U.S. pundits echo Seoul on OPCON

U.S. pundits have begun to share South Korean conservatives` concerns over the planned transfer of wartime operational control from the United States to South Korea in 2012, which would have each country command its own military units.

The ruling Grand National Party had officially requested that the government reconsider the scheduled transfer of operational control following North Korea`s second nuclear test last May.

Defense Minister Kim Tae-young also said last month that transferring the control in 2012 would be "bad timing."

Michael O`Hanlon, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, which has considerable influence on the Obama administration`s policies, said the transfer should be delayed or reconsidered.

"To my mind, the basic concept of dividing command never made sense and perhaps should even be repudiated," O`Hanlon wrote in his latest column on the Brookings website.

"It violates the basic principle of unity of command which the United States has spent three decades to strengthen since an unsuccessful Iran hostage rescue attempt in 1980," he said.

He said the motives of former President Roh Moo-hyun and former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld who pushed for the 2012 plan were "less than sound."

"Frustrated by South Korea`s resistance to various U.S. diplomatic ideas of the time, as well as the difficulty in deploying U.S. forces in Korea elsewhere in a manner that would help with his concept of a more flexible American global military system, Rumsfeld may have seen the idea as a way to weaken and downplay the U.S.-South Korea alliance," O`Hanlon wrote.



"For his part, Roh was anxious to assert Korean prerogatives, especially against a U.S. administration with which he often clashed. So he liked the idea of a plan that would seem to advance South Korean sovereign rights."

Noting that relations between Seoul and Washington now are much better with South Korea pursuing to contribute to the U.S.-led military mission in Afghanistan, O`Hanlon wrote that "any consideration of a delay in the OPCON plan - or even a fundamental rethinking of it - should be seen as a sign of confidence and maturity in the alliance rather than the opposite."

"If there is a need to evaluate the 2012 plan afresh, that should happen without apology, without undue haste and without any predetermined conclusion," he said.

Bruce Bechtol Jr., military expert on the Korean Peninsula and professor at the U.S. Marine Corps Command and Staff College, said the OPCON transfer should be delayed until South Korea is ready to fight North Korea`s asymmetric forces which include short-range ballistic missiles, long-range artillery and special operations forces.

"While the South Korean military is highly capable of combating a traditional conventional forces threat from North Korea, it is still heavily dependent on the capabilities of the U.S. military to deter and defeat the highly evolved North Korean asymmetric threat," Bechtol wrote in a March newsletter published by the Asia Foundation`s Center for U.S.-Korea Policy.

"By postponing the change in wartime operational control until the ROK military has sufficiently achieved the necessary acquisition, training, personnel upgrades and transformation, the United States would be safeguarding the security and stability of its most loyal ally in East Asia."

The Center for U.S.-Korea Policy will host a conference on the OPCON transfer later this month in Washington, where Bechtol, O`Hanlon, Korea University professor Kim Sung-han and Rep. Hwang Jin-ha will take part.

(sophie@heraldm.com)



By Kim So-hyun