Power, Interest, and Identity in Military Alliances

Power, I nterest, And Identity I n M ilitary Alliances

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Power, I nterest, And Identity I n M ilitary Alliances

Jae-Jung Suh

POWER, INTEREST, AND IDENTITY IN MILITARY ALLIANCES

© Jae-Jung Suh, 2007 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS. Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978-1-4039-7928-5 ISBN-10: 1-4039-7928-6 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Macmillan India Ltd. First edition: July 2007 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

Table of Contents

List of Tables

viii

List of Figures

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

List of Abbreviations

xiv

1 Power, Interest, and Identity in International Politics: The Military Alliance between the United States and Republic of Korea Three Ways of Looking at Alliances Institutional Persistence Power, Interest, and Identity in Alliance Politics Asset Specificity Social Identity Institutionalization Conclusion

1 4 8 12 13 16 21 23

2 Power and Alliance: Assessing Military Balance in Korea Conventional Force Balance in Korea Force-to-Force Ratios in the Theater Force-to-Force Ratios by Sectors Blitzkrieg? Dynamic Analysis Movement of a Battle Front Battles between Tanks Airpower and C3I Special Forces and Countermeasures Is the Alliance Maintenance a Puzzle? Power and Alliance

29 30 32 37 41 42 44 45 49 54 62

3

63 64 67 72

Interests and Alliance Persistence Equipment and Alliance Trend in Weapons Transfer Korea’s Weapons Production

vi

Ta b l e o f C o n t e n ts

Processes and Alliance Development of Institutional Integration Homogeneity in Military Doctrine Human Assets and Alliance Team Specificity Communication Specificity Locations and Alliance Assets Specific to Alliance 4

Alliance and Identity Alliance and Korea ’s Identity “Americans’R Us” North Korea as the Other Institutional Framework of Identity Preservation Alliance and U.S. Identity North Korea as the Other Institutional Framework of Identity Preservation Alliance and Identity

5

End of the Cold War, Beginning of Alliance Persistence Asset Specificities and Alliance Persistence Asset Specificities and Alliance Constituency Alliance Constituency, Security Costs, and Alliance Persistence Silent Consensus The End of the Cold War and the Persistence of Identity North Korea as a “Missile Threat” North Korea as a “Nuclear Threat” North Korea as a “Time Bomb” North Korea as the “Other” Alliance as Usual Interest, Identity, and Alliance Persistence

6

The Past and Future of Alliances: Institutionalization in World Politics Power, Interest, Identity, and Alliance Persistence Relationships between Institutional and Identity Frameworks Dialogue between Rationalist and Reflexivist Approaches to IR Theory of Institutional Persistence Cold War Alliances and Asset Specificity Social Identity and Homogenization

86 86 91 95 95 98 101 104 109 111 111 117 122 125 125 130 134 137 138 138 144 149 153 153 158 161 164 165 171 175 177 178 183 187 187 190

Ta b l e o f C o n t e n ts

Domestic Politics, Transnational Coalitions, and International Institutions The U.S.-Korea Alliance in the Twenty-First Century The U.S.-Korea Alliance Crisis at the Turn of the Century? The Future of the U.S.-Korea Alliance

vii

193 196 196 198

Appendices Appendix A. Adaptive Dynamic Model Simulations Appendix B. Hypothetical Armored Battle in a Breakthrough Sector Appendix C. Airpower’s Contribution to Ground War Appendix D. Military Effectiveness of North Korea’s Missiles

207 207

Notes

231

Index

279

211 221 225

List of Tables

2.1 Force Balance by “Bean Count” 2.2 Force Balance in WEI/ WUV 2.3 Force-to-Force Ratios 2.4 Air vs. Air Defense 3.1 Weapons Imports 3.2 Offset Trades with Various Countries (1983–1992) 3.3 Domestic Content of Korea-Produced Weapons 3.4 Major Defense Contractors’ Sales 3.5 Major Weapons Systems Korea Produces 3.6 Korea’s Ordnance and Ammunition Production 3.7 USFK Bases and Facilities 6.1 Major IR Theories’ Expectations versus U.S.-Korea Alliance Behavior 6.2 Congruence between Theoretical Expectation and Empirical Evidence C.1 Number of Aircraft Needed to Stop North’s Exploitation C.2 South Korea’s Aircraft Available for Ground Interdiction D.1 Number of Scud-Bs Needed to Destroy a Command Center D.2 Number of Scud-Bs with Chemical Warhead Needed to Slow Down Command Center Reaction D.3 Number of Scud-Bs Needed to Cut an Airbase Runway

33 36 40 47 70 71 78 80 81 82 102 178 179 222 223 227 227 228

Li st of Figu res

1.1 1.2 2.1 A.1 A.2 A.3 A.4 B.1 B.2 B.3 B.4 B.5

Specific and Nonspecific Security Costs in Arms and Alliance Causal Arrows of the Institutionalization Theory of Alliance Persistence North and South Korea’s Military Expenditures Simulation Results with Exchange Ratio of 2:1 and Force Ratio of 1.4:1 Simulation Results with Exchange Ratio of 2:1 and Force Ratio of 1.6:1 Simulation Results with Exchange Ratio of 1.75:1 and Force Ratio of 1.4:1 Simulation Results with Exchange Ratio of 1.75:1 and Force Ratio of 1.6:1 Homogeneous Force Battle South Korea’s Superior Tanks North Korea Reinforces at 1 tu The North Attacks the South in Defense North Korea Reinforces While Attacking

15 22 34 208 208 209 209 212 215 215 217 218

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Ack nowledgments

This book is the product of several years of research and writing, throughout which I have become indebted to a number of people. I am most grateful to Professor Ian Lustick, for his intellectual stimulation, emotional encouragement, and professional support. The ideas for the book grew out of his wonderful courses and were nourished by his guidance. I am also indebted to Professors Avery Goldstein, Chong-Sik Lee, and John Ikenberry, for their confidence, advice, and support. My initial work for the dissertation and research trips to Korea were supported by a Dissertation Proposal Development Grant from the Workshop on Problematics of States and Identities, Ford Foundation, and by a Research Travel Grant from the Association for Asian Studies. The bulk of my research and writing was supported by the Y. H. Park Fellowship for Korean Studies and by the SSRC-MacArthur Foundation Fellowship for Peace and Security in a Changing World. I have done most of the revision in the intellectually stimulating yet collegial environment of the Department of Government at Cornell University. I know I cannot thank enough my colleagues there, particularly Peter Katzenstein and Matt Evangelista, for their seemingly boundless generosity, which I shamelessly took advantage of many, many times. I had the fortune of being supported by the Fulbright-Hays fellowship to spend a year, 2003/04, in Korea, when the country was going through a politically exciting time. Professor Paik Yo˘ngso˘ and Dean Kim Yongdeok provided an office and resources at Yonsei University and Seoul National University during the final revision and updating process. I gratefully acknowledge their assistance. Earlier drafts of various chapters were carefully read by many, including Victor Cha, Dave Kang, participants of the Asian Security workshop, and graduate students at Cornell. I prepared an earlier draft of Chapter 2 in the felicitous environment of the Security Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). I am grateful to Professors George Lewis, Ted Postol, and Barry Posen for providing that opportunity and also to Professors Bruce Cumings, Michael O’Hanlon, and Edward Olsen for their comments on the

xii

Ac k n ow l e d g m e n ts

chapter. My work in Chapter 4 benefited from my stay at the University of California, Irvine. I appreciate the opportunity and assistance given to me there by Professor Chung-Moo Choi. Chapter 6 dramatically improved as a result of extensive comments by Peter Katzenstein and Matt Evangelista, to whom I am deeply indebted. I also benefited from participating in the Summer Workshop on Analysis of Military Operations and Strategy, to whose organizers, Professors Dick Betts and Stephen Rosen, I give my thanks. Professors Paik Hak-Soon, Moon Chung-In, Kim Eun-Mee, and Nam Chang-Hee and Messrs. Kim Hyo˘n-Su and Kim Ch’ang-Su facilitated my research by arranging interviews with people whom I could not otherwise have met and by providing access to materials that I could not otherwise have seen. I am also indebted to many friends, in Korea and the United States, who welcomed me and helped me conduct research in archives and libraries in different parts ˘ n-Hu˘i, Kim Kyo˘ng-Hu˘i, of the world. They include Ma To-Won, Yu U Cho˘ng Yong-Uk, the Reverend Ki-Yul Chung, Chung-Ok Lee, Hyuk-Kyo Suh, and Professor Kyung-Hyun Kim. I thank Toby Wahl at Palgrave Macmillan for taking an early interest in the book and Kristy Lilas and Smitha Manoj for making my task much easier than I had every reason to expect. In preparing the final manuscript, I relied on the unfailing and efficient help of Sarah Tarrow and Chris Cecot. I am eternally grateful to Siwoo Lee for letting one of his poignant yet hopeful photos grace the book’s cover. It is to Chong-Ae and Joon that I give my deepest thanks for their perseverance throughout my seemingly endless work on institutional persistence. Note on Transliteration The transliteration of Korean terms and personal or place names follows the McCune-Reischauer convention except in well-known cases (Seoul, Rhee Syngman, or Kim Il-Sung). Korean names are written with the surname first, followed by the given name (Hwang So˘k-Yo˘ng). Names of Korean authors who have published their works in English are listed following each author’s preferred transliteration. Copyright Acknowledgment An earlier version of Chapter 2 appeared under the title, “Blit zkrieg or Sitzkrieg? Assessing a Second Korean War,” Pacifica Review 11, no. 2 (1999): 151–176.

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Portions of Chapter 5 appeared under the title, “Bound to Last? The U.S.-Korea Alliance and Analytical Eclecticism,” in Rethinking Security in East Asia: Identity, Power and Efficiency, ed. J.J. Suh, Peter Katzenstein, and Allen Carlson (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), pp. 131–171. Cover photo is reprinted by permission of Siwoo Lee.

Li st of Abbreviations

ACC ADD ADE ADPA AFKN C3I CAS CDIP CEP CFA CFC CINC CODA DCS DEA DLP DMZ DPRK DTIC ESDI EU EUSA FEBA FIP FMS FOFA GDLS IAEA IMET JCG JUSMAG-K KAL KATUSA KDIA

Air Component Command Agency for Defense Development Armored Division Equivalent American Defense Preparedness Association American Forces Korea Network Command, Control, Communications, and Intelligence close air support Combined Defense Improvement Project Circular Error Probable Combined Field Army Combined Forces Command commander in chief Combined Delegated Authority Direct Commercial Sales Data Exchange Agreement Democratic Labor Party Demilitarized Zone Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) Defense Technology Industry Cooperation European Security and Defence Identity European Union Eighth United States Army forward edge of the battle area Force Improvement Plan Foreign Military Sales Follow-On-Forces-Attack General Dynamics Land Systems International Atomic Energy Agency International Military Education Training Joint Coordinating Group Joint U.S. Military Assistance Group-Korea Korean Air Lines Korean Augmentation to the U.S. Army Korea Defense Industry Association

L i s t o f A b b r e v i at i o n s

KEDO KFP KIDA KIFV KTX LPP MAP MCM MIR MND NATO NCC NCMA NDI NKPA NPT NSL OPLAN POL RMA ROC ROK ROKA ROKIT RSOI SAM SCM SOFA TDP UN UNC USFK USMG WEU WMD WUV

xv

Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization Korea’s Fighter Program Korea Institute for Defense Analyses Korea Infantry Fighting Vehicle Korean Trainer, Experimental Land Partnership Program Military Assistance Program Military Committee Meeting Ministry of Industry and Resources Ministry of National Defense North Atlantic Treaty Organization Naval Component Command National Command and Military Authorities National Defense Institute North Korean People’s Army (North Korean Military) Non-Proliferation Treaty National Security Law Operation Plan petroleum, oil, and lubricants Revolution in Military Affairs required operating capabilities Republic of Korea (South Korea) Republic of Korea Army ROK indigenous tank reception, staging, onward movement, and integration surface-to-air missile Security Consultative Meeting Status of Forces Agreement technical data package United Nations United Nations Command United States Forces in Korea United States Military Government weighted effectiveness index weapons of mass destruction weighted unit value

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Chapter 1

Power, I nterest, and Identity i n I nter national Politics : The M ilitary Alliance between the United States and R epu blic of Korea

T

he twenty-first century has witnessed the unprecedented endurance of international alliances. Not only have many of the present-day military alliances—such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the U.S.-Japan, U.S.-Korea, and U.S.-Australia alliances—existed for over half a century, but they are also redefining their purposes and missions. The phenomenon of alliance persistence, defined as the maintenance of the alliance past the point of its original purpose, necessarily threatens academic and political explanations of alliance formation, maintenance, and dissolution: despite changes in the circumstances that gave rise to them, these alliances persist, thus calling into question both the internal consistency of the alliance’s conceptual structure and the historical consistency of that structure over the alliance’s lifespan. The seemingly contradictory behavior of alliance persistence exhausts the explanatory resources of current academic paradigms in American international relations (IR). As such, it also suggests that the phenomenon is a particularly compelling unit of analysis for the conceptual structure of institutions in general, which has of late received much scholarly attention. Of the enduring alliances, the U.S.-Korea alliance seems to stand almost alone as an alliance that has not lost its justification in threat.

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Power, Interest, and Identity in Military Alliances

Although the global and regional threat of communism has dissipated, the local threat, North Korea, continues, wielding its mighty arms to endanger South Korea’s security and, indeed, its very survival. North Korea remains one of the most militarized countries in the world, with over a million military personnel—at least 12 percent of the male population. Its military is commonly thought to consume as much as 25 percent of the national budget. Recently Kim Jong-Il, who runs the country as chairman of the all-powerful National Defense Council, made the “military-first policy” the supreme guiding principle for his rule. Not only is North Korea highly militarized, but it maintains a threatening posture, with two-thirds of its ground forces and a significant amount of logistical support concentrated in the forward area between Pyongyang and the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), ready to strike with little warning. It therefore seems hardly surprising, according to the conventional wisdom, that South Korea and the United States remain allied out of necessity and caution. Such a rendering of the U.S.-Korea alliance, commonplace as it may be, is incomplete and incorrect. At the start of the 1990s, when global, regional, and local changes coalesced to strengthen South Korea’s security, Seoul and Washington began to downgrade, if not terminate, the alliance. As the South’s position continued to improve, however, Seoul and Washington reversed their policy and ended up strengthening the alliance by the end of the 1990s. The conventional caricature of the constancy of North Korea’s threat and the corresponding persistence of the alliance completely misses the variation in threat and the reversal of alliance policy. The threats that Seoul faced decreased a great deal in the 1990s. At the global level, the end of the Cold War eliminated the larger security context in which the alliance had been created and maintained. In Northeast Asia, Moscow and Beijing started a process of rapprochement with Seoul, recognizing its sovereignty, opening diplomatic relationships, and expanding their intercourse with it, while taking steps to distance themselves from Pyongyang. Through the end of the 1980s the regional power contest had remained an essential component of strategic balance on the Korean Peninsula, but in the 1990s the Russia-China factor became less worrisome for Seoul as Moscow and Beijing began to value maintaining the status quo more than supporting their erstwhile ally’s efforts to alter the balance in the peninsula.1 Soon, the local balance of power on the Korean Peninsula also began to radically shift in favor of the South as North Korea’s military capability plummeted, not only relative to South Korea’s but also in

Power, Interest, and Identity in International Politics

3

absolute terms.2 With the collapse of the communist bloc economy, the North’s economy—which had relied on trade within the bloc for some essential goods, particularly petroleum, at a “friendship rate” from the Soviets and China—started to tailspin out of control, resulting in massive starvation.3 Economic difficulties, compounded by such natural calamities as the repeated alternation of flood and drought, transformed the North’s military into a corps of engineers that was mobilized more often for construction and farming than for training, much less military operations.4 In the meantime, the South continued its growth spurt, eventually producing an economy that was at least 20 times as big as the North’s.5 The widening wealth gap was also reflected in a corresponding disparity in military spending. In 1991 Seoul spent $7.8 billion on its military, more than three times Pyongyang’s $2 billion; in 10 years Seoul’s defense budget grew to $10 billion, almost eight times as much as Pyongyang’s, which shrank to $1.3 billion.6 As changes in material capability favored the South, the North began to behave in a way that made it seem less threatening. Demonstrating an unprecedented level of interest and willingness to engage and cooperate with Seoul and Washington, Pyongyang signed a number of agreements with Seoul, ranging from the Denuclearization Declaration to the Non-aggression Pact and the Basic Agreement, which laid down basic rules of peaceful coexistence and engagement.7 Pyongyang dramatically increased its exchanges of goods and people with the outside world, particularly with the South, while revising its domestic laws to facilitate such exchanges as well as to introduce market measures.8 Also, Pyongyang’s dialogue with Washington resulted in the Agreed Framework in 1994 and culminated in the 2000 Joint Communiqué, which emphasized a commitment to move beyond past enmity and build a new relationship based on amity.9 All the changes on the global, regional, and local levels made the South less threatened and more secure. The good news about the South’s power, however, was not such good news for the alliance, for it meant that the alliance was no longer so essential to the allies’ security. Indeed, such changes began to weaken the alliance in the early 1990s, as power balance theories would expect. The Bush administration withdrew tactical nuclear weapons from the South in 1990 and adopted a three-stage plan to bring American soldiers home and reduce U.S. defense commitments in the following years. Yet the plan—which would, if fully implemented, have significantly downgraded the alliance—was suspended after the first stage and abandoned in 1995, when President Clinton canceled his

4

Power, Interest, and Identity in Military Alliances

predecessor’s decision to reduce the American military presence.10 This policy reversal is particularly puzzling because the process of power shifts that began in the early 1990s continued and even accelerated throughout the decade, leading to a more powerful and secure South by the end of the decade. These favorable changes in material capabilities, combined with Pyongyang’s increasing efforts at engagement, should have resulted in a growing incentive to reduce commitments to the alliance. The process of reduction, begun at the start of the 1990s, should have continued and, perhaps, have reached completion by the end of the decade. Nevertheless, the alliance was more cohesive at the end of the decade than at its beginning.

Three Ways of Looking at Alliances The alliance’s recovery in the face of a declining threat makes it the case study of the complex forces that keep alliances alive much longer than their threats. Of the institutions facing the end of the communist threat, only the U.S.-Korea alliance was the object of a presidential decision that could have led to its termination. Nonetheless, as the global and regional balance moved to further strengthen the South’s position and effectively undermined the basis of the partnership, the alliance finished the decade stronger than it started. To reverse President Bush’s decisions, the U.S.-Korea alliance—unlike others that continued without having to reverse such a decision—had to mobilize resources outside the local and regional power distribution that had traditionally justified its existence. The U.S.-Korea alliance in the 1990s is not just another case of alliance endurance; it is a monument to the institutional forces that protect an alliance faced with a declining threat. Explaining the alliance’s persistence in terms of existing ideas about how international relations work is no easy task. But the case is “analytically strategic”11 in that it offers a real opportunity to rethink the core assumption of each of the existing IR theories. The survival of the U.S.-Korea alliance, rather than being an oddity, is a deviant case that is not adequately understood within each of the existing IR theories and that challenges us to rethink some of its core assumptions. It offers a rich opportunity to deepen and refine our understanding of how the world works. First, the central case of the study occupies an analytically important position for realism, for its existence creates a critical problem for realism’s sustainability. In the realist world of “defensive positionality,” an

Power, Interest, and Identity in International Politics

5

international institution may be established and maintained by states as a tool to maximize their relative gains, but it is expected to rise and fall according to power shifts in such a way as to restore the balance among the states.12 When an alliance is allowed to “stick,” it is because it is seen to be contributing—or at the minimum, neutral—to power balancing and the security of states. Institutions are simply one of the tools with which states secure survival. Nations might allow institutional persistence in areas such as international finance, environment, wildlife, or telecommunication, none of which directly or immediately affects state survival. In the international security area, however, states are expected to strenuously resist institutional persistence when it diverges from national security interest. According to the realist view, of all international institutions, military alliances are least likely to take on a life of their own and develop independently of the dictates of power distribution. Hence a case that deviates from realist expectations merits close scrutiny, if only to emphasize its haphazardness or uniqueness. If the deviant case were found to have a causality that is ordinary, however, that causal explanation would represent a significant modification of realism. Indeed, the Korean case challenges most variants of realism. The persistence of the U.S.-Korea alliance defies the neorealist prediction that a change in power distribution will be followed by a change in balancing behavior. Nor does the alliance’s persistence follow the prediction of the threat-balance theory that a decline in material power, combined with the signing of a nonaggression pact and other pacific public statements, should reduce threat perception and, thus, weaken the defensive alliance formed to balance the threat.13 The case also challenges modified realism of the kind that Krasner proposes, in which institutions or identities have a role to play in international politics only to the extent that they are tools of power or an intervening variable.14 The Korean case opens the possibility that while institutions or identities may have been established in response to specific power distributions, they can subsequently achieve a status independent of the balance of power. In theoretical language, institution and identity may begin life as intervening or dependent variables driven by power, but they can work as an independent variable that causes changes in institutional behavior. All in all, not only does the case confound the predictions of the realist theories but it also points out the intellectual need to complement the realists’ capability-driven understandings of international politics with an appreciation of institution and identity. Liberal IR theories also face an analytically strategic challenge in the Korean case. Robert Keohane, in his groundbreaking work,

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Power, Interest, and Identity in Military Alliances

argues that international institutions, once they are formed, have a staying power independent of the material condition that gives rise to them.15 According to neoliberal theory, institutions persist because they play a useful role in reducing future uncertainties and increasing efficiency in resolving or mitigating coordination and collective action problems. As Celeste Wallander argues, institutional persistence is explained by the interest that the persisting institution serves.16 At first glance, the U.S.-Korea alliance would seem to confirm the theory. But if it betrays factors or mechanisms that do not fit neoliberal explanation, they would have to be seen as requiring serious complements or modifications to neoliberal theory. The U.S.-Korea alliance persistence does feature characteristics that complicate neoliberal theories in particular and liberal theory in general. Chief among those features is the silent consensus for, and the absence of opposition to, the alliance in the 1990s. Maintaining an institution is not free. In the world of many demands, one would expect competition for scarce resources and limited attention. On the way to institutional persistence, one expects to observe debates, competitions, and even conflicts over attention and resources. In Europe, for example, the end of the Cold War opened a debate about the best institutional arrangement for the future Europe, with a number of institutions competing for resources: NATO, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), the Western European Union (WEU), and the European Security and Defense Identity (ESDI). As Chapter 5 shows, that kind of debate or competition did not occur with respect to the U.S.-Korea alliance in the 1990s. Such behavior confounds most society-based liberal theories, which expect competition, if not conflict, within society.17 The processes of the alliance’s persistence complicate neoliberal explanations—and functional theories in general—which largely overlook the ways in which functional needs are met. In other words, if the phenomenon of alliance persistence presents a challenge to realism, the process of the Korean alliance’s persistence remains a puzzle for liberalism. An answer to the puzzle lies in reexamining the way in which most liberal theories accept identity as a given while treating the origins, persistence, or changes of interests as exogenous events.18 Even where alteration or persistence of an interest is the primary and prior cause of institutional persistence, liberals treat the history of the interest as exogenous to the phenomenon and start instead with the interest they observe at the moment of inquiry. Because neoliberal theorists presume a stabilized state identity with a preexisting preference ordering, all they have to do is to analyze the processes by which

Power, Interest, and Identity in International Politics

7

states calculate costs and benefits of given options and choose the one that maximizes state interests. So long as an institution serves a function useful for the state’s existing interest, it exists, according to this view. Less salient to liberal concerns are such questions as how states develop the interests observed and by what process they evaluate costs and benefits. As a result, liberal theories are less than adept at understanding the ways in which a state’s conception of national security interests is colored by identity or at analyzing the processes by which a society develops a consensual conception of interest that underlies institutional persistence. Finally, the alignment pattern of the U.S.-Korea alliance contradicts identity-based, or social constructivist, theories that explain alliances on the basis of shared identity. Most social constructivists have thus far chosen cases that seem likely to confirm a theoretical expectation that a shared identity leads to common behavior.19 But the United States and South Korea in the 1990s shared few norms and had little basis for a collective identity. They could not be said to share a democratic consultative norm; nor did they share a collective identity as liberal democracies. There was no cultural, religious, or historical commonality that could provide the basis for a collective identity. Furthermore, South Korea was allied with the United States, a stranger who was nationally, culturally, and historically different, against a North Korea that shared language, culture, and history (i.e. a national identity) with the South. Cutting against the identity distribution, the alliance represents a difficult case—a nonstarter for a constructivist analysis. If identity is observed to play a meaningful role in the persistence of the alliance, identity-based theories face a serious problem in explaining how the alliance persistence is related to the particular identity pattern. The inquiry must begin with an examination of the presumption that identity is exogenously given. A state has multiple identities in its repertoire—for example, for NATO members, European identity, liberal democracy, and the West; for Arabic countries, pan-Arabism, sub-Arabic identity (kahliji), and sovereign state identity. Why and how is one particular identity chosen and made salient? This wealth of options leaves identity theories open to criticism by modified realists who argue that the choice of identity is driven by state power.20 The weakness of identity-based theories is fully exposed by the U.S.-Korea case, where the alignment pattern is the very opposite of their expectations. If one is to present an identity-based explanation of the U.S.-Korea alliance, one cannot start with the existent identities but has to examine the sources of shared norms, the origins of identity, and the processes of identity formation.

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Power, Interest, and Identity in Military Alliances

The continuation of the U.S.-Korea alliance in the 1990s, therefore, constitutes a puzzle whose solution will shed light on more general theoretical questions about whether an international institution can outlast its original raison d’être, and if so, why. And an answer must be formulated in a way that challenges explanatory sketches framed within each of the three main American IR theories and that brings into relief the intellectual necessity to move beyond monocausal theories to a theoretical framework that draws on multiple explanations in a systematic way. This book develops, as an answer, a historical institutionalist explanation for alliance persistence/termination that draws on and mediates among realists, neoliberals, and constructivists.

Institutional Persistence The question of institutional persistence in the face of political and economic change is not a new one in IR. In the early 1980s, for example, the purported decline of U.S. hegemony raised questions about the staying power of the international institutions that had been created and sustained mainly, if not single-handedly, by the hegemon, which prompted scholars to identify the factors contributing to their staying power. So too have scholars since the 1960s sought to explain the evolution of European supranational institutions into an increasingly tight economic and political union. The dramatic and far-reaching changes brought on by the end of bipolarity and the Cold War have again brought the issue of institutional persistence to the fore. International institutions last.21 While new institutions are established and old ones die out, many do endure. Difficult to create, they tend to stick around. Despite the sometimes-high cost of their maintenance, many succeed in paying, or having their members pay, the costs. Some institutions refuse to go away long after they have completed their original mission or stopped performing the function that their original creators intended.22 For example, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, originally created in 1951 to provide legal assistance to refugees in Europe for three years, has become a global humanitarian organization; the International Monetary Fund, initially established to help states with their short-term balance-of-payments problems, has grown into an organization that is routinely engaged in sweeping structural interventions in many countries.23 Our general theoretical understanding of institutional persistence suggests that alliances should be much less likely to persist than other international organizations. Conversely, if security institutions take on

Power, Interest, and Identity in International Politics

9

a life of their own, other types of institutions are even more likely to outlast their initial purpose. The state is commonly seen as least likely to let institutional inertia get in the way of formulating and implementing its national security policies. Indeed, the state is as likely to break its international obligations as it is to commit itself to them, depending on its calculation of costs and benefits to its national security. In the issue area of national security, international institutions are expected to rise and fall as a result of states’ rational thinking; they are the least likely of all institutions to take on a life of their own. If selfperpetuating mechanisms are found to make an observable difference in the operation of an international security institution, we are likely to observe more of them, and in a stronger form, in other areas such as international trade or environmental protection. This is a study of a least likely case.24 Broadly, the existence of international institutions is best understood as an outcome of interactions among power, interest, and identity—in effect, an integration of the three schools of IR theory: realism, liberalism, and social constructivism.25 While many scholars have attempted to demonstrate that one trumps the others, a more challenging, and ultimately more rewarding, intellectual enterprise lies in inquiring into the complex ways in which the three negotiate with one another to produce the political phenomena we observe.26 There may be times and issue areas in which one weighs more than the others, but such instances do not so much prove the permanent supremacy of power or interest or identity as they present a particular constellation of the three in which two factors reinforce the third. An international institution’s persistence, for example, may rely on the presence of the hegemon that created it, but it may also be supported by an interest configuration and an identity framework that privilege the institution. An institution is not merely a passive beneficiary of those preferences and abilities. The Korean case shows how such an institution can play an active role in shaping and creating those motivators. Conceived of as a passive entity that relies for its existence on its members’ capabilities, preferences, and identities, an institution can play an active role in affecting the configuration of the preferences and constituting the social framework of identities. To facilitate its daily operations, its members make investments, some of which later render its maintenance cheaper than the creation of an alternative.27 In addition, the process of managing the international institution leads to the emergence of transnational networks of experts who develop a personal stake in the survival of the institution.28 The institution generates a

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Power, Interest, and Identity in Military Alliances

cost structure and a group of actors that privilege it over alternatives. Furthermore, the international institution produces documents, findings, resolutions, and decisions, the cumulative effect of which leads to a discourse delineating the boundary of what constitutes legitimacy and appropriateness in its issue area.29 This boundary serves as an identity framework within which actors make sense of the world, evaluate costs and benefits, and choose their course of action. By doing so, the boundary legitimizes—and in some cases even naturalizes—the existence of the institution. Hence, an international institution is part and parcel of the process of its own existence. At the core of institutional persistence lies the recursive mechanism by which an institution generates an interest configuration and an identity framework that privilege it and at the same time draws strength for its endurance from the very structure of interest and identity it helps create.30 An institution persists not only because it plays a useful function but also because its function is seen to be valuable.31 And its usefulness is enhanced thanks to prior investments and transnational networks; it is seen as valuable because its members, who have come to make sense of the world through a cognitive framework affected by the institution, are inclined to accept it as a legitimate constituent of social reality. An institution tends to generate self-sustaining momentum: it persists thanks to its existence. This book represents an attempt to synthesize rationalist and sociological strands of IR theory, the two paradigms that have in their debates made important contributions to our understanding of international politics but that have in the process parted ways, begun to talk past each other, and even reified the boundary between themselves. Divided, they will continue to generate valuable insights. Yet, synthesized, the two can generate new analytical dividends. One such dividend lies in shedding light on the different ways in which logics of appropriateness and consequences complement as well as compete with each other to produce observable political behavior.32 A better understanding of their interaction forms a basis for constructing “complementarity,” wherein the two logics are synthesized into a more complete explanation of a political phenomenon.33 Functionalist explanations—whether they focus on the relative or absolute gains that actors attempt to maximize—shed light on the ways in which capability distribution and preference configuration are correlated with the outcomes that maximize the actors’ utility functions. They are, however, less helpful in making sense of the process by which the utility functions develop their content, a gap

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that sociological theories are better equipped to fill because they shed light on the processes by which the actors develop their utility functions and the cognitive framework within which they evaluate the costs and benefits of their choices. A more complete answer, therefore, requires a two-way bridge between rationalist and sociological paradigms—a bridge that allows one to feed into the other and to incorporate the other’s feedback. Each has important insights to offer on the causes and mechanisms of the institutional life cycle; both are bound in a recursive constitutive and causal mechanism. This book synthesizes insights from the two research traditions by arguing that institutional persistence is best understood as a result of a mutually reinforcing recursive loop between the logics of consequences and appropriateness, which are themselves generated by the institution. This theoretical argument is an outcome of an attempt to answer the book’s central question: Why do international institutions exist and in some cases persist? To construct an answer to this deceivingly simple question, we must first deal with the following set of related questions about the ways in which an international institution interacts with a state. What happens after an institution is established and after a state signs on to it? Do the promises that the state makes to the institution affect its domestic politics? Do international obligations affect the ways in which the state views its roles and duties in the world? Conversely, how do changes, if any, in the domestic power constellations or in a state’s own understanding of its role affect the degree to which the state honors its international commitments? In other words, does the existence of the international institution set off a chain of events that will impinge on its own effectiveness or life span? These are the questions that guide this book’s inquiry. As the following chapters articulate these questions and develop an answer, they focus on the two-way interactions between the international and the domestic without privileging one or the other. The main hypothesis that is developed and tested in the following pages is concerned with the ways in which an international institution generates, as part of its normal operation, two unintended by-products in its member states: an interest configuration that makes it cheaper to maintain the institution than to create a new one, and an identity framework that makes it seem better to hold on to the existing institution than to look for an alternative. The existence of either one of these factors would make the institution more resistant to factors that could, in their absence, weaken or dismantle it. If the interest structure and the identity framework interact with each other in an

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escalating cycle of mutual reinforcement, the institution is most likely to persist, that is, to continue even under circumstances where it has been made superfluous, useless, or even counterproductive. The following chapters investigate whether an international institution engenders interest and identity structures able to generate institutional inertia, and if so, how.

