U.S. increases airpower in East Asia

[K.Snyder]

By ROBERT BURNS, AP Military Writer

Wed Oct 11, 4:22 AM ET



WASHINGTON - Much of the United States' ground combat might is tied up in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the U.S. is reducing its infantry forces in South Korea.

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But American air and sea power in east Asia, a key to almost any imaginable military conflict with North Korea, has grown in numbers and reach.

So on balance it appears the United States has sufficient forces for the more likely military missions to be required in a Korea crisis — perhaps some form of sea and air blockade, officials and analysts say.

If North Korea lashed out by launching a surprise attack on South Korea, the United States would face hard decisions on multiple war fronts. Soldiers and Marines getting ready to rotate into Iraq would have to be diverted to Korea, requiring the troops in Iraq to stay much longer than planned.

These issues arise as the U.N. Security Council considers imposing tougher sanctions on North Korea in response to its announced nuclear test.

Rep. Ike Skelton (news, bio, voting record), D-Mo., a close observer of military issues, said in an interview Tuesday that he worries that should a major military crisis erupt in North Korea, the Army and Marines would be over-stretched.

Skelton said the Army has only two fully ready combat brigades available — one in Germany, the other in Kuwait. The rest are either in Iraq or Afghanistan, are getting ready to deploy there, or have just returned.

The U.S. military has about 140,000 troops in Iraq and about 20,000 in Afghanistan, mainly soldiers and Marines.

One Army combat brigade is based in South Korea as part of a U.S. force numbering 28,000. That force has been pared down from 32,500 over the past few years and is scheduled to drop to 25,000 by 2008.

There are about 50,000 U.S. troops in Japan; of those, about 8,000 Marines are scheduled to move from Okinawa to Guam.

Michael Green, senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a private research group, said in an interview Tuesday that short of a total collapse of North Korea, the U.S. military has what it needs to handle the problem.

"The South Korean ground forces are strong enough to handle and deter a North Korean attack on the ground," said Green, who was senior director for Asia on President Bush's National Security Council. "What they need is help with air forces and naval forces, and that is not what we're using in Iraq right now."

He sees no shortage of U.S. air and naval power.

Skelton agrees that "we're in pretty good shape" in terms of air and naval forces available for Korean duty. He added that he does not see an immediate need to send more U.S. ground troops to South Korea.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and others argue that even with smaller numbers of U.S. ground troops in South Korea, recent technological advances and improvements in the South Korean army have actually increased the overall level of military power facing North Korea.

The U.S. Air Force has a range of fighter planes, surveillance aircraft and support planes at two major bases in South Korea — Osan and Kunsan — and at three bases in Japan, including Kadena air base on Okinawa. It also has begun in recent years to rotate continuously a fleet of long-range bombers to Anderson Air Force Base on the Pacific island of Guam, well within range of any target on the Korean peninsula.

There are six B-52 bombers on Guam, where B-2 stealth bombers recently did a rotation.

The Air Force also has begun basing C-17 long-range transport planes in Hawaii. As part of a broader strategy for focusing more on Asia, the Navy is considering shifting one of its aircraft carriers from the Atlantic region to the Pacific, possibly to Guam or Hawaii. The Navy has added two Los Angeles-class attack submarines to its forces on Guam.

The Navy also is installing missile-tracking radar and interceptor missiles on 18 Pacific Fleet ships.

Next week Rumsfeld is scheduled to meet at the Pentagon with his South Korean counterpart to discuss progress in reducing U.S. forces in South Korea, consolidating the remaining troops on fewer bases farther from the North Korean border, and shifting more command authority to the South Korean government.

The Pentagon wants to restore wartime control of South Korean forces to the Seoul government as early as 2009, but the South Koreans say they need more time, at least until 2012, to create a new command structure.

Since the end of the Korean War in July 1953, a U.S. commander has had wartime command of South Korean troops. In the proposed arrangement, U.S. troops in Korea would remain under U.S. command.

[K.Snyder]

N. Korea has finally gotten what they have been seeking for sometime now, at the expense of American intervention in Iraq in my opinion.

[LilacDragon]

My husband and I had a very brief conversation about this the other day.

If the President should feel the need to start pulling National Guard and Reserve troops to send into S. Korea - he will be looking for a unit going to Iraq to go with.

Sorry - we went into Korea once before and it was a long, drawn out waste of American troops. Way too many lives lost for nothing.

[K.Snyder]

LilacDragon wrote: My husband and I had a very brief conversation about this the other day.

If the President should feel the need to start pulling National Guard and Reserve troops to send into S. Korea - he will be looking for a unit going to Iraq to go with.

Sorry - we went into Korea once before and it was a long, drawn out waste of American troops. Way too many lives lost for nothing.


You have to wonder if the "domino effect" would have been worse if the United states didn't emphasize its disapproval.

[LilacDragon]

Because it wasn't part of the dinner conversation at the Bush table when the older Bush pulled our troop out of the Gulf the first time we went.

[Nomad]

Why not sell a nuclear submarine to Japan to level out the playing field ?

[Cardsfan]

flopstock wrote: Could someone explain to me why we went into iraq on a suspicion of WMD.. and yet we are not bombing the crap out of a place with confirmed WMD?



Just curious here in the cornfields


Because Seoul is well within conventional artillery range of NK and they make no secret about that fact. We could easily take out all nuke sites in NK in the blink of an eye but they would instantly level Seoul and result in the deaths of its 10+ million residents. Not to mention Japan being bombarded with Tap Doe IRBMs at the same time.

The majority of the US puplic doesn't understand that the Korean war never ended. It is just a long ceasefire. That is it. The US troops that go there for 1-2 years aren't in paradise. They live a hard life for that tour because the threat of NK rolling over the DMZ is always there and very real.

The only reason they haven't yet is because of the swaths of landmines spread across the DMZ.

In the desert there was no fear of retaliation against anyone other than US troops and Iran and possibly Israel and who gives a **** about Iran really?