Free Republic

Leaders of South Korea and the United States have delayed Seoul’s scheduled takeover of wartime operational control of its troops to Dec. 1, 2015, pushing back the transfer date three years and seven months. The decision was made at a meeting between Presidents Lee Myung-bak and Barack Obama before the Group of 20 financial summit here on Saturday. The two leaders also discussed security issues and North Korea’s recent provocation, government officials said. When the 1950-53 Korean War began, South Korea handed over peacetime and wartime operational control of its soldiers to the U.S.-led United Nations Command, after which the...

South Korean President Lee Myung-bak and his American counterpart Barack Obama announced a three-year delay in Washington's transfer of wartime operational control (OPCON) to Seoul, citing the volatile atmosphere on the Korean Peninsula with North Korea's continued military provocations, most recently a deadly naval attack on a warship. The leaders also agreed to make concrete efforts to revive their long-stalled free trade agreement talks, as Obama set November as the deadline for completing necessary discussions. Obama began the summit with Lee with a show of his resolve to make North Korea pay a price for sinking a South Korean warship,...

Charles Reeder remembers the backlash after the ‘Highway 56 Incident’ in 2002, when a couple of US soldiers driving an armoured vehicle accidentally crushed two South Korean schoolgirls, yet were found not-guilty of negligent homicide by a US military court. ‘It rocked the whole USFK,’ says Reeder, 42, a recent retiree from the United States Forces Korea, who was stationed in downtown Seoul at the time. ‘It was painful…We were out there on the gates, and it was like a siege mentality.’ South Korean activists broke into a US facility in the northern part of the capital, he recalls, and...

Top U.S. military commanders said Friday that they are ready to transfer the wartime command control of South Korean troops to Seoul as scheduled in 2012, but left open the possibility of a delay if governments agree. "To the extent that the government would question that, I think then it becomes a government to government decision between the United States and the Republic of Korea," Adm. Robert Willard, commander of the U.S. Pacific Command, told a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing. "This is a government of Korea decision, or certainly OPCON transition will be considered by the government of Korea...