring to the DPRK, a state that has never deployed troops outside its borders, as “a belligerent North Korea.”17 Perhaps the North Korean belligerence the publication refers to pertains to Pyongyang’s rhetoric toward Washington and Seoul, which, to be sure, is often belligerent, but no less bellicose than Moon’s assertion that the ROK has “the power to destroy” the DPRK “beyond recovery,” to say nothing of the highly aggressive threats of total extermination US officials have frequently directed at the DPRK. States which regularly deploy troops beyond their borders and participate in wars for empire, as is true of the United States and the ROK, are not, by any reasonable definition, peace-loving. Conversely, a state which has never deployed troops beyond its borders, and has never participated in a war of empire, can be described fairly as a state that rejects wars of aggression. Indeed, the very idea that the DPRK could engage in a war for empire is inconceivable; it is entirely antithetical to its core values.
* * *
There are “not two but three Koreas,” observed William R. Polk: the DPRK, the ROK, and US military bases.18 Actually, there is only one Korea, and that Polk can point to three (or even two) is emblematic of the power Washington has to create artificial political constructions and an ideology to explain them. There is, in reality, one Korea. But grafted onto the one indivisible country is an illegitimate state, the ROK, (“basically set up” by Washington, as Bruce Cumings observes19) and roughly two dozen US military bases on which nearly 30,000 US service personnel are stationed as an occupation force.
The US military presence in Korea began with the establishment, in 1945, of the US military government, which spent its three-year tenure engaged in a war to suppress the Korean People’s Republic, at the time, the organically created state of the one true Korea, from whose people’s committees the DPRK sprang. Once Soviet forces exited the peninsula at the end of 1948, the reason for US troops to remain in Korea, under the original US-Soviet agreement on Korea’s occupation, dissolved. All the same, Washington maintained its garrison on the peninsula until the summer of 1949. “Americans usually perceive an important gap between the withdrawal of US combat forces in July 1949 and the war that came a year later,” observes Bruce Cumings. But, in reality, the US military never left. US “advisers were all over the war zones in” South Korea, “constantly shadowing” their ROK charges “and urging them on to greater efforts” in the war to suppress the guerrilla uprising against the US-ROK occupation.20
The number of US soldiers on the Korean peninsula swelled to nearly 330,000 during the conflict of 1950-1953, but a residual force of 50,000-70,000 US troops continued to occupy South Korea in the immediate aftermath of the war. US military advisers trained the ROK military, evaluated its performance, and sent its officers to war colleges in the United States.21 Over the years, the size of the US occupation force has diminished to its current level just shy of 30,000.
Until 2017, the Pentagon’s main base in Korea was at Yongsan, a facility that had also been the main Korean base of the Japanese Imperial Army during the Japanese colonial period. The base of one imperial army in Korea became the base of its successor. The Yongsan base was a conspicuous foreign implantation in the middle of the ROK’s capital city and a constant reminder of a more than century-long imperial military presence in Korea. Perhaps for this reason the Pentagon moved US forces to a less conspicuous location in 2017. Another reason, more significant, was that the base was within range of KPA artillery.
The Pentagon built a new main base, Camp Humphreys, at Pyeongtaek, beyond the reach of North Korea’s heavy cannons. Like the base at Yongsan, Camp Humphrey’s has been built on the site of a former Japanese military installation. The base covers an area equivalent to more than four Central Parks. The Diplomat calls it “the largest overseas American military base in the world.”22
The US installation has “apartment buildings, sports fields, playgrounds and a water park, and an 18-hole golf course with the generals’ houses overlooking the greens. There is a ‘warrior zone’ with Xboxes and Playstations, pool tables and dart boards, and a tavern for those old enough to drink,” according to The Washington Post—which is to say, all the amenities an occupation army could desire. The base is also outfitted with “two elementary schools, a middle school and a high school,” as well as a “68-bed military hospital.” There is housing to accommodate as many as “1,111 families and a total of about 45,500 people.”23
Despite the gross imbalance in conventional military force that divides the ROK from the DPRK—an imbalance strongly in Seoul’s favor—South Korean officials have never asked Washington to withdraw US troops. The military imbalance is even greater if nuclear weapons are taken into account. The ROK is, along with some 30 other countries, sheltered under the US nuclear umbrella, and Washington has announced on several occasions that it will reduce North Korea to ashes if ever the DPRK attempts to assert its sovereignty over the entire peninsula. That threat alone, issued by the world’s most formidable nuclear power, ought to be reason enough to believe that the chances of a DPRK attack on the ROK are vanishingly small. The ROK can readily defend itself, a point made by two ROK presidents, (even if to an unreceptive military brass and an equally unreceptive Washington.) In contrast, the DPRK is the weaker military force on the peninsula and no state provides it a sheltering nuclear umbrella.
The reality that Seoul fails to demand US troop withdrawal hinders the possibility of reunification. “In the question of the country’s reunification,” Kim Il-sung declared in 1971, the US army must be “withdrawn from south Korea.”24 In Kim’s view, reunification and independence are inseparable. In contrast, Seoul insists that any reunification be accompanied by Korean integration into the US military command structure25—in which case there would two Koreas: one of the colonizers, and one of the colonized. The ROK has no intention of building one united, independent, Korea. That aim is embraced by the DPRK alone. For the ROK, the subordination of Korea to the US-dictated global order is a goal whose primacy exceeds the recovery of the one Korea.
1 Tim Beal, “A Korean Tragedy,” The Asia-Pacific Journal / Japan Focus, Volume 15, Issue 16, no. 2, (2017).
2 “The Limits of Power: Andrew Bacevich on the End of American Exceptionalism,” Democracy Now!, August 20, 2008. https://www.democracynow.org/2008/8/20/the_limits_of_power_andrew_bacevich.
3 Choe Sang-hun, “South Korea delays shift in control of military,” The New York Times, October 24, 2014.
4 Gordon Lubold and Jonathan Cheng, “Seoul presses US to hand over wartime command of South Korea military,” The Wall Street Journal, October 26, 2017.
5 “Defense budget projected to rise 6.9% from last year’s total,” The Hankyoreh, August 30, 2017.
6 Alastair Gale and Chieko Tsuneoka, “Japan to increase military spending for fifth year in a row,” The Wall Street Journal, December 21, 2016.
7 “Debate over size of North Korea’s army reignites,” The Hankyoreh, December 25, 2015.
8 Choe Sang-hun, “Behind North Korea’s bluster, some see caution,” The New York Times, September 26, 2017.
9 “Moon says dialogue with N. Korea ‘impossible,’ warns of destruction ‘beyond recovery’,” Yonhap, September 15, 2017.
10 “President Moon rebukes Defense Ministry for its ‘lack of confidence’,” The Hankyoreh, August 29, 2017.
11 Letman.
12 Cumings, Korea’s Place, 255.
13 Ibid., 321.
14 Baldwin, 20.
15 Cumings, Korea’s Place, 322.
16 Baldwin, 29.
17 David Axe, “South Korea’s Secret War,” The Diplomat, April 27, 2010. https://thediplomat.com/2010/04/south-koreas-secret-war/.
18 Polk.
19 Bruce Cumings, “Saber rattling won’t fix North Korea threat,” Global Times, September 18, 2017.
20 Cumings, Korea’s Place, 245.
21 Baldwin, 18.
22 Letman.
23 Anna Fifield, “As North Korea intensifies its missile program, the U.S. opens an $11 billion base in the South,” The Washington Post, July 29, 2017.
24 Kim, 1971.
25 Cumings, Korea’s Place, 506.