On August 19, the armed forces of the Republic of Korea and the United States began conducting joint exercises (Ulchi Freedom Shield), aimed at “strengthening joint defence capability in the face of growing threats from North Korea, as well as checking the interaction of troops in war conditions”.
What will the exercises bring, and in which atmosphere did they commence?
According to the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the Armed Forces of the Republic of Korea, the programme of the exercises, which will last until August 29, includes command and staff manoeuvres based on computer modelling, field exercises and 4-day civil defence exercises, the participants of which will practice repelling threats from North Korean missiles, GPS jamming and cyberattacks. Moreover, for the first time, this exercise will involve a scenario simulating a nuclear attack by North Korea. According to North Korean data, the programme includes both the “capture of Pyongyang” and “decapitation operations”.
The scale of the exercises will be similar to last year’s and about 19 thousand South Korean servicemen will take part in them. However, the number of elements of manoeuvres, such as amphibious landings and live firing exercises, has been increased from 38 to 48. The number of exercises at the brigade level will also increase from 4 to 17. In addition to South Korean and US troops, representatives of UN Command member countries will also take part in the exercises.
As part of the manoeuvres, the South Korean Strategic Command, which is planned to be established in the second half of the year, will also be checked.
All in all, it’s not so bad. After all, repelling a nuclear attack was excluded from the exercise programme.
Is the president awaiting provocations?
The exercises began in an atmosphere of alarmist excitement, voiced personally by the President of Republic of Korea (ROK). On August 19, at a cabinet meeting, President of ROK Yoon Suk Yeol said that as the situation in Ukraine and the Middle East shows that war can flare up at any moment and ROK is already facing “the most reckless and irrational provocations in the world” from DPRK.
Yoon then repeated the idea that modern military conflicts have changed and moved into a hybrid form that combines regular and irregular warfare, cyber operations, psychological warfare, the struggle for public opinion and the spread of fakes.
On August 21, during a visit to the Ground Operations Command in Yenin, Yoon Suk Yeol familiarised himself with the course of the exercises and repeated that “the North Korean regime is the most irrational group on the planet, and it can stage a provocation at any moment”. He called on the South Korean Armed Forces to maintain a constant high level of combat readiness, stressing the importance of joint exercises that make it possible to test the state’s readiness to resist aggression.
Shortly before the start of the exercises, Admiral Kim Myung-soo, Chairman of the ROK Joint Staff, ordered troops to take immediate retaliatory measures in case of any provocations, saying that the North would probably use the exercises as a pretext for provocation.
Pyongyang’s reaction
North Korea, of course, condemned ROK and the US, calling Ulchi Freedom Shield “the most offensive and provocative exercises in preparation for aggression against the North”. As noted in the statement of the Institute for American Studies of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the DPRK, published on August 18 by the KCNA agency under the heading “To bolster up self-defensive power for defending security environment of Korean peninsula and region is urgent requirement of times”, seeking one’s own security at the expense of the security interests of other countries is a typical US tactic. It emphasised that the UN Command member countries are taking part in the exercises, making them “the largest military exercises in the Asia-Pacific region” and “a multinational offensive demonstration of force in which NATO members take part”.
The defensive nature of the exercises, which are part of the confrontational policy against the DPRK, is also being exposed, and general statistics are mentioned. In 2023, the number of US nuclear submarines around the Korean Peninsula increased to 7 times more than in 2022 and the number of fighter and bomber sorties increased by 4 times. Nuclear aircraft carriers constantly enter the ports of the Republic of Korea and F-16 fighters, which were stationed at the Kunsan air base, were transferred to the Osan air base near Seoul to form the so-called ‘super-powerful air squadron’ near the southern border of DPRK. They also recalled the RIMPAC exercises, which began in 1971 against the former USSR, but did not disappear with the end of the Cold War between the USSR and the United States, and were in 2024 held on the largest scale in history with the participation of 40 ships, 3 submarines, over 150 aircraft and 25,000 military personnel from 29 countries. Unusually, the Steadfast Defender exercises, which took place near the Russian border (also on the largest scale since the end of the Cold War), involved more than 90,000 military personnel, more than 50 ships, including an aircraft carrier, over 80 fighters and 1,100 combat vehicles.
Accordingly, Pyongyang “will continue to make every effort to build up powerful defence capabilities to protect state sovereignty, security and territorial integrity”.
Ulchi Freedom Shield – only part of the process
If earlier inter-Korean tension seemed to come and go in waves and the peaks of its aggravation fell on the spring and summer-autumn exercises of the US and ROK, now the density of allied military preparations has increased so that Ulchi Freedom Shield does not stand out as before. This is supported by the actions of the US and ROK during the summer of 2024.
So, in May of this year, joint exercises of the US Air Force and ROK were held, involving two US F-22 fighter jets and two South Korean F-35As; large-scale Soaring Eagle manoeuvres, in which over 60 different aircraft took part; annual command and staff exercises with elements of ‘Taegeuk’ computer simulation; complex ground exercises to prevent enemy infiltration attempts and provocations; exercises with live firing of air-to-air missiles over the Yellow Sea with the participation of more than 90 aircraft. For the first time in seven years, a US B-1B strategic bomber took part in the exercises, during which JDAM (Joint Direct Attack Munition) bombs were dropped at a training ground in South Korea.
In June 2024, South Korean and US troops began joint river crossing exercises, large-scale tactical outdoor exercises (FTX) were conducted, during which countering the penetration of enemy forces into the coastal zone was practiced. This month also saw the first joint exercises of the ROK Coast Guard, the US and Japan in the Sea of Japan, joint air exercises with live firing and joint exercises on logistics. About 2,000 military personnel from two countries and about 500 pieces of equipment took part in them. Regular exercises with live firing from MLRS ‘Chunmoo’ and joint air exercises with the participation of the latest fifth-generation fighters were conducted. At the end of July, the US, South Korea and Japan held the first joint trilateral exercise ‘Freedom Edge’, designed to increase interoperability and interaction between the armed forces of the respective countries.
June 25: ROK President Yoon Suk Yeol visited the US nuclear aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt, which arrived in the port of Busan the day before to participate in the trilateral South Korean-US-Japanese Freedom Edge exercises. Yoon Suk Yeol noted that the arrival of the US aircraft carrier is part of the “expanded deterrence” measures and stressed the importance of expanding trilateral cooperation between Seoul, Washington and Tokyo in the field of security. This is the third time that a president of South Korea has boarded a US aircraft carrier, after Park Chung Hee in 1974 and Kim Young-sam in 1994.
In August, the ROK Armed Forces and the US conducted joint live-fire exercises at a training ground 30km south of the inter-Korean border and large-scale joint exercises to respond to massive enemy strikes. Special forces units of the Republic of Korea have completed exercises around Anmyeon Island, 123km southwest of Seoul.
Summa summarum
According to the author, such large-scale exercises are always perceived by everyone as preparation for war, especially when it involves the border area. Firstly, large-scale exercises are not a kind of pressure on the North Korean military infrastructure, requiring additional measures to maintain combat readiness. Secondly, not only North Korean, but also Russian experts admit a scenario in which some kind of provocation may occur during the exercises, after which the exercises cease to be such. That is why every large-scale exercise raises the degree of tension.
Hopefully, the exercises will take place without any provocations. A new reality is emerging on the Korean peninsula, within which such a scale of military preparations becomes a permanent element of inter-Korean tension.
Konstantin ASMOLOV, Candidate of Historical Sciences, leading researcher at the Centre for Korean studies, Institute of China and Contemporary Asia of the RAS, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”
