Keyboard warriors: S.Korea, US gear up for war games to counter N.Korea

SEOUL, Aug 19 (Reuters) - In air conditioned bunkers and at military bases across South Korea, it is with keyboards - not tanks - that South Korean and US forces will launch military exercises on Monday, denounced by North Korea as a rehearsal for war.

The Aug 21-31 exercises involve computer simulations designed to prepare for the unthinkable: war with nuclear-capable North Korea. The wargames, details of which are a closely guarded secret, simulate military conflict with the isolated country. The US describes them as “defensive in nature,” a term North Korean state media has dismissed as a “deceptive mask”.

Far from the dusty firing ranges just south of the heavily fortified border with North Korea, US and South Korean troops hunch over laptops and screens wearing earphones and camouflaged combat uniforms, according to photos of past UFG drills on the United States Forces Korea website.

The US military describes the software behind the drills as “state-of-the-art wargaming computer simulations”. There will be no field training during the exercise, according to US Forces Korea. As part of the exercises, imagery from military satellites orbiting above the Korean peninsula, is at times used to peer deep into North Korea, said a former South Korean government official who declined to be identified.

Banks of monitors and computer graphics create simulated battlefields, complete with troop movements, according to Park Yong-han, a military expert formerly with the state-run Korea Institute for Defence Analysis.

North Korea's rapid progress in developing nuclear weapons and missiles capable of reaching the US mainland has fuelled a surge in tension. Other South Korean allies are also joining this year with troops from Australia, Britain, Canada, Colombia, Denmark, the Netherlands, New Zealand taking part.

“It's to prepare if something big were to occur and we needed to protect ROK,” a US military spokeswoman, Michelle Thomas, said, referring to South Korea by the initials of its official name, the Republic of Korea.

North and South Korea are still technically at war after the Korean War ended with a truce, not a peace treaty. China, North Korea's main ally and trading partner, has urged the United States and South Korea to scrap the drills and so has Russia.

The United States has not backed down.