Power, Interest, and Identity in Alliance Politics To explain alliance persistence, we need to understand how a state’s interest configuration and identity constitution affect and are affected by the behavior of military alliances. To develop such an understanding, a three-stage institutionalization theory is developed that views the state as embedded in a triple-layered structure: the power stage, where the state’s choice is a matter of balancing power; the interest stage, where the state’s power politics is mediated by domestic interest constellations; and the identity stage, where the state’s behavior affects, and is affected by, the social constitution of state identities. Because state behavior at any given moment reflects the resultant of forces from the three stages, the institutionalization theory explains a policy outcome in terms of the interactions among variables at the three levels rather than by a single variable that overpowers the others. While state behavior in each of the three stages—if they can be isolated for analytical purposes—may be explained by one of the three theoretical perspectives, realism, liberalism or constructivism, state behavior as a whole is better accounted for when it is seen as an amalgamation of three different kinds of political dynamics. A state’s power behavior, for example, is profoundly affected by an institutionalization of interstate relationships on the interest stage that skews a state’s calculation of costs and benefits, while its consideration of material factors is deeply embedded in the social structure that skews a state’s frame of reference for its calculus.34 The institutionalization theory borrows the concept of asset specificity from institutional economics to argue that the institution of an alliance leads to the establishment of asset specificities, which in time renders the alliance cheaper and smoother running and gives it a first-mover advantage over alternative arrangements.35 It also draws on constructivist theories to detail the constitutive mechanism by which alliance practices constitute actor identity.36 The alliance institutionalizes the allies’ identity as a security enhancer and the adversary’s identity as a threat, which in time orients the allies to more readily accept the alliance

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as a legitimate arrangement than they would otherwise. The theory brings these two different logics to bear upon the states’ power politics so as to account for their alliance’s behavior. Hence, the institutionalization theory represents a systemic synthesis of the theories based, respectively, on power, interest, and identity. Asset Specificity On the level of interest, asset specificity is the key variable that military alliances affect and that influences states’ decision making. Asset specificity as a concept originated in the new economics literature in order to explain the emergence and ultimate form of economic organization. It refers to “durable investments that are undertaken in support of particular transactions, the opportunity cost of which investments is much lower in best alternative uses or by alternative users, should the original transaction be prematurely terminated.”37 For example, suppose that a worker becomes highly skilled over time at an important, company-specific job. Asset specificity refers to the specialized skill that the worker has acquired on the job. Williamson argues that this asset specificity leads to the formation of a firm. It makes the worker more valuable to the employer, but also more dependent, for it would be difficult for the worker to sell his or her company-specific skill to any other companies. Similarly, the employer becomes more dependent on the worker because the market does not present a replacement worker with the same degree of the companyspecific skill at the same wage. As their mutual dependence grows, they develop an incentive to find a way to harmonize and safeguard their relationship, which results in what Williamson calls the “fundamental transformation”: market-based transactions are transformed into bilateral arrangements in which the parties design and adopt a mutually acceptable governance structure. Once the transformation is completed, the parties to the contract enjoy “first-mover advantage” over others when the contract is up for renewal, because the winner of an original contract acquires a cost advantage thanks to relationship-specific assets.38 Williamson’s insight can be applied to military alliances because an alliance relationship, practiced long enough, can generate its own asset specificity: consultation mechanisms, military planning and command structures, common infrastructure, joint exercises, interoperable weapons systems, and integrated forces.39 Some allies, once bound together in an alliance, go through modification processes whereby they adjust to each other and in some cases attempt to integrate their

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respective militaries into a seamless fighting force through joint planning and exercises. These adjustment processes result in a condition in which the size and configuration of their militaries are transformed to be specific to the alliance. The two allies develop a set of specific assets that privilege the alliance over other alternatives at alliance renewal intervals. Alliance asset specificity can bring about a fundamental transformation of the security relationship because the states that are party to the alliance have incentives to adopt a mutually acceptable governance structure to bind each party in a mutually beneficial, longterm relationship. Alliance asset specificity gives the alliance a comparative advantage over other security arrangements because the durable investments make the alliance the more efficient security provider.40 Two caveats are in order. First, a long-term relationship does not automatically create the condition of asset specificity unless the relationship leads to durable investments that are specific to it. If the exchanged goods and their exchange processes are highly standardized or universal, for example, the transactions involving them are not peculiar to the alliance, and asset specificity may not result. Second, the process of alliance persistence is not necessarily monolinear and irreversible. An alliance is likely to develop in time asset specificities that have binding effects on the allies, but the alliance can be terminated before the specificities develop or have any effect. Moreover, political transactions, unlike economic ones, involve struggles among groups and individuals that compete for scarce resources and power over them. The outcome of the competition, about which alliance practices do not remain neutral, determines whether the alliance will stimulate the development of a host of specificities, thus setting it on the path of deeper binding, or create obstacles to its normal operation, thus setting it on the path of early termination. Contrary to the presumption of an apolitical, rationalist model of alliance, alliance formation, maintenance, termination, and persistence involve political conflicts and struggles over power both domestically and internationally.41 The NATO expansion process under way in the mid-1990s illustrates an aspect of the argument that alliance practices create a condition of asset specificity that would make it costly to change sides. One of the central NATO debates concerns the costs of the expansion whose estimates range from $17 billion to well over $100 billion. Although some of the costs are incurred to improve the new members’ militaries—the kind of expenses that would presumably be required to overhaul a dilapidated military regardless of alliance change—a large portion of the costs stems from asset specificity. The

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tasks for enlargement include measures “necessary to foster compatibility, inter-operability, integration and operational effectiveness within NATO”42: for example, building a NATO theater command structure and communication links to East-Central European militaries; rewiring East-Central European aircraft so they can communicate with NATO’s system; promoting technical compatibility to enable the use of common NATO equipment; upgrading East-Central European infrastructure such as pipeline distribution systems; or upgrading road and rail systems to enable reinforcement missions. These measures embody the steps needed to transform the assets specific to the Warsaw Pact into those that are specific to NATO. The NATO expansion, an alliance switch from an East-Central European country’s perspective, involves tremendous costs precisely because of the asset specificities involved. For Poland, for example, it would have been cheaper to remain allied with Russia and continue to use durable investments undertaken to support the pact operations; an alliance switch would render many of these investments useless and incur additional costs to make modifications to suit the new alliance. Precisely for this reason, the NATO expansion process includes the efforts by existing members to infuse money into Poland and other new members to help them defray the costs. Some previous works on alliance implicitly take asset specificity into account when considering alliance operations, even if these works offer little in the way of an explicit theory.43 While a number of scholars explain alliance formation in terms of the lowest cost choice between arms and alliance,44 their economistic model can be misleading in cases where asset specificity is involved. As Figure 1.1 illustrates, arming and alliance both involve a level of durable investment that is specific to the existing balance between the two allies—a durable

Costs nonspecific

specific

Alliance

nonspecific specific Arms

Figure 1.1 Specific and Nonspecific Security Costs in Arms and Alliance.

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Power, Interest, and Identity in Military Alliances

investment, all, or a significant portion, of which will be lost when a different arrangement replaces the existing mix. A state would have to include in its calculations the investments already made that would be lost if an existing alliance were disbanded. An existing alliance has a cost advantage over alternative arrangements and is more likely to be chosen as the option that provides the most security at the lowest cost. Improving upon the previous work, Wallander, in her insightful analysis of NATO enlargement, uses the concept of “institutional assets” to explain NATO’s adaptability after the Cold War.45 In this book, asset specificity is defined as the durable investments that allies undertake to carry out alliance commitments and that would incur higher opportunity cost than best alternative uses if the alliance should be prematurely terminated. For the purpose of analyzing alliance relations, alliance specificity can be classified into four types: equipment, process, human asset, and location specificities. The general logic is tested in the specific context of the U.S.-Korea alliance in Chapter 3, and NATO, the U.S.-Iran, and the SovietEgypt alliances in Chapter 6. Social Identity Although the preceding section used Williamson’s new economic institutionalism as its starting point, his theory by itself has three shortcomings. First, it is asociological, as its critics point out. Despite the many works that demonstrate pitfalls of such an asociological stance,46 it pays little attention to the extent to which institutions are “socially embedded.” Second, it is apolitical. It fails to recognize that institutions are not just tools of mutually beneficial cooperation but also structures of power that give rise to winners and losers.47 Third, an exclusive focus on specific assets faces empirical difficulties, as it fails to explain the termination of alliances, such as the U.S.-Iran or the Warsaw Pact, that had a high level of asset specificity. To address these concerns, this section considers the degree to which alliances are socially embedded, the degree to which alliance practices affect social understandings of state identity, and the ways in which the social identities, so affected, contribute to alliance persistence. This turn to identity also addresses our concerns about power, as it brings back a conception of power that explains the status quo bias of political institutions, a propensity that realists and constructivists do not fully appreciate yet.48 Although there are many conceptualizations of identity,49 social identity in this book refers to more than the characteristics of an

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individual or a national type: it encompasses intersubjective expectations about one’s roles and duties.50 As such, it is constructed and stabilized through stylized, regularized repetition of social practices and discourses and, if accepted by most members of a given society to the degree that it becomes a background knowledge, makes up part of social reality. As social identity is contingent upon social practices, its content is just as partial and fluid as they are. That content may be subject to contentions and conflicts, particularly when changes in material realities create a large dissonance between the prevailing identity and the new realities or when a hegemonized institutional environment breaks down. But some content may also be privileged by power, economic and cultural capital, or institutional structures. That content may even become a convention in a society as a result of habituation or institutionalization.51 This book, hence, suggests that social identity lies in an arena of politics where actors mobilize their cultural and political capital as well as their material power to privilege a particular content element of identity so as to render it permanent, natural, and hegemonic. Although social identity is contingent upon discourses and social practices, there is a limit to the ways in which it is constituted. Among a number of competing identities for the same object, only those that have good congruence with “stubborn realities”—material facts that are not yet imbued with social meanings—are likely to have a chance of becoming widely accepted, as Gramsci observes.52 Whether any will ever be unproblematically accepted as the salient identity—and if so, which one—will be contingent on the outcome of a “war of position,” the political competition where political entrepreneurs compete among themselves by bringing to bear upon their favored content their political power and cultural capital as well as material resources.53 Three classes of alliance practices directly bear upon identity constitution: discursive politics, social practices, and institutional politics. First, the politics of discourse is one of the mechanisms by which a military alliance identifies allies and adversaries, a process where the politics of naming takes on a particular significance.54 A significant portion of an alliance’s activities consists in representational practices that help constitute social reality. Allied officials and officers issue a number of statements, findings, directives, announcements, and so on, which identify threats and define security. Their identifications and definitions are given credibility because the national security managers—holding a privileged position in security affairs—are not only charged with providing for security but also almost exclusively

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monopolize and control access to “primary sources” about the dangerous world. The representations that the security managers produce then become a primary source for reporters, civilian analysts, scholars, and politicians, who process and proliferate these representations in different forms. The average citizen learns, through the discourses so generated, who the primary adversary is, how dangerous it is, and what kinds of menacing activities it is engaged in. Most citizens, who rarely have a direct contact with adversary or ally, come to know them and make sense of the world largely through these representations. Once named an ally, a state begins to receive the discursive benefit of being continuously represented as a friend, as a result of which the alliance may become accepted at a deeper societal level as more than a mere marriage of convenience. Statements, findings, and studies—which allied officials continuously produce—reflect the existing social reality, but they also interpret it in a particular way and fortify that interpretation in the minds of the allied public. When immediately after the Berlin crisis President Kennedy proclaimed, “Ich bin ein Berliner,” he was not only reiterating the American commitment to defending Berlin but also reinforcing the identification between the two allies. The second mechanism of alliance’s identity effect is concerned with a number of social practices that strengthen the discourse by adding concrete contents. If, for example, a country sends its soldiers to help defend its ally from an attack, it strengthens the credibility of its identity as an ally. Military or economic assistance, provided to enhance the ally’s defense capability, serves as a concrete material evidence of goodwill. Joint military exercises, carried out to enhance the coordination and collaboration between allied militaries, not only promote bonding between soldiers and officers but also demonstrate to the general public who the ally is, thereby spreading and solidifying an identification effect created by representational practices. The exercises also reinforce the enemy identity of the country that the allies are poised against. In sum, routine activities associated with alliance produce social effects that strengthen the ally’s positive identity and the adversary’s negative one. But it needs to be noted that an act of assistance, if done improperly, can undermine the ally’s positive identity. If security assistance is provided, for example, in such a way as to help a small segment of the recipient country at the cost of a larger society, as the United States did for the Iranian regime until the end of the 1970s, or if alleged assistance is done in a way that undermines the recipient’s

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perceived security, as was the case when Washington tried to deploy its intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe, it can backfire and undermine the ally’s identity as a security enhancer. Allied soldiers’ improper behavior can also create a negative impact on the ally’s positive identity. Nonetheless, so long as the alliance provides security as intended, the positive identity is strengthened. Finally, the third mechanism by which an alliance affects social identities lies in the institutional arrangements it creates in support of its existence and operations. An alliance is usually created by signing a treaty that codifies the ally’s, and in some cases the adversary’s, identity. Identity is thereby literally “inscribed.” The identity distribution, which might have existed before the establishment of the alliance, thereby becomes institutionalized, eliminating a margin of ambiguity about social identities, creating concrete material evidence that embodies an otherwise abstract intersubjectivity, and, thus, giving the identities the momentum that the intersubjectivity alone would not possess. The treaty is, furthermore, accompanied by a host of institutional arrangements that supplement and complement it by fleshing out the skeletal outline established by the treaty. For example, allies sign a status-of-forces agreement that establishes the rights and duties of allied militaries, and weapons sales or transfers involve signing a document that codifies the roles of the allies. Allied countries may adopt regulations, legislation, and even constitutions that embody their shared understanding of social identity. The United States, for example, has adopted the Trading with the Enemy Act and various sanctions that institutionally identify North Korea as an enemy, and South Korea has the National Security Law that identifies the North as an antistate organization. These institutionalizations empower the state to enforce the social identity by means of state apparatuses that mobilize state resources to implement them. The first mechanism interacts with the second in a dialectical way to produce an escalating cycle of security dilemma. Once a country develops a collective understanding of another’s identity as an aggressive adversary, it makes sense of the other’s words and deeds in terms of its understanding of the adversary identity, which tends to emphasize danger (“worst-case scenario”) and counsel caution (“err on the safe side”). Such interpretation seems a prudent defensive measure, but the adversary, in turn, understands the resulting actions in terms of its understanding of the social world, which reverses the identity roles for the two countries. As a result, what one takes as a defensive maneuver is understood as an offensive move by the other, who then takes what it considers a defense measure, which is

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then understood as an aggressive step, and so forth. The result is the familiar security dilemma. While such material attributes as offensedefense distinguishability and offense-defense balance also have an impact on the emergence and severity of security dilemma, and they can in some cases help states overcome the constraints imposed by security dilemma,55 the security dilemma does not arise automatically out of them but results from a specific way in which the social and the material interact.56 It is arguable that Washington and Pyongyang are caught in a security dilemma that results from a pernicious interaction between their social identities and their material behavior.57 The security dilemma reinforces the negative identification of the adversary as well as the positive one of the ally. The “identity effect,” which began as a codification in a treaty or a declaration, will as a result deepen and widen both amity and enmity as an intersubjective reality. The three mechanisms, and the interaction of the first two, coalesce to strengthen, and possibly to hegemonize, the alliance identity—that is, as a result of representational practices, maneuverings by the alliance, and institutional arrangements, the alliance identities come to be “taken for granted as legitimate, apart from evaluations of their impact on work outcomes.”58 Once the alliance identities become hegemonic, rendering that particular constitution of identities natural and permanent, the alliance is intersubjectively privileged over alternative security arrangements. The alliance is accepted as a natural arrangement with what is viewed as a security enhancer against what is seen as an obvious security threat. The institution of alliance produces the identity “lock-in effect.”59 This argument should not be confused or conflated with the argument that because identity is socially constituted, anything is possible in discursive politics. The “facts on the ground” provide the raw material to not only represent but also establish a real limit to how to represent them. If, however, representations bear a close relationship with material facts, then why is it necessary to analytically distinguish the two and give an analytical significance to the former? One reason lies in the fact that the two have different rates of disappearance and institutional stickiness. Acts disappear the moment they are committed, but their representations may outlast the acts themselves. The representations’ endurance will increase if they form a discourse that is widely and deeply shared in a society. If they are institutionalized as, for example, a memorial, a law, or an official history, they acquire a life expectancy that far surpasses the original acts. An actor that has committed an aggression in the past, for example, may have turned status quo, but its current identity may not matter so much as the

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identity represented and institutionalized by the alliance, because the alliance understands the present in terms of the identity that has been institutionalized. Through the lens of the socially entrenched identity of the aggressor, the alliance’s future perceptions and decisions are subjected more to the influence of the present inherited from the past than to the reality of the present.60 Seen in this light, an alliance is not just created to balance threats that exist independent of its practices;61 it is also involved in the constitution and reproduction of a social world divided into security and threat. Alliance practices, undertaken on a strategic level to secure the safety of the allied states, produce on the discursive level a constituting of state identities and a reinforcing of both the social bond between the allies and the social division between the allies and the adversary. Alliances constitute social identities. Institutionalization The institutionalization theory predicts that an institution is most likely to persist, that is, to outlast its original raison d’être, when it is supported by an interest structure that makes it cheaper than the alternatives and by an identity formation that makes it seem natural. This is the central hypothesis that will be tested against the U.S.Korea alliance of the 1990s. One corollary of this hypothesis is that an alliance can be changed even when there is no shift in the power distribution if state identities are significantly altered. Political forces that benefit the most from an existing alliance relationship would feel threatened as much by changes in power distribution as by challenges to the state’s identity. Another corollary is that an alliance may be maintained despite shifts in the balance of power if alliance asset specificities generate enough interest in maintaining it and if alliance identity is so reconstituted as to “relegitimize” the alliance under changed material circumstances. The termination of the Egypt-Soviet alliance and the U.S.-Iran alliance in the 1970s and NATO’s persistence in the 1990s are analyzed to test these corollaries. The basic “causal arrows” in the institutionalization model are presented in Figure 1.2, although the arrows must be understood not just as a temporal causal sequence but also as a structural constitutive relationship. Thus, the causal mechanism of alliance persistence can be understood in terms of the transformation that alliance operations cause in the material and social identities of states. At a hypothetical time (T1) after states are joined in an alliance, they develop asset specificities as they carry out the terms and obligations of the alliance.

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T1:

Power, Interest, and Identity in Military Alliances

Power Distribution

Asset Alliance Social Identity

Asset T2: Social Identity

Alliance Persistence

Figure 1.2 Causal Arrows of the Institutionalization Theory of Alliance Persistence.

On a discursive level, or on the level of social identity, the alliance relations produce social practices and representations about security and threat that help shape the allies’ state identities in the issue area of national security. At a later time (T2) the asset specificities privilege the alliance by creating a cost barrier to alliance termination/replacement and by generating a domestic constituency that advocates alliance maintenance. At the same time, the state’s social identities provide the second layer of protection for the alliance by naturalizing it, by making it seem a natural security arrangement. Hence, the alliance persists. The sequence of the above explanation, however, is more logical than temporal because the arrows do not imply a corresponding temporal sequence. The dotted arrow from T1 to T2 indicates a temporal sequence, but the rest of the arrows do not. It is not necessarily true that power relations produce asset specificity and then a discursive structure. Nor is it necessarily true that state identity produces alliance persistence in a temporal causal sense, for the relationship among power, asset specificity, and social identity is mutually constitutive rather than causal. The constitutive processes are much more diffuse; they occur in multiple sites and affect other layers concurrently. And the processes are recursive: power affects identity, while identity, so affected, impinges on power. To explain the phenomenon of alliance persistence, my model employs a recursive causal mechanism between the international and the domestic, a second-image reversed argument followed by a second-image explanation:62 the alliance causes changes in the allies’ domestic politics and social identities, and such changes cause the alliance to behave in a certain way. While many scholars have recognized that “interactive approaches integrating external and internal factors offer a better and richer understanding of foreign policy than accounts

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exclusively relying on one aspect,” their analyses are limited to either material attributes or identity dimensions.63 This book shows that an interactive approach that captures feedback mechanisms between the domestic and the international can be further enriched by including recursive process(es) among power, interest, and identity. Such logic, however, runs the risk of becoming circular, and one must take care to separate the two mechanisms. Although both mechanisms look at alliance behavior and the allies’ interest configuration and identity mode as the two main groups of variables, the individual factors selected from each group in one mechanism may not be used again in the second mechanism. The evidence used as an independent variable in the second-image reversed argument, for example, should not be used as a dependent variable in the second-image explanation. Nevertheless, by collecting a wide array of evidence for each group and maintaining the separation, one can avoid the fallacy of circular logic so often found in recursive causal arguments.

Conclusion The combination of alliance asset specificity and identity held the U.S.-Korea alliance together in the 1990s, as it does now. First, the alliance has built up institutional arrangements that make the alliance more useful than other alternatives in dealing with the threat from the North. The alliance is supported by interoperable weapons systems, integrated command structures, and unified operation plans that help turn the allies’ independent and separate militaries into a coherent fighting force. The alliance’s operation is facilitated by a transnational network of soldiers, officials, and civilians who have developed a common language and a mutual understanding about the alliance. On the one hand, these institutional assets help smooth alliance operations and lower the cost of military transactions, which makes the alliance all the more valuable. On the other hand, they represent “a sunk cost,” a significant portion of which would be lost if the alliance were terminated. These institutional assets serve as both a positive incentive to keep the alliance and a negative incentive to not terminate it. Second, while the conventional wisdom suggests that the alliance exists because Washington and Seoul face a common threat posed by North Korea, the book argues that the alliance exists not just because the North is a threat but also because the alliance has for the past 50 years been caught in the security dilemma that orients the allied societies in such a way as to identify the North as

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a threat—no matter what it does. When Pyongyang is engaged in a dangerous action, its behavior confirms its identity as a danger. When its behavior is ambiguous, the allies tend to err on the safe side and interpret the ambiguity as a potential threat. If Pyongyang’s behavior does not fit the enemy identity at all, proposing to conclude a peace treaty, for example, the allies become suspicious: Is it trying to throw the allies off guard or trying to drive a wedge between them? Or is there a sinister motive behind the apparent “peace overture”? The fact that the North Korean threat remains so obvious helps explain the alliance, but it is only the beginning of an answer. To understand the alliance’s existence better, one must explain the constancy of the perceived threat despite great variations in North Korea’s material and behavioral attributes. The constancy, in combination with the asset specificity, helps the alliance keep going. It may seem perverse to question the obviousness of the North Korean threat, which seems to constitute one of the rare instances of universal consensus, but only when we do so can we begin to account for Pyongyang’s seeming eccentricity, and a better understanding of the North will pave the road toward a more sensible policy. Take the case of North Korea’s nuclear program. Although it is conventional to blame Pyongyang for deceiving the world while developing nuclear weapons, and although some may point to its nuclear weapons as a reason for the alliance maintenance, this book argues that the behavior needs to be seen in the context of the security dilemma in which both the North and the U.S.-Korea alliance are caught. Throughout the 1990s, when North Korea’s economic and military capabilities plummeted, the alliance turned a blind eye to the decline, maintaining its traditional view that the North was a threat. Pyongyang, reflecting its weakening material position, started indicating its desires to engage its former adversaries and to seek peaceful coexistence. But, guided by the Cold War conception that peace offers from Pyongyang always concealed an ulterior motive, the alliance ignored or dismissed them. Within the frame of mind inherited from Cold War days, it seemed only natural to maintain a deterrent posture. What the allies thought of as a deterrent posture, however, was perceived as a threatening posture by Pyongyang, which interpreted the world through its own Manichaean lens. Because Pyongyang’s power was declining, it saw the persisting alliance as an increasing threat and interpreted the allies’ neglect of its peace overtures as a sign of aggressive intention. Pyongyang most likely turned to nuclear weapons as a last and

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relatively cheap means of assuring its survival.64 The North Korean nuclear crisis was born out of a security dilemma that was exacerbated by, and at the same time entrenched, the oppositional identity framework held by both sides. Such an understanding helps formulate a solution different from the typical repertoire of sanctions, surgical strikes, or all-out war. A self-reflexive understanding of the problem points to the necessity and plausibility of a solution that, without singling out the North as the chief culprit, binds both sides of the enmity to a set of quid pro quos that addresses security concerns with fair and equal consideration. An approach that criminalizes and punishes one side would perpetuate the security dilemma that stands at the core of the nuclear problem; but self-moderation, combined with reciprocal exchanges, would go a long way toward lessening the enmity and resolving the nuclear crisis. Although the alliance survived the 1990s, it does not imply that it will sail on indefinitely. Indeed, there were signs of a strain at the turn of the century. Bringing the dimension of identity into the discussion on alliances helps us to understand the uneasy and growing strain between the allies, which was most dramatically exposed in the “anti-American” demonstrations at the end of 2002, when tens of thousands of Koreans took to the streets to protest the acquittal of U.S. soldiers charged with killing two students in an accident. While the demonstrations subsequently diminished, the underlying tension lingered on. The immediate cause of the protests was the acquittal of the soldiers, but a deeper cause lay in the diverging perceptions of the North’s identity. The United States understood the North primarily in terms of its proliferation and terrorist threats, whereas South Koreans vacillated between seeing the North as the enemy and remembering the North as part of the Korean nation. When Seoul emphasized the North’s identity as an enemy, the alliance found a point of unity; when Seoul tilted toward the nationalist identity, it collided head-on with America’s “axis of evil” framework. With the allies now guided by these conflicting identity frameworks, the future of the alliance remains contingent on the point at which South Korea strikes a balance between its national and alliance identities, on the degree to which its national identity is constituted in terms that are oppositional to the alliance, and on the degree to which U.S. understandings of its own and others identities resonate with those of South Korea. This chapter has thus far sketched out the book’s questions and theoretical model. The remainder of the book fills in the details.

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Power, Interest, and Identity in Military Alliances

Chapter 2 applies various capability-based theories to the behavior of the U.S.-Korea alliance in the 1990s. Out of this exercise emerges the key puzzle of the study: that the allies started to reduce their military ties at the beginning of the decade, when the power/threat balance moved in a favorable direction for the South but they reversed the process of disentanglement in mid-decade despite the continued downward spiral of the North’s capability. It concludes that the first part of the alliance’s behavior conforms to the expectations of realist theories but the second part confounds them, raising the need to look for alternative explanations. Chapter 3 borrows the concept of “asset specificity” from institutional economics and applies it to the institution of the U.S.-Korea military alliance to examine the ways in which alliance operations brought about changes in the domestic interest structure of the United States and Korea. Chapter 4 develops my argument about states’ social identities and considers changes in the social identities of Korea and the United States brought about by the alliance operations. Both these chapters constitute a realist second-image reversed argument that a power-induced institution causes changes in the domestic arena. Chapter 5 pulls together arguments presented in the previous chapters to present a sociological institutionalist, secondimage argument that the changes in interest structure and identity constitution, having been divorced from power distribution, caused the alliance to persist in the 1990s. Finally, this book concludes in Chapter 6 by considering the implications that my argument and findings have for international relations theory and for the future of the U.S.-Korea alliance. As the allies are bound to last, their alliance has outlasted many an expectation of its demise, including the one that recently emerged after the Roh Moo-Hyun administration (widely seen as the most “anti-American” regime that South Korea has had) was inaugurated and the Bush administration initiated unilateral policies in the aftermath of 9/11. The institutionalization theory expects that the alliance will continue in the near term despite difficulties in managing many complex issues. The critical issue for future viability is less likely to be the balance of power than the balance of identities. Where South Korea strikes a balance between its national and alliance identities and how its national identity is constituted in terms that are oppositional to the alliance will determine the alliance’s future.65 A military alliance is a tool of power balancing that states use to provide for security. It is also an institution that helps reduce uncertainty and transaction costs in the alliance relationship and that

Power, Interest, and Identity in International Politics

27

generates asset specificities that confer on it an efficiency advantage over alternative arrangements. It is, furthermore, an organization that promotes socialization and affects its members’ social identity, which helps bind the allies in a homogenizing social relationship. A military alliance is all of these things, operating on the levels of power, interest, and identity at the same time. The challenge for the analyst is to dissect the whole, disaggregate the distinctive parts, and identify the different logics at work. More challenging is to design an intellectual construct within which to reassemble the parts in a way that shows—without distorting the original workings of the whole—how different parts interact with one another. This book’s emphasis on the complementarity of theories draws on one of the key insights offered by such foundational figures as Thucydides, Carr, and Hirschman.66 They were preoccupied with understanding the complex interactions among power, market, and ideas as they tried to explain the causes of war and peace. Some of them criticized contemporary theories for overemphasizing one of the three and called for a return to balance. They were united in their concern that a theory that focuses on one level to the exclusion of the others misses important aspects of their interaction and generates incomplete explanations and unsatisfactory predictions about behavior. An international institution may be established as a result of states’ calculation of costs and benefits, and material capabilities may figure prominently in their calculation. What happens after the institution is established, however, is not determined solely by the states’ original intention. The institution engenders processes that create, on the levels of interest and identity, an inertia that can in the end narrow the states’ choices. This book brings together power, interest, and identity to explain the binding mechanisms that underlie an institutional inertia. To paraphrase a proverb, states may give birth to an institution and feed it, but the institution may in time bind the very hand that feeds it.

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Chapter 2

Power and Alliance: Assessing M i li tary Bal ance in Korea

Was South Korea able to deter or defend itself against a North

Korean attack in the 1990s?1 Answers to the question are sharply divided between optimists, who see enough defensive capacity in the South, and alarmists, who view it as incapable of deterring or defeating a North Korean attack. Overall, the balance of the assessments is skewed in favor of the latter,2 although the body of optimist literature is small but growing steadily.3 The analysis presented in this chapter explicitly leaves out the U.S. military component in order to assess the pessimistic and optimistic conclusions on an equal footing, because the difference between the two results mainly from whether or not one includes the U.S. capability.4 The pessimists are pessimistic because they exclude U.S. support, whereas the optimists are optimistic because the Combined Forces Command (CFC) of the United States and South Korea, supplemented by forces deployed from overseas, has military power that is overwhelmingly superior to the North’s.5 Their opposite conclusions result directly from their opposite assumptions. To avoid this analytical pitfall, this chapter disaggregates the CFC’s capability and focuses on South Korea’s capability by itself.6 It also moves beyond the “bean count” measure of power that both camps use and applies more rigorous models to assess the conventional force. While there is no single magic formula to compare the military might of two countries except for a natural experiment—a real war—a number of methods have been devised and used over the past few decades to assess the correlates of forces in the European theater.7 They generally fall into two groups: static and

30

Power, Interest, and Identity in Military Alliances

dynamic. The former comprises two techniques, “bean counting” and aggregate measures, such as Armored Division Equivalent (ADE) or TASCFORM, while the latter can be divided into Lanchester and non-Lanchester models and into low- and high-resolution dynamic models.8 Each of these methods is good at analyzing a particular aspect of military balance, but none by itself is a perfect indicator of the overall balance. If, therefore, these methods are applied judiciously and complementarily, they provide a more reliable measure of military effectiveness than a single method ever can. This chapter employs a number of static and dynamic measures to assess the conventional force balance. The analytically independent methods lead to a consistent and mutually reinforcing conclusion that in the 1990s the ROK by itself was capable of stopping a North Korean invasion without losing much ground.9 This conclusion has theoretical as well as policy implications. On the theoretical front, it challenges a pillar of the realist paradigm that military alliance is a function of power balance, because if there is parity in military strength between North and South Korea, the sources of the U.S.-Korea alliance persistence need to be found elsewhere. The alliance is a realist anomaly, much like NATO, that is growing stronger in the face of diminishing threats. The theoretical challenge is to develop an explanation of the anomaly, a task that the rest of the book tackles. On the policy side, the conclusion raises questions about the degree to which U.S. contributions are critical to South Korea’s survivability. Although the U.S. Forces Korea (USFK) provides unique assets, particularly C3I (Command, Control, Communications, and Intelligence), that the ROK Army (ROKA) lacks, these assets may not be as essential to the South’s defense as many believe if the ROKA had already in the 1990s, when it lacked those assets, the military power to stall the North’s blitzkrieg attempt. The first section of the chapter lays out a strategic basis for military balance analysis and follows it up with two sections on static measures. The fourth section applies dynamic analyses to assess the likelihood of a successful blitzkrieg by North Korea. Finally, the chapter concludes with comments on the implications that my analysis has for international relations theory and for U.S. military posture.

