U.S. Plans to Cut Troops in S. Korea by a Third

The Pentagon said Monday that it planned to withdraw a third of the 37,000 troops stationed in South Korea, auguring the biggest change to the U.S. military presence in the nation in three decades.

The plan to pull out 12,500 troops by the end of 2005 will force the South to shoulder more responsibility for defending itself against any aggression by North Korea, U.S. defense officials said.

A U.S. delegation in Seoul, led by Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Lawless, told South Koreans the troop reduction would not affect U.S. defense capabilities in the region. Defense officials said the Pentagon’s operational plan for the defense of South Korea has long relied more on advanced air and naval capabilities than on ground troops.

The U.S. troop reduction would include about 3,600 soldiers from the 2nd Brigade of the Army’s 2nd Infantry Division already earmarked for redeployment this summer from the Korean demilitarized zone to Iraq, Lawless said. The Pentagon is still working out which other units would move. In a statement, Lawless said consultations were continuing with South Korea.

Defense officials acknowledged privately that freeing up thousands of troops in South Korea could provide some much needed flexibility for a military straining to meet its commitments in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere around the globe.

“We don’t have a troop to waste,” said one senior defense official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “We don’t want to be anchored in any one place. We want to be able to move to where we need to get to.”

The move is part of a sweeping plan by the Pentagon to reposition U.S. forces around the world to be closer to areas it considers unstable while cutting the U.S. presence in Cold War-era strongholds such as Germany.

The plan is also geared to lower the U.S. military’s profile in areas where its presence has provoked resentment and become a troublesome political problem, such as Seoul and the Japanese island of Okinawa.

The majority of the U.S. troops guarding South Korea have traditionally been considered untouchable by the Pentagon for deployment to other trouble spots because of the risk of attack from communist North Korea’s 1.1-million-member military. Under the agreement that has kept U.S. troops in the South since the end of the Korean War in 1953, those forces have maintained a focus on just one contingency: an attack by North Korea.

The last significant troop reduction in South Korea was in 1971, when the number of U.S. soldiers stationed there was cut from 63,000 to 43,000. In 1992, an additional 5,000 troops were pulled out. Monday’s announcement would cut the number to 24,500.

For several years, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has been pushing for more flexibility to deploy troops rapidly to react to conflict around the world. Pentagon officials say that South Korea’s army, with nearly 700,000 well-trained troops, has adequate ground capability for the country’s defense as long as it is backed by advanced U.S. air and naval power.

Pentagon officials have argued that the limited numbers of U.S. ground troops on the Korean peninsula would be little more than a “tripwire” should another conflict break out between the two Koreas, and have said repeatedly that reductions to the troop presence in Korea should be expected.

“This is about psychology,” said Derek Mitchell, former Pentagon special assistant for Asian and Pacific affairs. “It’s not about the 12,000 troops per se because when you look at it in purely military terms, we have the capabilities to do what we need to do. The ground troops largely are symbolic.”

Reducing the number of U.S. troops in South Korea, or at least their visibility, could also serve to remove a major irritant. The troops’ presence has been controversial among South Koreans for years, and the deaths of two girls run over by a U.S. military vehicle two years ago inflamed anti-American sentiment.

Asked last week whether the U.S. planned such a reduction, Rumsfeld told reporters, “We will not weaken the deterrent or the defense capabilities that we have, even though numbers and locations may shift and evolve as technologies advance and as circumstances change.”

News of the cuts appeared to have taken the South Korean government by surprise.

There has been much public fretting in Seoul lately about the psychological impact of U.S. troop reductions on financial markets and the economy and about North Korea’s ongoing development of nuclear weapons.

Kim Sook, the head of the South Korean Foreign Ministry’s North American division, gave no indication of the official South Korean response to the proposal. “That is what the United States presented as their plan, and we are going to discuss it,” Sook said.

South Korean officials quoted in the media in Seoul have said they are pleading with the United States to delay the reduction until 2007.

Among some South Koreans, there is a sense that the U.S. troop cuts are proof of a weakening U.S.-Korean alliance as a result of the left-of-center government of President Roh Moo Hyun.

“There was this binge of populist, nationalist anti-Americanism, and now they are paying the consequences,” said Lee Chung Min, an international relations specialist at Seoul’s Yonsei University and a frequent critic of the current South Korean government. He said that South Koreans fear a weakening of their economy similar to the economic downturn caused by the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the Philippines.

“If the U.S. footprint here gets smaller by the day, there could be economic repercussions,” Min said. “One reason that foreign companies have been willing to invest in Korea is because of the strong U.S. alliance.”

Pentagon officials said that working out the details of the withdrawal could take weeks or months.

Among other matters, the South Korean government wants to ensure that $11 billion worth of “enhancements” to U.S. military capabilities on the peninsula will continue to be put in place. Those improvements include the deployment of tactical unmanned aerial vehicles and improved command, control and communications devices.

Schrader reported from Washington and Demick from Seoul.