The U.S. and South Korea will hold joint military exercises beginning on Monday, as tensions on the Korean peninsula are on the rise. U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un engaged in a war of words over the past few weeks, with Trump saying he would release “fire and fury” on the North if the country continued threatening the U.S. with missile launches. The North, after threatening to fire on the U.S. territory of Guam, eventually backed down. And on Thursday, South Korean President Moon Jae-in said there will be no war on the Korean Peninsula, after assurances from Trump that the U.S. will not attack North Korea without Seoul’s consent.
Still, the U.S. and South Korea are moving forward will their annual Ulchi Freedom Guardian exercises, an event the North views as a major threat, and a preparation for invasion. It’s also an event that Beijing would rather see toned down or ended altogether. In March, China proposed the U.S. halt its annual Foal Eagle exercises with South Korea in return for North Korea promising to stop its nuclear missile tests. But ending these annual exercises is a non-starter for the United States, as Washington considers them a way to both deter the North and ready forces in case of an actual attack.
The Cipher Brief’s Kaitlin Lavinder spoke with retired U.S. Army Special Forces Colonel David Maxwell, who is now Associate Director at Georgetown University’s Center for Security Studies, about the upcoming U.S.-South Korea exercises – what they are, why they’re important, and how the North is likely to respond.
The Cipher Brief: Can you explain the upcoming U.S.-South Korean Ulchi Freedom Guardian exercises?
David Maxwell: It’s really a two-part exercise. Ulchi is named for a Korean war hero, and the first part of the exercise is a strategic decision-making exercise for the Republic of Korea (ROK) government and the U.S. government. In Korea, the ROK government will respond to simulated intelligence that North Korea is preparing for an attack. The South Korean government has to make decisions on mobilization, reserves, committing forces to the ROK-U.S. combined forces command, and instituting civil defense measures to protect the population as best they can from an attack from the North. That is the first part of the exercise, and it is really a government exercise to allow policy-makers and political leaders to make decisions in the face of potential war, which is very important because those decisions are critical to ultimate military success.
The second part of the exercise is Freedom Guardian, which is again a computer simulated exercise. It takes place on the peninsula and off the peninsula, where command posts are connected by normal command and control communications computers and intelligence networks, and have scenarios that are computer-generated, but run by a red team – a team of intelligence and military experts who study North Korea. They design the computer simulation to fight the way they think North Korea would. What is really important about this is that the commanders and staff of the Korean and U.S. units execute the war plan.
One of the things we should remember is the Korean War has been planned in practice more than any other war since 1953 that we have not had to execute, and I hope we don’t have to execute it.
The red team provides dilemmas to the commanders and staff. Although we have a defensive plan to defend South Korea from attack, as [German military strategist Helmuth] von Moltke said, “no plan survives first contact with the enemy.” So, we initiate the plan, and then “North Korea” will use its asymmetric capabilities - the red team will try to do things that the Korean and U.S. commanders and staff did not anticipate. This is how learning occurs, this is how training occurs, and this is important to do because commanders and staff can then make mistakes, and learn from this, without having forces in the field to waste their time and resources. Plus, the computer exercise allows the commanders and staff to deal with multiple problems in a ten-day period that would take months to do if they were actually maneuvering forces in the field.
Again, the exercise is designed to test and practice the defense of South Korea in the face of a North Korean attack. It’s not a threat to the North, although the North of course looks at any exercise as a threat to them and as preparation for invasion.
TCB: Is it focused mostly on a conventional attack, or will there be a large cyberattack component as well?
Maxwell: Every exercise is different, and as I said, the red team tries to anticipate things that the North might do. Cyber has been and will continue to be a huge part of the exercise. But they will again create dilemmas for commanders and staff that will make them think and make them fail in the exercise. You learn more by failing, and that’s the beauty of a command post exercise – that we can fail and learn from those mistakes.
Ironically, the exercises are designed to be harder than actual war, so that the harder we train, the better we are able to fight in an actual war. Of course, people don’t think about the importance of commanders and staff to be able to command and control, devise orders, and react to North Korean activities - but all of this is really critical to being able to orchestrate the fight. The soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines, on ground, at sea, in the air, need the orders, the directions, the operational art that is conducted by the commanders and staff. That’s why this exercise is so important.
TCB: How long have the U.S. and ROK been doing this specific Ulchi exercise?
Maxwell: It goes back to 1968, after the Blue House attack [an unsuccessful attempt by the North Koreans to assassinate the South Korean president in his residence at the Blue House]. We’ve been doing variations of this exercise really since the late 60s, and exercises have evolved over the years. Now we only do two major exercises. A couple decades ago we would do four a year.
What we also have to remember is that training occurs on the Korean peninsula 12 months out of the year, almost 365 days. There are units at squad, platoon, company, battalion, brigade, division, and corps levels conducting some form of training –just normal routine training - 12 months out of the year.
TCB: Do the North Koreans view “normal routine training” as actual training?
Maxwell: No, they don’t. They will spin it to support their rhetoric. But again, we cannot be dissuaded by their rhetoric, and we cannot allow the ROK-U.S. alliance to be split. We can’t allow the military forces to be weakened, as long as there is a 1.2 million person active army and a 6 million person reserve force poised in the north.
To put it in our geographic terms, imagine if we were sitting here in Washington, DC, and outside the beltway there’s a 1.2 million man army with some 13,000 artillery pieces, 6,500 tanks, and missiles, chemical weapons and likely nuclear weapons. That’s the threat. As long as that threat exists, we must maintain our military capabilities, both to deter, and if deterrence fails, to fight and win the war.