Conventional Force Balance in Korea A comparative assessment of opposing military forces must start with an understanding of the political objectives and strategies of both sides, because different means and ends set divergent military requirements,

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31

an obvious point that many analysts neglect. For the purpose of the force balance analysis in this chapter, South Korea’s strategic objective is defined as the level of military capability that deters a North Korean attack. As Mearsheimer argues in his seminal treatise, conventional capabilities sufficient to deny the attacker the option of blitzkrieg are crucial to effective deterrence,10 for the attacker is then left only with the attrition strategy and will likely be dissuaded from launching hostilities by the prospect of a long and costly war with uncertain outcomes: “Because the cost of an attrition strategy is always high and because success is relatively uncertain, deterrence is very likely to obtain when an attacker has this strategy as his only option.”11 Mearsheimer’s theoretical discussion is consistent with the conclusion that Blainey draws in his historical study of the causes of war: most wars were initiated by those who believed that “the coming war . . . would be short”12; conversely, dilution of the short-war optimism reduced the likelihood of war initiation. Although it is impossible to ascertain North Korea’s strategy with confidence, Pyongyang seems to have adopted blitzkrieg as its strategy of choice. First, it was faced with an opponent that enjoyed an enormous advantage in the resources it could mobilize for its war efforts: South Korea had a population twice as big and an economy 10 times as big as North Korea’s. Even if the North had a large reserve army of 0.5 million, the South’s reserve force was nine times as large, for it had a larger population that served shorter terms in the military. A long war would only increase the time and thus the opportunity for the South to mobilize its resources to the fullest in order to fight the North. Second, the North lacked the resources with which to wage a long war. Producing no oil domestically, it relied for its petroleum supply on imports from overseas, particularly China and Russia but its oil imports dramatically declined in the 1990s, primarily because of Russia’s reluctance to export to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) on credit.13 As a result, North Korea was short of petroleum, oil, and lubricants (POL), with reserve stocks that could sustain an active military campaign for only about 30 days.14 The lack of war materiel made a long war of attrition a less attractive option. And finally, North Korea’s order of battle indicates that Pyongyang employed blitzkrieg as its strategy. It had an exceptionally large armored force with 3,600 main battle tanks, about 400 more than what the Germans mobilized for the entire European theater in 1940. It had invested heavily in making its artillery and infantry mobile and acquired 25,000 armored personnel carriers and 54,000 self-propelled artillery. It had shifted a majority of its ground and air

32

Power, Interest, and Identity in Military Alliances

forces closer to the DMZ, concentrating over 65 percent of its army within 100 km of the DMZ. The heavily armored, highly mobile, and forward-deployed forces were optimally configured for a blitzkrieg. They would be much less effective in an attrition war. Given the nature of the threat, it is not unreasonable to assume that South Korea’s strategic objective was to maintain a capability sufficient to stop a North Korean blitzkrieg. If the South achieved the objective, it would be likely, following Mearsheimer’s conventional deterrence logic, to deter Pyongyang’s adventurism, for Pyongyang would know that its blitzkrieg would turn into a war of attrition that it would likely lose.15 To assess if the South had the level of forces necessary to attain this objective, it is necessary to interpret what would be required to stop a blitzkrieg within the context of Seoul’s theater strategy. This chapter’s analysis takes a forward defense as the South’s base strategy for three reasons. First, it closely resembles the first parts of the CFC’s defense strategy, although the CFC’s operation plan included elements of defense in depth (embodied in three defensive belts) and of maneuver warfare (associated with the AirLand Battle Doctrine).16 Second, Korea’s geography dictates a forward defense. Because Seoul, the most important strategic target in any scenario of a North Korean blitzkrieg, is only 40 km away from the DMZ, South Korea does not have the option of trading space for time.17 And finally, as the theoretical inquiry calls for an assessment of whether South Korea can by itself deter a North Korean attack, it must exclude deep air strikes, a key component of maneuver warfare that would require the American airpower’s support.18 In short, the following will try to determine if the ROKA could muster enough strength to execute a forward defense strategy and to convince the North that its blitzkrieg would not succeed, for whether or not deterrence is obtained in a crisis would largely depend on whether the North Koreans thought they could launch a successful blitzkrieg. The following section examines the balance of forces in light of the doctrine and the theater’s topography to assess the likelihood that the North could, in the absence of U.S. forces’ intervention, launch a successful blitzkrieg in the 1990s. Force-to-Force Ratios in the Theater Throughout the 1990s, the North Korean People’s Army (NKPA) enjoyed an overwhelming numerical superiority over the ROKA in manpower and every weapons category. The NKPA’s army consisted

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33

of 26 infantry divisions, 15 armored brigades, 24 truck-mobile infantry brigades, and a Special Forces command. The ROKA comprised 19 infantry and 3 mechanized infantry divisions and 12 infantry, Special Forces, and counterinfiltration brigades. The North’s army was estimated to total 1 million soldiers, outnumbering the 650,000 men in the South Korean army by about 1.5:1. The North outnumbered the South in tanks and mortars by roughly 50 percent. The NKPA had almost twice as many artillery pieces as the ROKA, while enjoying an almost 7:1 superiority in self-propelled artillery and a 16:1 supremacy in multiple-rocket launchers19 (Table 2.1). In addition, North Korea deployed surface-to-surface missiles that could reach almost all of South Korea. The ROKA’s alarming numerical inferiority, however, concealed a number of crucial qualitative differences. Most of the South’s military equipment was more advanced and more capable than the North’s, although both Koreas had a large stock of old Soviet- or Americandesigned tanks. For example, the North’s main battle tanks T-54/55 and T-62 were introduced in 1949 and 1961, while the South’s M-47 and T-48 were introduced in 1948 and 1952, respectively. But the Soviet tanks were not upgradable, because they could not incorporate the advances in armored protection, engine efficiency, or firepower, whereas the American tanks were easily adaptable.20 Taking full advantage of their upgradability, South Korea upgraded most of its M-48s to M-48A3s or M-48A5s between 1980 and 1990, while North Korea was left with its fleet of antiquated tanks.21 Moreover, during the same period, the South began producing a new-generation tank, K1, which carried several state-of-the-art features found

Table 2.1

Force Balance by “Bean Count”

Category Personnel Armored Carriers Tanks Artillery Self-Propelled Art Mortars Average Ratio

North Korea

South Korea

NK /SK Ratio

1,000,000 4,000 3,500 8,100 3,300 11,000

650,000 1,550 1,550 4,640a 500a 5,300

1.5 2.6 2.3 1.7 6.6 2.1 2.8

Source: International Institute for Strategic Studies, The Military Balance, 1991–1992 (London: Brassey’s, 1991), pp. 167–170. a International Institute for Strategic Studies, The Military Balance, 1992–1993 (London: Brassey’s, 1992), p. 152.

34

Power, Interest, and Identity in Military Alliances

in the M1 Abrams. K1A1, an upgraded version, was equipped with a CO2 laser range-finder and a commander’s independent thermal viewer (CITV), together with composite armor, an integrated fire control, and an adjustable suspension, which made K1A1 comparable to America’s most advanced tank, M1A1.22 If M1A1’s qualitative advantage over Iraq’s T-72 tanks in the Desert Storm was any indication, the South’s K1A1s would probably enjoy a similar, if not greater, edge over the North’s T-62s, the Soviet-designed tanks one generation older than the T-72s. As an armored battle simulation later shows, the South’s qualitative edge, combined with the fact that it would be fighting in a prepared defensive position, did more than compensate for its numerical disadvantage. Seoul had invested in the military far more than Pyongyang for the previous two decades, as Figure 2.1 shows. The South’s military spending began to surpass the North’s in 1972 and had since widened the gap throughout the rest of the 1970s and the 1980s, resulting in a cumulative difference of $38.7 billion by 1990.23 In 1990 it spent $5.9 billion, more than two times the North’s $2.5 billion (in 1980 constant figures). Given the wide margin in the actual spending amounts, it would not be unreasonable to interpret the North’s higher military spending ratio as representing Pyongyang’s desperate efforts to match its adversary’s spending level—obviously without success. 7,000

Military Expenses

6,000 5,000

NK (US$mn.) SK (US$mn.)

4,000 3,000 2,000 1,000

19 69 19 70 19 71 19 72 19 73 19 74 19 75 19 76 19 77 19 78 19 79 19 80 19 81 19 82 19 83 19 84 19 85 19 86 19 87 19 88 19 89 19 90

0

Year

Figure 2.1 North and South Korea’s Military Expenditures (Constant Figures at 1980 Prices and Exchange Rates) Source: SIPRI Yearbook: Armaments, Disarmament and International Security (New York: Oxford University Press, various years).

Power and Alliance

35

If we assume that one-fourth of the military expenditure was used to improve the military’s fighting capability, with the rest used for maintenance and operation, the South cumulatively invested about $10 billion more than the North on new weapons and upgrades for the past 20 years.24 Since the ROKA’s manpower in uniform was about 40 percent smaller than the North’s, the amount that Seoul had invested in each soldier to improve his or her combat power was disproportionately larger. In addition, South Korea’s far heavier investment in support systems should increase its effective combat power beyond what would be represented in simple comparisons of firepower.25 A simple numerical comparison, however, did not readily capture the qualitative advantage that had accrued in weapons systems and training over the past two decades. The “bean count” buried the difficulties in “comparing apples and oranges.” To circumvent the lack of comparability between militaries armed with different weapons systems, the U.S. Army in the 1970s developed the notion of the armored division equivalent (ADE), an overall measure of capability based on firepower, mobility, and survivability.26 This methodology assigns to each weapon a weighted effectiveness index (WEI), which is then added for all the weapons in a military unit to produce the weighted unit value (WUV). By aggregating weighted effectiveness indices for each weapon in a division—as opposed to simply counting numbers of soldiers and weapons—the ADE is designed to provide a meaningful unit of comparison. To apply this measure to the North-South balance, conservative assumptions are made about unknown factors. Where there is uncertainty, a ceiling figure is used for North Korea, while a floor index is assigned to South Korea. The resulting estimate amounts to the ratio of the upper-bound ADE for the North to the lower-bound ADE for the South, although the actual ratio would be much more favorable to the South than the estimate suggests. The scores derived from this methodology indicate that the potential combat effectiveness of North Korea on a theater basis was larger than that of South Korea—although by a smaller margin than the “bean count” suggests. The total WUV of combat units in the South equals 1,427,489, against the North’s 2,003,554. The North has 41.1 ADEs and the South 29.3 ADEs, which results in a 1.4:1 advantage for the North in terms of ADE27 (Table 2.2). To see if this theaterwide aggregate ratio gives the NKPA enough military might to pull off a blitzkrieg, more detailed analyses are called for.

36 Table 2.2

Power, Interest, and Identity in Military Alliances Force Balance in WEI/WUV

Category Small Arms APCs Tanks Antitank Guns Artillery Mortars Total

North Korea

South Korea

Ratio

819,000 48,275 183,360 125,000 507,240 320,679

600,000 14,600 110,413 276,321 185,045 241,110

1.4:1 3.3:1 1.7:1 0.45:1 2.7:1 1.3:1

2,003,554

1,427,489

1.4:1

The armor/antiarmor balance is an important measure of the armored capability of each side versus systems on the opposing side that are designed to defeat the armored vehicles. As such, it can indicate the degree to which either side may dominate the battle with offensive maneuvers. This balance is assessed by comparing the entire armor (tanks plus armored personnel carriers [APCs]) on one side with all systems capable of fighting the armor (tanks plus antitank guns) on the other. This balance shows that both sides had substantially more antiarmor capability than their opponent’s armor capability. The South had a 1.7:1 advantage over the North’s armor, and the North had a 2.5:1 advantage over the South’s armor, which indicates that both should be effective in combating the armor of their opponent.28 This situation stood in stark contrast to that at the start of the Korean War, when the South had practically no antiarmor capability.29 The firepower balance is a composite of the relative effectiveness of artillery and mortar on the two sides. These systems are dedicated to the suppression and destruction of the opposing forces in support of infantry and mechanized operations. With respect to fire support effectiveness, the North enjoyed a clear superiority in numbers. However, because the South’s artillery was about five times more accurate and lethal than the NKPA systems, its qualitative advantage, O’Hanlon concludes, “would more than compensate for the allies’ numerical artillery disadvantage.”30 The measures show that North Korea had an advantage in overall combat effectiveness as well as in most weapons systems, but the armor/ antiarmor balance suggests that an armored breakthrough would be difficult for either side to achieve. Now the question is whether this ratio gives the South enough strength to deter a Korean blitzkrieg.

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Force-to-Force Ratios by Sectors A theaterwide force comparison is a good indicator but can be misleading when used to assess the likelihood of a blitzkrieg, as is well illustrated by the BDM Corporation study of the 1940s’ force balance in Central Europe.31 The study, applying the WEI/ WUV method to the Battle for France in 1940, found that the Allies had a 1.3:1 advantage on a theaterwide basis. Although the combat effectiveness of the two adversaries, as measured by WEI/ WUV for the entire theater, was relatively evenly matched, the outcome of the battle was anything but what the ADE measures suggested. If the measures are applied to each sector of the theater, however, they yield interesting results: although the Germans had somewhat unfavorable ADE ratios in the Northwest and Southern Sectors, they had a 4:1 advantage in the Central Sector, where they made a breakthrough. This suggests that in order to assess the likelihood of a blitzkrieg, we need to look at sectoral ADE ratios rather than a theater ratio. But then we immediately face a problem, because we do not know where the North Koreans might concentrate their forces to make a breakthrough attempt. Even worse, they could feint or camouflage a concentration to confuse and disorient the defender—moves that an analyst could not predict a priori. This analytical problem is circumvented by assuming, consistent with the chapter’s overall conservatism, the worst case: the North concentrated its forces in a sector of attack without the South’s detection, whereas the South’s defense was evenly spread along the border. Although there is no consensus among analysts on the forceto-force ratio needed to stage a successful blitzkrieg, there is little doubt that attackers need an advantage in force, because they, in their offensive operation, have to expose themselves to the defenders’ fire. Mearsheimer suggests that the attackers need a 3:1 force advantage as a general rule.32 Although historical studies show that some militaries succeeded with a much smaller ratio, the rule seems to hold if the analysis is confined to a division or corps sector of a breakthrough attempt, as Mearsheimer specifies for the 3:1 rule’s condition. Dupuy’s study of combat corroborates Mearsheimer’s rule, as far as it is applicable to the force balance in Korea. Dupuy suggests that the defenders’ combat power is increased by a factor of 3 if they are in a prepared defensive posture in rugged terrain.33 One can surmise that if the North attempted to make an armored breakthrough in a sector where the ROKA was in a prepared defensive position, it would want to mobilize a force at least three times as large as the South’s force in the sector.

38

Power, Interest, and Identity in Military Alliances

In the initial offensive stage of the Korean War in June 1950, the NKPA commanded a 1.5:1 force ratio in the theater but established a 2.1:1 advantage in the breakthrough sector of Ch’o ˘ rwo ˘ n.34 On the other hand, for the Pusan breakthrough in September 1950, the UN forces established a 2:1 force ratio in workforce and an even more favorable ratio in artillery and other areas at the sector. “Weapon fire power superiority was probably about six to one over the North Koreans. In the air the Far East Air Forces had no rival over the battle-ground, and on the flanks at sea the UN naval forces held unchallenged control.”35 Even with this overwhelming power, the UN forces did not launch their breakthrough offensive until one day after the Inch’o˘n landing, in order to take full advantage of the demoralizing effect the news had on the North Korean soldiers. The Soviet doctrine during the Cold War and the NKPA’s doctrine called for a force ratio higher than the Korean War ratios or historical averages. The Soviet doctrine, for example, called for a 3:1 force ratio in infantry, a 6:1 in artillery, and a 5:1 in tanks—ratios that matched the average ratio that the Soviet forces maintained in their offensive operations during the Second World War.36 Furthermore, according to the U.S. Army, the North Korean doctrine for a successful offensive operation called for force-to-force ratios that would far exceed both Mearsheimer’s 3:1 rule and the Soviet norm—that is, 3–5:1 in armor, 6–8:1 in artillery, and 4–6:1 in infantry.37 The above discussion suggests that a 2:1 ratio would be a conservative threshold for a North Korean blitzkrieg attempt. The following analysis, therefore, postulates that Pyongyang would decide to strike if it could mobilize its forces so as to achieve a force ratio better than 2:1 in a sector. In other words, since the South is assumed to not know where the North might attempt to break through, its chance of successful deterrence depends on its ability to deploy its forces along the DMZ, so that the force ratio in every sector would never fall below 1:2—a more stringent requirement than necessary, because it assumes a complete failure of the South’s observation, reconnaissance, and intelligence. Assume for now an idealized space that poses no constraints on the size of forces that can be deployed. If the South decided to commit all its forces to the front, it could deploy 2.9 ADEs per 25 km. After using 29 ADEs as a holding force along the DMZ, the North would have 12 ADEs left to concentrate in a breakthrough sector. Therefore, the maximum possible force ratio it could achieve in a 50 km sector is (12 ⫹ 5.8):5.8 ⫽ 3.1:1. The force-to-force ratio in an idealized sector does not guarantee the ROKA the capacity to deter a North Korean blitzkrieg.

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39

The force-to-space ratio constraint, however, would limit the NKPA’s ability to concentrate. Common sense suggests that only a limited number of armored vehicles and soldiers could fit into a given geographical space—unlike the idealized space discussed above. Even if one could concentrate 10 armored divisions in a particular sector, only the forces that are deployed in the frontal area would fight effectively. Furthermore, too much force in a limited space poses multiple difficulties in maneuvering, while making itself an easy target for the adversary’s fire. Considering such space constraints, Posen suggests that “one ADE per 12.5 km would seem a good theoretical maximum,” and he notes that a force density beyond this level can actually impede the operation.38 Bermudez argues that the North Korean doctrine calls for a combined arms brigade attacking on a front of 1.5 to 2 km and a tank battalion (31 tanks; 30 to 50 m between each vehicle) on a front of approximately 1 km.39 Chung Min Lee, on the other hand, suggests that the current North Korean doctrine calls for 100 tanks per kilometer in breakthrough sectors, although the Soviet doctrine envisions deploying 33 to 50 tanks.40 But his suggestion seems a little extreme, since it would allow only 10 m for each tank that is 3 to 4 m wide. For defenders, Posen and Mearsheimer argue that 0.5 to 1 ADE, occupying 15 to 25 km in depth, can guard a front of 25 km.41 The doctrinal norm for a North Korean division was between 12 and 20 km.42 Now I assume that the ROKA, taking Posen’s and Mearsheimer’s counsel, allocates 1 ADE per 25 km for a total of 10 ADEs along the DMZ, holding 23 ADEs in reserve. The NKPA also has to dedicate 10 ADEs along the front as a holding force, leaving 27 ADEs to bring to an attempted breakthrough sector. Therefore, it seems possible for it to have as favorable a force ratio as it wants: a 5:1 ratio is certainly within easy reach. However, if we apply Posen’s theoretical maximum (1 ADE per 12.5 km), the NKPA can allocate four ADEs to a 50 km wide sector, where the ROKA has two ADEs deployed. This gives only a 2:1 force advantage for the North. The North Koreans, of course, can choose to exceed the “theoretical maximum” in order to achieve whatever force ratio they deem necessary. We need to look at the terrain carefully to assess the most likely strategy. Because of time and logistic support requirements, large military forces moving offensively would move through the major natural crossings of the DMZ. The terrain along the DMZ, which has 10 primary land crossings, is rugged, particularly in the eastern half. Although an infantry can still move through the intervening hills, its offensive capability would be much lower than mechanized forces

40

Power, Interest, and Identity in Military Alliances

because of the lack of significant logistic support from vehicles. The 10 crossings largely coalesce into three primary avenues of approach: the Ch’o ˘ rwo ˘ n and Munsan corridors in the west and the East Coast corridor. The Munsan, Ch’o ˘ rwo ˘ n, Ku˘mhwa (joining the Ch’o ˘ rwo ˘n ˘ ijo at U ˘ ngbu), and East corridors could be used by NKPA armored brigades to attack the South. The western attack corridors are each about 15 km wide and lead directly to Seoul, while the eastern one is only 4 km wide and offers no easy passage to Seoul because of a major mountain range running north to south.43 The North Korean military took these three routes to advance southward in the initial phase of the Korean War. Although the Munsan corridor has some wide, flat areas, the Imjin River and the Han River estuary impose severe terrain restrictions on the movement of heavy armored forces and seriously impede a rapid blitzkrieg. Given the difficulties posed for armored units in the East Coast and Munsan corridors, this analysis focuses on the Ch’o ˘ rwo ˘ n corridor that runs between mountains for 47 km to Seoul.44 Although the North might make a breakthrough attempt in a 50 km wide sector, the terrain restrictions along the DMZ limit the size of corridors available to armored vehicles to a maximum of 15 km. Even if we take Lee’s extreme maximum, which would allow the NKPA to deploy 1,500 tanks (a more realistic estimate would be much lower), and extrapolate possible ADEs from the number of tanks, the North could commit at most 2.2 ADEs worth of its combined arms brigades to the Ch’o ˘ rwo ˘ n corridor. If the North managed to send in 1.8 ADE worth of infantry soldiers on the surrounding hills and mountains, the overall force ratio in the sector would amount to 2:1. However, if 1 ADE worth of infantry is committed to the sector, the North can achieve only a 1.6:1 force ratio for the breakthrough sector.45 This result falls well below the 2:1 ratio, established as a threshold for a North Korean blitzkrieg. The result of the foregoing static analysis is summarized in Table 2.3. As is apparent in the table, the force-to-force ratio is not so lopsided as the bean counts indicate. The static analysis shows Table 2.3 Force-to-Force Ratios Bean Count

2.8:1

ADE Theater

Ideal Sector

Ch’orwo ˘n

1.4:1

3.1:1

1.6:1

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41

that the most favorable force-to-force ratio the North could attain in any sector along the DMZ was 1.6:1, well below the 2:1 force ratio needed for North Korea to attempt a blitzkrieg. These numbers are mere indicators of the effective military power of the two Koreas and as such do not predict the outcome of a war. Given the extreme conservatism built into every layer of my calculations, the cumulative effect of which may credit the North with extraordinary capabilities, bordering on the unrealistic, the static analysis indicators still strongly suggest that the South’s capability was adequate to deter a North Korean blitzkrieg.

Blitzkrieg? Dynamic Analysis The first part of the dynamic analysis applies a FEBA (forward edge of the battle area) model to assess the theaterwide movement of the front line. The second part adopts a Lanchester analysis to simulate a hypothetical armor battle in the Ch’o ˘ rwo ˘ n sector. Finally considered are the effects that the air force is likely to have on the ground campaign. First, while mobilization schedules played a key role in assessing conventional force balances in Central Europe during the Cold War, this analysis focuses on the “standing attack” because of differences in force readiness and deployment schedules. In Cold War Europe, both NATO and WTO kept many of their military units at low levels of readiness, and thus varying degrees of mobilization were required to bring the forces to full strength. Also, even if sizable military forces faced off in Central Europe—particularly in Germany—larger reinforcement forces were kept in the Soviet Union and the United States, away from the intended battlefield. In Korea, by comparison, most of the active units were kept at full strength and at high levels of readiness on both sides of the DMZ. The North had invested heavily “in initial combat power at the expense of the logistic support capabilities required to sustain a prolonged conflict.”46 The strategic warning time was estimated to range from a few hours to no more than 18 hours.47 The situation was made more urgent by the redeployment of the North’s ground and air forces closer to the DMZ in the 1980s and 1990s. Second, although the South’s current operation plan (OPLAN) calls for reinforcements from Japan and the United States, and the North’s plan probably envisions fighting these reinforcements in addition to the forces stationed in South Korea, this analysis excludes all overseas reinforcements as well as U.S. assets stationed in the

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South for the reasons laid out in the beginning: the purpose of the analysis is to assess the likelihood that South Korea by itself can deter or defeat a North Korean blitzkrieg. The following analysis, therefore, assumes a standing attack by the North: it attacks the South without mobilization. To account for the South’s worries about “a surprise attack,” it is further assumed that the North has deployed all its forces along the DMZ to be ready for offensive operations, without being detected by the South (although this amounts to failing to notice at least three mechanized corps driving 80 to 100 km south to the border).48 Movement of a Battle Front Posen and Epstein have proposed two different combat models that simulate, without resorting to the Lanchester equations, the frontline movement.49 Posen’s model moves the FEBA at a historically determined rate, as long as the offender maintains a force ratio at or above a threshold level in the face of accumulating attrition and expanding FEBA. The model then generates the “Force Needs” curve that each side has to meet to continue the offensive or defensive mission. This curve is compared with each side’s mobilization curve to assess the adequacy of its forces in the theater. Epstein’s model produces the FEBA movement as an outcome of the attrition rates in the course of the offensive/defensive. Each side has a threshold attrition rate, a “pain threshold,” beyond which the attacker halts the offense (and the defender withdraws). While Posen’s model indicates whether each side has forces adequate for defense or offense in the theater as a whole, Epstein’s captures battle dynamics in a sector. Applying Posen’s model to the Korean situation poses some difficulties. It assumes that the attacker makes an advance of 5 km per day if a certain level of force strength in the front can be maintained. Posen surveys a large pool of combat data to justify the advance rate, which might be a reasonable estimate in Central Europe. As indicated above in the section about sectoral force ratios, however, battles in Korea present a very different picture. Early on, in the fluid state of the Korean War, the attacker, whether it was North Korea, China, or UN forces, often advanced as far as 20 km a day; in the ensuing static war of attrition, neither side advanced more than 4 km even in intense 10-day combat situations. As an approximation to what might happen in a second Korean war, we could estimate an average advance rate on the basis of the battles near what became the DMZ. The movements of the FEBA in the latter stage of the war, however,

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were carefully controlled by political considerations related to the ongoing armistice negotiations rather than dictated by military logic. Because of the difficulties in assigning a value to Posen’s key input variable, Epstein’s model is chosen to run several possible scenarios. Results from Epstein’s simulation suggest that the South in general can hold its ground against the North’s blitzkrieg attempts (see Appendix A and Figures A.1 through A.4). The simulation is run for four different scenarios, which combine two force ratios with two exchange ratios, and each scenario also considers the likely outcome of a surprise attack. For a surprise attack (defined as lasting two days), the North is willing to take a 10 percent attrition rate and manages to sustain a 1:1 exchange ratio, twice as high as the normal. In all four simulations, the South does not suffer attrition rates higher than the threshold, 5 percent, and thus is able to defend the front without yielding any ground. As time progresses, both sides lose considerable strength and are quite likely to reinforce the frontline force with reserves. The actual outcome of the combat, thus, would depend on each side’s reinforcement capacity. And given that both had large reserves in the second echelon that were more than adequate to keep the frontline units at full strength, neither would have found reinforcement problematic in the 1990s. Even under a surprise attack, the South can hold its defense line after making tactical withdrawals of 4 km for the first two days. As the fighting drags on, it eventually reaches a stalemate. But the simulations show that there is one worrisome scenario. When the North launches a surprise attack with a 1.6:1 force advantage and an exchange ratio of 1:1.75, the result is catastrophic for the South, which, being forced to retreat every day, loses heavily in the first two days and never recovers from the loss. However, if the South reinforces the front strength to its full level by the start of the third day (and the North does the same, to be fair), it can maintain the attrition rate below the threshold and thus hold the line. Given the large reserves in the second echelon, the reinforcement scenario is more credible than the repeated retreat. In a real battle, the frontline units would get reinforced by default if they withdrew 2 km to the rear, where the second echelon forces were deployed in a prepared position. On the other hand, the North would find it increasingly difficult to reinforce the front, as the reinforcements would have to travel, to catch up with the advancing frontline force, a longer distance across enemy territory through the opposing fire. Adaptive Dynamic Model simulation results corroborate the static analysis: the South had the capability to stop a North Korean blitzkrieg.

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Battles between Tanks Considered here is the likely outcome of a clash between armored forces of the North and South in the Ch’o˘rwo˘n corridor. The battle is modeled by adapting the Lanchester equations50 for directed fire, since they most closely resemble the combat between two armored forces lined up in two opposing parallel lines. If the above dynamic models used aggregate force measures such as WEI/ WUV to generate outputs, Lanchester models take as input the number of individual weapons systems such as tanks. While these models have a higher resolution, which produces a more realistic picture of a battle, their reliability decreases exponentially if they are used to simulate a combat that involves more than two different weapons systems, such as tanks and artillery, interacting with each other. This section starts out by modeling a battle between tanks of the same quality in a narrow sector and then gets complicated by bringing in such factors as qualitative differences and prepared defensive positions. It then considers a possible way of modeling a battle that involves multiple weapons systems, if only to indicate the possible complications of using a Lanchester model. The simulation assumes that the North mobilizes as many tanks as it can bring to bear upon the defender in the sector and that the South spreads its tanks evenly in four sectors. It also assumes for analytical purposes that the North chooses the Ch’o˘rwo˘n corridor as the main axis of advance where its armored brigades will make their best breakthrough effort. Of its 2,500 available tanks, the North is assumed to bring 1,500 tanks to bear upon this sector (all of its 600 T-62s and 900 T-59s) and to deploy tanks 20 m apart, tighter than their minimum doctrinal interval in order to squeeze the maximum number of armored vehicles in the sector and thus ensure their numerical superiority. It can then have 700 tanks deployed in the front line, with the rest standing in the second and third echelons. Now we assume that the South can send only a quarter of its tank forces (500 tanks) to the sector, because it has evenly spread its inventory of 2,000 tanks in the four possible corridors for armored attack, as laid out in above discussion of the terrain.51 Given the characteristics of the terrain, “North Korea’s armored forces would be reduced to acting as a battering ram,” and would be slowed by artificial obstacles and by “killing zones”—areas where antitank weapons fire is directed from the mountains on either flank of the corridor. With limited mobility, the forces forming the battering ram would make excellent targets for artillery fire and close

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air support.52 The obstacles include tank ditches, minefields, and tank traps.53 South Korea constructed a complex integrated barrier system south of the DMZ that consisted of a 10-foot-high chain-link fence supplemented with minefields, ditches, and electronic sensing devices. Reinforced watchtowers, concrete bunkers, and guard posts were established behind this fence. Thousands of acres of brush were cleared along roads and fences and around military positions near the southern boundary of the DMZ.54 Behind these frontline barriers, the ROKA constructed a series of well-fortified defensive positions, commonly called the “Hollingsworth Line,” consisting of three defensive belts: Alpha, Bravo, and Charlie.55 Although very little information exists about the fortifications, it is known that reinforced bunkers were built for weapons aimed at the corresponding killing zones. The most basic modeling (Figure B.1) shows that the South’s tank force would be quickly decimated if its 500 tanks were matched against 1500 North Korean tanks of the same effectiveness.56 But if qualitative differences are taken into consideration (Figure B.2), the South is able to overcome the numerical inferiority and defeat the North. If the North reinforces the losses in the front line with second-echelon forces at the end of time 1 (Figure B.3), the South’s qualitative advantage is nullified. If the South’s tanks fight from prepared defensive positions (Figure B.4), they can quickly and without much loss destroy the North’s reinforcements. If the North can sustain reinforcements and maintain the front line at full strength, it can put up a good fight on the front. As soon as it runs out of reserves, however, it quickly loses the battle. The Lanchester simulation concludes that in the most likely scenario (Figure B.5), the South, fighting with qualitatively superior tanks in prepared defensive positions, is likely to prevail over the North, which fields qualitatively inferior tanks to advance over many obstacles.57

Airpower and C3I The air/air defense balance provides a measure of the relative effectiveness of each side’s air force to support a ground blitzkrieg attempt. Although the German blitzkrieg of 1940 is commonly portrayed as a ground offensive conducted mainly by armored vehicles, Germany’s superior airpower was critical to the success of the ground operations. The German Luftwaffe provided excellent support to the ground forces by attacking Allied defensive concentrations and

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providing suppressive fire for key offensive operations such as the crossings of the Meuse River. In comparison, the Germans could not make a breakthrough in the Battle of the Bulge in 1944, when they lost their air superiority to the Allies.58 In 1950 the North had meager airpower by today’s standards, but it still enjoyed a huge advantage over the South’s almost nonexistent air force. The North Koreans effectively utilized their air superiority in the opening phase of the Korean War to effect breakthroughs against the South’s defenses. After the UN forces began mobilizing their airpower, however, the North lost its air superiority, and as a result its ground operations were consistently hampered. Since the WEI/ WUV methodology, devised for ground weapons, does not account for air vs. air defense systems, a different method is adopted to assess the likely impact that airpower might have on ground combat. As a first approximation to WEI/ WUV, the total offensive air weapons of each side (bombers ⫹ CAS [close air support]) are compared with the total defensive systems (fighters ⫹ antiaircraft guns). Then the analysis takes into account qualitative differences and finally uses a model designed by Posen to simulate combat dynamics. In 1991, South Korea deployed 340 combat aircraft, including 48 F-16 fighters, while the North Korean air force consisted of 686 combat aircraft and 80 bombers. Using these figures, the theaterwide balance shows that the North commanded a clear numerical advantage in offensive airpower over the South, at the ratio of 2.3:1. The North, at that time, also enjoyed an even wider margin of superiority in the number of transport aircraft: 280 transport airplanes against 37, close to an 8:1 ratio. The North’s numerical advantage begins to diminish if offensive and defensive air capabilities are compared: the North had a total of 816 offensive air weapons, against which the South’s air defense deployed 340 aircraft, 540 surface-to-air missiles, and 600 air defense guns; the South had the offensive capability of 438 platforms against the North’s 686 aircraft and 8,000 air defense guns (Table 2.4). This simple comparison indicates that while the North was not likely to have an effective air offensive capability, the sheer size of its air force had the potential to overwhelm the South’s air defense capability. The North’s quantitative advantage, however, was largely offset by its qualitative disadvantage vis-à-vis the South’s more modern aircraft operated by better-trained pilots. Of the North’s 686 combat aircraft, 206 were MiG-23s and MiG-21s (and J-7s, a Chinese version of the MiG-21), Soviet fighters designed in the 1950s, while 430 were of

Power and Alliance Table 2.4

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Air vs. Air Defense

Category Fighters Fighter/Ground Attacks Bombers Attack Helicopters Air Defense Guns Surface-to-air Missiles

North Korea

South Korea

376 310 80 50 8,000 5,000a

132 208 0 98 600 540

Source: International Institute for Strategic Studies, The Military Balance 1991–1992 (London: Brassey’s, 1991), pp. 167–170. a International Institute for Strategic Studies, The Military Balance, 1992–1993 (London: Brassey’s, 1992), p. 152.

yet older vintages. Thirty MiG-29s represented the only modern fighter aircraft in the North’s inventory, and even those did not match up favorably with the South’s main fighter, the F-16.59 Even if the MiG-29 matched the F-16 in its capabilities, the North had only 30 of them, while the South had 48 F-16s in stock and more in the pipeline as of 1991. The contribution that airpower could make to the ground tank battle is analyzed using a different methodology that sidesteps the intractable problem of sorting out the qualitative-quantitative contradiction. This analysis assumes that the North, having succeeded in making a breakthrough in the Ch’o ˘ rwo ˘ n sector and having substituted fresh tanks for all those destroyed during the breakthrough battle, has 1,500 tanks to deploy. Under this conservative assumption, which gives the North an unrealistic advantage, the likelihood is assessed that the South could prevent the North’s exploitation forces from arriving in Seoul, their tactical objective.60 The simulation result indicates a catastrophic outcome for the North’s forces, as Appendix C shows. Even if they make a breakthrough and send 1,500 tanks as an exploitation force, all of the tanks could be destroyed by airpower alone within two days, and before they reach Seoul, because the South could mobilize more than the 188 aircraft that are needed to annihilate the North’s exploitation forces. Even in the highly challenging and highly unlikely scenario that Pyongyang sends 1,500 tanks and 2,500 APCs and does not stop its advance until all its vehicles are destroyed, the South would need about 500 aircraft for close air missions. Even if some of its aircraft were disabled by enemy attack or mechanical failure, it could meet the need by raising the number of sorties to three per day.

