SEOUL — U.S. military officers in Korea are privately saying that North Korea has succeeded in its campaign to turn the South Korean public against the United States and break up the once rock-solid U.S.-Republic of Korea military alliance.
A senior U.S. officer, in a private memorandum to a network of friends and pro-U.S. contacts in Korea, predicted that in the next one to five years the Combined Forces Command, responsible for U.S.-ROK operations and training, will be dissolved while the United Nations command, set up in 1950 at the outset of the Korean War, will move to Hawaii.
The implications, he suggested, are dire for South Korea's ability to cope with a crumbling, heavily-armed communist North Korea with powerful anti-U.S. allies in the neighborhood.
The forecasts in the communication lead a list of major shifts that he and other officers view as the logical result of pressure on U.S. forces to leave this now prosperous nation, as well as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s program for downsizing and realigning U.S. forces in Korea.
The good news, he predicted, is that “the U.S. will maintain the so-called ‘nuclear umbrella’ and will meet its treaty obligations with a promised commitment of air and sea power if the ROK is attacked” — an arrangement that seems strikingly similar, however, to that made in the first half of 1950 when about 500 U.S. advisers remained in Korea to bear the brunt of the North Korean invasion that June.
However, “[t]he question will have to be asked,” said the memo, “can the ROK deal with a collapsing NK regime unilaterally without international support.” The officer responded in the next sentence: “It is highly unlikely that it can but it is not doing anything to prepare for it now.”
The memo concluded with a downbeat history lesson in regional geopolitics.
“Korea will again be the shrimp among whales as the balance of power will be China/Russia on one side and U.S./Japan on the other. Will Korea be able to be the 'balancer' as envisioned by President Roh?”
“I think not,” he wrote. “It will have to cast its lot with one side or the other. Unfortunately economics and geography (as well as the Japanese colonial legacy) may rule and I fear that Korea will be pushed into the China camp. The geo-political strategic implications for this I think are obvious.”
Under the Rumsfeld scheme, the 30,000 U.S. troops in Korea are expected to decrease by about 2,000 by the end of the year amid plans to move what’s left of the Second Infantry Division from its historic position on the Korean War invasion route north of Seoul to areas well south of the Han River, near Pyongtaek and Osan, the Air Force base.
Disillusionment has set in at the U.S. military headquarters in Yongsan, most of which is reverting to South Korean control. The view is that as Seoul increasingly compromises with Pyongyang on everything from business deals to nuclear weapons, the South will be dangerously exposed to surprise attack from the North, just as it was in June 1950. Some U.S. officers are more philosophical and are going with the flow.
“If much of the above comes to fruition, it will be a victory for the NK information operations campaign,” said the officer's memorandum. “They will have severely weakened the alliance if not totally split it.”
“While I do not fear an immediate attack upon the withdrawal of major U.S. combat forces, it will surely make the Kim Family Regime’s decision to attack in the face of internal crisis much easier because of its perception that the balance of military power will favor the north,” he wrote. The "Kim Family" refers to the family of North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il, one of whose sons is expected to succeed him just as he succeeded his father, Kim Il-Sung, after the latter died in 1994.
In his unusually frank assessment, the officer said North Korea's successful information operations campaign will “undermine the ROK political system as it has been so successfully doing to reach the point at which we find ourselves.”
