The Korea Times : US to Dispatch 690,000 Troops to Korea in Crisis

Korean White Papers:

If the Korea Times is to be believed... well, to be honest, I find them a bit hard to believe:

About 690,000 U.S. troops along with 2,000 military aircraft and 160 warships would be mobilized to defend South Korea in the event of a war on the Korean peninsula, according to a document released by the Ministry of National Defense Friday.

The Defense White Paper said the U.S.' contingency plan included the deployment of 70 percent of its Marine Corps. The remaining forces consisted of 50 percent of the U.S. Air Force and 40 percent of the U.S. Navy.

Those are astonishing numbers. But here's some background.

The US is pulling 12,500 servicemen from US Forces Korea, to reassign to other duties. The ROK citizenry has mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, they're glad to see us go; large scale military basings (and even large-scale shore leaves) are always friction points, in Korea as in Okinawa and elsewhere. Welcomed after the ravages of the Japanese occupation, Americans have come to be regarded as a mixed blessing.

On the other hand, just over the border are 700,000 starving DPRK soldiers, backed with 13,500 artillery pieces and probably two to six nukes. Seoul, capital and megacity, is within range of the guns and missiles.

There are three possibilities arising from this story, assuming that it is correctly reporting US information.

1) The US expects to defeat the DPRK without substantial loss of life, but feels it is likely to need 70% of the USMC to stabilize and rebuild the place. In this case, much of the initial fighting would be standoff fire from the USAF/Naval elements, with the Marines advancing to engage the enemy once it was already substantially degraded.

2) The US believes the DPRK could effectively force a Marine engagement with their lines before those lines could be substantially degraded, perhaps by bringing Seoul under fire at a level our political culture couldn't tolerate. If the Marines had to fight against dug-in DPRK positions, in the face of guns and unknowable nuclear power, very severe loss rates are possible.

3) The US is bluffing, and expects never to have to put up the 690,000 troops. The DPRK military suffers from a combination of logistical poverty and the inability to advance off static lines of defense without creating massive vunerability. Thus, it is safe to reassure the ROK populace about our troop drawdown by promising massive reinforcements if there is an attack, while also giving the DPRK official notice that an attack would be doomed to failure.

If I had to, I'd bet on position 3 being the true one. If I were correct about that, it explains what is otherwise a little baffling -- why the US would permit its contingency plans to be described in detail by the ROK Defense Ministry. It is not otherwise clear either why the US DOD would permit its plan to be made public, nor why it would have the ROK DM do it instead of releasing the plans themselves. If the white paper is an information operation, however, it becomes clear: the release is permitted because we want the enemy to know this information; and ROK DM is doing it rather than DOD because US information operations must take pains to target foreign rather than domestic audiences. A statement by Rumsfeld would draw US eyes; this paper may not draw so many.

Hat tip: China E-Lobby.