The Pentagon said Monday night that it has suspended all planning for a major military exercise with South Korea that had been set for August, making good on a pledge from the president last week to suspend “war games” with Seoul.
“We will be stopping the war games, which will save us a tremendous amount of money, unless and until we see the future negotiation is not going along like it should,” President Donald Trump said last week after a summit meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. “We’ll be saving a tremendous amount of money. Plus, I think it’s very provocative.”
The Pentagon said that the suspension of the long-standing August exercise, called Ulchi Freedom Guardian, would not affect Pacific exercises outside the Korean Peninsula. The suspension was made “in concert with South Korea,” per a release.
Spokeswoman Dana White added that no decisions have been made on other joint exercises, the most significant of which usually occur in spring. “We are still coordinating additional actions,” she said. “No decisions on subsequent war games have been made.”
Defense Secretary Mattis, Secretary of State Pompeo, and National Security Adviser John Bolton will be meeting about the matter later this week, the Pentagon added.
Trump’s comments last week triggered questions about which exercises would be called off and under what conditions, as well as concerns about hurting military readiness. The administration has clarified that only “war games” would be suspended and not ”readiness training and training exchanges.”
“Vice President Pence has personally assured me that regular readiness and training exercises will continue,” Colorado senator Cory Gardner said Monday at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, later adding, “They may not like the use of the word exercises, but there will be a level of exercises, it sounds like, that will continue. But it was a point that I said needed clarification, and it probably still does.”
In 2017, Ulchi Freedom Guardian spanned 11 days and featured thousands of troops. Bruce Bennett, a senior defense analyst at the RAND Corporation, said that the annual August exercise familiarizes newly arrived U.S. personnel with the war plan for the theater and their role in it. It features computer simulations that occur in a bunker.
“They use a computer simulation to walk through parts of the war plan, so that they can see what might happen in fighting North Korea,” he said. “Each of the organizations within the headquarters sends their people to play the role they would play in an actual conflict. And they make decisions, and the computer adjudicates the results of that.”
The U.S. and South Korea also conduct Key Resolve and Foal Eagle drills, which includes field exercises. The two often take place in spring on the heels of Pyongyang’s winter military exercises. “A major part of the spring exercise is practicing the deployment of U.S. troops to Korea,” Bennett said. “This is a matter of actually getting personnel to arrive in Korea, pick up equipment they would use if they were getting ready to go to combat.”
Thomas Spoehr, a three-decade Army vet and director of the Heritage Foundation’s Center for National Defense, wrote last week that the annual exercises ensure force readiness.
“The large joint exercises ensure that U.S. and South Korean forces, as well as select allied forces who are part of the United Nations Command, are able to work seamlessly together to defend South Korea from attack,” he wrote. “These are necessary to ensure the interoperability and integration of operations.”
Some lawmakers have strongly criticized the president’s decision to suspend “war games,” not least because he described the exercises as “provocative,” echoing a long-standing criticism from North Korea. The U.S. has stressed that the exercises are defensive, and the Pentagon in its statement Monday described the August exercise as a “defensive war game.”
Arizona senator John McCain said Friday that suspending exercises is a “mistake.”
“Making unnecessary and unreciprocated concessions is not in our interests—and it is a bad negotiating tactic,” he said in a statement. “Parroting Chinese and North Korean propaganda by saying joint exercises are ‘provocative’ undermines our security and alliances.”
Gardner noted Monday that the president has said he would suspend, not cancel, the joint exercises and that it is possible they will have resumed by August. But he also expressed a preference for continuing training with the South.
“The cost in a decrease in readiness, the cost in sort-of losing the muscle memory of what that preparedness looks like, would greatly outweigh any kind of a cost of an exercise,” he said. “We have training programs all the time, readiness exchanges, whatever you want to call them, all the time, around the globe, and we should continue.”
Trump also said last week that he hopes to eventually bring home the more than 25,000 U.S. service members in South Korea. Gardner on Monday said that “removing any U.S. troops from the Korean peninsula in the near future would be a profound mistake.”
