Big changes planned for Pacific military forces
By Richard Halloran
Special to The Advertiser
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is planning a sweeping revision of the command apparatus through which American military forces are controlled in Asia to make them more responsive to contingencies from the Korean Peninsula to Australia.
Military officers who spoke on condition of anonymity said the revision would take place primarily in South Korea and Japan but would affect deployments throughout the Pacific Command's area of responsibility that runs from the West Coast across the Pacific and Indian oceans to East Africa.
From its headquarters overlooking Pearl Harbor, Pacific Command controls 300,000 military people and is the largest combatant command of the U.S. armed forces.
Among the command elements that will most likely be dismantled in South Korea are the United Nations Command (UNC), United States Forces Korea (USFK), the Combined Forces Command (CFC), and the Eighth U.S. Army.
In Japan, United States Forces Japan (USFJ) will disappear but a new operational corps headquarters led by a lieutenant general would be set up. In addition, the position of the four-star general who commands the UNC, USFK, and CFC will be abolished. At the same time, plans call for establishing a new billet for an Army four-star general at the headquarters of the U.S. Army Pacific at Fort Shafter. He would take control of Army forces in the Pacific region now under the command of a lieutenant general.
In response to a query, the spokesman for the Honolulu-based Pacific Command, Capt. John Singley of the Navy, said: "The Pacific Command is currently reviewing plans to strengthen our defense posture as part of a larger U.S. government global effort in that regard. We are currently consulting with our allies and partners in the region and will continue to do so before any decisions are made.
"Some of these plans are near term," he said. "Others are further in the future. The aim of the global posture review is to strengthen our defense relationships with key allies and partners, improve flexibility, enable action regionally and globally, exploit advantages in rapid power projection, and focus on overall capabilities instead of numbers."
Officers informed of the shakeup, who asked not to be identified because the review is still in progress and no final decisions have been made, pointed to Rumsfeld's wider plan to "transform" the Pentagon and the armed forces.
The undersecretary of defense for policy, Douglas J. Feith, told an audience in Washington, D.C., in December: "A key facet of transformation is realigning our global defense posture; that is, updating the types, locations, numbers and capabilities of our military forces and the nature of our alliances."
In Asia, the officers said, the plan appears to seek elimination of crisscrossing chains of command that are legacies of World War II, the occupation of Japan, the Korean War, the war in Vietnam, and the Cold War that ended in 1989 with the collapse of the Soviet Union.
By removing layers of the cumbersome military bureaucracy, they suggested, troops, ships and aircraft would be able to respond more quickly to a crisis on order from the president and secretary of defense.
In addition, the revisions are intended to appeal to South Korean nationalism and to tamp down rising anti-Americanism. The United States and South Korea have already announced that the U.S. headquarters will move from a congested area in Seoul to a new site about 75 miles south. The 2nd Infantry Division will move from the heavily populated area north of Seoul to new bases further south.
Disbanding the Combined Forces Command is intended to lessen Korean complaints that it diminishes Korean sovereignty. The CFC controls both Korean and U.S. forces but is led by a U.S. general with a Korean general as second in command. Many Koreans have argued that it is their country and they furnish the bulk of the forces, and therefore a Korean should command.
It might also take away a North Korean charge that South Korean forces are lackeys of the Americans.
Disbanding the United Nations Command, Feith said, "will undoubtedly be part of the whole discussion that we have regarding the realignment of our posture in Korea."
The UNC was established in 1950 to provide a flag under which forces of nearly 20 nations fought to repel the North Korean invasion; a small headquarters may be retained for political appearances.
The corps headquarters in Japan will likely take operational control of the 2nd Division and other Army combat formations in South Korea to meld them into one operational force. The United States has 37,000 troops in South Korea, about 17,000 of them in the 2nd Division. Its mission will focus less on the defense of South Korea and more on deploying to meet threats elsewhere in Asia.
The new corps commander, most likely to be posted at Camp Zama, southwest of Tokyo, will be on a level with the Navy's 7th Fleet commander, whose flagship's home port is Yokosuka, south of Tokyo, and with the 5th Air Force, with headquarters at Yokota Air Base west of Tokyo. Thus U.S. forward operational commands will be bunched for better coordination.
In most Asian nations, Japan being an exception, the army as an institution is politically and economically powerful. That gives the American commander in the Pacific region a political-military portfolio in his job description.
Asian counterparts, many of whom are sensitive to protocol and want to be seen as equals, will more easily receive a visiting American general with four stars on his shoulders — or the four-star Navy admiral who heads Pacific Command — than a lieutenant general with three stars.
Richard Halloran writes regularly on Asian issues for The Advertiser.
