Trump casts a long shadow over South Korea-US drills

South Korea and the United States have agreed to halve the duration of the annual Ulchi Freedom Shield exercise at Washington's request, Seoul's Joint Chiefs of Staff announced Wednesday.

The allies decided to end this year's UFS exercise on Friday, shortening the drill to Aug. 17-21 from the originally planned Aug. 17-27 schedule, according to the JCS.

The exercise kicked off Monday as initially planned.

This is the first time a major combined exercise has been abruptly adjusted after getting underway.

The adjustment comes after US President Donald Trump said Sunday that he had ordered the Pentagon to reduce joint military exercises with South Korea, citing what he described as his good relationship with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.

The shortened schedule is expected to eliminate the latter phase of the exercise, which North Korea has long criticized as a rehearsal for an invasion.

UFS is typically conducted in two phases, with the first focused on defending South Korea against a simulated attack and the second on counteroffensive operations.

“The second phase, which focuses on counteroffensive operations, will not be conducted under the shortened schedule,” a military official in Seoul said.

The allies have also agreed to scale back some combined field training exercises conducted in conjunction with UFS, although the details are still under discussion, the JCS said.

The allies had originally planned to conduct computer-simulated command post training and field maneuvers involving about 18,000 South Korean troops to strengthen their combined defense posture against potential contingencies on the Korean Peninsula.

The South Korea-US Combined Forces Command is currently conducting the command post portion of the exercise from two wartime command posts, CP Tango and Camp Humphreys, according to the South Korean military.

The reduction comes as Trump seeks to revive diplomacy with Pyongyang. Trump has suggested that Kim has responded to his overtures, although he has not disclosed details of any exchanges.

Trump is also seeking a face-to-face meeting with Kim this year, according to reports, with a possible encounter around the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Shenzhen, China, in November.

Such a meeting would mark the first face-to-face encounter between Trump and Kim in more than seven years.

The two leaders last met on June 30, 2019, at the inter-Korean border village of Panmunjom, where Trump briefly crossed the Military Demarcation Line into North Korea. The meeting followed their summits in Singapore in June 2018 and Hanoi in February 2019.

South Korean Foreign Minister Cho Hyun said neither Seoul nor Washington had advance knowledge of Trump’s decision to order the exercise be scaled back.

“Neither our government nor US government officials were aware of what was revealed in Trump’s Truth Social post, so we had not received any prior notification,” Cho told the National Assembly’s Foreign Affairs and Unification Committee when asked when Seoul learned of the decision.

Cho said the South Korean defense minister had been in close contact with the US side since Trump’s post. He added that he did not believe the eventual decision to shorten the exercise had been made unilaterally, although the Foreign and Defense ministries had not held detailed consultations.

Pyongyang, for its part, is responding to the joint exercise in the usual manner, threatening military action while remaining silent on Trump's comments.

In a commentary carried by the Korean Central News Agency on Wednesday, North Korea described in detail the scale and content of the UFS exercise and claimed the drills were going beyond routine military training.

“The enemies’ war exercises are not simply following a process of review and rehearsal,” the commentary said, arguing that new doctrines and methods derived from recent conflicts were being continually incorporated into exercise scenarios.

Pyongyang also highlighted the participation of US reinforcement forces from outside the Korean Peninsula as well as troops from member states of the United Nations Command, accusing the allies of turning South Korea into a gathering point for “multinational forces of aggression” and a testing ground for modern warfare.

It further claimed that the scope of the drills had expanded beyond land, sea and air operations to include space, cyber and psychological and information warfare, with advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence and uncrewed systems also being incorporated.

North Korea warned that it would respond with what it described as “evolved new power” to increasingly sophisticated military threats.

“Our exercise of the right to self-defense to thoroughly neutralize the enemies’ military threats will be expressed in even more explicit actions until attempts to upset the balance of power in Northeast Asia and the wider Asia-Pacific region are completely abandoned,” the commentary said.