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The reasons given for South Korea‘s recent agreement with the US to indefinitely postpone the transfer of wartime operational control (OPCON) are being called “too convenient” and “arbitrary” by military and North Korea experts.

Some experts are even saying the rationale was deliberately concocted to bolster the pre-determined goal of postponing the OPCON transfer.

The biggest problem is Washington and Seoul’s exclusive focus on military deterrence against the North Korean nuclear and missile threats, without exploring diplomatic options, experts said.

The South Korean military‘s ability respond to North Korean nuclear weapons and missiles was one of the OPCON transfer conditions mentioned by the two countries at their Security Consultative Meeting (SCM) on Oct. 23. Following the agreement, discussions on the transfer are effectively postponed until South Korea has put in place its kill chain and Korean Air and Missile Defense (KAMD) system, with a target date in the mid-2020s.

But experts agreed the idea of the kill chain and KAMD system being enough to neutralize the North Korean nuclear and missile threat is faulty.

“North Korea is just going to produce more nuclear weapons and missiles to ensure secondary and tertiary strike capabilities, and beef up their mobility while working on more sophisticated means of concealment,” predicted Handong University professor Kim Joon-hyung.

“Also, the kill chain and the KAMD system would be useless against North Korea’s main means of striking - long-range artillery, short-range missiles, and multiple rocket launchers - which can‘t be intercepted,” Kim added.

Experts said it was especially contradictory for South Korea and the US to respond to North Korea’s nuclear advancements by postponing the OPCON transfer without addressing the diplomatic failures that allowed them to happen in the first place. Instead, they advised a fundamental solution incorporating efforts to solve the nuclear issue by improving ties with Pyongyang or resuming the six-party talks.

A second problem is the use of North Korean conventional weapon threat assessments as a condition for the transfer. According to this reasoning, a transfer would only be possible once South Korea has the conventional weaponry to overwhelm North Korea.

But the exclusive reliance on a military defense against the threat, without any game plan for normalizing ties with Pyongyang, could not only fail to diminish the threat, but make relations even worse.

"They’re talking about leaving the Cold War behind, but they’re stuck in a Cold War frame. They talk about how unification would be a ‘jackpot,’ but they’re paying too great a cost for division,” said Kim Joon-hyung.

“It perfectly illustrates the way the Park Geun-hye administration only looks at Korean Peninsula issues through the lens of security,” Kim added.

A third problem is the reference to the transfer taking place when “the security situation on the Korean Peninsula and in the region is conducive to a stable OPCON transition.” The inclusion of “in the region” in addition to “on the Korean Peninsula” could be too broad.

A senior Ministry of National Defense official said on condition of anonymity that the situation “in the region” referred to “a 90% reliance on maritime routes for South Korean trade in the event of a regional conflict.”

“If connecting routes in the South China Sea or East China Sea get caught up in an armed conflict, that would pose a serious threat,” the official explained.

But the ministry has yet to produce a convincing argument for why the OPCON issue, as a response to the North Korean threat, should also be tied to the general Northeast Asian environment.

Some critics charge that the overreach in tying OPCON to regional issues is a way of leveraging the North Korea threat to justify building a stronger alliance with the US and Japan. By this reasoning, the logic behind postponing the transfer has been deliberately crafted to expand the South Korea-US alliance at a time when the US-Japan alliance is also growing in scope.

“Tying OPCON to structural issues in Northeast Asia could end up turning into a structural factor that only makes an actual transfer more unlikely,” said Kim Chang-soo, director of research at the Korea National Strategy Institute.

“If that happens, we’ll never see a transfer,” he predicted.

Another concern is that an additional postponement of the transfer, rather than just being an emotional issue of “giving up military sovereignty,” could end up leaving Seoul without a say in negotiations with its neighbors. As the date of the transfer becomes more and more uncertain, North Korea, Japan, and China could lose any reason for holding in-depth discussions with Seoul on military concerns. Evidence for this includes the discussion on placing a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system in South Korea, which the US is conducting directly with China.

By Yi Yong-in, staff reporter

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