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Although South Korea had a qualitative advantage in airpower, the North’s quantitative advantage could be a serious factor if the North succeeded in catching planes on the ground with a surprise attack, because the attack would leave the South’s air force with even fewer aircraft. Since the North’s aged aircraft were not so likely to penetrate the South’s sophisticated air defense system and catch its combat planes on the ground, the following assesses the effects that North Korean missiles might have on the South’s air capability if Pyongyang launched a surprise attack on the South’s air assets.61 The results are hardly alarming for the South. Even if the North achieves 50 m of Circular Error Probable (CEP), twice as high a degree of accuracy as its missiles’, it would need to expend 10 Scud-B missiles to inflict 25 percent damage on a command center and 86 missiles to render one air base runway useless for operations. Given that Scud-B CEPs are estimated at 0.15 percent to 3.3 percent of the range, the South’s CEPs can easily be 100 m, in which case the North needs 41 missiles and 101 missiles to destroy an air base command center and a runway, respectively. In a war situation, the North would not be able to take all the preparatory steps, such as flying a balloon to measure the wind, and as a result its missiles’ accuracy would be compromised even further. In other words, the North has to fire 40 to 100 missiles to disable one air facility, while the South maintains more than 100 airfields, not to mention the extensive network of highways it can use to fly aircraft. Given that the North possessed at most 100 missiles (even including FROG missiles) in the 1990s, it is safe to conclude that it did not have the capability to undermine the South’s air capability.62 Even if North Korea possessed more than 200 Scud-B missiles, they would pose little threat to the South’s air capability to interdict the North’s exploitation forces.63 North Korea had little amphibious capability to challenge the South’s defense—no marine, just three amphibious light infantry brigades—whereas South Korea maintained two marine divisions.64 Furthermore, to make things worse for the former, it faced serious problems in communication, command, control, and intelligence, which would seriously constrain any ability to exploit breakthroughs. In light of the fact that the German Army’s superior C3I system enabled it to concentrate its forces to gain local numerical superiority, outmaneuver British and French defenders, and exploit its breakthrough opportunities,65 the North’s limited C3I capability, combined with the fact that its ground units rarely exercised beyond company levels, would make a successful blitzkrieg a remote possibility.

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Special Forces and Countermeasures North Korea would undoubtedly resort to countermeasures to disable or degrade the South’ s defense. In the early hours of an attack, for example, the North would most likely start a series of heavy artillery attacks, saturating South Korean frontline fortifications and its second-echelon forces with several kilotons of explosives in less than an hour.66 Given the North’s numerical superiority in artillery, this could severely damage the fortifications and degrade the South’s ability to defend itself. The South, however, maintained several belts of heavily fortified and virtually impregnable underground bunkers, where troops could take shelter and counterfire.67 The North’s artillery, initially sheltered in prepared positions, would have to move forward to attack as the FEBA moves and expose itself to the South’s counterartillery fire. Even if the NKPA had an advantage in the sheer quantity of its firepower, the ROKA enjoyed the advantage of fighting from protective bunkers. Pyongyang would most likely deploy, together with armored units, assault units composed of engineers, infantry, and supporting units, which would assist the advancing troops by removing obstacles in their approach and securing strong points.68 These assault units would probably be drawn from the special-purpose forces. Notwithstanding the advances in and the emphases laid on armored warfare, a second Korean war is very likely to involve large-scale fighting between infantry soldiers in the mountains. The attacking infantry forces could move down the center of the peninsula. The mountains would make the advance slow, but if one or two ridges could be surmounted so that some units reached one of the east–west valleys, they could move west down the valley and enter the flatlands south of Seoul, thus seriously disrupting South Korea’s defenses. The specialpurpose forces would likely assign this mission to their light infantry brigades deployed in the forward corps sectors;69 but even with the high levels of skill and morale that the North’s special forces may possess, such a maneuver would be extremely difficult to achieve. In the mountains, small defensive units can successfully hold positions, and thus the attackers’ success would depend on avoiding such positions. The defenders, on the other hand, must ensure that they can position their infantry forces in front of the attackers. Doing so would require good tactical mobility, a task made more complicated by the absence of collateral lines of communications running east–west. Hills also complicate the defense by limiting the radar’s range and making it harder to scramble interceptors against sudden air attacks.

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The North’s Special Forces were estimated to range from 60,000 to over 100,000 persons, organized into 22 brigades and at least seven independent battalions. Its one-time lift capability, however, was limited to 5,000 persons by sea and 2,000 to 3,000 persons by air.70 Its primary transport aircraft for airborne Special Forces was the An-2 Colt, a 1947 vintage single-engine multipurpose airplane with a payload of one ton. It could escape detection by the South’s air defense radar by flying below the mountaintops and down the valleys, to complicate the South’s fighters’ interception efforts. At the same time, however, ground observers could easily detect it, and its low altitude and slow speed made it highly vulnerable to antiaircraft gunfire from the ground. Furthermore, the lack of heavy weapons and dependence on extraordinary means of logistics support severely limited the ability of the amphibious or airborne light infantry brigades to conduct effective operations in the South’s rear. Limits on their insertion capabilities, complicated by the vulnerability of their transport platforms, constrained operational flexibility and determined the allocation of strategic, operational, and tactical missions. All in all, North Korea’s special operations forces seemed no more than highly trained infantry forces, given the multiple problems in their lift capability. “Most North Korean special operations forces,” a U.S. congressional study concludes, “infiltrate overland and are dedicated to operational and tactical missions, that is, reconnaissance and combat operations in concert with conventional operations in the forward corps.”71 South Korea, for its part, maintained seven Special Forces brigades and three counterinfiltration brigades. In addition, each South Korean infantry division had one organic reconnaissance battalion, and each corps had one Special Forces regiment of four battalions.72 Since the ROKA comprised 11 corps and 19 infantry divisions, South Korea had a total of approximately 26 regiments of what was equivalent to North Korea’s special operations forces. Moreover, the South had one aviation brigade that operated several types of attack and transport helicopters that could be strategically deployed to support combat operations of the infantry divisions: 200 500-MD helicopters, at least 50 of which were equipped with TOW antitank missiles; 50 AH-1S attack helicopters; and 144 UH-1B/ H transport helicopters. For the infantry, 106mm/ 90mm recoilless rifles were the basic antitank weapons, while TOWs were organized into independent units separate from the infantry divisions’ main organization and equipment.73 It is not easy to foresee the outcome of a duel between these two Special Forces. Dupuy’s Quantified Judgment Method gives a unit in a prepared defensive posture in difficult terrain a capability multiplied

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by a factor of 3. In other words, to launch a successful infantry battle, the attacker must be able to muster a force 3 times as effective as the defender’s—a task hard to achieve for the North, which has only 1.5 times as many foot soldiers. On the other hand, the attacker can offset the defender’s advantage by a surprise attack that degrades the defender’s mobility and increases vulnerability.74 Since the “importance of surprise for an attacker varies inversely with his advantage in forces or the risks he faces from the victim’s retaliation,” surprise is “vital if opposing forces are evenly matched.”75 Surprise can be a way to gain superiority, because it can be a force multiplier of 2, as Dupuy concludes in his study.76 If the North achieves a tactical surprise, the South’s advantages will be seriously compromised or nullified. But given that the ROKA had three lines of defense, that each line employed defensein-depth, and that the South’s defense line had no open flanks, it would be difficult for the North to achieve tactical surprise except in some squad or platoon sectors of the very first defense line. If it were difficult for the North to breach defensive lines in small sectors, it would be nearly impossible for it to turn the breach into a tactical operational advantage, because coordination of units at a larger scale would be hampered by its limited C3I capability. The Korean War experience showed that once either side established a continuous line of defense anchored to either coast, the attackers could make little advance no matter how much attrition they were willing to endure. Rapid advances were made only when one side failed to maintain a continuous line of defense with a force density of approximately one division per 30 km. Before August 1950, when the UN forces for the first time established around Pusan a continuous line of defense with allied units left and right and some reserves in the rear, there had seldom been a continuous line beyond a battalion or a regimental position. Both flanks had generally been wide open, and enemy troops moving through the hills could easily overrun a defensive position. Once the UN forces established the defensive line with an even force ratio, the North’s advance was halted.77 If the infantry played a significant role in supporting the armored breakthrough in the initial stage of the war, infantry fighting became much more pronounced once both sides established, along what became the DMZ, a continuous line of defense with a close-to-the-current doctrinal level of force-to-force and force-to-space ratios. After the Allied forces had enough strength to deploy one division for every 13 km of front in 1951, the communists failed to rupture the defensive line in their January offensive or to capture Seoul in their April offensive despite

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the appalling 10:1 casualty ratio they inflicted.78 In the latter stages, as force densities increased, neither side could make significant advances, and therefore the battle was transformed into a static war of attrition. In June 1953, for example, the Chinese launched a major offensive against South Korean forces in the rough mountainous terrain northeast of Ku˘mhwa. Despite concentrated and committed efforts by the Chinese, they gained only 3 km along a 13 km front after suffering 6,600 casualties within nine days.79 In conclusion, a North Korean blitzkrieg attempt was highly likely to degenerate quickly into a war of attrition that resembled the latter stage battles of the Korean War. Because the North had a smaller economy and more limited reserves, this infantry fight would be disproportionately more costly to it. And the North Korean military was unlikely to make advances even if it was willing to pay the high price of trying. Faced with this near certainty of the costly attrition war whose outcome was probably unfavorable to the North, Pyongyang would be dissuaded from launching an attack in the first place. In other words, the South Korean military possessed enough capability to stop a North Korean blitzkrieg attempt and to turn it into an attrition war that was painful to Pyongyang, and thus to deter a North Korean attack. The South had a conventional deterrence capability. Needless to say, one must be circumspect when considering the results from formal analyses. First, there is the problem of assessing the incentive to start a war and of gauging the ability to realize the potential capability in actual combat. Betts, for example, finds little historical evidence supporting the view that there is a high correlation between potential capability for conventional defense and deterrence. “Historically, many states have failed to deter attack even when their estimated capability to defend—according to technical analysis of the prewar balance of forces—was extremely high,” because the incentive to start a war was too high or the capability was not fully realized in the war.80 His counsel must be taken seriously but is less applicable, as he acknowledges, to Korea because many of his concerns stem from his worries about the political cohesion and will of the NATO forces, problems that South Korea can afford to worry less about.81 Second, a war is an interaction between two groups of people, and predicting the outcome of such an interaction requires more than knowledge of military power. To arrive at an adequate understanding of the interaction, “knowledge of the goals and general patterns of behavior of ourselves and the enemy” must be coupled with an analysis of military hardware and personnel, as Rosen argues.82 The analyses in this chapter evidently lack this cultural-political dimension, but indirectly circumvent the problem by building in multiple layers

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of analytical conservatism. North Korea is given the “advantages” of a totalitarian society by assuming it can mobilize all of its war potential and execute its operations beyond historical standards; South Korea is given the “disadvantages” of a free-for-all democratic society by assuming that it will be caught completely by surprise and will fight the concentrated enemy power with spread-out forces. This kind of analysis suffices for my purpose of assessing the South’s ability to stop the North’s attack. Third, an analysis on paper cannot predict the outcome of a real war, as it does not allow for the inevitable “friction” of war that Clausewitz appreciated so well.83 As many critics of war modeling point out, the fog, friction, and nonlinearity of war all combine to complicate, if not make impossible, the job of modeling.84 Detailed accounts of combat operations during the Korean War, as well as other wars, illustrate the confusion, shock, and other factors that had a large impact on the course of war and yet that are extremely difficult to quantify, model, or predict.85 Predicting the outcome of a war is further complicated by idiosyncrasies and contingencies that abound in any war—factors that are by nature unpredictable. The purpose of the foregoing analyses is not to produce a point prediction about the outcome of a potential conflict on the Korean peninsula, but to answer one question: Was South Korea able to block North Korea’s blitzkrieg attempt in the 1990s?86 Precisely because of the problems associated with modeling, a number of independent measures are brought to bear upon the situation. If their results show conflicting outcomes, very little confidence would be obtained in the overall assessment of the balance; if they all point in the same direction, however, some confidence may be warranted. All the above measures of conventional force balance point in one direction without exception: the South was able to halt the North’s blitzkrieg. These results are all the more remarkable because of the extreme conservatism built into the analyses. The North Koreans are consistently given a very high level of capability and are allowed to mobilize all their military might without detection and to concentrate their forces beyond the currently known doctrines and theoretical maximums. On the other hand, the South is always given the worst possible scores in its force effectiveness and little intelligence capability, and is not even allowed to counterconcentrate. Despite all these conservative biases, the South comes out, in all simulations, strong enough to block a blitzkrieg attempt by the North. Furthermore, it is worth underlining that these results are obtained without including the American forces deployed in South Korea or dispatched in a crisis.

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The Korean War serves as a constant reminder of the destruction that a North Korean blitzkrieg can wreak on the South. Since history can be repeated, it is imperative to take cautionary measures. To do that, appropriate lessons must be drawn from past experiences. In 1950, the North Koreans were able to effect a major breakthrough because they had a number of advantages: a superior force-to-force balance theater-wide, a better than 2:1 advantage in the breakthrough sector, air superiority (even supremacy), and the design and execution of an operational plan that maximized their advantages. On the other hand, the South had forces ill-prepared to fight such a mighty adversary: for example, it had no effective antiarmor weapons. The South’s military did not have enough strength to maintain an adequate level of force density, making it extremely easy for the North Koreans to bypass strong blocking positions, turn the defense’s flank, or envelop the defenders.87 Moreover, in the crucial first days of the war, the South’s military leadership made what Appleman calls “a really fatal error” of planning to counterattack the North with units that could not be deployed at the location of the planned counterattack on time!88 However, 1990 was no 1950. South Korea in the 1990s had enough strength to allocate one division per 10 km of front, which literally left no room to make a tactical error such as General Chae made in 1950. Theaterwide and sectoral force ratios improved, leaving no sector under a 2:1 force ratio even in the worst scenario. South Korean soldiers were better equipped and better trained, and many of their officers and noncommissioned officers had combat experience in Vietnam, whereas the North scored less favorably in manpower terms—a reversal of the 1950 situation. The South enjoyed air superiority; its antiarmor capability outnumbered the North’s armor capability. South Korea maintained layers of impregnable fortifications for its forces and “killing zones” for an attack from the North. Not surprisingly, all formal analyses of the military balance confirm one conclusion: the South had military power adequate to stop a North Korean blitzkrieg. Perhaps, the South’s military drew appropriate lessons from history and used them to deploy appropriate force postures. If so, my analysis merely confirms its wisdom.

Is the Alliance Maintenance a Puzzle? Although the above analysis shows that the South had by the early 1990s the military capability to deter and defend itself against North Korea’s attack, the conventional wisdom suggests that until the end of the decade, Seoul still needed to ally with the United States. The

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alliance continued to exist, according to the conventional wisdom, because the North continued to pose a mortal threat. Not only did it maintain 1 million strong soldiers, deploy most of them near the Southern border, and continue to engage in miscreant behavior and flamboyant rhetoric, but it also persisted in its quest for more modern, more dangerous weapons systems. It seems hardly surprising, therefore, to those who hold the conventional view that Seoul and Washington continued to hold on to the alliance that would help them counterbalance the North. The conventional wisdom, drawing on well-known facts, suggests that the alliance continuation constituted a nonevent that would be a nonstarter for inquiry. On closer examination, however, the nonevent turns out to be a political phenomenon that defies the conventional wisdom and that brings out the need to complicate our understanding of the alliance beyond the simplistic threat-alliance binary mode. While the alliance was formed in 1953 and maintained in the following years, as the realist theory of alliance would expect, to counterbalance North Korea’s power superiority over the South,89 it behaved in the 1990s in a way that challenged a simplistic power balance view. The U.S.Korea alliance began the decade with measures designed to weaken itself, but ended it with steps to strengthen itself even though the South’s power position, relative to the North’s, continued to improve throughout the 1990s. The alliance’s flip-flop in the face of the North’s continuous decline presents a puzzle that challenges the conventional wisdom that fails to recognize the flip-flop, the continuous decline, and the mismatch between the two. In the late 1980s, Washington decided to begin the process of military drawdown from Korea, while Seoul seemed to begin to prepare for a Korea without U.S. military support. On July 31, 1989, the U.S. Congress passed the Nunn-Warner revised resolution that called for a reduction of American troops in Korea; a few months later, in 1990, the Bush administration adopted the East Asia Strategic Initiative, a three-stage plan to reduce the size of the American military presence in Korea.90 As the first major step, the 802th Division of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was dissolved in February 1992. By early 1992, the U.S. government was well on its way to completing the first stage of the reduction, whereby 5,000 noncombatants would be withdrawn from its ground forces in Korea. The Department of Defense went so far as to suggest in its report to the Congress in May 1992 that it would decide whether or not to dissolve the CFC on the basis of its assessment of the North Korean threat. Although the two allied governments never explicitly suggested that they were

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contemplating the termination of the alliance, the dissolution of the CFC would have in effect ended the military alliance of the kind that had existed at least since the 1970s. In the most significant step, the Bush administration withdrew all U.S. tactical nuclear weapons from South Korea in 1991. The series of events in this period seemed, therefore, to corroborate one of the realist insights: the end of the Cold War and the decline of North Korea’s power began to reduce the importance of the U.S.Korea alliance as a tool of power balancing. It also adds credence to the conclusion of the foregoing analyses that in the early 1990s the South was capable of defending itself. The fact that the governments showed their willingness to consider the end of the CFC suggests that they recognized that there had been a power shift by the early 1990s enough to warrant a weakening of the alliance. In line with the direction of the power transition, they began to reduce the alliance’s capability. These policies of drawdown, however, were all reversed in the following years and led to the entrenchment of the alliance by the end of the decade, thus confounding realist expectations. The process of reversal began with the Twenty-third Security Consultative Meeting (SCM) in 1991, where the allies “agreed to postpone the second stage of USFK troop cuts, originally scheduled to begin in 1993.”91 At the next SCM the following year, the two governments approved the two recommendations, made by the Military Committee Meeting (MCM), to resume the Team Spirit exercises in 1993 and to suspend the second stage of Bush’s withdrawal plan, and furthermore reconfirmed that the United States would extend its nuclear umbrella to South Korea. In 1995, the U.S. Department of Defense put the final nail in the coffin by issuing its posture statement, U.S. Security Strategy in the East Asia Pacific Region, which declared that the number of U.S. troops stationed in Korea would remain the same to maintain the total number of U.S. soldiers in Asia at 100,000.92 In a single stroke, this statement effectively killed Bush’s reduction plan, the Nunn-Warner resolution, and the Department of Defense’s plan to study the feasibility of the CFC’s dissolution. The U.S.-Korea alliance would face no further reduction of forces and no more changes in its structure until 2003.93 The reversal was particularly puzzling for realists because the balance of power and threat on the Korean Peninsula tilted even further in favor of South Korea throughout the rest of the 1990s. Since the allied governments, recognizing the favorable power transition, began the process of alliance reduction in the beginning of the decade,

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realists expect them to accelerate, or even complete, the process. Changes in the power distribution at the end of the 1980s brought about the corresponding reduction in the allied military power at the start of the 1990s; bigger and more profound changes should have caused a faster and larger reduction, if realist insights are right. What we observed instead was the opposite. While North Korea’s material capabilities continued to decline in absolute and relative terms through the 1990s, as dramatically shown in the massive starvation of the mid-1990s, the U.S.-Korea alliance reversed its earlier decision to decrease its military capabilities. In the 1990s, moreover, Pyongyang lost its traditional military allies, only to see them become Seoul’s new friends. After Pyongyang and Moscow let their defense treaty expire in 1991, they had no treaty guiding their relationship until 2000, when they signed a “Treaty of Friendship, Good Neighborliness, and Cooperation,” which was devoid of the provision of “automatic military intervention in case of a contingency” that had been the central clause of the defense treaty.94 Moscow and Beijing, which had maintained their distance from Seoul throughout the Cold War period, entered into diplomatic relationships with Seoul in 1990 and 1992 respectively. Moscow embraced its new partner enthusiastically, not only holding 10 summit meetings by 1999 and enlarging its trade but also sending to the South its most advanced weapons systems, such as T-80Us, which it did not even sell to the North. Taking a more nuanced approach, Beijing seemed to engage in an equidistance policy, treating the North more or less on the same footing as the South, but Beijing made it known that maintaining peace on the Korean Peninsula was its priority. This new regional configuration represented a sea change from the previous arrangement in which the communist countries, the Soviet Union, and China had been South Korea’s “enemy states” and appeared to be eager to assist the North’s military adventures. In the 1970s and 1980s, South Korea might have been able to fend off a North Korean military offensive, an assessment on the basis of which Presidents Nixon and Carter seemed to have made their troop withdrawal decisions. But one could not rule out the possibility, indeed the likelihood, of the North being assisted by its allies—a scenario that was used to oppose American disengagement and to support alliance maintenance. By the 1990s this scenario was no longer a serious possibility, as neither Russia nor China was interested in supporting the North’s adventurism. The regional power configuration made the U.S.-Korea alliance irrelevant. Yet there was no change in the alliance.

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By the summer of 1994, Pyongyang’s nuclear programs became the central security concern of the alliance to the point where the Clinton administration seriously considered taking military measures to destroy the North’s nuclear facilities. Realists might cite the North’s nuclear capability as a palpable material factor that justified the alliance, which at first sight looks plausible. As I elaborate later in the book, however, the “nuclear crisis” was not so much a material fact as a social reality. Even if North Korea was armed with nuclear weapons, the material capability alone could not explain why the North’s bomb was perceived as a threat, while the Chinese or American bombs were not. The answer lies in the social structure of enmity, the “Hobbesian culture,” as Wendt calls it, that existed between the alliance and North Korea.95 The North Korean bomb was a threat because the North was—just as U.S. bombs were not a threat because the United States was not. As Weldes argues with respect to the “Cuban missile crisis,” the facts on the ground (and at sea) lend themselves to multiple interpretations and are perceived differently by actors who understand the world in different terms.96 Just as the events on and around Cuba in 1962 were seen as a crisis by the United States, which understood the world through the Manichaean prism of the Cold War, so were the events in North Korea in 1994, and again in 2002/03, perceived as a security threat by the United States and the South, which were locked in a Cold War-like enmity with the North. Material capability indicators have some explanatory power but by themselves fail to account for the existence of the threat and hence the U.S.-Korea alliance in the twenty-first century. A variant of the conventional wisdom suggests that the alliance was continuing because it was facing a new threat against which it needed to balance. It is true that throughout the 1990s there were discussions among policy makers and analysts from Korea and the United States about a possible reconstitution of the alliance against the new threat. It is also a fact that since the early 1990s Beijing and Washington have been engaged in a complex strategic tango in which they push and pull each other, gauging the “partner’s” or “competitor’s” strength and intentions. But until the end of the decade, Washington and Seoul reached no consensus on who might be the new threat: some, particularly from the United States, pointed to China, whereas others, especially from Korea, pointed to Japan. “Strategic uncertainty” seemed the uneasy compromise between the two, and the allied governments did not see the urgency to specify what it might be, since they shared a unanimous view that the alliance was still facing the common threat of North Korea. While the possibility remains

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that the alliance may some day turn against China, it would be a stretch of imagination to argue that Washington and Seoul viewed China as the immediate threat, much less that the U.S.-Korea alliance was reconfigured in the 1990s to counterbalance the China threat. Another variant of the conventional wisdom adds a perceptual variable to material capability distribution and suggests that the alliance continued to counterbalance threat but the threat-balancing argument does not fare well in explaining the persistence of the U.S.-Korea alliance, because threat, measured in terms of the North’s behavioral indicators, decreased in the 1990s. Beginning with the Non-aggression Pact and the Denuclearization Declaration that Pyongyang signed with Seoul in 1991, Pyongyang was engaged in its version of “Glasnost.” After it publicly pledged in the Nonaggression Pact that it would not initiate aggression, not only did the North repeat in various statements that it had no intention or desire to attack the South or to reunify the country by force, but it also dramatically increased its peaceful interactions and exchanges with the South.97 The North-South trade ballooned more than 3,000 percent, from $19 million in 1989 to $642 million by 2002, and involved 581 South Korean businesses. By the end of January 2000, Pyongyang had allowed over 171,000 South Koreans to visit North Korea as tourists; the number of nontourist visitors jumped dramatically from 183 in 1990 to 5,599 in 1999.98 A number of South Korean businesses were building or operating factories in the North, all with Pyongyang’s blessing. As Pyongyang was increasing peaceful exchanges with the South and toning down its belligerent rhetoric, it also made numerous and consistent peace proposals and gestures toward the United States: to sign a peace treaty, to end hostilities, and to normalize its relationship with Washington. A content analysis of Kim Il-Sung’s New Year addresses shows that the United States was cast in more favorable terms in the 1990s than in previous decades and that Pyongyang was more interested in peaceful engagement with Washington than in confrontation.99 Combined with a shift in the power balance, these moves suggest that there was a decline in the North’s “aggressive intention,” as defined by Walt.100 The threat from the North, measured in these terms, did not disappear but did decrease. Yet no corresponding reduction was observed in the readiness level of the U.S.-Korea alliance. Contrary to Walt’s expectation, the alliance’s force level began to decrease before Pyongyang began its “Glasnost,” and the force reduction process was reversed after the North took the series of threat-reducing measures.

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The above behavioral changes of course did not make North Korea a peaceful country that harbored no aggressive intention. At any given moment one could find indicators that showed its “aggressive intention,” such as the forward deployment of its military forces, intermittent clashes along the border, or occasional bellicose remarks. It also added to perceptions in the United States and Japan of the North as a rogue state that was engaged in weapons trade, kidnappings of unarmed citizens, and drug smuggling. In the history of confrontation between the two Koreas, these represented a constant. North Korea always maintained a large conventional force near the Southern border; small-scale military clashes were the order of the day since before the outbreak of the Korean War; and the flamboyant rhetoric of war represented a hallmark of North Korea’s statements. What changed in the 1990s was the emergence and increase of peace gestures, initiatives, and measures. Pyongyang has, since the late 1980s, said and done a number of things that it had not done before and that should have reduced the threat perception: the NorthSouth Denuclearization, the Non-aggression Declaration, the Geneva Agreed Framework, the North-South summit, and others. While these changes are not expected to completely eliminate the threat perception, since states can change their policies and since their declarations and agreements can turn into a mere scrap of paper, they are expected to lead at least to a decrease in the degree of the threat that the South perceives. And the balance of threat theory would lead us to expect the U.S.-Korea alliance to reduce its military readiness. What was observed, however, is the opposite. Walt’s balance of threat theory fails to explain why the alliance continued and even strengthened in the face of a declining threat. A residual threat theory represents another conventional wisdom, according to which North Korea, despite the decline in its power and reduction in its threats, represented a lingering threat that warranted the continuation of the U.S.-Korea alliance, just as some realists explained NATO’s persistence in the 1990s in terms of the residual Russian threat. This argument, however, overlooks the obvious possibility that the residual threat at a reduced level could be met with a lower level of military capability. After all, NATO continued, but at a much lower level of military power: the United States pulled out large segments of its military from Europe, the European members of NATO downsized their militaries, and NATO reidentified itself as a democratic community concerned with stabilizing and democratizing neighboring countries. Just like NATO, Seoul and Washington began to draw down their military preparedness early in the 1990s,

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before Pyongyang began to take threat-reducing measures. But those initiatives were all reversed, unlike NATO’s, afterward. This situation presents an anomaly that defies the residual threat explanation. By the end of the 1990s, there was a decisive shift in the balance of material power and also of threat in favor of South Korea. The allied governments made an attempt to bring the alliance in line with the power shift in the beginning of the decade, when the balance of power and threat began to shift. Yet, they showed little interest in changing or ending the alliance in the new millennium, when the power transition and threat reduction were more pronounced. In short, the U.S.-Korea alliance was persisting. And its persistence represented an anomaly for materialistic power explanations or rationalistic threat accounts. The continuation of the U.S.-Korea alliance represented a puzzle that was not readily recognized or explained within an analytic framework that focused exclusively on material capabilities or threat. The above discussion illustrates not only the inadequacies of capability-based explanations but also the need to complicate our understanding of alliance behavior, for it raises questions about institutional and discursive contexts within which power/threat balancing is carried out. While military balance can be measured by a number of indicators, one particular measure is privileged; aggressive intention can be assessed with reference to different factors, yet a particular set is weighed more. This fact suggests that measuring balance is not so objective as measuring the size of a book. A balancing act is done within discursive and institutional contexts that skew the relative weights of power/threat indicators in a particular way. Balancing is implicated in a discursive tug-of-war, and the institution of the alliance brings its weight to bear upon this tug-of-war. For example, the more sophisticated power analyses, which represent a closer approximation to the real fighting capabilities, are relegated to the sidelines, if not the outside, of the public debate because of discursive politics. When discussing the alliance, allied government officials and officers make references only to the bean counts, which are then processed and reproduced by the media and academia. Thanks to their power over public debate, the bean counts are recognized and named as the true representation of the military balance. They reign in the public debate. As a result of the politics of naming, the discourse of a superior North dominates the public debate on Korea, notwithstanding the evidence to the contrary. To understand the full extent of alliance politics, we need to problematize the complex ways in which power balancing is done and analyze the intimate ways in which a balancing act is implicated in institutional and discursive imbalancing acts.

