Military drills set to be suspended

ROK media says major exercises with US to be halted this week

SEOUL — The Republic of Korea and the United States are expected to announce the suspension of “large-scale” military drills this week, with the provision that they would restart if the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea failed to keep its promise to denuclearize, news agency Yonhap said on Sunday.

Citing an unnamed government source, the ROK news agency said the suspension was likely to affect only major joint exercises, not more routine military training.

US President Donald Trump surprised officials in Seoul and Washington when he pledged to end “war games” after his summit with DPRK top leader Kim Jong-un in Singapore last week.

Immediately after the announcement, US forces in the ROK said they had received no guidance on stopping any drills, and ROK officials said they were trying to figure out which exercises Trump was referring to.

However, in a sign Seoul may be open to suspending drills, ROK President Moon Jae-in said on Thursday his government would need to be flexible when it came to applying military pressure on the DPRK if it was sincere about denuclearization.

Moon said the ROK would carefully consider joint military drills with the US and he asked his officials to cooperate with Washington on the issue, his office said in a statement at the time.

Yonhap also reported on Sunday that during inter-Korean military talks on Thursday, ROK officials asked their DPRK counterparts to relocate artillery 30 to 40 kilometers away from the heavily fortified military demarcation line that divides the two countries.

The ROK’s Defense Ministry denied it made such a request, Yonhap said.

The talks, the first in more than a decade, held in the border village of Panmunjom in the Demilitarized Zone, followed an inter-Korean summit in April at which leaders of the neighbors agreed to defuse tensions and cease “all hostile acts”.

The DPRK and the ROK failed to reach any concrete agreement during those talks, officials said.

The DPRK proposed to Seoul to disarm, on a trial basis, the Joint Security Area in Panmunjom, the only site in the DMZ where both countries’ soldiers stand almost face to face, the ROK’s presidential spokesman said on Friday.

About 28,500 US troops are stationed in the ROK, a legacy of the Korean War, which ended in 1953 in an armistice that left the neighbors technically still at war.

At a Senate hearing on Thursday, Trump’s nominee to be ambassador to the ROK, retired Admiral Harry Harris, backed the idea of a “pause” in major military exercises. He said his understanding was that any suspension would involve only major military exercises and that regular training of US forces in the ROK would continue, although final decisions were up to the Department of Defense.

The US-ROK exercise calendar hits a high point every year with the Foal Eagle and Max Thunder drills, which both wrapped up last month.

The next major drill, Ulchi Freedom Guardian, is planned for the end of the summer.

Last year, 17,500 US and more than 50,000 ROK troops participated in the Ulchi Freedom Guardian drills, although the exercise is mostly focused on computerized simulations rather than live field exercises that use weapons, tanks or aircraft.