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Helicopters on standby at the US Army garrison Camp Humphreys in Pyeongtaek

Following the news that South Korea and the US will be halting their joint Key Resolve and Foal Eagle exercises that they’ve held every March, reports surfaced on Mar. 6 that the two countries will also be ending their Ulchi-Freedom Guardian joint exercise, which was scheduled for August, and replacing it with exercises under different names. The components of the Ulchi-Freedom Guardian exercise will be divided into the Ulchi Taegeuk exercise, led by the South Korean government and military, and a South Korea-US command-post exercise that has yet to be named.

Ulchi Taegeuk will combine the Ulchi exercise, a crisis management drill run by the South Korean government, and the Taegeuk exercise, an independent command-post exercise run by the South Korean military. The first exercise will reportedly be held at the end of May. After the first North Korea-US summit was held in Singapore on June 12, 2018, the South Korean government announced it had decided to “postpone this year’s Ulchi exercise and develop a new model in connection with the Taegeuk exercise in line with various security conditions that have come into play recently and with the plan to postpone joint military exercises with the US.”

The Ulchi-Freedom Guardian exercise began in 1976 with the combination of the Ulchi exercise and the Focus Lens exercise, which had been organized by the UN Command since 1954. It was known as Ulchi-Focus Lens until 2018, when the name was changed to Ulchi-Freedom Guardian.

“The agreement to make changes to the Ulchi-Freedom Guardian exercises was made during a telephone call between the top defense officials of South Korea and the US on Mar. 2,” said an official at South Korea’s Ministry of National Defense.

The South Korea-US joint command-post drill that had been carried out during the Ulchi-Freedom Guardian exercise will be replaced with an exercise under a new name. It will reportedly either be called “19-2 Dongmaeng,” to match the Key Resolve exercise, which will now be called “19-1 Dongmaeng,” or will be given a different English name. These exercises are likely to be held in tandem with the initial operational capability (IOC) assessment that South Korea and the US are supposed to carry out this year in order to verify the conditions for the handover of wartime operational control, or OPCON, of the South Korean military.

By Yoo Kang-moon, senior staff writer

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