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Power and Alliance The U.S.-Korea alliance was formed in the 1950s to counterbalance the power superiority that North Korea seemed to enjoy over the South. The U.S. participation was justified on the grounds that it was needed to restore the power imbalance caused by Pyongyang’s power edge, which had been amplified by North Korea’s alliances with the Soviet Union and China. In the 1990s, when North Korea’s economy continued to decline and North Korea lost its traditional allies, there were many indications that the North’s power advantage had been neutralized or replaced by the South’s superiority.101 Despite such indications, theU.S.-Korea alliance lived on. Moreover, there were few noticeable changes in the political actors’ perceptions of the danger and few observable efforts, not just by the governments but also by oppositional social movement groups, to bring the alliance in line with the power change.102 One can make the case that NATO was persisting in the 1990s because it also enjoyed a power advantage over its adversary. But in NATO’s case, it is clear that there were many who perceived the power redistribution; while in the U.S.-Korea case, those who advocated for the maintenance of the alliance won the debate on its future early on, thus setting the stage for its expansion. A similar case can be made about the U.S.-Japan alliance, although it emerged under quite different circumstances and has served different purposes.103 Waltz and Krasner provide a good starting point to build a theory of alliance persistence, although both leave some key questions unanswered. Waltz’s power balance theory remains indeterminate about the interval from the time of power imbalance to that of power balance, and it only predicts that “willy nilly, balances will form over time.”104 Krasner explicitly opens up the theoretical possibility of “institutional lags,” but he leaves it underspecified and undeveloped.105 To complete the intellectual project that they began and left unfinished, we need to investigate the nature and causes of the institutional lag. To do so, we start with the recognition that an alliance, once formed, sets off a series of processes that affect the ways in which the state-society is constituted and the ways in which it in turn affects the processes of alliance transformation. In an effort to explain the phenomenon of the alliance persistence that this chapter has brought into relief, the following chapters will analyze these processes.

Chapter 3

I nterests and Alliance Persistence

I

n After Hegemony, a groundbreaking contribution to our understanding of international cooperation, Keohane brings in the institutional context of state action to explain the continuation of existing international institutions even after the conditions that facilitated their creation have disappeared. Institutions are created as a result of the distribution of power, shared interests, and prevailing practices; they persist, however, because they are valuable for states. And they are valuable, according to Keohane, “because they perform important functions and because they are difficult to create or reconstruct.”1 Hence an international institution that states have created generates an incentive structure that promotes its persistence. Applying Keohane’s theory to the NATO institution that persisted after the end of the Cold War, Duffield and Wallander advance a functionalist explanation.2 Their work captures an aspect of forces that prolong an alliance’s life, notably the way in which an outcome of state action can provide a context that constrains later choices by the state. Their work, however, describes only the demand side of the story. To see why such a demand is met, one needs to look—as Walt does in his study of alliance collapse and endurance—at the domestic as well as the international context of state action.3 This chapter develops the argument that an international institution creates an institutional context for state action at both domestic and international levels and that such a context facilitates the persistence of the institution. The impact of war making on state making has been extensively studied not only in the

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European context but also in non-Western regions. Alliance operation influences the structures of the state and society much as war making influences the state-building process. More precisely, alliance practices transform allies’ states and societies to produce what may be called alliance asset specificities, a concept introduced in Chapter 1. Moreover, the alliance’s imprints on the state and society, namely, these alliance asset specificities, produce tendencies and pressure to prolong the alliance structure even in the face of the alliance’s obsolescence. Alliance asset specificity refers to durable investments that are undertaken to complete alliance commitments and that would incur higher opportunity cost than best alternative uses or alternative users if the original alliance should be terminated. To analyze alliance persistence, asset specificity can be classified into four types: equipment, process, human asset (team specificity and communication specificity), and location specificity. This chapter examines the ways in which the U.S.-Korea alliance has resulted in asset specificity in each of the four areas. It ends with a tentative exploration of the ways in which the alliance’s imprints on the state and society, namely, these alliance asset specificities, produce tendencies and pressures to prolong the alliance structure even in the face of the alliance’s obsolescence. This exploration will be further carried out in Chapter 5, which articulates an explanation of the U.S.-Korea alliance persistence in the 1990s.

Equipment and Alliance Allies make durable investments in military hardware to ensure the interoperability of weapons systems, platforms, and infrastructure between the allies’ militaries. Equipment specificity refers to these investments, which embody large opportunity costs that could have been invested in alternative weapons systems. If an alliance is terminated, the equipment specificity would incur a heavy loss, because some portion of the investments is specific to the alliance and would be lost in any other security arrangements. Thus, durable investments, together with their potential replacement costs, set up a barrier to alliance change and facilitate the continuation of the existing arrangement. The U.S.-Korea alliance displays an unusually high degree of equipment specificity. The ROK Army (ROKA) was established with arms supplied by the United States, and it has relied on the States for the continued provision of arms, ammunitions, parts, and upgrades. As a result, nearly all equipment that the ROKA owns and uses is of American origin, which makes weapons interoperability practically a

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nonissue. Not only do the ROKA and the U.S. forces share the same U.S.-made weapons systems, but the weapons systems that South Korea produces are also based on U.S. design and use U.S.-made parts. In addition, Korea-designed weapons systems are configured so as to be compatible with American ammunition and petroleum, oil, and lubricants (POL), and conversely, Korea’s ammunition and POL are designed to fit American weapons systems. Airports, ports, roads, and railroads are designed, built, and maintained for American as well as Korean use. The level of equipment specificity and its binding effects are recognized by Yu Chun-Hyo˘ng, vice president of the Korea Defense Industry Association: After the Korean government was established in 1948, its army was equipped with U.S. weapons systems, was trained according to American doctrines, and carried out operations in accordance with American strategies and tactics. As almost all of Korea’s major weapons systems are comprised of American ones that it has received as military assistance from Washington, it is not easy now to shift its American weapons systems to other European ones.4

Korea has always imported the vast majority of its weapons from the United States. Even though Korea started diversifying its import sources in the early 1990s, over 85 percent of its weapons imports in 1995 still originated from the United States.5 As a result, American and Korean militaries faced few difficulties in maintaining the interoperability of their weapons systems. For example, in what Hayes describes as the “fusion of South Korean and U.S. nuclear warfighting forces,” the American military had plans to use Korean artillery tubes to fire U.S. nuclear projectiles.6 It would not have been possible if the two forces had not maintained interoperability between Korean cannons and American shells or between their communications equipment. Likewise, it would have been much more complicated if the two militaries had not achieved a high level of integration in terms of command structure. Indeed, more than integration, there was control: the arrangement whereby the commander in chief of the Combined Forces Command (CFC), who had operational control of South Korean military forces, was a U.S. army general enabled the CFC commander to use Korean detachments for nuclear operations and yet, as nuclear commander, answer only to U.S. authority, not to Korean.7 Equipment specificity leads to specificity in weapons production because the allies are engaged not just in weapons transfer/sales but also in joint production/development, licensed production, and

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technology transfer, as the M-16 production program shows. The memorandum of understanding for this program stipulated that the South Korean government would contract with American firms “for the license, proprietary rights, documentation, production equipment, components, raw materials, and technical assistance required to initiate and implement the program” and that “all components of complete M-16 rifles assembled in the Republic of Korea . . . will be procured from United States sources.” The South Korean government “will take necessary steps for such production engineering, tooling control and maintenance, as will ensure the operational and logistic interchangeability among the M-16 rifles and components being produced in Korea and in the United States” (emphasis added). The M-16 program led to a separate “Memorandum of Understanding concerning the ammunition requirements,” which regulated the receipt, storage, transportation, accountability, inventory, surveillance, demilitarization, maintenance, and security of the ammunition. As this simple firearm case shows, the equipment specificity resulting from weapons interoperability spins off a whole array of connections between the two militaries and societies. Yet the M-16 program represents just one of many licensed productions that include M-101 and M-114 howitzers; M-19, M-29, and M-30 mortars; 20 mm Vulcan cannons; M-60 machine guns; M-113 armored personnel carriers; M-48 tanks; and F-16 fighters.8 There are well over 140 defense items that Korea produces under U.S. license.9 The need for weapons interoperability, generated by the alliance, results in the condition of equipment specificity, while it also widens and deepens the transnational ties between the two states and societies. These ties sometimes take the form of an organization, such as the U.S.-ROK Military Industry Conference, which, as an advocate of cooperation between American and Korean military businesses, actively participates in policy debates on the alliance.10 But the value of weapons import can hardly be limited to the issues of interoperability and asset specificities, as Nolan notes: Importing U.S. material has symbolic and military importance, reaffirming close security ties with the United States. As long as the United States continues to provide relatively liberal access to coproduction and coassembly arrangements and continues to support Seoul’s objectives, the costs of actions that risk terminating the relationship likely will outweigh any apparent benefit.11

Hence equipment specificity would raise the cost of terminating the alliance or switching sides in multiple ways. First, should the alliance

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be terminated, the alliance member would have to find a new ally or develop its own arms, a classic alliance versus arms question.12 Keeping the existing ally appears to be cheaper than finding a new one, because equipment specificity provides the current ally with the firstmover advantage. And the second option of arming itself includes the costs that could be incurred by the termination of coproduction and coassembly arrangements, by problems in maintenance parts supply, or by the increase of the license fee. Thus specificity militates heavily against changing the alliance. Second, the binding impact of equipment specificity is not limited to one side of the alliance, although there may be differences in the degree of the binding power over the alliance members. In other words, if weapons imports have an impact on South Korea for obvious reasons, they also affect the exporter, the United States. South Korea, the fourth-largest importer of weapons in the second half of the 1990s, was one of the biggest consumers of U.S. military hardware, with imports totaling $2.9 billion in 1995–1997 and $4.2 billion in 1997–1999.13 One analysis, prepared for the American League for Exports and Security Assistance, estimated that recent and prospective sales to Saudi Arabia could generate over $80 billion for U.S. contractors and their communities and over 1.5 million working hours over a 20-year period.14 Since the amount of American sales to South Korea is comparable to that to Saudi Arabia, a similar argument can be made about the impact that arms sales to Seoul might have on American society. Defense contractors and their trade associations, such as the Aerospace Industry Association and the Aerospace and Defense chapter of the American Chamber of Commerce, remain a powerful constituency that supports the alliance. In short, equipment specificity not only brings the two militaries closer because of the interoperability of weapons systems, platforms, and infrastructure, but also makes two societies, or at least some societal sectors, more interdependent. This would make alliance termination or switch very costly to the United States. Trend in Weapons Transfer Equipment specificity in the U.S.-Korea alliance has developed in three stages. Free transfers of American weapons systems characterized the initial stage, from 1953 to 1969. The grant aid programs came to an end toward the late 1960s. Therefore, in the second stage, 1970 to 1987, Seoul relied predominantly on imports. In the final stage, from 1988 on, Korea steadily increased domestic production of weapons systems. Throughout the three stages, equipment specificity

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has deepened between the allies. The first two stages will be dealt with in this section; the last stage, in the next. In the 1950s, when the ROKA started building itself up as a modern military, the United States provided virtually all the military equipment and training through such grant aid programs as the Military Assistance Program (MAP) and International Military Education Training (IMET). The extent of American influence is well reflected in the fact that the American grants made up “most of South Korea’s defense expenditure in the 1950s,” while they constituted more than half of Seoul’s entire defense budget in the 1960s.15 As Seoul increased its military spending in the 1970s, the relative importance of American grant aid declined. By 1984, when South Korea had “graduated” from MAP, Seoul had received a total of $5.47 billion worth of weapons and training from the United States through these programs. MAP and IMET are grant programs with no payback obligation that the United States provides to a recipient country. On the one hand, these grant aid programs represent a bonanza for the recipient, as it can quickly build up its military capability without a corresponding, if any, increase in its defense spending. On the other hand, however, the grants function as a training wheel for weapons dependency, as the recipient starts equipping its military with the import weapons. The military trained in and familiar with the MAP-supplied weaponry will later find it difficult to be weaned from U.S.-type hardware. The grant programs thus have a smothering effect on the recipient’s independent defense capability. From the perspective of alliance asset specificity, the grant aid programs represent the beginning of equipment specificity. Immediately after the ROK government was established in 1948, the Ministry of National Defense (MND) established an arsenal and the Headquarters of Arsenal Administration to begin arms production and research. The MND arsenal produced bullets, grenades, and land mines and was engaged in repair works until the end of the Korean War, when the United States started transferring its weapons through MAP. With the massive infusion of U.S. weapons after the war, the MND did not feel the need to maintain their arsenal that produced mainly ammunition for Japan-made Type 99 rifles and closed it down in April 1954. The Institute of Science and Technology, which had been set up under the Arsenal Administration in 1950 for weapons research and development, absorbed the arsenal personnel and operations, one of whose accomplishments included successful development of a three-stage rocket. The institute, however, also met the same fate as the arsenal in 1961, when it was disbanded as part of

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a military reorganization.16 The military officers who staged a coup to seize power in 1961 were eager to disband the institute, which Washington suspected had been seeking an independent, autonomous defense capability. Also, by aborting Korea’s nascent defense technology base, the new regime wanted to impede an American plan to terminate the grant aid programs and replace them with sales and loans.17 With Korea’s nascent weapons production and research capability removed, the ROKA depended entirely on the United States for the supply of ammunition, weapons, and parts until 1968, when Washington and Seoul agreed to allow South Korea to manufacture a rifle—the U.S.-designed M-16. This early history of Korea’s weapons development demonstrates that the grant aid programs such as MAP helped Korea build up its military force as quickly as they obscured the need to maintain Korea’s own weapons production capacity and removed a potential roadblock to equipment specificity between the allies. The M-16 production agreement prefigures an increasing dependency: South Korea’s weapons production would become heavily based on U.S. designs and technology transfers. Having established with the grant aid programs an infrastructure of arms demand, the United States in 1971 began to switch to weapons sales under the Foreign Military Sales (FMS) and the Direct Commercial Sales (DCS) programs. By 1988, these sales totaled more than $6.4 billion, surpassing the cumulative total of $5.6 billion for the grants (grants total as of 1984, covering a 34-year period). By 1997, Seoul had purchased over $10 billion worth of weapons from the United States and received $5.5 billion under MAP.18 In other words, for the initial two decades (1950–1970), the United States made heavy investments in South Korea’s military hardware; for the ensuing decades, the ROK made durable investments to purchase weapons systems from the United States, thus deepening the equipment specificity between the allies. In 1980, when General Chun Doo-Hwan seized power by a coup, he did exactly the same thing that President Park Chung-Hee had done two decades ago after his coup. President Chun stopped the weapons research projects, such as missiles and nuclear weapons, which the United States had considered Korea’s attempt to develop an independent arms production capability. At President Chun’s directive, funding for the Agency for Defense Development was drastically reduced in 1980 and 1981, and 1,400 of its researchers, one-third of its research and development (R&D) personnel, were fired. As a result, Korea’s weapons R&D, which accounted for as much as

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5 percent of the national defense budget by the late 1970s, dropped to 1.3 percent of the defense budget in the 1980s. The military, seeing which way the wind was blowing, began making its weapons requests in such a way as to render it impossible for Korea’s defense industry to meet them. With the reduction in both research and demand, Korea’s arms production plummeted in the 1980s, while its arms imports surged—a trend Seoul tried to reverse only after 1987. In the 1980s, Korea spent 41 percent of its military forces improvement budget to purchase weapons systems from overseas, and 85 percent of weapons imports were from the United States.19 In the late 1980s, the Roh Tae-Woo administration started diversifying the sources of weapons imports in the hope of giving South Korea’s military and defense industry more leverage over U.S. weapons exporters and even more independence. The Ministry of National Defense statistics show that while Seoul had by the early 1990s succeeded in breaking the near monopoly that the United States had enjoyed, it still received almost 80 percent of weapons imports from the States, as Table 3.1 shows.20 Large-scale imports usually involve an offset trade contract whereby the exporting country agrees, as an incentive for the buyer, to spend a certain percentage of the sales total on the importing country. For example, the exporter makes an arrangement, as part of its weapons export contract, to buy commercial goods from the importer, to use parts manufactured in the purchasing country, to allow the importer to participate in weapons production, or to transfer arms manufacturing technologies.21 The United States dominated Korea’s offset trade from 1983 to 1990, with $1.5 billion out of the total $2.1 billion, despite the fact that Seoul had offset trade agreement with 15 countries.22 If the U.S. domination is not surprising—because it surpassed other countries in exporting arms to Korea in the first place—it is interesting to note that the United States allowed a far smaller perTable 3.1 Weapons Imports (No. of Contracts/$ Million) 1991

1992

1993

1994

1995

1996

Average

U.S. 565/2,793 590/457 625/730 621/794 638/777 638/1,252 Total 769/3,042 819/742 840/819 912/1,012 967/1,081 998/1,614 Ratio 73/92 72/62 74/89 68/78 66/72 64/78 69.5/78.5 Source: Choeku˘n 6nyo˘n’gan kukkapyo˘l haeoekumaekyeyaksilcho˘k [Past 6 Years’ Overseas Purchase Contracts by Country], Office of Procurement, Ministry of National Defense, October 1997.

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Table 3.2 Offset Trades with Various Countries (1983–1992) United States Britain Italy Germany Spain France Others Total Total trade Offset amount Offset rate (%)

8.19 2.5 30.6

0.54 0.29 0.26 0.13 49 47

0.2 0.1 50.3

0.2 0.1 51

0.15 0.07 46

0.27 9.85 0.13 3.3 48.5 34

Source: Kim Chin-Ch’o˘ l, “Kunsacho˘lch’unggyoyo˘ku˘ i ch’ujinyuhyo˘ngkwa so˘ngkwae kwanhan saryeyo˘ n’gu” [Case Study on the Types and Achievements of Military Offset Trades] (master’s thesis, Korea Institute of Science and Technology, December 1995), p. 83.

centage of its exports for an offset than did other countries. Of the total of $8.2 billion worth of weapons it sold to South Korea in offset trade, the U.S. imported 30.6 percent as offsets. In comparison, Spain exported only $0.199 billion and yet bought back $0.1 billion from Korea as offsets, 51 percent of the total. As Table 3.2 shows, Spain is not the exception the United States is. Since offsets are generally given as an incentive to prospective buyers, it is puzzling that the United States almost monopolizes Korea’s offset trade with the lowest offset rate—unless we consider equipment specificity. One analyst explained this phenomenon in just such terms: “Although offset arrangements have a decisive influence on a procurement decision in the weapons market, Korea depends highly on the U.S. for security and has a preference for U.S. weapons to insure weapons interoperability.”23 It must be noted that the ROKA owns major non-U.S. systems, and its share of the total, though small, is on the rise. However, the process of non-U.S. systems acquisitions illustrates, as well as anything, the advantages that equipment specificity confers on the United States in a weapons sale. Let us look at portable surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) as one example of the non-U.S. weapons systems that the ROKA operates. After considering for purchase three SAM systems—the American Stinger, French Mistral, and British Zeblin— the MND initially selected the British system because its price was the lowest. Following the army’s complaints that the Zeblin’s hit rate was too low, however, it switched to the French Mistral two years later. It did not choose the American Stinger in the first or second round, primarily because of Washington’s refusal to install the risk management program (RMP) postcard, a key component that enabled the missile system to automatically distinguish a friendly airplane from an enemy plane. Without the card, it took longer to fire and was prone to fratricide. In comparison, the British and French were eager not only to supply all the parts but also to transfer key technologies.

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It must be emphasized that their systems were chosen not when they offered all the necessary parts that would make their systems better than American missiles, but only when they sweetened the deal with technology transfers that the United States was not even considering to offer. For a similar reason, Seoul chose a German company as a contractor to supply submarines. But even if a system satisfies the required operating capabilities (ROCs), a military requirement, it faces a disadvantage if it is not an American system. At a minimum, a non-U.S. system must, in addition to the same operational capability, have interoperability with the rest of the weapons systems and the ability to distinguish friends from foes, especially so as not to fire at American systems. If this additional requirement, unnecessary for American weapons systems, is met, it is on a par with the American competitor. Furthermore, it has to overcome invisible specificities built into the alliance system: personal connections and predilection.24 For a non-American system to win, therefore, it has to offer extra incentives that can more than compensate for America’s first-mover advantages. A weapons sale involves more than an exchange of weapons for cash. A weapons sale package includes, in many cases, technical and logistics services, personnel training, and the design and construction of supporting infrastructure. For example, when the Bush administration decided in 1992 to sell F-15s to Saudi Arabia, the Saudis agreed to set aside one-third of the $9 billion package to build facilities specifically designed for the American planes’ use. Although they would be built for the F-15s that the Saudis were buying, all American fighters could use them. And thus the Americans were in effect using the Saudi money to construct an infrastructure that would be available to the U.S. forces, a fact frankly admitted by Carl Ford, undersecretary of defense: “Many of the infrastructure developments that have occurred in the facilities, air bases, were done with an eye to the possibility that the U.S. Air Force . . . might have to come into Saudi Arabia at some point.”25 Hence a weapons sale, facilitated by the alliance, produces specificity not just in the allies’ equipment but also in their infrastructures. Korea’s Weapons Production As the type of weapons transfer moved from grant aids to sales in the 1970s, the shift was accompanied by weapons production assistance.26 The grants represented the United States’ willingness to make a durable investment in its ally, the sales represented a Korean investment, and weapons production assistance signaled a move to deepen equipment

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specificity and the binding relationship that had developed through these investments. Some argued, on the basis of the alliance’s shift from grants to sales and production, that the U.S.-Korea alliance had moved away from a lopsided relationship and had become an equal one, where the United States and Korea cooperated on an equal footing.27 In reality, however, it is a “dependent autonomy” that Seoul has attained from the shift, while Washington has only deepened its involvement in Korea’s security. The roots of Korea’s arms production capability can be traced back to the colonial period, when Japan operated a number of modern ammunition factories. After Korea was liberated in 1948, however, these facilities were quickly converted to produce ammunition and weapons compatible with American systems, a process that was accelerated with America’s participation in the Korean War. If the facilities could not be converted easily, they were closed down. Choso˘n Yuji [Choson Oil] Inc.’s factory in Inch’o˘n was the only gunpowder factory; it had produced 20 tons of dynamite and 200,000 industrial detonators a year under the Japanese colonial rule. It became the second Arsenal Factory in 1948, and by 1950 it had manufactured 1.25 million bullets for Type 99 rifles and some mines. After the end of the Korean War, in 1953, the factory resumed operation but was closed down only a year later amid a flood of American weapons provided as grant aid, which eliminated any need for Japanese-type ammunition. As a point of interest, the factory was then sold to a private interest and converted to manufacture commercial dynamite; it later became Han’guk Hwayak [Korea Gunpowder], which grew to be one of the largest chaebols in the 1980s. After President Rhee Syngman’s request for U.S. assistance in building a facility that could produce ammunition and guns, Washington and Seoul agreed in July 1954 to invest $6 million each to construct an arsenal. Three months prior to the agreement, the MND shut down its arsenal that had been producing ammunition for Japanese-type rifles, thus clearing the road to the American monopoly of Korea’s arms production. After an American adviser, Colonel (Retired) Miller, surveyed Korea’s production facilities, he concluded that Korea was not ready to start rifle production but could, with American technical assistance, manufacture ammunition. Following his recommendation, Seoul and Washington concluded in May 1955 an agreement that the United States would provide the machinery, material, testing and evaluation tools, and technical assistance, within a limit of $5 million, which were necessary for the Koreans to manufacture 12 million M-2 and M-33 bullets a year. After the United States trained Korean officers and

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engineers at the Frankford Arsenal and provided high-tech machinery necessary for ammunition production, the arsenal began operation in 1959. The factory was transferred to P’ungsan, as part of an arsenal commercialization program in 1982, and is now the main producer and supplier of ammunition. Nixon’s policy of disengagement forced Korea to seek self-sufficiency in defense. It is ironic that Seoul’s search for independent security led to two policies that in the long run deepened its dependence on the United States. President Park started buying more weapons from overseas, while building up the defense industry. The former led to increased imports of American weapons; the latter to a higher level of cooperation with the United States in weapons development and production. In the early days of Korea’s defense industry development in the 1970s, the United States provided technical data, equipment, and training, while guiding Korean firms through coproduction arrangements. Starting with the M-16 rifle coproduction with Colt in 1971, Korea’s defense industry has relied on American technology transfers to manufacture a number of weapons systems: 500MD helicopters in 1976, F-5E/F fighters in 1980, 155 mm self-propelled artillery in 1984, and the K-1 tank in 1986. By 1991, 16 weapons systems, produced by Korean firms, had incorporated American technologies, and 70 percent of all foreign technology transfers came from the United States.28 Weapons production cooperation began under the Park administration with the Data Exchange Agreement (DEA), which was concluded at the U.S.-Korea Defense Ministers’ Meeting in 1963. After an initial lull, the pace of cooperation began to pick up in the early 1970s with Seoul’s defense modernization program. Reflecting the increased activity, six appendices were added to the DEA in 1972, 21 in 1974, with a total of 45 appendices by 1996. In 1975, the Scientists & Engineers Exchange Program (renewed in 1984) was concluded, and by 1996, 238 engineers had been sent to the United States for training.29 In 1976, the Science Technology Cooperation Agreement was signed to expand scientific cooperation beyond simple exchanges of scientists. This agreement, however, was allowed to expire in October 1988 because of differences in opinion over intellectual property rights. It was not until 1992, one year after the Patent Secrecy Agreement was signed and satisfied American concerns, that the Science Technology Cooperation Agreement was renewed. The new agreement was designed to promote exchanges of scientists and engineers, and joint research projects, and established the Science Technology Joint Committee and the annual Science Technology Forum. The U.S.-Korea defense industry cooperation reached a higher level in 1987, when Korea was

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included in the Armament Cooperation Program that had initially applied only to NATO countries according to the Culver-Nunn Legislation. Commonly known as the “Nunn Amendment Program,” it had been created as a way of transferring advanced technology and further developing weapon design and system integration capabilities between the United States and NATO countries. Recognizing the increasing importance of defense industry cooperation, Seoul and Washington established at the 20th Security Consultative Meeting (SCM) in 1988 the Defense Technology Industry Cooperation (DTIC) Committee as one of the five standing committees under the SCM, the highest coordinating body of the alliance. While Seoul and Washington were busy building a framework of military industry cooperation, Seoul launched its own campaign to develop “indigenous defense capabilities” in the 1970s. It started fostering its defense industry through such incentives as tax reductions, exemptions, and financial supports. In 1971 Seoul also established the Agency for Defense Development (ADD) “to strengthen defense capabilities and to contribute to the completion of an independent defense by conducting surveys, research and development, and tests on the arms, equipment and material necessary for national defense.” Though domestic weapons production appeared to be a tabula rasa, Korea did have U.S. molds. The ADD originally reproduced U.S. small arms by reverse engineering.30 It also acquired U.S. technical data packages (TDPs) for R&D purposes and then developed arms essentially by trial and error. In its first task, “Po˘n’gaesao˘p [Lightening Project],” carried out in a Hongnu˘ng Arsenal, the ADD reproduced ten kinds of small firearms, including an M1 rifle, a machine gun, a grenade, and a land mine, within seven months after its start in November 1971. Because the ROKA was at the time equipped with American weapons systems, the ADD enlisted the army’s help in getting weapon samples and its manuals. The samples were disassembled and studied, and provided the blueprints for Korea’s indigenous weapons systems. Simple firearms were copied, as well as more sophisticated ones. The only difference was that copying the latter involved a lot more work. The head of the Paekkom Kyehoek [Polar Bear Plan] team, which was engaged in producing a copy of McDonnell Douglas’s Nike-Hercules missiles, went to the U.S. Missile Command for six months to learn repair skills for the Nike-Hercules. The ADD team also sent 12 engineers to the McDonnell Douglas factory in California, allegedly for an upgrade project. These people, in addition to learning what they were supposed to, also gathered information on the Nike-Hercules design, which on their return they used to build a copycat missile.31

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This early stage of Korea’s “indigenous” defense capability development clearly shows the path dependency that alliance equipment specificity creates. Because the Korean Army had been equipped with U.S. weaponry, the ADD reproduced the same kind of weapons via reverse engineering and copying. Because of the predominance of American systems in the ROKA’s inventory and because of the alliance relationship, Korea sent its engineers to U.S. facilities for training; the engineers then became familiar with American weapons systems. As a result, Korea’s “indigenous” weapons systems became “American.” Technical assistance further deepens this path dependency, as the following suggests. As Seoul set up the ADD and began arms production, the MND and the ADD made strenuous requests at SCMs that the United States provide technical assistance. The Department of State and the U.S. Embassy, skeptical about Korea’s ability to develop weapons systems, were initially cool to its requests. The Department of Defense, however, took a positive stance and dispatched a technology survey team in June 1971. After a week-long survey of Korea’s defense industry base, the team made a recommendation to assist Seoul’s effort, which led to a technology assistance agreement at the U.S.-Korea Defense Ministers’ Meeting one month later. As per the agreement, a “Defense RDT&E Counterpart Group” was sent to the ADD in 1972 to provide technical assistance. The group provided a lot of vital information that the ADD needed, but it gave away apparently “too much” information for some in the United States, and was replaced two years later with the Joint U.S. Military Assistance Group-Korea (JUSMAG-K).32 As Ku Sang-Hoe recognizes, the technical assistance and TDPs from the United States “contributed more than anything else” to the development of Korea’s defense industrial capability in the 1970s. While the technology transfers helped Korea bypass the time-consuming R&D phase and jumpstart production in a short period of time, they also preempted the need to develop system design and component production capabilities. As a result, Korea now has a large defense production base that relies on the United States for the provision of key parts and system designs. The United States provided 659 TDPs, over 70 percent of the total to date, between 1974 and 1980, when Seoul was most vigorously building up its defense industry. Despite the decrease of TDP transfers in the 1980s, the TDPs had by then provided the ADD with a basic knowledge of weapons production and the nascent Korean defense industry with manufacturing skills. By 1987, over 40 percent of Korea-manufactured military goods were based on TDPs.33 After

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1983, the number of TDP transfers plummeted dramatically for a number of reasons. First, the United States was alarmed by Seoul’s clandestine and persistent efforts to develop nuclear weapons and missiles, and Washington wanted Seoul to terminate its programs. Second, as the United States began to perceive South Korea as a potential competitor in the weapons market, its interest in protecting its market share began to overshadow a pure military logic in defense cooperation considerations.34 And finally, the Chun Doo-Hwan regime, which faced a legitimacy problem, sought Washington’s support by unilaterally giving up these efforts to develop an independent defense capability. Hence Korea’s defense industry faced a “dark age” in the 1980s, when weapons imports from the United States dominated the market. Since the ROKA operates weapons that are manufactured or designed by U.S. companies, it also is bound to purchase repair and maintenance parts and supplies from those companies. According to Chi Man-Wo˘n, the army imports 71 percent of its repair parts, the navy 86 percent, and the air force 98 percent. Looking at overall defense expenditures in the 1980s, the ROKA as a whole imported 72 percent of its repair parts from U.S. companies.35 Hwang TongJun, head researcher of the state-run Korea Institute for Defense Analyses (KIDA), who tends to cite more conservative figures, suggests a higher import rate: Korea meets, according to him, only 29 percent of its parts needs with imports, but this works out to 86 percent in terms of the price because more sophisticated, more expensive parts cannot be manufactured in Korea.36 The import rate of parts is so high not just because they are needed for imported weapons systems but also because many of the “indigenously produced” weapons rely on imported parts.37 For example, via technology transfer from the Hughes Corporation, Korea Air produced 220 units of 500MD helicopters from 1976 to 1985. And yet, despite Korea Air’s ability to manufacture the helicopters, it did not acquire from the technology transfers the technical capability to produce any of the parts, and had to rely on Hughes for its supply. As a result, Korea Air had to pay $4,200 for a battery for the 500MD, when a UH-1H helicopter battery, a commercial model, cost about $600. In another example, Asia Motors, which “manufactured” 374 units of APCs—the Korea infantry fighting vehicles (KIFVs)—from 1977 to 1981 with a technology transfer from Fiat, proved unable to produce any of the vehicle’s parts; it could only assemble the parts supplied by Fiat. As the KIFVs broke down because of parts failure, the ROKA had to resort to “cannibalization” to get the necessary parts—that is,

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they disassembled other systems and took out the parts. This kind of dependency is not limited to high-tech weapons, but extends even to low-tech conventional weapons systems. As an example, let us look at the teletype machines that were indigenously produced by Tongyang Cho˘ngmil (Oriental Precision) on the basis of an American design. One year after their provision to the army, 52 out of 240 systems became useless because some broken parts could not be replaced. Tongyang Cho˘ngmil belatedly found out that the parts were obsolete and out of production in the U.S. market, but did not have the capacity to produce any of the parts.38 Since Korea depends largely on imports for parts and material, the local content rate for “indigenous” weapons remains low. “In the defense industry sector as a whole, the domestically produced content had only reached 53.1 percent by 1986; if guns and ammunition are excluded, the local content was only about 40 percent.”39 According to the Korean Navy, 36 percent to 49 percent of its equipment is domestically produced, while 29 percent of the parts are indigenous. However, because many of the indigenous equipment and parts, particularly most of the high-tech ones, use import material or are assembled from foreign components, the actual domestic content rate is much lower, as Table 3.3 shows. According to Kim Yong-Nam’s

Table 3.3 Domestic Content of Korea-Produced Weapons (% of Total) Import

KF-16 Fighter Basic Add-on UH60 Helicopter K1A1 Tank KTX Trainer Ch’o˘nma Missile KDX-1 Destroyer 155 mm Self-Prop Gun Piho Self-Prop Basic Equipment

14 34 49 29 48

Domestic Price

44 96 24 44 (2) 25 51 71 (9) 25 (6) 73 68

Production Number

56 4 52 66.1

Domestic Price

Assembly Number

43

35 92

42 37

17

26 90 89

27 33

10 11

Source: ’97 Kukcho˘ngkamsa Yogujaryo (1) [Requested Material for National Audit 1997], Ministry of National Defense, September 1997, p. 257; and Chi Man-Wo˘ n, Kunch’uksidaeu˘i han’gukkun o˘tto˘tke talajyo˘ya hana [How Must Korean Military Change in the Disarmament Age], rev. ed., vol. 2 (Seoul: Chinwo˘ n, 1992), p. 82. Note: The numbers in the parentheses represent Chi Man-Wo˘n’s estimates.

