New commander, old wiring: Korea’s untested OPCON certification

Résumé détaillé

This article first appeared on Pacific Forum and is republished here with kind permission. Read the original here. For two days in August, as part of the Ulchi Freedom Shield…

This article first appeared on Pacific Forum and is republished here with kind permission. Read the original here.

For two days in August, as part of the Ulchi Freedom Shield exercise which opened at reduced scale and closed six days early, the US-Republic of Korea alliance tested whether the Republic of Korea Armed Forces could command the combined force.

In the end, the American four-star retained command for both days. ROK command of the combined defense on the Korean Peninsula is the first gap under the certification the US and ROK defense ministers will need to take up at the next Security Consultative Meeting.

That meeting, normally held in the fall, has slipped to early 2027, officially over scheduling, with the two ministers meeting in Washington in December ahead of it. The second gap is physical: the network the future headquarters will operate through. It is being rebuilt, and the rebuild is not expected to finish until at least 2029, well after the projected date for transferring operational control to the ROK.

The third concerns cyber operations. Across 14 years of alliance documents on cyber cooperation, not one formalizes that cooperation with language authorizing how the future combined force would command and control those operations. In the public record at least, the Combined Forces Command (CFC) a South Korean general would inherit has no cyber chain of command at all.

These gaps are consequential. The certification process is supposed to determine not only whether the ROK possesses the military capabilities required to lead the combined defense on the Korean Peninsula, but also whether the future combined headquarters can perform its wartime missions under the command arrangements that will exist after transition.

In 2014, the allies abandoned the 2015 transfer target date and agreed instead to a conditions-based approach. The following year, they adopted the Conditions-based Operational Control Transition Plan.

The logic was straightforward…

In 2018…

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