A few days ago, the United States and South Korea launched this year’s rendition of joint military exercises that began in 1955 when the artillery was still cooling from the recently paused war against North Korea and China.
Often the drills have been massive engagements designed to test the responses and coordination needed to stave off a renewed invasion by our ally’s deranged northern neighbor and its unhinged dictator Kim Jong Un. At other times, usually for political or diplomatic reasons, the exercises have been scaled back.
That’s the case with the current Operation Ulchi Freedom, which began what was initially scheduled to be an 11-day run on Aug. 17 and now will end instead on Friday.
For its part, the Defense Department has insisted that even though some aspects of the planned drills had been canceled or switched from live field operations to simulations, “these adjustments preserve essential readiness and training objectives. There will be no degradation to U.S. training objectives.”
As reported by National Review and many another outlet, President Trump ordered a significant reduction of this year’s operation, in the magazine’s words, “citing what he said was a good relationship with Kim and South Korea’s refusal to support him over Iran.”
Both alleged reasons are, of course, nonsensical. There is no such thing as a good relationship with an erratic lunatic like Kim Jong Un, who is fully capable of ordering his own brother assassinated at a public airport or that high-ranking officials be blown to bits by anti-aircraft guns for the dozing off at meetings.
And as to supporting the war with Iran, a conflict in which the world’s greatest military power remains mired in a humiliating naval standoff against a vastly weaker adversary, the situation evokes memories of childhood in which an errant preteen tries to excuse doing something immensely stupid by whining, “but all my friends were doing it too,” and the parent responds with a variation of, “If all your friends jumped off a cliff, would you follow them?”
Even so, despite the dubious reasons attributed to the Trump Administration for curtailing them, scaling back this year’s exercises could very well be exactly the proper move, given the current flux of military operations and strategies worldwide.
To understand why, one need only look back to another joint military exercise, one held just a week or so ago, that pitted an elite U.S. tank battalion against a team of Ukrainian drone operators. As reported by the Wall Street Journal, the contest was over almost before it began, with their drones knocking out our tanks so quickly that the tanks had to be recycled as “new” replacement units just to keep the exercise going beyond the first few minutes.
That circles back to the underlying rationale for allies to conduct joint training exercises. As has been demonstrated most recently in Ukraine, battlefield success is impossible without coordination among a military’s various branches, including not just its fighters but its supporting units. Everyone needs to be on the same page about who’s doing what and when.
That essential coordination becomes exponentially harder between allies who not only have their own independent command and organizational structures, but who don’t even speak the same language. Frequent joint drills between allied militaries are the traditional answer, so that should a need arise, everyone knows that if the enemy tries “this,” we and our allies respond with “that,” whatever “this” and “that” might be.
But what if nobody has the slightest idea what the “this” might be? Drones have rendered the wave-of-tanks offensive that had been military doctrine since World War II as obsolete as a charge by mounted knights. The whole idea of exercises like Operation Ulchi Freedom is to prepare against … well, what? We don’t know. Nobody does.
At the moment the only thing that’s certain is that large-scale joint operations cost a lot of money that might be put to better use elsewhere. The attributed reasons might be dubious, but limiting the current joint exercises with South Korea still makes sense.
This article originally published at Editorial: President Trump’s South Korea policy is sensible.