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study, the domestically produced gun ships are fitted with equipment whose foreign content rate gets as high as 81 percent.40 Korea adopts American military specifications (MIL-SPECs) for all the weapons that it produces. In the early days of the Korean military, the choice was inevitable, as almost all its weapons systems were American. As South Korea began to produce weapons in its own factories, it continued to rely on American MIL-SPEC, as its weapons designs were based on the TDPs provided by the United States. Technology transfers, coproduction, and licensed production all reinforced the habit of using American MIL-SPECs. Now after Defense Secretary Perry’s initiatives, the United States is moving away from the MIL-SPECs and is increasingly adopting commercial specifications for its weapons systems. Korea, however, seems stuck with the old American MIL-SPECs not only because many of its weapons systems are old designs based on American MIL-SPECs but also because Korea lacks testing and evaluation abilities. Currently, the Army Logistics Command, Procurement Headquarters, and the ADD, which are mandated to change military specifications, resist any changes because they are not capable of certifying specification changes.41 The United States made yet another durable investment in its ally when it decided to provide a $1,596 million aid program from 1971 to 1975 in support of the Five-Year Force Modernization Plan, the first serious upgrading of the ROKA’s equipment since the Korean War. The aid was agreed on as compensation for the ROKA’s participation in the Vietnam War and for the U.S. Seventh Division’s withdrawal from Korea. Through this plan, Seoul hoped to realize its goal of a self-reliant defense posture, while Washington wanted to reduce the burden of defense commitments to an ally. Such ambitious goals were not to be accomplished by a single five-year plan. And Seoul chased after its dream through three successive Force Improvement Plans (FIPs): the first from 1974 to 1981, the second from 1982 to 1986, and the third from 1987 to 1994. If the first FIP placed its emphasis on catching up with the perceived conventional superiority of North Korean forces, the second shifted its focus to attempts to “develop and produce more independently Korean-type weapons and military equipment not only for its combat effectiveness but also for the avoidance of potential military dependence and exports control.”42 In the late 1980s, Seoul notably targeted its procurements for developing independent capabilities in areas where it had traditionally depended on Washington. Well into the 1990s, after the four ambitious modernization plans, and Seoul’s intention to develop

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an independent defense capability notwithstanding, Korea’s military industry remained heavily dependent on the United States for key parts and for R&D. If the 1971–1975 U.S. aid of $1.6 billion represented the seed money to start building Korea’s defense industry, the Defense Tax, collected from 1975 to 1990 to finance the FIPs, provided the money needed to support its growth. By 1994, when the third FIP was completed, a total of 27,820 billion won, more than 30 percent of the cumulative defense budget from 1971 to 1994, had been spent to produce or procure new weapons systems.43 Under the Special Law for the Promotion of Defense Production and Procurement, enacted in 1973, the ROK defense industry was fostered through numerous incentives, such as long-term low-interest loans, tax benefits including exemption from import tariffs, prepayment, and special cost accounting for defense contracts. As a result of this purposive guidance and support, the MND designated 80 companies as “defense industry” in 1996, and they delivered 313 billion won worth of weapons systems. The defense industry is heavily dominated—as is the civilian sector—by large companies; in this industry, the large companies produce more than three-quarters of the total defense industry output, as Table 3.4 shows. Korea produced an impressive array of weapons systems by the mid1990s, as Table 3.5 shows. The list conveys the impression that Korea has finally realized the elusive dream of a self-reliant defense capability Table 3.4

Major Defense Contractors’ Sales (billion won)

Samsung Aviation Daewoo Heavy Industry Hyundae Precision LG Precision P’ungsan Hanhwa Korean Air Samsung Electronics Asia Motor Ssangyong Heavy Industry Total % of Defense Industry Total

1994

1995

1996

376.6 140.0 196.1 117.8 174.9 157.0 214.7 81.2 159.8 76.7 1694.8

567.3 129.6 264.4 152.3 185.5 143.6 138.4 99.5 160.1 97.1 1937.8

589.7 335.6 270.3 203.8 193.1 152.2 139.9 135.8 132.4 105.8 2258.5

77

76

75

Source: ’97 Kukcho˘ngkamsa yogujaryo (1) [Requested Material for National Audit 1997], Ministry of National Defense, September 1997, pp. 492–494.

Interests and Alliance Persistence Table 3.5

81

Major Weapons Systems Korea Produces R&D Production

Technology Transfer Production

Gun

Pistol, rifle, machine gun, mortar, howitzer, self-prop artillery, antiair gun, MLRS

Air/Missile

Trainer Ch’o˘nma, Hyo˘nmu (missiles) Destroyer, frigate, corvette, transport, amphibious

Rifle, machine gun, Balkan cannon, mortar, howitzer, self-prop artillery, MLRS 500MD, UH-6 (helicopters) F-5E/F, F-16 (fixed wing) NHK-1 (missile) destroyer, submarine

Ship

Mobile

Jeep, APC

Electronic/ Communication

KPRS-6 PRC-999K TPC-830K

K-1, M-48A APC Transport TA-312-PT, AN-PRC77 AN-GRC122, AN-VRC12, ANARC87 TCC15K

Source: Ku Sang-Hoe, Han’guku˘i pangwisano˘p: Cho˘nmangkwa taech’aek [Korea’s Defense Industry: Prospects and Suggestions] (Seoul: Sejong Institute, 1998), p. 35.

and might be readying itself for an eventual alliance termination. To fully appreciate the specificity that exists in the defense industry, however, we need to look at individual cases more closely. By the early 1980s, Korea’s defense industries, particularly the P’ung-San Metal Manufacturing Company, produced a full range of ordnance, artillery, and ammunition as well as propellants and explosives. Reflecting the fact that most of the ROKA’s firearms are of U.S. origin, almost all the ammunition and artillery produced in Korea, with the exception of one item, is of U.S. design, as Table 3.6 shows. As such, they are subject to export regulation by the U.S. government. The developmental history of this category of armament reveals the degree to which Korea’s weapons systems are integrated with those of the United States. The ADD, by copying the U.S.-provided TDPs and by reverse-engineering the U.S. weapons in Korea’s possession, produced prototypes for the 105 mm and 155 mm howitzers in 1973 and 1974, respectively. The indigenously produced howitzers, however, were increasingly affected by severe malfunctions in the mid-1970s, to the point where the Koreans felt compelled to request further technical assistance. They received technical help from personnel from American arsenals, and their “manufacturing capabilities have improved commensurate with efforts to abide more closely by US specifications,” as one analyst comments.44

82 Table 3.6

Power, Interest, and Identity in Military Alliances Korea’s Ordnance and Ammunition Production

Item M-16 Rifle (5.56 mm) M-14 Rifle (7.62 mm) M-60 Machine Gun (7.62 mm) 155 mm Howitzer 105 mm Howitzer 8 inch Self-Propelled Howitzer 81 mm Mortar 60 mm Mortar 4.2 inch Mortar 106 mm Recoilless Rifle 90 mm Recoilless Rifle Vulcan Antiaircraft Gun Oerlikon Antiaircraft System M-19 Antitank Mine M-18 Antipersonnel Mine M-72 Rocket Launcher M-203 Rifle Grenade 90 mm Armor-Piercing Projectile

Comment U.S. design; license production with Colt Industries U.S. design U.S. design U.S. design U.S. design U.S. design U.S. design No longer produced U.S. design U.S. design; permitted for export U.S. design U.S. design Swiss coproduction U.S. design U.S. design U.S. design U.S. design U.S. design

Source: Defense Market Survey, Inc., DMS Market Intelligence Report for China (Taiwan) and South Korea (Greenwich, CT: Defense Market Survey, Inc., 1981); cited in Janne E. Nolan, Military Industry in Taiwan and South Korea (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986), p. 77.

Although Korean ammunition is virtually all of U.S. design, which reflects Korea’s inability to do arms R&D, Korea’s ammunition production has achieved independence to the extent that the production process does not rely on the United States for supplies, except for some specialized detonators. Seoul’s tank project, on the other hand, demonstrates the way in which one ally’s effort to develop an indigenous military capability deepens the alliance relationship. In the 1970s, Seoul set out to develop its own indigenous tank, dubbed ROKIT (for ROK indigenous tank).45 Korea’s technical capability to develop a tank began to grow in the mid-1970s, when it started upgrading M-48 tanks. The upgrade proceeded in two stages: the M-48 was upgraded first to the M-48 A3 by adding a new diesel engine and an advanced fire control system, and then to the M-48 A5 by adding a 105 mm M-68 gun. The upgrading projects improved not only the tanks that South Korea had imported from the United States, but also the knowledge base that Korea’s defense industry had about tanks. The experience that the ADD gained from the projects laid the foundation for its future tank development. At the same time,

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the upgrade projects created a basic American orientation for the tank project, as the upgrading facility was equipped with American machinery or tools and operated by technicians familiar with U.S. designs. Hyundai Heavy Industry (later Hyundai Precision Industry), which carried out the M-48 upgrading work, was naturally chosen as the contractor for the ROKIT project in 1978. Following the 1975 decision to develop Korea’s own tank, the ADD set up a tank project team, which worked in cooperation with Hyundai Precision Industry on a new tank system. At the 10th SCM in 1977, the MND, reflecting its basic pro-U.S. orientation, sought a licensed production agreement with the United States, allowing Korea to manufacture America’s most modern tank, M-60 A1. Despite the fact that there existed at the time other types of tanks that were equal to or better than M-60s, the Korean government favored the American tank for no obvious reason. The United States, however, preferring to transfer its old models, M-48s, did not grant this license. Persistently pursuing the tank project in the face of Washington’s refusal, President Park Chung-Hee started negotiations with a German company, Krauss-Maffei, which was producing Leopard I tanks. When it became clear that Seoul was on the verge of concluding a contract to develop a newer version of Leopard I with the German company, Washington intervened. Giving in to its strenuous insistence that Seoul work with an American company for the tank project, Seoul signed in July 1978 a memorandum of understanding that laid out the basic contours of Korea’s tank program. In 1979, three American companies, including TCM and ADI, were contracted to begin the concept exploration and designing of a tank on the basis of the ROCs that the ADD had established after studying foreign models. In close consultation with Washington, Seoul selected Chrysler Corporation, which was producing M1 tanks at the time, as a development contractor for Korean tanks. In 1982, when Chrysler was sold to General Dynamics Land Systems (GDLS), the MND signed a contract with GDLS that allowed the ADD and Hyundai Precision to take part in the development and manufacturing process. In the following year, GDLS, the producer of the M-1 tank, produced the first development model; it was similar to the M-1 and used many M-1 parts. Although the MND claims that K-1 tanks are Korea’s indigenous model, the development history shows otherwise. Royalty issues demonstrate that K-1 is clearly a derivative of an American model. In 1985, when the ROKIT models were ready for a test, the United States demanded a royalty payment of $70,000 per tank,

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claiming that the ROKIT design was based on an American model. Washington stopped Korea’s production lines by halting the supply of key parts. Seoul succumbed to the pressure and agreed to pay $50,000 per tank as a royalty. The fact that Seoul agreed to pay the royalty shows that the K-1 is based on the M-1. Moreover, the negotiation process reveals the total dependence on the United States for the supply of key components. Hyundai Precision Industry began delivering the tanks in 1986, although it was not until 1988 that the Korean Indigenous Tank was unveiled to the public with the name K-88. It then became known as the K-1 tank, which was later upgraded to a K-1 A-1 after its 105 mm gun was replaced with a bigger 120 mm gun. Despite the original intention to develop a Korean indigenous tank and despite the acclaim for the K-1 as the “culmination of Korea’s defense industry capability,” the K-1 A-1 is anything but indigenous.46 The MND suggests that only 14 percent of the K-1 A-1’s parts are imported but acknowledges that 42 percent of the parts contain import material.47 According to an ADD expert, however, Korea imports about 70 percent of the parts, if the parts that are assembled in Korea with imported components are counted as imports, as they should be.48 The military analyst Chi Man-Wo˘ n puts the estimate much higher at 98 percent.49 Since detailed information about weapons systems remains classified, it is impossible to independently verify their claims. Fragmentary information suggests that the major parts that are manufactured by Korean contractors are limited to metal structures such as hull structure, and caterpillar, suspension, and gun systems. Some high-tech components that Korean subcontractors provide are in fact assembled from imported kits. As the U.S. Office of Technology puts it, the K-1 tank is “an assemblage of components produced in the United States, Germany, and France. . . . Even this most sophisticated of South Korean weapons had no original research and development.”50 Gunner’s sights, for example, which Samsung Electronics provided, were simply assembled by Samsung with parts that it imported from Texas Instruments. The fact that Samsung was a mere assembler was brought home when it could not fix a problem the sight was found to have. Only when Texas Instruments intervened was a solution found.51 More sophisticated parts, such as a gun control system and a composite armor, are wholly imported. In the case of the armor, it is not just imported but also installed by American technicians. Since for an advanced weapons system, structures and bodies contribute less than 20 percent to their total price, it is quite plausible that over 70 percent of K-1 A-1 tank parts are imported.52

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The dynamic of dependent development, which equipment specificities facilitate, was also repeated in the Korea Fighter Program (KFP) that began in the mid-1980s. First, all the major contractors in the program began their military aircraft businesses with work for American subcontractors and received training from the U.S. Korea Air Lines (KAL), which became a contractor for the KFP in 1991, also began its military line of business with maintenance work for U.S. military aircraft in the 1970s, and has a long history of cooperating with American aircraft manufacturers such as Hughes and Northrop.53 KAL began its line of military aircraft production with the coproduction of 500 MD helicopters with Hughes Aircraft in 1976, Korea’s first major aircraft production program. As this program progressed, the Hanjin Corporation, a subsidiary of KAL, was awarded a joint U.S. Navy and Air Force contract to maintain and repair American F-4D/E deployed in Asia. New facilities were built for that purpose, and Korean technicians were trained by the U.S. Air Force. Having thus gained experience in dealing with American aircraft, KAL was designated in 1980 as the prime contractor for the FX project to manufacture F-5E/Fs that were then being produced by Northrop. Also Samsung Aviation, the prime contractor for the KFP, also began its business with airplane engine repair and maintenance work in 1977.54 The adoption of an American model for the KFP is remarkable because European competitors had offered better terms. Details of these offers are not known, but an official of Samsung Aviation admitted that there existed a “wide gap” in aircraft technology transfer offers between U.S. and European aircraft makers.55 But despite the “wide gap,” the European models were serious contenders for the project, and the considered models narrowed down to two American systems: F-16 and F-18. Second, despite the coproduction arrangements and ostensible technology transfers, Korea’s aircraft industries remain dependent on U.S. companies for key components and material. Although the MND argues that technologies transferred in the KF-16 Project include engine technologies, the air force defers all serious engine maintenance work to Pratt & Whitney.56 The U.S. Air Force, after experiencing nine crashes of the F-16 within a year, requested in 1999, as it ordered an inspection of its aircraft, that the ROK Air Force perform an emergency checkup on KF-16s. The fact that the U.S. Air Force made such a request underlines the degree to which KF-16s are subject to the same kind of failures as F-16s. The ROK Air Force performed the inspection as requested and found cracks around the engine combustion chambers, the same problem found on F-16s.

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After it identified problematic engines, the ROK Air Force sent them for repair, not to the Korean contractor who provided them, but to Pratt & Whitney.57

Processes and Alliance If equipment specificity deals with the hardware aspect of the military alliance, process specificity involves software, that is, the ways the allied militaries utilize military equipment and workforce to achieve joint objectives: consultation and coordination mechanisms, military planning, command structure, doctrines, strategy, and operation of combined forces and combined exercises. Alliance military practices are guided and governed by a host of rules in documents ranging from treaties, agreements, and domestic laws and regulations to the rules and regulations that apply to most military activities, such as standard operating procedures (SOPs) and rules of engagement. This software infrastructure represents another set of durable investments made to carry out alliance obligations, investments whose costs are hard to recover in case of alliance termination and which provide the alliance with a “first-mover advantage.” The process specificity in the U.S.-Korea alliance is engendered and nurtured at two levels: institutional integration and doctrinal homogeneity.58 Development of Institutional Integration59 The origin of the current command structure of the CFC can be traced back to the 1940s, when the U.S. Army laid out the basic institutional structure of the Korean Army. Although the Korean Army was officially established with the promulgation of the Military Organization Law in November 1948, three months after the foundation of the Republic of Korea, its structure and personnel remained the same as those in the Bureau of Constabulary and the Coast Guard that the U.S. Military Government had set up under the Department of Internal Security in 1946.60 Then, with the beginning of the Korean War, the ROKA became organizationally integrated with the U.S. military. In the Taejon Agreement of July 15, 1950, immediately after the outbreak of the Korean War, President Syngman Rhee placed the entire ROK forces under the control of the United Nations Command (UNC) commanded by General MacArthur.61 In a letter addressed to General MacArthur, President Rhee delegated to him “command authority over all land, sea and air forces of the Republic

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of Korea during the period of the continuation of the present state of hostilities.” Although the representatives of the UNC, North Korea, and China signed the Armistice Agreement on July 27, 1953, the operational control of the ROK forces remained under the UNC’s commander in chief (CINC UNC) even after the agreement. In 1957, when the United States disbanded the Far East Command, the CINC UNC headquarters moved from Tokyo to Seoul. All throughout the 1950s, however, there was some ambiguity about the precise extent of the “command authority” that President Rhee had transferred to the UNC. This ambiguity was finally cleared up in 1961 after a military coup. Before the coup, there had been no Korean military units that were not under the operational control of the UNC, but the Marine Brigade and the 6th Corps Artillery removed themselves from the UNC’s control when they staged the coup. To reestablish the command control, General Carter B. Magruder, the UNC’s commander, had a series of meetings with the National Reconstruction Supreme Council, the governing body set up by the coup, and reached an agreement in May 1961: to have the Marine Brigade and the 6th Corps Artillery return to the UNC, to limit the UNC’s authority to “operational control,” and to create the new Capital Defense Command under the direct control of the Korean government.62 A second major change that tightened the organizational integration between the Korean and U.S. militaries was made in 1978 when the CFC was created according to the “Terms of Reference on the Establishment of the Military Committee and the ROK-U.S. CFC,” signed at the 10th SCM in July 1977, and the “Strategic Directive No. 1,” delivered at the Military Committee Meeting (MCM) in July 1978. The operational control over the ROKA, as well as the USFK, was transferred from the CINC UNC to the CINC CFC. The CINC CFC reports to the National Command and Military Authorities (NCMAs) of the two countries—each nation’s president and secretary/minister of defense. Although the CFC and the UNC are legally separate entities with separate home bases, “with regard to armistice affairs the CINC CFC is under the control of the CINC UNC.”63 Therefore, if there should be any armed provocation by the North, it would be viewed as a violation of the Armistice Agreement and thus a challenge for the UNC. The CINC UNC, who has no combat forces under him, would immediately request the CINC CFC to counter such aggression. At present, the CINC CFC and the CINC UNC are the same person, and some of the CFC staff members serve on the UNC staff as well, rendering the legal distinction meaningless.

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It is interesting to note here that the organizational integration of the two militaries accelerated in the 1970s, when Washington was considering pulling its military out of Korea and when there was strong international pressure to disband the UNC.64 “To offset this threat [of the eventual withdrawal of U.S. ground troops],” argues Hayes, “it served the [U.S.] army’s interest to speed up its integration with South Korean forces.”65 In 1974, a few years after Nixon withdrew one of the two U.S. divisions from Korea, the U.S. Army created a U.S.-Korea combined battle staff within the UNC, and merged the separate U.S. staffs serving the UNC/U.S. Forces Korea and the Eighth U.S. Army. In the same month, Gen. Richard Stilwell, U.S. commander in Korea, recommended that a combined command be created with South Korea. His recommendation gained momentum as Exercises Ulchi (ROK) and Focus Lens (U.S.), which were combined in November 1975, led to the same recommendation. The CFC was officially launched in 1978 and in November took over from the UN Command the operational control of the USFK and the South Korean military forces. According to Hayes, the creation of the CFC was “a wily move by opponents of Carter’s withdrawal policy”: The command was justified as reassuring the South Koreans. In fact, it placed great pressure to keep American troops in Korea as a U.S. commander of the combined command bereft of U.S. ground troops could not expect the South Korean military to take much notice of him in wartime.66

The ROK/U.S. Military Committee was established together with the CFC according to the 1977 agreement, to define the missions and tasks of the CFC and provide strategic directives and operational instructions to the CINC CFC. Five persons attend the Plenary Session of the Military Committee: the chairmen of the two JCSs, one representative designated by each chairman, and the CINC CFC. The Steering Session of the Military Committee has two members: the Senior U.S. Military Officer Assigned in Korea (i.e., Commander of the USFK), representing the chairman of the U.S. JCS, and the chairman of the ROK JCS. The Steering Session decides day-to-day matters concerning the CFC and refers unresolved or other appropriate matters to the Plenary Session. In the Plenary Session, the CINC CFC is binational; in the Steering Session, the same person, as the Senior U.S. Officer in Korea, is “American.” The minister of defense and the secretary of defense have met annually since 1968, a meeting that is the highest joint

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security consultation mechanism. The National Command and Military Authorities provide strategic guidelines through this meeting to the Military Committee. First called the Annual Meeting of the Korean and United States Defense Ministers at Ministerial Level, it was institutionalized between Presidents Park Chung-Hee and Lyndon B. Johnson in April 1968. This meeting was succeeded in February 1971 by what was named the SCM, an annual meeting that the two governments agreed to hold “to assess the nature of the military threat directed against the Republic of Korea” and to evaluate “overall capabilities to defend against the threat.”67 Since the late 1980s, the SCM has become the forum for consultation and discussion of security affairs of mutual concern such as USFK troop reduction and role adjustment, the North’s nuclear issues, transfer of operational control, and defense burden sharing. Officials from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and State Department as well as the defense minister and the secretary of defense attend the SCM. It consists of a plenary session that centers on a cabinet-level meeting, and five working-level committees that support it. They are the Policy Review Subcommittee, the Security Cooperation Committee, the Logistics Cooperation Committee, the Defense Technology and Industrial Cooperation Committee, and the Joint Communiqué Committee. The SCM Plenary Session is held annually one day after the MCM and is briefed on the MCM’s results. The CFC, in charge of the practical operations of the U.S.-Korea combined defense systems, consists of three component commands: Ground, Naval, and Air. The CINC CFC also serves as the commander of the Ground Component Command. As CINC UNC, he would also be the commander of the UN Ground Component Command should the ground elements of other countries accredited to the UN be reintroduced into Korea. During peacetime, the CINC CFC had operational control of all the ROKA except for Special Operations, the 2nd Army, and the Capital Defense Command; in time of war, he had operational control of all the ROKA except for the Capital Defense Command.68 In December 1994, however, the CINC CFC transferred peacetime operational control over the Korean units to the chairman of the ROK JCS; then the role of the CINC CFC in peacetime was the exercise of the Combined Delegated Authority (CODA), delegated by the chairperson of the ROK JCS.69 Since the creation of the CFC, the U.S. commander in Korea holds seven posts: CINC UNC; CINC CFC; Commander GCC; Commander GCC of UNC; Commander USFK; Commanding General, Eighth U.S. Army (EUSA); and Senior U.S. Military Officer Assigned

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in Korea. The commanding general of the EUSA functions as the U.S. Army’s top officer in Korea, commanding the Commander of CFA and the CG, Second Infantry Division. The commander of the CFC does not have the operational control of the U.S. Air Force (USAF) squadrons permanently based in Korea, because the USAF has insisted on the “flexibility” of tactical air and its need for centralized control by the Pacific Air Command in Hawaii. But the entire ROKA Combat Air Command is under the Air Component Command, which is commanded by the CINC CFC. The CINC CFC has under his command Korea’s eight ROK Corps that have frontline defense missions, but not the U.S. Second Infantry Division, the only American combat formation on the DMZ, which remains under the command of a U.S. general. The Ground Component Command of the CFC has three field armies deployed along the DMZ, each with two or three ROKA corps. Two of them, the Third ROK Army (TROKA) and the First ROK Army (FROKA), have only ROKA troops and are commanded by Korean four-star generals. TROKA is responsible for the western sector of the DMZ and FROKA for the eastern sector. Deployed between the two ROK armies is the ROK/U.S. Combined Field Army (CFA), commanded by a U.S. three-star general who also has operational control of the U.S. Second Infantry Division that makes up the bulk of the USFK.70 The CINC CFC is himself the commander of the GCC, and his CFC staff serves as the GCC staff. The Air Component Command (ACC) consists of all Korean and U.S. Air Force wings operating from bases in Korea in time of war. The commander of the ACC, a U.S. lieutenant general, also commands the U.S. Seventh Air Force and the U.S. Air Forces Korea and also serves as deputy CINC UNC and deputy CINC USFK. The institutional integration of the two militaries is underlined by the fact that the three-star ACC commander reports as Seventh Air Force commander to the CINC, Pacific Air Forces, in Hawaii, but reports as commander of the Air Forces Korea to the commander USFK. The three air commands—ACC, Seventh Air Force, and AFK—share the same tactical air control center (TACC) at Osan, although the Air Forces Korea includes no U.S. squadrons on a regular basis. This ACC commander had held the decision authority to declare hostile a North Korean or other aircraft approaching or entering ROK airspace. Should the U.S. commander be not available, that decision authority would have been transferred to a U.S. colonel in a U.S.-only chain of command. In 1988, however, the SCM changed the arrangement so that the authority would go to the second-in-command of the ACC, a position held by

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a ROKAF three-star general who is also commander of the ROKA Combat Air Command.71 The Naval Component Command (NCC), commanded by an ROK vice admiral, consists of the ROK Navy’s three coastal fleets and its Marine Corps divisions. The Marine Corps may come under other field armies or corps in peace or war. There are also the ROK/U.S. Combined Unconventional Warfare Task Force (CUWTF) and the ROK/U.S. Combined Aviation Force. The institutional integration of Korean and American militaries is not limited to placing the military units under a single integrated command structure but includes the composition of those units also. The CFC and its component commands are binational headquarters, with Korean and U.S. officers intermingled throughout. These headquarters are established on the principle of an equal number of staff members from each country: if the commander is American, the deputy commander is Korean, and vice versa—a pattern replicated throughout the CFC from top to bottom. Because the CINC CFC and the commander of the CFA are Americans, the deputy CINC CFC is an ROKA four-star general, and the deputy commander of the CFA an ROKA two-star general. The Chief of Staff CFC is a U.S. AF major general; the deputy chief an ROKA major general. The institutional integration, which is guaranteed by the structure of the CFC, is deepened by the presence of units that are not under the CFC commander’s control but support his forces in war: the U.S. Seventh Fleet, the B-52 bombers of the Strategic Air Command operating from Guam, the Second ROK Army, the ROK Army’s Logistics Command, the military intelligence apparatus of the United States and the ROK, and various other military, paramilitary, and civil forces. Homogeneity in Military Doctrine Military doctrine provides the fundamental principles for organizing a state’s military forces—its weapons systems, strategy and tactics, and training—and plays a central role in shaping the way in which allied forces are structured. An alliance’s military efficiency is in large part affected by the degree to which the allies’ doctrines are congruent or made consistent enough to allow combined operations. Doctrinal compatibility is required for smooth alliance operation and is promoted and facilitated by organizational integration between the allied armies.72 The militaries within an alliance make a significant effort to devise doctrines, strategies, and operation plans that are mutually compatible. Once adopted and put in place, they act as the guiding

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principles for the alliance militaries and represent a durable investment in the software aspect of the alliance. The U.S.-Korea alliance has bypassed the difficulties in doctrinal integration because Korea’s military has essentially adopted U.S. doctrines, as the MND acknowledges in its White Paper: “Our military did not pay attention to developing an independent doctrine as it has relied primarily on the U.S. military’s doctrine for a significant period of time since ROKA’s birth.”73 Although each service in Korea established in 1970 an organization to develop its own doctrine, it was only in 1987 that the Doctrine Development Department was established in the office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff “to develop a joint and combined forces doctrine appropriate to the Korean theater.” The “Military Basic Doctrine” study project, led by the “818 Study Committee,” began in 1988 and was completed in 1990; the project developed a joint war-fighting concept to maximize the combined fighting capability of the army, navy, and air force. Even this newest and most indigenously developed doctrine borrowed heavily from the AirLand Battle Doctrine, which the United States had developed in the previous decades. Citing a study published by the National Defense Institute (NDI), Ko Kang-So˘k argues that ROKA’s military doctrine has never gone through any substantial change but has “rather passively adapted to changes in American military doctrine regardless of fluctuations in the North’s threat.”74 According to the NDI study, Korea’s doctrine went through four phases since the end of the Korean War: area defense until 1957, active defense until 1967, forward defense until 1979, and offensive defense until now. And each of these modifications was influenced, if not determined, by American doctrinal changes. Immediately after the end of the Korean War, the ROKA relied entirely on the U.S. military for every aspect of its operations, and its strategy was no exception. It adopted the area defense strategy that had been employed by the Americans during the war. As the U.S. shifted its emphasis toward a nuclear war-fighting strategy in the 1950s, the ROKA moved to a successive defense strategy that relied on trading space for time, while waiting for the American nuclear bombing of the North’s strategic targets and for massive reinforcements from the U.S. continent. South Korea’s basic defense strategy, one that was to have an enduring impact, came about in 1973, when General James F. “Holly” Hollingsworth, the commander of the USFK, revised an active defense to a forward-defense strategy.75 Having estimated that six North Korean divisions and 500 tanks could reach Seoul after a

