South Korea and the US kicked off major combined military drills Monday to bolster their joint readiness posture amid heightened tensions from North Korea's missile tests and hardening rhetoric against the allies, Yonhap News Agency reported.
The annual Ulchi Freedom Shield exercise, based on an all-out war scenario, began its 11-day run of various contingency drills, such as the computer simulation-based command post exercise, the report said.
Some 30 allied field-training events are scheduled to take place during the exercise period, according to South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS). This year's exercise is known to include scenarios to train troops to swiftly transition into wartime, as well as to respond to false information possibly spread by Pyongyang during wartime or a contingency.
Aside from South Korean and US participants, personnel from nine member countries of the UN Command will join the exercise. The countries are Australia, Canada, France, Britain, Greece, Italy, New Zealand, the Philippines and Thailand, the US Forces Korea said. The UN Command is a key enforcer of the armistice that halted the fighting in the 1950-53 Korean War.
Meanwhile, the South Korean military is strengthening its readiness posture against possible military activities by Pyongyang during the exercise period, such as missile launches. Seoul's spy agency said Thursday that the North is preparing various provocations in time for the combined drills, such as an intercontinental ballistic missile launch.
The joint exercise also got under way as Pyongyang's state media reported Monday that the country's leader Kim Jong-un oversaw cruise missile tests from a warship. Kim visited the Navy flotilla tasked with defending the east coast and watched the seamen on a patrol ship stage a launching drill of "strategic" cruise missiles, the Korean Central News Agency said, without disclosing the date of his visit.
Kim vowed to strengthen the North's navy to make it an "all-round and powerful" service group with improved combat efficiency and modern means of surface and underwater offensive and defensive capabilities, it said.
Source: Kuwait News Agency