hankyoreh

South Chungcheong Province

By Park Byong-su and Ha Eo-young, staff reporters

Minister of National Defense Kim Kwan-jin said South Korea was “obviously” not going to take part in the US missile defense system and would only be pursuing its own Korean Air and Missile Defense (KAMD) system.

Speaking with the press on Oct. 16, Kim said the US system was “not right for us in terms of suitability and need considering the Korean Peninsula’s short range, or the astronomical cost, which is likely to be in the trillions of won [billions of US dollars].”

“Nor do I think the public will agree to it,” he added.

Analysts said Kim appeared to have called the previously unscheduled press meeting in a hurried effort to silence questions about whether the government was planning to join the US program, which arose after a parliamentary audit of the ministry by the National Assembly National Defense Committee on Oct. 14.

On Oct. 15, the ministry sent out a press release repudiating as “completely untrue” press reports that South Korea was trading participation in the US system for a postponement of the transfer of wartime operational control (OPCON).

Kim also denied the tradeoff, saying there had “never been any requests whatsoever from the US with regard to the missile defense system.”

“Our missile defense system is for intercepting North Korean missiles, and its goals, scope, and capabilities are different from those of the US system, which is fundamentally aimed at defending the US mainland,” he said.

Kim also responded to US Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel’s Oct. 2 remarks that the South Korea and US defense systems required “interoperability.”

“It means that we get information from the US on North Korean missile detection, identification, and trajectories, and it’s very useful because they’re providing us with equipment we don’t have,” he explained.

“Calling that ‘joining the US missile defense system’ is a leap of logic,” he added.

Kim went on to say that South Korea had “no need” for the SM-3 high altitude interceptor missile because “ours is low-tier defense.” He added that the military was not yet considering the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) interception system.

“Instead, we’re looking at upgrading our Patriot missile interception system from a PAC-2 to a PAC-3 and developing the [long-range] L-SAM surface-to-air missile by 2022 and the [medium-range] M-SAM surface-to-air missile by 2020,” he said.

“So we would have multi-layered defense, with different types of missiles covering our low-altitude defense,” he added.

Discussing the delay in the selection of a next-generation fight (F-X), Kim said a delay of about one year until the F-X became operational was “inevitable.”

“We intend to work as quickly as possible over the next year to minimize the gap in our firepower,” he said.

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