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series of battles—not a surprising discovery, since the active-defense strategy was specifically designed to achieve that—Hollingsworth determined that the frontline troops needed to be deployed closer to the DMZ and more safely in fortified bunkers. Chung Min Lee explains that the shift to forward defense came about “because of the upsurge in the KPA’s overall strength, in addition to a reappraisal of U.S. military doctrine, following the Vietnam War.”76 However, there was no such observable “upsurge” in North Korea’s military power in the preceding years, although Pyongyang had increased the frequency of small-scale incursions in 1969 and 1970. Quite to the contrary, Pyongyang, buoyed by the Nixon Doctrine and the unprecedented North-South Joint Communiqué of 1971, reduced its defense budget by 34 percent in 1972, the largest reduction in its history. Also, it had dramatically reduced its smallscale operations. On the other hand, the United States, deeply mired in the Vietnam War and seeking to avoid getting involved in another one, was trying to reduce its military commitments overseas. Nixon made it clear to Seoul that South Korea would have to defend itself and should not expect the United States to send in reinforcements quickly or massively. The ROKA, therefore, had to discard the activedefense strategy whose critical component was U.S. reinforcements (i.e., a strategy that traded space for time, waiting for U.S. reinforcements) and devised a strategy whose primary goal was to defend Seoul at all costs with the forces in place within Korea. The change in Korea’s strategy at this time, therefore, was brought about because of the change in America’s global strategy, not because of an “upsurge” in the North’s power. The presence of the alliance system required the South Korean military to adjust its strategy in order to ensure doctrinal compatibility after an American reappraisal. The next significant change in the doctrine was instituted in the early 1980s, again to accommodate a shift in the U.S. military strategy. The ROKA adopted in 1982 the AirLand Battle Doctrine, which the United States had developed to respond to the way Soviet forces are structured and to take advantage of advances in military technology. To counter a Soviet battlefield strategy that placed a premium on achieving a high force-to-force ratio, the doctrine was designed to avoid individual battles of attrition and instead to use offensive air or ground firepower against uncommitted second-echelon forces in the early stages of the war. The U.S. Army’s move to this doctrine can be traced to the mid-1970s, when the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command recognized, in its analysis of the 1973 Middle East War, the growing lethality of modern weapons systems and the importance

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of combined arms coordination.77 The main impetus, however, was provided in 1979 by an extensive evaluation of NATO’s conventional capabilities, out of which emerged the operational concept known as “Follow-On-Forces-Attack” (FOFA).78 The FOFA attempts to maintain a manageable force-to-force ratio at the front line by attacking rear-area forces—follow-on forces—before they can be deployed to the front.79 The doctrine was offensive in nature, in line with the then President Reagan’s overall policy toward the Soviet Union.80 As Lee notes, “The adoption of the AirLand Battle doctrine by the ROKA, the first and only allied army to do so thus far, attests to the degree of interoperability practiced by the Combined Field Army (CFA).”81 Since the North Korean People’s Army (NKPA) adopted organizational principles and doctrines similar to the Soviet Union’s, it might be logical for the ROKA to embrace the strategy that had been designed to counter the Soviet strategy, instead of reinventing the wheel. But the strategic explanation loses its persuasive power if one realizes that the Soviet follow-on forces were deployed beyond the Urals, thousands of miles away from the Central European front, whereas NKPA’s second-echelon forces were in the immediate vicinity of the frontline troops. The doctrine was probably adopted to ensure doctrinal familiarity and interoperability. The ROKA’s adoption of an American doctrine contributes to the interoperability of the two forces, as Lee argues: Factors that will contribute to the enhanced interoperability of ROK and U.S. forces and to their success on the battlefield include (1) doctrinal familiarity with, in this case, the AirLand Battle doctrine under which the U.S. Army and the ROK armed forces both train; (2) interoperability and compatibility in weapons systems, communications, logistical supply networks, and intelligence systems; (3) flexibility, horizontally (between the various ground, air, and naval units) and vertically (between headquarters [and] the various field commands).82

As described above, the structures of the two militaries are entangled in combined force institutional arrangements; the militaries also work jointly to lay out specific procedures for the use of their armed forces and materiel in pursuit of common objectives. These procedures range from operational plans to rules of engagement to maintenance procedures. The CFC establishes its war plan (OPLAN), currently OPLAN 5027-98, which then guides combined exercises, and the Eighth U.S. Army also has its operation plan, OPLAN 5002. Every base of the combined operations institutes maintenance or operation procedures that are compatible with both forces, as the United States’

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Taegu base arrangement shows: “Establish maintenance practices/ procedures compatible with ROKAF practices/procedures which produce desired results, possibly by means different from established USAF practices/procedures.”83 The history of Korea’s doctrinal development shows the degree to which the interoperability requirement calls the allies to make heavy investments in military strategy that are unrecoverable should the alliance be terminated. The integration of force structures and the compatibility of procedures provide potent ammunition with which to suppress efforts to terminate the alliance. They are the material embodiment of a “special relationship” and therefore serve as a substantive basis for retaining the alliance, because it can be argued that they give the existing alliance a cost advantage over other possibilities. Indeed, the “binational synthesis of command relations and force structures,” according to Hayes, “enabled the army to argue,” in its bid to defeat President Carter’s withdrawal policy, “that what is good for the army in Korea is good for the United States.”84

Human Assets and Alliance Team Specificity Organizational charts and rules lay out who is supposed to do what in which way. As it is infeasible to imagine and plan for all possible contingencies, however, the formal structure leaves room for adaptation and opens the door to organizational idiosyncrasies. People who actually occupy the dots in the charts and carry out the missions have a tendency to develop their own ways of accomplishing their mission by adapting the charts and rules to their specific circumstances. Personalities also play a role in producing a set of organizational idiosyncrasies. Team specificity obtains as a result of alliance practices that place allied personnel in a team configuration that ranges from the SCMs to the CFC headquarters to various military units to task-specific committees. It is not just that the alliance relationship promotes proliferation of a vast network of transnational and transgovernmental ties at various levels. These diffuse and dense networks of governmental, corporate, and private teams bind the alliance together. But it does more: this web of ties is specific and partial to the alliance, privileging it over other possible security relationships at a contract renewal time. Many “teams” are involved in the alliance operation, starting with the ROK /U.S. Military Committee at the top. Providing political

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and strategic guidance to it is the SCM, held annually since 1969, where the U.S. secretary of defense and the ROK minister of national defense lead their respective delegations that include senior defense and foreign affairs officials. The SCM reiterates in its joint statement every year that “the combined US-ROK forces . . . should continue to maintain and develop combined readiness, tactics, doctrine, professionals, training and interoperability.”85 The SCM has under it a number of subcommittees on policy review, logistics cooperation, security cooperation, and defense technology and industry cooperation. The U.S.-ROK MCM, instituted in 1979, over which the chairpersons of the respective Joint Chiefs of Staff preside, is also held annually. While the SCM and the MCM represent permanent teams instituted to guide and manage the alliance, a number of ad hoc, or temporary, teams have been created to deal with specific issues that arise from time to time. The USFK-MND Brigadier General Contentious Issues Task Force was created to discuss some of the more thorny issues between the allies: the use and return of facilities and areas granted to the USFK, the return of the Tongduch’o˘n training area, the SOFA revision process, and the relocation of the Camp Hialeah. The establishment of a joint operation facility is usually accompanied by the creation of a team that is tasked to coordinate the use of the facility and to resolve problems that may arise. For example, when the Taegu Operation Facility was established, the Joint Coordinating Group (JCG) was created to “maintain close interaction and coordination to insure that the spirit and intent of this agreement are maintained and to resolve problem areas.”86 Also, a weapons production, particularly a licensed or joint production, leads to a formation of a team of experts and officers from the two countries to manage the project. The M-16 rifle production agreement, which was mentioned above in the equipment specificity section, for example, obligated the U.S. and South Korean governments to “designate a Liaison Officer to monitor and coordinate the M-16 rifle production program.” Between 1950 and 1970, South Korea had the largest number of military officers trained in the United States, with 21,063 officers sent to U.S. military academies for training, while the Latin American countries altogether had 23,878 of them for the same period. By 1989, 36,000 Korean officers, NCOs, and enlisted soldiers had received training through the U.S. IMET program.87 The three presidents who ruled South Korea from 1960 to 1992 were all retired generals who had been trained in the United States, and two of them had even served under an American commander in the Vietnam War. As a result of these trainings, not to mention the daily interaction within the CFC,

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Korean and American officers have developed professional and interpersonal ties that are specific to the alliance. In a striking example of the integration of the two armies, the Korean Army selects, promotes, disciplines, and pays 4,400 Koreans to serve in the U.S. 8th Army under the Korean Augmentation to the U.S. Army (KATUSA) program. The program’s 4,400 KATUSAs eat, sleep, work, and train with the 27,000 U.S. soldiers of the U.S. 8th Army, wear U.S. uniforms, and answer to the U.S. chain of command, making the U.S. 8th Army “a U.S. force that is part American, part South Korean.”88 The huge influx of U.S. weapons has also resulted in a large contingent of officers needed to deal with it. The Procurement Headquarters, for example, has 138 employees, including 44 officers. A disproportionately high number of military attachés are sent to the United States: 13 in the United States; one each in Britain, Germany, France, and Russia as of 1997.89 The Procurement Headquarters trains its officers at the Korea Trade Association on trading practices and in English and sends some of them to the Institute for Foreign and Security Policy. It annually sends two officers to the United States for training at the Security Assistance Agency and Logistics Management School. The Procurement Headquarters operates a language laboratory and administers foreign-language evaluations twice a year. Defense industries have also been involved in coproduction arrangements, have formed joint committees, and have held meetings. Major arms export deals have what Michael Klare calls a long “prehistory,” which lasts anywhere from several months to five years or more. The prehistory includes a series of informal discussions, exchanges of information with foreign governments, demonstration of specific equipment for representatives of the potential purchasing nation, and reviews by the State and Defense Departments, the National Security Council, and other executive branch agencies. All these activities generate a powerful political momentum behind a sale.90 Hence a sale involves more than a simple exchange of hardware and money; it generates an intimate web of connections among the involved officers, officials, and businesspersons, who learn organizational and personal idiosyncrasies through these contacts—a team specificity. Team specificities are not limited to the military but extend more broadly into society. For example, equipment specificity, a spin-off of the hardware requirement of the alliance, leads to intimate connections between Korean and U.S. arms manufacturers. At the SCM in June 1988, Korea and the United States signed a memorandum

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of understanding on Defense Technology and Industry Cooperation (DTIC) and established the DTIC Committee as one of the key teams under the aegis of the SCM. The DTIC is made up of defense industry representatives from the two countries as well as concerned officers, thus providing an official channel of contact and communication between powerful actors in two societies. Defense contractors themselves have also taken an initiative to promote team specificity in their sector. The Korea Defense Industry Association (KDIA) and the American Defense Preparedness Association (ADPA), for example, have held the annual U.S.-ROK Defense Industry Conference since 1986 as a forum to exchange views and coordinate lobbying efforts. They moved the degree of their team specificity one step further by establishing in 1987 the Korea-Oregon Defense Industry Committee, with the KDIA and the Oregon Chapter of the ADPA as its members. No less important are the civilian ties whose birth is midwifed by the militaries. U.S. soldiers marry Korean nationals at a rate of some 2,000 per year,91 and 60,000 marriages had taken place by the end of the 1970s and nearly 100,000 by the end of the 1980s.92 There are also veterans’ groups whose commonality is their experience in the Korean War or their tour in Korea, including the Veterans of Foreign Wars, American Legion, Chosin Few, Korean War Veterans Association, American Veterans Committee, and Second Division Association. The American participation in the Korean War also resulted in the formation of groups of families that had lost their family members to the war, including the Association of Korean War Families and the Coalition of Korean War Families. Communication Specificity As Americans and Koreans speak different languages, their soldiers have to learn the other’s language to facilitate an efficient communication within the alliance. Also the soldiers have to familiarize themselves with cultural differences and idiosyncratic expressions in order to minimize miscommunication among themselves. Their acquisition of a foreign language and idiosyncrasies involves a durable investment by the soldiers, who have to expend their time and energy to learn, and by the government, which has to provide workforce and resources to facilitate language acquisition. As this investment would be of little value for other alliances, it represents a form of an asset specificity that is engendered by the alliance—a communication specificity.

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The CFC and its component commands, being binational headquarters with an equal number of staff members from each country, have Korean and U.S. officers intermingled throughout. Unlike their U.S. counterparts, Korean officers assigned to these headquarters are bilingual; the work of these headquarters is largely carried out in English, although messages between tthem and the ROK-only headquarters are usually in Korean.93 “The quality of military communication within Korea is also excellent. One key to the effectiveness of integrated command structure is the ability of many of the Koreans to understand and speak English. In fact, communications are so good that there may be a tendency to take them for granted.”94 To attain the excellent quality of military communication, the MND has encouraged its officers to learn English and instituted a number of measures for that purpose. One of its key measures concerns the English education of its officers, which began in the early days of the ROK Army, over 50 years ago. In December 1945, the U.S. Military Government set up the Military English School, which produced 110 graduates by April 1946. Immediately after the English school was closed a year later, the U.S. Military Government established the Korea Constabulary Training Center (which the Koreans called Military Academy and which indeed became the Military Academy in 1948, with the establishment of the Korean state) to train officers. By 1948, it had produced 1,254 officers, who formed the core of the ROKA’s leadership. As Sawyer points out, U.S. military advisers imparted the impression on Korean officers that good English skills and close relationship with American officers would be the key to success in their military career. A majority of the constabulary officers were graduates of the English school or the training center and had a good command of English.95 They formed the initial top leadership of the ROKA and demonstrated to the next generations of officers that a good command of English is essential to their military career. Now, in the Korean Military Academy, English is one of the most important part of the curriculum that every cadet is required to take. The ROKA went so far as to institutionalize an English test as part of a promotion system for its officers and NCOs.96 To better prepare its officers for the information age, according to the army, it decided in May 1999 to require all its officers and NCOs to take Test of English for International Communication (TOEIC) and Test of English Proficiency developed by Seoul National University (TEPS). The army planned to reward high scorers with a priority in promotion and to deny it to low scorers. English, long recognized a key to success in an officer’s career, is now enshrined officially as one of the

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criteria for performance review: for a Korean officer, speaking good English is as important as fighting a good war. The English test was institutionalized to promote smooth operation of the CFC, as the ROKA acknowledges. The operation of an alliance burdens military officers not only with acquiring fighting capabilities but also with foreign-language requirements. The U.S. military runs a number of language schools, including the Defense Language Institute—Foreign Language Center (Monterey, CA), which teaches the Korean language to soldiers and then sends them to the 501st Military Intelligence Group (MIG), which is responsible for listening to North Korean military communications; analyzing Korean dailies, magazines, and books; and interrogating defectors. Members of the 501 MIG receive one year of intensive language training—45 credit units—at the Defense Language Institute and an additional one-month training at the Yonsei Language School. Although the MIG is known to have had 1,600 members in five companies of three battalions in 1953, its current size is unknown.97 On the other hand, the IMET program sends Korean officers and NCOs to the United States to teach them military skills. Although it is not designed to teach foreign soldiers English, the existence of the program, conducted in English, encourages them to learn the language. Given the combined nature of the command structure, it becomes more and more critical for a Korean officer, as he advances to a higher rank, to be able to communicate with his American counterparts or superiors. It is not uncommon for an officer, and even his wife, to hire a private tutor to improve their English, for he knows that English is the key to his success for CFC positions: the most coveted ones most certainly require English skills. Communication specificity, however, goes beyond the simple issue of dealing with foreign languages. Cultural differences such as attitudes toward authority also complicate communication, as soldiers have to learn and incorporate them in their communication in a “learning-by-doing” fashion. For example, the U.S. military devolves authority and responsibility to lower echelons, whereas the South Korean military centralizes authority at the upper rungs. American officers often find that their South Korean counterparts cannot take initiatives without checking with their senior commanders. For their part, South Koreans are often reluctant to believe that American officers can speak authoritatively on contentious matters. “The difficulty of ensuring precise communication of information exacerbates the problems caused by inherently different approaches to command and control.”98

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The idiosyncratic knowledge about Korean soldiers that American soldiers gain from “learning-by-doing” cannot easily be translated for soldiers from another country. These relationships are necessary in order to provide responsive, effective, and timely staff assistance. Team members must also acquire a thorough understanding of FROKA’s [First ROK Army’s] organization, methods of operation, and it’s [sic] capabilities and limitations. Only through the development of these working relationships, and by acquiring this knowledge, can we facilitate responsive support, and ensure that team members are able to precisely articulate both FROKA and CFC requirements.99

Communication specificity, however, goes beyond the simple issue of dealing with foreign languages. Every communication involves idiosyncrasies in terms of expression and manners of speaking. For example, “let’s rock ’n’ roll” in the context of a ground combat engagement does not indicate the beginning of a dance party to the tune of a particular genre of popular music, but a command to fire a rifle at the automatic setting. These idiosyncratic expressions, of which there are many, are extremely difficult to teach in a classroom setting; they are usually experientially learned in field trainings and exercises. One of the key functions of exercises is precisely to reinforce learningby-doing for each soldier involved in them. The knowledge of idiosyncratic expressions that each soldier acquires through trainings and exercises represents a durable investment that is specific to the alliance and that would be lost if it were terminated.

Locations and Alliance Location specificity refers to the situation where military infrastructure is laid out in such a way as to economize on inventory and transportation expenses. The specificity results in an “asset immobility condition,” in which setup or relocation costs are so great that alliance members find it more beneficial not to terminate their military relationship even when purely military considerations may warrant it. Location specificity involves two kinds of assets: immobile and hardto-move. Immobile assets include bases, training ranges, runways, roads, train lines, radars, fences, trenches, and land mines, while hard-to-move assets comprise ammunitions, tanks, APCs, and POL. Although strategic intertheater lift capability and pre-positioning could potentially reduce the logistical burden of transporting hardto-move assets, location specificity would be extremely difficult and

102 Table 3.7

Power, Interest, and Identity in Military Alliances USFK Bases and Facilities

Bases

Total

96 sites

265

Area (million km2) Dedicated Local 138

34

Temporary 93

Source: Ministry of National Defense, Defense White Paper 1995–1996 (Seoul: Korea Institute for Defense Analyses, 1996), p. 117.

costly to completely eliminate, for the allies cannot choose the location of the common adversary against which the alliance operates, but have to operate within the given geographical constraints imposed by international treaties and norms governing sovereignty. In accordance with the ROK-U.S. Mutual Defense Treaty and the War Host Nation Support Agreement, Seoul provides the USFK with land and facilities. The land offered to the USFK totals 80.28 million pyo˘ ng (265 million km2), over which the USFK operates 96 bases and facilities (Table 3.7). And since the mid-1970s, Seoul has offered land and facilities for the Combined Defense Improvement Project (CDIP), while the United States has invested in buildings and other infrastructure.100 These structures, such as bases, training/firing ranges, runways, roads, rails, ports, fences, trenches, bunkers, land mines, radar and communication facilities, all represent investments made to facilitate the smooth operation of the alliance and are therefore nothing extraordinary. Because they are durable and because they cannot be readily recouped if the alliance is terminated or replaced with other arrangements, however, they embody assets specific to the alliance. The location of the bases is not random but reflects an assessment of the threat, the defensive strategy, and natural conditions. Thus, the construction of a military installation exemplifies a durable investment not only in terms of the actual construction costs but also in terms of the costs associated with threat assessment and defense strategy articulation. The CFC built an extensive network of bases along ˘ ijo˘ngbu corridor, because it deemed the corridor the most likely the U avenue of advance by the North and one of the most advantageous locations for defensive operations.101 Building an infrastructure for the alliance involves more than constructing facilities: facilities must be connected to one another. Hence communication links need to be established between a theater command structure and its principal subordinate command centers and between the subordinate command centers and frontline facilities;

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command centers need to be protected with medium- to high-altitude surface-to-air missile systems; a POL pipeline distribution system must be in place from the point of entry to storage sites to expected areas of operation; and road and rail systems must be constructed to enable various missions. Even if we look at airpower alone, it involves multiple assets specific to the alliance. First, there must be bases capable of receiving U.S. air units, with an air control center, runways, and hangars to support them. Each air base needs to be stocked with adequate munition and POL for military operations, and rotational exercises need to be held between the U.S. air wings and the Korean forces. Korean aircraft must be wired in such a way as to enable them to communicate with U.S. systems and employ U.S. air-to-air missiles. Also technical compatibility needs to be promoted between the two air forces to enable the use of common equipment such as fuel, fuelling nozzles, and radio frequencies. Clauses in the Status of Forces Agreement, such as “Access of Vessels,” “Aircraft and Air Traffic Control,” and “Navigational Aids,” are apparently written with these requirements in mind. There are also secondary facilities that are not essential to war fighting but nevertheless necessary for an effective alliance. The American Forces Korea Network (AFKN) represents such a facility. It began as a mobile radio station in September 1950 and started broadcasting TV in September 1957. Although Seoul and Washington agreed to return the VHF channel, Channel 2, which the AFKN had been using, Seoul had to bear the cost of the transition to UHF.102 Recent developments in strategic intertheater lift capability and pre-positioning have reduced the logistical burden of transporting heavy equipment, ammunition, or POL to frontline units in case of combat. But reducing the logistical difficulty incurs costs in other areas. For example, while pre-positioning is a tactical innovation that allows a lightly armed force to move to a remote area quickly and to be supplied with heavy equipment on the spot, thus producing the same effect as a quick reinforcement with heavily armored forces, it incurs the new costs of storage and the opportunity costs of the unavailability of the pre-positioned equipment for training and other purposes. Also, because the pre-positioning requires a different kind of exercise to prepare the dispatched force, the CFC stages reception, staging, onward movement, and integration (RSOI) exercises every year. Therefore, savings in one area are invested in other areas of alliance operation.

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Assets Specific to Alliance We have so far seen the ways in which a normal alliance operation creates specificities and the extent to which alliance specificities are entrenched. These specificities, an unintended but natural by-product of alliance practices, in turn affect the life span of the alliance in two ways. First, they lower the costs of alliance maintenance and raise those of an alliance termination or switch. And second, by generating an “alliance constituency” that benefits from the status quo and would suffer losses in case of an alliance termination, they ensure that there will be political actors favoring alliance maintenance. We shall look at these processes in depth later in Chapter 5, which will use, inter alia, these concepts to help explain the persistence of the U.S.Korea alliance in the 1990s. The remainder of this chapter, therefore, will be limited to sketching out the ways in which asset specificities affected the U.S.-Korea alliance in earlier periods. Hayes argues that the integration of the USFK with the South Korean military, into the CFC, functioned as an effective tool with which to oppose Carter’s policy to withdraw U.S. military from Korea in the late 1970s.103 Likewise, Walden explains in terms of bureaucratic interests the reversal of President Bush’s decision to reduce American military presence in South Korea a decade later: It was basically the culmination of a campaign waged by the Pentagon and U.S. Pacific Command to reassert Washington’s grip over the AsiaPacific security situation after its hold on this had been loosened by the immediate post-Cold War developments. The Bush administration’s policy of drawing down U.S. forces had essentially been forced on Washington by strong public pressures from within both the U.S. and the Asia-Pacific to reduce its military presence in the region owing to the loss of the Soviet enemy. To worried observers at the Pentagon, the Philippines Senate’s refusal to ratify a new bases treaty with the United States was seen as an alarming development that could culminate in a rollback of U.S. forces from the Western Pacific to Hawaii.104

Allison suggested in his bureaucratic politics model that a policy represents an outcome of compromises among different, often conflicting, bureaucratic interests.105 Duffield made use of Allison’s model to strengthen his argument that NATO conventional force levels fluctuated very little because an international regime, consisting of norms and rules about the number of forces that each country should contribute, has strongly influenced the provision of forces: “One way in which compliance may become institutionalized at the

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domestic level is through the formation and strengthening of substate actors that promote such behavior.”106 The Joint Chiefs of Staff and John McCloy, a special U.S. negotiator to the talks, for example, opposed the 1966/67 reduction plan, while the Treasury Department and secretary of defense favored it. According to Duffield, the “decision not to reduce significantly the U.S. conventional force contribution in the Central Region . . . was strongly influenced by regime considerations and a reinforcing set of beliefs held by many U.S. officials that militated against reductions.” The bureaucratic politics model is again borrowed by Hartung to explain President Carter’s difficulties in implementing his arms control policy. Hartung argues that elements of the national security and foreign policy bureaucracies undermined Carter’s efforts to control arms transfers. While Carter was formulating his arms control policy—Presidential Directive 13, which was to be released on March 19, 1977—officials in the Pentagon and State Department hastily pushed through the $4 billion in pending sales between January and March 1977, because they had anticipated a decision to place a ceiling on future arms sales on the basis of fiscal year 1977 levels. As a result, total orders for U.S. arms for 1977 exceeded $12 billion, effectively keeping the arms export ceiling at an unusually high level. After the Defense and State Departments’ effective sabotage, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s national security adviser, was opposed to arms transfer controls and effectively stymied them.107 The bureaucratic politics model may also seem applicable to the Korea-U.S. alliance, and has indeed been put forth by a few scholars to explain the difficulty in changing the alliance structure.108 Focusing on the Joint U.S.-ROK Camptown Clean-up Campaign from 1971 to 1976, for example, Katherine Moon examines how the Korean government and the USFK used women as an instrument to resist a foreign policy change they opposed: A specific disruption in the secure U.S.-R.O.K. alliance [Nixon Doctrine], then drove the USFK leadership and the R.O.K. government, through the Purification Campaign, to tighten joint control over the bodies and conduct of camptown prostitutes. For the USFK, the Clean-Up efforts were a means to defend its organizational interests vis-à-vis the policy-makers in Washington and a symbol of its commitments to remain in Korea, regardless of Washington’s policy statements. For the Korean government, the clean-up was an integral part of “private diplomacy,” a desperate resort to the use of local people and resources, in the absence of conventional carrots and sticks, to secure U.S. commitments to Korea.109

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On balance, the impact of this specific action on Nixon’s policy is dubious at best, if only because during this same period the Blue House was engaged in intense diplomatic negotiations to stop further reductions of U.S. military in Korea; the Korean Parliament passed resolutions and sent delegations to Washington asking the USFK to stay; and the ROKA was dispatched to Vietnam as a way of compensating the United States for its defense commitments in Korea. Nevertheless, two things must be noted. First, the USFK had by the early 1970s established itself as a political entity with organizational interests to protect and had mobilized the meager resources at its disposal for its own sake, notwithstanding the American mantra of civilian control of the military. Second, it was the Korean government—its executive and judiciary branches—that attempted to end the disruption in the alliance. By the early 1970s, few sectors in the Korean society remained with a stake in protecting the alliance, a situation that would change drastically in the ensuing two decades. When President Carter wanted to pull the American military out of South Korea in the late 1970s, it was the USFK’s leadership that openly opposed and ultimately derailed it, as Cumings chronicles the event. The troop withdrawal from Korea also no sooner saw the light of day than it met with furious opposition. General John Vasey, former commander of American forces in Korea, began arguing within Carter circles in later 1976 that a putative North Korean buildup made the withdrawal impossible; soon thereafter, a Carter appointee on NSC told me that “only one person supports the withdrawal, and that is Jimmy Carter.” The formal reversal of the policy was finally announced when Carter visited and toasted Park Chung Hee in June 1979.110

If General Vasey worked behind the scenes, General Singlaub openly opposed Carter’s policy and took his case to the Congress, a daring move that ultimately cost him his job but that nonetheless helped bring about the intended outcome.111 In all fairness, however, it must be noted that this policy reversal was achieved in the midst of a sea change in international affairs. The debate on Carter’s arms control policy was preceded by the fall of the Shah in Iran in December 1978 and followed by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. In other words, the fate of Carter’s policy was tied to the rise of what Thompson called the “Second Cold War.” Arguing that the best way to bridge the domestic and international levels in the study of international regime formation is to explore the nature of what he calls a “regime-conducive foreign policy” and to

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seek to identify the unit-level attributes that dispose states to engage in such policies, Zürn lists as those unit-level attributes a corporatist political structure and a change in the domestic power constellation.112 Following his suggestions, this chapter identifies and analyzes the domestic structures and power constellations that were conducive to regime maintenance. Unlike Zürn, who implicitly assumes that those unit variables are independent of the regime, however, this chapter shows that the international regime creates and affects the unit attributes in such a way as to facilitate regime preservation. Now this chapter must end with a word of caution, for the foregoing discussion may “tell the truth, but not the whole truth.” During the Nixon and Carter administrations, there were conflicts of interests and clashes of views, and there were fights between different branches of the governments. In the 1990s, however, we observe none of these, as Chapter 5 shows. The alliance constituency did not really have to fight to protect its interests that stemmed from the alliance, or to preserve the alliance that was its raison d’être. Following Sun Tzu’s advice, the constituency won the war without fighting a battle. In this decade, just as in the two previous ones, alliance asset specificities created constituency and cost barriers, and they perhaps made it more difficult to terminate the alliance. Yet few had to be mobilized to maintain the status quo, for there was a silent consensus. This crucial difference must be recognized and included in any explanation of 1990s’ alliance behavior, to which the next two chapters turn.

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Chapter 4

Alli ance and Identity

C

hapter 3 has shown how alliance specificities create powerful domestic constituents with interests in maintaining the alliance, but such constituents represent a small segment of the state and society involved in the alliance. Even in Korea, the military industry’s portion of the economy and society was small. In 1991, the Ministry of National Defense designated as “defense industry” 84 companies, which produced 260 defense products, with a total sales of 1.7 trillion won—only 7 percent of the total sales of the companies and a meager 0.7 percent of Korea’s gross national product (GNP).1 Korea’s military, with about 600,000 men in uniform, was not a small group by any measure, but almost all of the soldiers were draftees who derived little, if any, personal gain from the alliance. Very few higher-echelon officers in powerful and profitable positions had a personal stake in it. Also, though the Ministry of National Defense was one of the largest bureaucratic bodies in the Korean government, only a small number of its officials had direct contact with their counterparts in the United States, and an even smaller number had an immediate interest in the alliance. In the United States, the alliance constituency was an even smaller fraction of state and society. Hence the previous chapter leaves a crucial question unanswered: How could this small segment produce a policy that would benefit it at the cost of the larger society? If a state is authoritarian, a small group can, by definition, make and implement policies contrary to the wishes of the majority. But a democratic state is expected to honor these wishes, although it occasionally makes and implements policies favored only by a minority—usually as a result of internal politicking. Because a party making an unpopular decision runs the risk of a loss in the next ballot, such decisions will be rare

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or limited to issue areas that affect only a small segment of the society. As a rule, then, when a democratic state makes a decision, particularly on national and critical issues, such as alliance renewal, we expect a lively debate, at least among politically ambitious entrepreneurs. And if the decision favors a small group at the expense of the larger society, we should observe either intense bargaining among political entrepreneurs or popular admonishment and criticism. If no observable bargaining or debate occurs before or after a political decision that favors a minority, we need to explain the absence of debate and bargaining and the seeming consensus. The uneven domestic consequences of alliance should lead the reactions to maintenance decisions to be segmented if social actors have stable identities that lead them to look after their individual interests. The absence of critical or oppositional voices where distributional consequences are highly uneven, thus, raises questions about identity formation. For acquiescence signifies the existence of a consensus among social actors, including those disadvantaged by alliance practices and specificities, that the alliance is in everybody’s interest.2 To explain the consensus that underpins alliance persistence, this chapter focuses on the social production of threat and security that frames state identity, and, thus, we relax a key assumption, implicit in the preceding chapters, that states have prediscursive, stable identities. This chapter explores the ways in which alliance operations constituted the state identities of South Korea and the United States. Thanks to North Korea and the alliance’s behaviors, representational practices, and institutions, the identity of the United States as a security-enhancing ally and North Korea as a threatening adversary became, by the 1990s, so entrenched in the South Korean way of thinking that the alliance seemed a natural choice. Such entrenchment began with material acts, but only when those acts were represented in particular ways in the news media and in government analyses, such as defense white papers, and institutionalized in history textbooks, museums, legal rulings, or laws did it become part of the common background knowledge of society, capable of constraining the understanding of the present. Once material acts and their representations are conceptually separated, it becomes apparent that the two have different rates of disappearance and institutional stickiness. Acts disappear the moment they are committed, but their representations remain so long as they are remembered. Should the representations form a discourse that is widely and deeply shared in a society, their endurance increases. If they are, in addition, memorialized in an institution, they acquire

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a life expectancy that mere representations can hardly match. For example, an actor may move across a piece of land. That material act can be, depending on the representational scheme chosen, an aggression, a defensive maneuver, a war of liberation, or a continuation of an ongoing civil war. Which one is chosen is consequential, all the more so if the chosen representation is memorialized in a museum, a national cemetery, or a law. The actor may, after committing the act, remain the same or change, but its contemporary identity is understood only within the perceptive matrix framed by the represented and institutionalized identity, thus making it difficult for those who share the perceptive matrix to recognize or acknowledge a change even if there is one. The U.S.-Korea alliance’s perceptions and decisions were subjected at least as much to the influence of the present inherited from the past as to the reality of the present. Such material, representational, and institutional inputs into the allies’ understandings of both alliance and threat laid the discursive foundation for the silent consensus on which the alliance rested in the 1990s. Analyzed in the following are the various ways in which Korea’s and the United States’ identities of themselves in relation to their allies and enemies were based on material acts, their subsequent representation, and the institutions that preserved those representations.

