With prospects of war in Korea escalating in recent weeks, the Pentagon is scrambling with contingency plans for how to respond to all scenarios there while still engaged in Afghanistan and Iraq, analysts said. South Korea’s new defense minister, Kim Kwan-jin, said Friday, “in case of further provocations, we will definitely strike North Korea by air” in a full-scale attack using F-15s and F-16s.
President Lee Myung-bak, who was widely criticized by his own parliament for not retaliating against North Korea after the attack last week on Yeonpyeong, said last week that if another attack occurs, North Korea will “pay a dear price without fail.”
Negotiations are under way to resolve the crisis. If they fail, “this could be the war that dominates the Obama administration, making Afghanistan and Iraq look minor,” said Michael O’Hanlon, director of foreign policy research at the Brookings Institution, a nonprofit think tank in D.C.
The key player in those negotiations is China, North Korea’s lone ally and the region’s growing power. China’s limited response to the sinking of South Korea’s Navy ship Cheonan in March — which killed 46 South Korean seamen — gave the North Korean regime the impetus to escalate strikes against South Korea, O’Hanlon said.
Lt. Col. Mark Ballesteros, Pentagon spokesman, said defense officials are “consulting with our partners in the region, including China, on the way forward.”
He added that “the defense department continually plans for various scenarios,” but has no immediate plans to increase the force of 28,000 U.S. troops in South Korea.
The escalation of tensions on the Korean Peninsula comes at a time when the United States is not only engaged in Iraq and Afghanistan, but looking for ways to trim the military.
Proposed defense cuts by the Obama administration’s deficit commission are based on the assumption that the U.S. will not face a major conventional war, critics said. And the panel’s recommendation to cut $5 billion from the missile defense budget will leave the U.S. vulnerable to North Korea, Iran and other enemies, said James Carafano, senior defense analyst with the Heritage Foundation.
The proposed cuts “would send the military back to 1973,” he said. “Defending U.S. interests in parts of the world would fall off the table. For starters, there is no way the U.S. could sustain in any credible way its commitments to NATO, the Middle East and Israel, and South Korea and Asia at the same time.”
Cutting ground forces would mean units on their fifth and sixth tours of combat duty will get no relief in Afghanistan, experts said.
Complicating matters is America’s tense relationship with China. Among the more than 250,000 top secret U.S. diplomatic cables released Sunday by WikiLeaks were documents showing U.S. frustration at China for turning a blind eye to North Korean shipments of ballistic missiles to Iran.
But China is aware that the U.S. military is in a precarious state. Retired Army Special Forces Maj. Gen. Timothy Haake said the U.S. military “has already been stretched thin due to Afghanistan and Iraq, with Korea it would be an insurmountable task. If we are dragged into a third war, the administration would be left with limited options.”
