SEOUL, South Korea -- The United States has moved to ease jitters among conservative South Koreans by agreeing to delay the return of wartime control of the South Korean military to Seoul until its forces are better prepared to deter North Korea's nuclear and missile threats or fight it in a war.
The delay, agreed to Thursday at the Pentagon, means that the main U.S. military command will stay in Yongsan, central Seoul, for the time being. The U.S. military's presence in the heart of Seoul, the South Korean capital, has become increasingly an eyesore, especially among younger South Koreans.
The U.S. military had been scheduled to vacate 653 acres of prime real estate in Yongsan by 2016, relocating most of its personnel there to a new base being built south of Seoul. If the main command post stays on, it will reduce significantly the size of land to be vacated, complicating the city's plan to build a badly needed municipal park in Yongsan.
"We must deal with this issue in a realistic and coolheaded manner, considering national security," Min Kyung-wook, the spokesman for President Park Geun-hye, said Friday.
Min's comment came as the political opposition denounced Park for breaking her election promise to retake wartime control by 2015.
The U.S. assumed operational control of South Korea's military in 1950 after it rushed U.S. troops to the Korean Peninsula during the Korean War. It returned peacetime control to Seoul in 1994, but it was still obligated to command combined U.S.-South Korean forces in the event of war. That pledge has been a central fixture of the U.S.-South Korean military alliance, but many South Koreans, especially the postwar generations, began seeing it as a slight to their national pride.
At Seoul's request, the United States agreed in 2007 to return that power to the South by 2012. The plan was for the South Korean military to build its capabilities to play a lead role in the country's defense. But the date was pushed back to 2015 after the South accused North Korea of torpedoing a South Korean warship in 2010 and fears of military conflict rose. Conservative South Koreans demanded that Seoul ask the United States for another delay as a sense of vulnerability increased after the North's successful launching of a long-range rocket in late 2012 and its third nuclear test in February last year.
Park, reversing her campaign pledge, formally asked U.S. President Barack Obama during a summit meeting in April to consider another delay.
After months of negotiations, the United States accepted South Korea's request during the annual Security Consultative Meeting at the Pentagon on Thursday. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and Han Min-koo, the South Korean defense minister, agreed to put in effect Seoul's proposal for a "conditions-based approach" to transferring control "to ensure the combined defense posture remains strong and seamless."
Rather than setting a new target date for the transfer, the allies will now "focus on South Korea achieving critical defensive capabilities against an intensifying North Korean threat," according to statements from both sides. The allies will negotiate details of the new transfer plan by next fall, they said.
But South Korean officials said they now expected the transfer to take place in the mid-2020s, by which time the South hopes to build an ability to detect and destroy any move by the North to launch its nuclear weapons or missiles, as well as its vast arrays of front-line artillery and rocket batteries.
Until then, they said, the U.S. military will also keep its 210th Field Artillery Brigade in Camp Casey in Dongducheon, north of Seoul. The brigade's M270A1 Multiple Launch Rocket Systems are crucial to countering the North Korean rockets, which are amassed near the border, keeping Seoul within their range.
The new delay triggered strong criticism from the political opposition in the South, which has been arguing that the transition was long overdue and that another postponement would only increase tensions on the peninsula by making North Korea more intent on building its weapons systems, including missile and nuclear capabilities.
"President Park, as commander in chief of the nation's armed forces, must apologize to the people for this wretched reality of giving up the country's military sovereignty," the New Politics Alliance for Democracy, the country's main opposition party, said in a statement.
The Korean Peninsula remains technically in a state of war after the Korean War was halted in 1953 in a truce but without a peace treaty.
A Section on 10/25/2014