Alliance and Korea’s Identity Simply put, South Koreans had so much absorbed the alliance that they automatically considered it when they thought about security or state identity. Any rethinking of that identity would depend on a transformation in the “culture of national security” within which those issues are thought of, debated, and decided on.3 Particularly relevant to our discussion of alliance persistence are the degree to which alliances are socially embedded and the degree to which alliance practices affect social understandings of state identity. Of the mutually constitutive relationship between the alliance and the social identities, the chapter considers the ways in which the former constitutes the latter, focusing on South Korea’s and the United States’ identities in the issue area of national security. The other directional relationship, from the identities to the alliance, will be analyzed in the next chapter. “Americans’R Us” Most Koreans in the 1990s accepted without question that the United States was the protector, the savior, the good. South Korea, noted

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a scholar who studied anti-Americanism, was “one of the most proAmerican nations in the world and supportive of the U.S.-Korean defense and economic alliance.”4 Opinion polls repeatedly and consistently showed the United States as the country that the Koreans liked the most. In a poll by a major newspaper, 62 percent of Korean respondents picked the United States as their favorite, about six times as many as those who voted for the second most liked country, Switzerland.5 Another poll showed that 76 percent of respondents viewed the United States as a “friendly nation,” while only 30 percent regarded Taiwan, the country that ranked second, as such.6 South Korea was one of the few countries, perhaps the only one, where an American military presence was not just tolerated, but welcomed. In Korean congressional debates in 1974 concerning President Nixon’s decision to remove the American military from South Korea, opposition party members, of a liberal political bent, criticized the conservative government for not doing enough to keep the American military in Korea.7 According to a public opinion poll conducted by Korea Gallup in 1992, 89 percent of Koreans felt that the U.S.-ROK alliance was still necessary—a conclusion similar to that of 73 percent of the respondents in the same poll who believed that the North’s military power was superior to the South’s and 76 percent who doubted that the North would reduce its military might through dialogues with the South. Furthermore, in a surprising show of support for the alliance by the notably nationalistic Koreans, 52 percent supported maintaining the alliance even after “peace takes root on the Korean peninsula.”8 In comparison, a majority of the Germans favored a “complete U.S. withdrawal” in the 1990s, while the Japanese have, since the Americans’ landing in 1945, never wholly embraced the American military.9 The extraordinary degree of Korean amity toward the United States did not go unnoticed by Americans. As Gregory Henderson observed, “We [Americans] were more than a friend to Seoul, we were the friend . . .; until the late May 1980 Kwangju uprising . . . anti-Americanism was about as common in South Korea as fish in [a] tree” (emphasis in the original).10 The South Korea of the 1990s was a stark contrast to the South Korea of the 1940s. While the Republic of Korea was arguably created by the American military in 1945, the United States was not welcomed in the early postliberation period. Its state-building project was violently resisted at the local level, where autonomous Inmin wiwo˘nhoi (people’s committees) clashed with local officials appointed by the U.S. Military Government (USMG). At the national level, the USMG’s policy of setting up a separate state in the South was openly

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challenged and opposed by a majority of leading politicians who, defying the government’s ban, crossed the 38th parallel to meet with political elites in the North and discuss the possibility of founding a national state. Popular opposition to American efforts to establish a separate state was so strong and widespread that it had to be quelled by force, before a South Korean state was founded in 1948. In 1949 alone, over 100,000 Koreans were arrested and 132 political parties and organizations disbanded for opposing American policies. And an as-yet-unknown number of Koreans were killed in the South even before the Korean War broke out in 1950.11 How did the virulently anti-American Korea of the 1940s become so welcoming of the United States in the 1990? First, the Koreans’ receptivity is embedded in material facts that explicitly and implicitly tell the Koreans which power to love and which to fear. The Koreans acquired “a strong fear of the Soviet Union and North Korea” because of the Korean War and many provocations by the North, and they developed “a feeling of genuine warmth toward the US for supporting South Korea with the sacrifice of thousands of young men and millions of dollars in aid.”12 Other things being equal, a threatening act identifies its actor as a threat; a helping hand helps its owner to be seen in a positive light. Second, the Koreans understand their social world, as others do, through representations that imbue material reality with particular social meanings. Few Koreans have had a direct experience with North Korea, but they learn about the threat through textbooks, news, and official statements, which form an enemy much as a nation forms an “imagined community” as citizens become aware of one another through national print media.13 Third, the alliance draws its strengths from the institutionalization of identities: the United States is codified as an ally by the Mutual Defense Treaty, whereas North Korea is identified as an “anti-state group” by South Korea’s National Security Law and as a terrorist state by U.S. regulations. The two most significant material facts determining the Koreans’ perception of the United States are America’s arrival in 1945 as a liberator from Japanese colonial rule and its return five years later as a savior of South Korea from the North’s invasion. The formal establishment of the alliance at the end of the war and the continued presence of the U.S. military also left a deep imprint on the Koreans’ perception. Lim noted the effects on Korean identity and emphasized that the “U.S. military presence symbolizes more than defense and security”: To Koreans who have bitter memories of the brutality of Communism they experienced during the Korean War, the U.S. presence goes far

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toward relieving their constant anxieties over the threat posed by North Korea. But such a psychological configuration also tends to perpetuate, rather than eliminate, the dependence mentality toward a big and strong nation.14

The modern origin of such identity effects can be traced back to the 1940s, when the USMG established the institutional structure of the Korean military, and to the outbreak of the Korean War, when the Korean Army (ROKA) was organizationally integrated with the U.S. military, which was given the authority to command the former. This institutional history and structure were to have an enduring impact on the Korean soldiers’, and by extension Korean civilians’, perception of the United States. The Korean Constabulary officers, who were recruited, trained, and promoted to ROKA’s highest positions by American military advisors, grew to view a good command of the English language and an intimate relation with American officers as essential for success in the military, as a study by the U.S. Department of the Army shows.15 Continued training has strengthened the bonds that Korean officers feel with the United States. By 1989, 36,000 Korean officers, noncommissioned officers (NCOs), and enlisted soldiers had received training through the U.S. IMET program.16 The three presidents who ruled South Korea from 1960 to 1992 were all retired generals who had been trained in the United States, and two of them had even served under an American commander in the Vietnam War. Former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara bluntly stated the long-term effects of such training programs: The most beneficial of all our military aid programs is probably the training of foreign elite officer corps and specialists. They are none other than future leaders of their respective countries. It is important to have in the leadership position the people who know the American way of thinking and action. It would bring us incalculable benefits to have these people as our friends.17

The production of the “benevolent Americans” identity was backed by massive inflows of economic benefits from the United States, which provided $12.6 billion in economic and military aid from 1946 to 1976 alone. That translates into $600 per capita annually for 30 years, when Koreans in 1960 had a per capita income of $100.18 The aid, though primarily motivated by Washington’s Cold War considerations, created a solid material pillar supporting Korean

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amity toward the U.S. military. By conferring benefits that could be captured by various elite groups and economic sectors, the aid created powerful interest groups within Korea that supported the image of a friendly America. Adding in those groups, which benefited from alliance asset specificities and the economic growth Korea experienced while allied with the United States, the Koreans had palpable material evidence to identify the United States as a munificent and benevolent friend of Korea. But material facts do not provide a full account of the U.S. image. Elsewhere, economic aid was seen as an instrument of Cold War competition or even as a form of economic invasion, as, the Economic Commission for Latin America asserted, was the purpose of the U.S. capital infusion into Latin America. In Korea the money was represented and accepted as an expression of sympathy and concern for Korea’s needs, never as an act of U.S. self-interest.19 The positive identity created and buttressed by material facts was further consolidated and disseminated by representations of the United States first as the liberator who freed the Koreans from the yoke of Japanese colonialism and later as the defender of Korea’s freedom against threats from North Korean and global communism. The first president of the Republic of Korea, Rhee Syngman, described the United States as follows: America has never been an invader. Americans want to assist all countries in need, desiring no compensation or land in return. . . . The U.S., with self-less friendship, is promoting a unity of its allies to help our economic recovery and to assist the anti-communist world. . . . When the U.S. came to the Philippines and Korea, it aimed to liberate and assist them, not to invade. . . . The U.S. went into the Philippines to educate the Philippines and help them achieve their independence.20

Ten years later, President Park Chung Hee played a variation to the pro-American theme: “We like America. We like their system of liberal democracy. They liberated us, protected us from the Communist invasion, and aided us economically.”21 Such descriptions by Korea’s leaders dominated the public discourse on the United States and added to social and representational practices to produce what Stuart Hall calls the “reality effect”: the United States’ identity as a benevolent, security-enhancing ally was accepted as a reality.22 Even American TV programs, frequently broadcast and watched by many Koreans, contributed to the benevolent image of the United States. In an analysis of television’s effects on Koreans’ perceptions,

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Tae-Jin Yoon showed that the rebroadcast programs reproduced such American values as the frontier spirit, emphasis on peace, and hard work and packaged them in such a way as to reinforce the presumption that the United States possessed a moral and material superiority that caused it to accept a responsibility in the world that paralleled the role of the police in a nation. The U.S. television was a morally upright guardian of international peace and order. These shows contributed to the Koreans’ understanding of the United States as a peace-protecting ally and further protected and reproduced the amicable image of the U.S.-Korea relationship.23 The politics of representation also involved erasing facts inconvenient to the reality of the “good U.S.” The sasam sat’ae (April 3rd Insurrection of 1948), in which tens of thousands of civilians were killed by the military and right-wing thugs under the USMG, for example, simply did not exist in history texts. It was only in the late 1970s, when Hy˘on Ki-Y˘ong, a novelist who witnessed the incident as a child, published a “fiction” about the massacre, that it began to enter public discourse.24 Even then, the publication of this “fiction” prompted severe disciplinary measures by the state: the book was banned, the author arrested, and the publisher closed. The mechanism of erasure is also palpable in the way in which a massacre of unarmed civilians at Nogu˘lli was forgotten and not brought to public attention for 50 years. In the small village of Nogu˘lli, hundreds of children, women, and elderly peasants were bombed, strafed, and machine-gunned by American soldiers days after the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950. For the next five decades, survivors and victims’ families were silenced; the incident was blacked out. It was only in 1994, when one survivor recounted the incident in an autobiographical “fiction,” that the story began reaching the public. This survivor waited for nearly 50 years, until a popularly elected civilian had replaced a former general as president, to publish the fiction, because victims offering narratives counter to the dominant discourse of the “good U.S.” faced disciplinary measures by the state.25 Yet it took five more years for the Nogu˘lli massacre to be recognized as a historical incident, and this public recognition came about only after an American wire service, the Associated Press, picked up the “news.”26 Although some local media had previously reported the news, proAmerican discourse was so dominant that it took a “reputable, objective” American media source to break the “news.” The “Cultural Cold War,” Frances Saunders observes in the context of the United States–Soviet Union rivalry, was also conducted in Korea, particularly intensely and extensively after the Korean War.27

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According to Armstrong, the “U.S. played an enormous role as both a model and instigator of cultural change” to win the hearts and minds of the Koreans, as it brought about “a real reorientation of Korean society and culture.”28 The United States was an active participant in the cultural cold war from the time it came to Korea in 1945, mobilizing such institutional tools as the U.S. Information Service, which promoted pro-U.S. sentiments through publications and exhibitions, and the Foreign Operation Administration, which administered educational assistance through which Korea’s elites were educated in the United States.29 By 2003, 88 percent of the professors at the top three universities were educated in the United States, as were almost half of key cabinet members.30 While not all sing the praises of the United States, it was not without significance for Korea’s orientation that a majority of leading opinion makers were educated in the United States. Acknowledging the degree of positive identification of the United States by the Koreans, Armstrong concludes that the cultural war can be said to have been “a significant success for the United States.”31 North Korea as the Other If the United States constitutes the primary object of South Korea’s amity, North Korea is the unrivaled target of its enmity. Not only is the North’s military might perceived as a cardinal threat to the South’s very existence, but the South defines its identity as, essentially, the North’s antithesis. The politics of identity, facilitated and promoted by security politics, reproduces North Korea’s discourse as the preeminent danger to South Korean society. Here, too, three mechanisms of identity constitution are at work: material, representational, and institutional. First, there are material facts that contribute to a North Korean identity that sets it apart not only from South Korea but also from the rest of the world. It practices a mixture of communism, Juch’e, and Confucianism.32 Its economy might have performed better than the South’s in the 1960s and perhaps the 1970s, but it took a nosedive in the 1990s, resulting in a massive famine.33 It restricts people’s movement, limits their right to expression, and punishes dissidents by keeping them in gulags.34 It was also found to systemically violate the economic, social, and cultural rights of its citizens.35 It is not just different; it is deemed by many to be politically intolerable, economically bankrupt, and morally abominable. The North has furthermore engaged in a series of dangerous acts, ranging from the Korean War to the Pueblo interdiction to

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guerilla infiltrations to naval clashes in the West Sea. In one of the most dramatic public displays of violence, its soldiers used axes to kill American soldiers near Panmunjo˘m in a dispute about a tree.36 It did not hesitate to interdict an American ship or to shoot down an American spy airplane.37 Of a number of guerillas sent by Pyongyang, one group managed to come close to assassinating President Park, sending a chill throughout the South. Pyongyang’s agents were reportedly engaged in a variety of overseas operations ranging from kidnapping ordinary citizens, including some Japanese, to killing high-ranking from the South.38 While Pyongyang’s own acts of violence, together with its flamboyant rhetoric, provide material evidence for the North’s dangerous identity, those facts were given a meaning within the context of a social matrix of meanings. The Korean War, for instance, serves as a palpable evidence of the North’s aggressive identity in the South and the United States, whereas the North sees the war as underlining its nationalist identity in its own social context and portrays the war as a defense of the nation against imperialist forces. In everyday life, an act and its representation are fused into one, and the social context of meanings is taken for granted. But because the same act can be represented in opposite ways, given opposite meanings, and constitute opposite social worlds, the analyst needs to separate the representation from the act and understand how the act is represented, remembered, and understood. Of the many acts that an actor commits, the dangerous ones are particularly likely to be fixed in memory and institutionalized. In the late 1960s, for example, the North made a series of daring moves to destabilize the South, beginning in 1968 by sending in a team to assassinate the South’s president. Sensing that the Vietnam War was creating troubles for the United States and, thus, favorable conditions for the North, Pyongyang raised the level of its guerilla activities in the South and increased the range of military actions against the United States, including interdiction of an American spy ship and the downing of a U.S. surveillance aircraft. Such aggressive moves were part and parcel of the “yugyo˘ktae kukka [guerilla state]” that emerged in the North in 1967 to promote conditions conducive to revolution in the South. 39 The emergence of the guerilla state was accompanied by the ascendance of generals from the anti-Japanese guerilla struggle, who became the members of the Politburo of the Korean Workers Party and took over its South policy in the late 1960s.40 These are the irrefutable material facts of the 1960s Northern aggression. The generals who directed the aggressive moves, however, were subsequently purged from the party for their “revisionism,”

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and their revisionist policies were replaced with a policy of peaceful coexistence, which extended to a 1972 meeting with a special envoy of South Korea’s president to sign a joint communiqué declaring peaceful reunification as a guiding principle of their relationship. Reflecting the change in policy orientation, Pyongyang’s military spending, which had exceeded 30 percent of its budget in the late 1960s, was reduced to 17 percent by 1972.41 That the first, flamboyant and aggressive, part of the above story occupied center stage of the collective memory, while the latter ended up in collective amnesia, is indicative of the lopsidedness of South Korea’s discursive space. As late as 2000, South Korea’s Defense Ministry argued that the North was spending about 30 percent of its budget on the military, repeating for over 30 years the ratio announced by Pyongyang in the late 1960s, and selectively ignoring Pyongyang’s release of lower numbers in the following years.42 Which of the multiple material realities produced by the North were to be remembered and which ignored lay at the heart of the politics of memory. The ways in which material realities were selectively remembered and particularly represented were at once forged by and forging the shape of the South’s discursive space.43 That same discursive space also influenced how material facts were understood. If the large military force that the North deployed near the Southern border, for example, was a material reality that could not be disputed, then the fact that this reality was commonly understood as an undeniable proof of Pyongyang’s aggressive intention was a social reality. It was, however, at least possible that the North’s forces were concentrated near the border as a defensive measure against the alliance’s smaller but more modern forces, or as a reaction to the allied military’s adopting the Air Land Battle doctrine, which included the use of nuclear weapons deep inside the North.44 These alternative possible understandings of the North’s military posture remained on, or even outside, the periphery of the discourses in the South and the United States, while the alliance remembered and institutionalized a selective understanding of the material reality as the reality affirming the North’s dangerous identity. Furthermore, the alliance’s selective memory fed into Pyongyang’s selective representation to produce an escalating cycle that consolidated the North’s threat identity. While Seoul and Washington perceived the North’s military posture as offensive, Pyongyang had an incentive to go along with, if not exaggerate, their alarmist perception. To the allies, such an interpretation was dictated by prudence; to the North, it served to increase both bargaining power and deterrence. Each had an interest in representing the North’s military as

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a highly capable, offensive machine, and both ended up consolidating the North’s identity as a threat. This representational politics constituted what game theorists call the “game of chicken” and was particularly important, as Chapter 5 illustrates, with respect to the North’s nuclear weapons. The politics of representation also turned on the unprovable. Things that could not be proved or disproved were presented with a certain interpretation that was by its nature unfalsifiable. Once the unfalsifiable claim was accepted as commonsensical, it acquired the status of an unassailable truth, and the other side was required to disprove what could not be proved either way. This politics of certitude was seen in the ways in which the alliance based Pyongyang’s aggressive identity on its unalterable ulterior desire to “reunify the nation by force.” The North’s alleged ulterior motive, although analytically impossible to prove or disprove, was so commonsensical in the South that commentators, analysts, and politicians routinely referred to it without feeling the need to prove it.45 An analytical inquiry into observable data, however, reveals an interesting twist in the discursive shape of the South. A comparison of the North’s and South’s constitutions can shed light on their ultimate, if not ulterior, political goals. The 1948 constitution of the Republic of Korea declared that the republic was the sole legitimate state on the Korean peninsula whose “territory shall consist of the Korean peninsula and its adjacent islands,” whereas the constitution of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea designated Seoul as its capital. Each of the constitutions declared the other an illegitimate, unconstitutional occupier of a part of its territory. Neither the Republic of Korea nor the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, from a constitutional perspective, could, without undermining its own raison d’être, accept or reconcile with the other: “Because one’s mere existence negates the other, their relationship can be compared to the state of war without the declaration of war.”46 Although for the past five decades the North’s and South’s constitutions have gone through small but politically significant changes, the latter still maintained its hostile stance toward the North, claiming the entire Korean peninsula for its jurisdiction, with the implicit but unmistakable implication that the North was an illegitimate regime that should be overthrown. The North in contrast had no comparable clause in its constitution. Article 9 of its new constitution, adopted in 1998, stated that “in the northern half, the DPRK strengthens the people’s administration and strenuously executes the three revolutions of ideology, technology and culture to accomplish the complete victory

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of socialism” (emphasis added). The subtle but critical difference was also repeated in clauses concerned with unification. The North confirmed the three principles of unification that Kim Il-Sung and Park Chung-Hee agreed on in 1972: “It strives to realize the unification of the fatherland on the basis of the principles of independence, peaceful unification and grand national solidarity.” In contrast, the South, while adopting the policy of peaceful unification, asserted that “liberal democracy” should be the principle of unification, which the North never agreed to and was ever unlikely to find agreeable. Furthermore, the South held on to UN resolutions as legal justification not only for its being the sole legitimate government of Korea but also for its using, under the UN Command, military force to occupy the North and to unseat a regime that it deemed an illegal, antistate entity.47 It also had laws that defined the North as an illegal, antistate organization that must be eradicated, whereas the North had no such law. The North comes closest to stating its ascribed ulterior motive in the ruling party’s commitment to Juch’e ideology, a commitment at least comparable to the South’s devotion to liberal democracy and market economy.48 Ulterior motives are, by their nature, unprovable, and clauses in a constitution are not always fail-safe guides to action, but examination of their constitutions and laws shows that the North was arguably at least as status quo oriented as the South. The social reality, however, was that despite the overt declaration of status quo objectives, Pyongyang was suspected of a hidden aggressiveness, whereas Seoul was immune from such a suspicion notwithstanding its institutionalization of the anti-North stance. The point is not that the North’s true intention was peaceful or that the South harbored an aggressive intention, but that it is not so unproblematic or natural as one might assume that the different—economically inferior and politically illiberal—North was accepted as a dangerous North. In the social scheme within which the U.S.-Korea alliance operated, nonetheless, a different North was not just an inferior North, a despised North, or an immoral North; it was a dangerous North that had an ulterior motive of undermining the South’s and the United States’ security. It was the threat that the allies must unite in constant readiness to deter and defeat. It was an entity whose very existence was anathema to their very existence. It was the Other. This section has thus far argued that a combination of the material facts and representational practices constituted the North’s identity as an enemy to such a degree as to make it seem commonsensical. The material facts certainly facilitated, but did not preordain, the

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establishment of the North’s identity. Representational practices that framed the material in an alarmist fashion, privileged an alarmist interpretation, and established the unfalsifiable as unquestioned truth were also necessary. Furthermore, the representational practices in the South had their counterparts in the North, resulting in a coupling of mutually interdependent yet antagonistic entities: South Korea shaped its identity as the opposite of the North’s, while the North shaped its identity as the opposite of the South’s. The two fed into each other to create the locked-in, contradictory coexistence of two oppositional identities, one threatening the very existence of the other and at the same time creating the condition of its very possibility.49 The North’s identity, thus constituted by the material and the representational, became further consolidated by the institutional arrangements that the allied governments made.

Institutional Framework of Identity Preservation The threat that was perceived to come from North Korea was posed not merely by actions it might take to injure or defeat the South, but by the very visibility of its mode of being as the other. North Korea was the other in opposition to which South Korea was constituted; it was supposed to represent everything that South Korea was not. The binary mode of identity difference may not be unique, but it posed a particularly difficult challenge to Korea, for North Korea and South Korea were supposed to be one nation. Korea’s national identity remained so deeply entrenched that the nation was accepted as almost a primordial entity.50 Here is the irony: Korea was one, yet one half was the opposite of the other half. The two primary discourses along which the Korean identity was stabilized clashed with each other head-on, creating what was tantamount to schizophrenia at the national level.51 The clash was resolved by privileging statism over nationalism. As Jang Jip Choi argues, immediately after the national division in 1953, South Korean nationalism “became transformed into a statism that privileged anti-communism over unification.”52 Grinker also observes, National security laws and anti-communist statutes in south Korea inhibited free speech about the North. South Korean governments bolstered their power by promoting a Cold War discourse that vilified the north as the enemy and thus justified a strong authoritarian state that censored the flow of information to its citizens.53

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That the social constitution of Korea’s identity was stabilized within the institutional arrangement of the state can be seen in the way the South’s constitution laid out the basic boundaries of state identity in both geographic and social terms. The Constitution of the Sixth Republic declared South Korea a “democratic republic,” its territory consisting of “the Korean Peninsula and its adjacent islands,” and repeated that the democratic republic polity and the territorial jurisdiction over the entire Korea were the two enduring themes that were preserved throughout the six constitutional revisions. The Republic of Korea was the sole, legitimate governing organ of the Korean peninsula, and the entity that ruled the territory north of the DMZ was made illegal and illegitimate.54 The latter point was made more explicit by the promulgation of the National Security Law (NSL), which identified the North’s regime as an “anti-state organization.” If the constitution defined Korea’s identity, the NSL provided a potent institutional tool with which to stabilize that identity. In order to secure Korea from life-threatening actions by an antistate organization, the law empowered the state to discipline and punish the populace. It was designed to deal harshly with people who could be accused of leftism or sympathy with the North, and 118,621 people were sent to jail within the first year of its enactment in 1948.55 The minister for justice freely admitted its “contribution”: “The Justice Ministry used the law to eradicate leftists and communists. Its contribution is tremendous.”56 The identity stabilization effect of the NSL was pervasive. When Representative Yu So˘ng-Hwan brought up the issue of kuksi (national policy principles) in 1986 in an effort to challenge South Korea’s “anti-communist” identity, he was charged with violating the NSL. Authors who wrote about facts incongruous with the hegemonic reality of “good Americans” and “dangerous North Koreans”—ranging from Nam Cho˘ng-Hyo˘n to Hyo˘n Ki-Yo˘ng to Hwang So˘k-Yo˘ng—were disciplined with the law. Their public punishment, along with many others, had the secondary effect of forcing self-censorship on would-be critics and dissidents who might have, without the constant threat of the NSL’s invocation, offered alternatives to the South’s official anti-North identity. The Anti-Communist Law, promulgated in 1961, went one step further, identifying not only North Korea but also overseas communist organizations, all socialist countries, and their residents as antistate entities.57 The law thereby empowered the state to label any contact that a Korean made with a citizen of a socialist country as a meeting or a conspiracy with an antistate organization. The law that criminalized the entire population in the communist bloc in effect

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kept Koreans out of touch with the realities of that part of the world and limited their understandings of the bloc to officially sanctioned knowledge. This law had been maintained for almost three decades, until the 1990s, when the Roh Tae-Woo administration began its Nordpolitik, opening diplomatic relations with such communist countries as Russia and China. The new reality, forced on the state by its own initiative, made it necessary to abolish the Anti-Communist Law’s global reach but North Korea was still excluded from legitimate space, and the NSL preserved the North’s illegitimacy. The anti-North identity was nowhere more evidently institutionalized than in the Korean Military Academy, which President Rhee established in the midst of the Korean War as a key instrument to realize his official policy of unification through “marching to the north.” Since its opening in 1951, the academy adopted and repeated “pukchin t’ongil, kot’o hoebok” (unification by marching to the North, and recovery of old territories) as a central slogan in its daily routine of salute practices as well as its basic military training for new cadets, thus inculcating them with enmity toward the North. Although this motto was removed from the academy’s buildings in 1988, the practice of shouting it at salute and during basic training continued.58 Beyond the academy, the military itself embodied the anti-North ethos that was its raison d’être.59 Militaries often function as a mechanism through which the state’s administrative apparatus extends its hold over populations as part of the internal pacification of societies.60 Participation in military service serves to integrate society and convey commitment to collective goals, as studies of the military note.61 In South Korea, where the most important collective goal was to secure its survival against the threat from the North, military service helped integrate the population along the South’s anti-North identity. The Ministry of National Defense made clear that military service was part of the production of a collective subjectivity: “Military service, essentially not for individual interests but for the nation, instills in the soldier a collective mentality that he is a member of a unit and of the nation and an attitude that he sacrifices for and contributes to the nation.”62 The “continuous necessity to defend the Korean nation” allowed the soldier’s role as citizen to be extended to the citizen’s role as soldier.63 The soldier-citizen was constantly taught to place the nation’s survival as the highest goal, to which the North’s presence posed the most serious threat—a message repeated during three years of compulsory military service and reinforced throughout the rest of

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the soldier-citizen’s life as part of the required reservist retraining. Thus, military service was implicated in the very constitution of subjectivity with predisposed enmity toward North Korea.64 Such institutional structures as constitution, laws, and military service serve as tools of governance, not just as instruments with which to administer but also as mechanisms by which to constitute and stabilize identity. They, in conjunction with material acts and representational practices, aligned South Korea’s identity with the United States as opposed to North Korea.

Alliance and U.S. Identity U.S. identity has also been constituted through material acts, representational practices, and institutional politics. The experience of fighting the Korean War and protecting the South throughout the Cold War did much to propel the United States into its role as a defender of the free world. As South Korea’s identity was defined as opposite of the North’s, the United States was identified in terms of its role in containing the danger of communism, of which North Korea constituted an important part during and especially after the Cold War. Finally, the U.S. government institutionalized measures to politically and economically punish North Korea for its transgressions and, in so doing, effectively secure the North’s identity as the Other and the United States’ as its opposite. North Korea as the Other The Korean War left an indelible imprint on the United States. Not only did it facilitate the emergence of a Cold War national security state through, for example, the tripling of the U.S. defense budget—maintained throughout the Cold War—but dramatic defeats, such as Chosin, and grander victories, such as Inch’o˘n, burned images of terrifying communist hordes and heroic American soldiers into the American mind—images that were widely circulated in the mass media and repeated by movies and TV shows long after the war.65 Further material facts were provided by the North, which engaged in numerous aggressive maneuvers and terrorist acts. Its military shot down an American reconnaissance plane and captured a naval ship in 1968, holding 83 crewpersons for almost a year. In 1976 a series of photos that shocked the world captured North Korean soldiers wielding axes in a barbaric attack on American soldiers in the Joint Security

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Area, leaving two officers dead.66 The North reinforced the threat image impressed on American minds by digging infiltration tunnels under the DMZ, building up its military, and forward-deploying much of it. While these palpable facts helped constitute the North’s identity, their effect had a particular direction and persuasive appeal once placed within the powerful frame of reference that bifurcated the world into the zones of security and danger. Although the U.S.-Korea alliance was not the only axis, or for that matter a major one, along which American state identity was reproduced and stabilized, the alliance came to be nested in the more pervasive intersubjectivity of danger that undergirded the Cold War and continued after its end—in a particularly virulent form after 9/11. The image of the North drew sustenance from the larger “discourse of danger,” while continuously contributing to its reproduction.67 During the Cold War, North Korea was one danger among many; with the collapse of communism, Pyongyang emerged as one of the primary dangers in terms of which American identity was constituted.68 Governmental allusions to this danger were numerous. The Department of State, for example, annually designated North Korea as a state sponsor of terrorism in its report on worldwide terrorism.69 While based on the material fact that Pyongyang was engaged in a number of terrorist acts in the 1970s and 1980s, the report sidestepped another material fact: Pyongyang had committed no terrorist act since 1987. It thereby institutionalized the North’s terrorist identity and gave an authoritative interpretation that enabled the use of institutional power to protect that identity by, for example, denying foreign assistance or opposing World Bank loans. In addition to leading to the intended political and economic consequences, these punitive measures in turn had the discursive effect of reproducing the North’s identity. Administrative, military, and intelligence officers also used the platform of congressional committees to reproduce the “dangerous North” identity in testimony and reports provided to explain and justify their policies and budgets. While it is not surprising that the commander of the USFK assumed the North’s threat identity on the basis of a net assessment as well as out of self-interest, it is indicative of the independent and overwhelming power of the identity that even State Department officials seeking to defend engagement under the Clinton administration felt compelled to repeat the conventional line. When he came to the Senate to defend the Geneva Agreed Framework and subsequent measures, for example, Charles Kartman, the then special envoy for the Korean Peace Process, unequivocally

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laid out his administration’s understanding of the North’s identity in defensive terms: Let me make clear that, in these as in past negotiations, the U.S. approach was one of seriousness with respect to the security risks at stake, coupled with deep skepticism. Let me be clear, we do not trust North Korean intentions. It remains indisputable that North Korea represents a major threat to peace and stability not only in northeast Asia, but also in other volatile areas in the region. [emphasis added]70

The U.S. military was, because of its role as the primary security organization, the central institution also implicated in producing and multiplying representations of the North as a national security threat, with the commander of the Combined Forces Command leading the effort in his annual testimony to Congress that detailed the danger posed by the North Korean military. A training manual repeated the same discourse, to the point of elevating, perhaps inadvertently, the North Korean soldier to the status of a superhero: The NKPA [North Korean Peoples’ Army] soldier is generally wiry, well muscled, and kept in top physical condition by constant and strenuous training. Because of his mental and physical conditioning, the NKPA soldier is noted for his stamina and capabilities in all types of terrain and weather. His capabilities of strength, daring, and endurance will provide a definite challenge to those who will face him in combat. . . . The NKPA soldier is a tough, intensely trained fighter. He can travel farther and faster with more equipment and less food than almost any other soldier. He is mentally and physically hardened, is disciplined, and is ready to obey orders and suffer privations that would cause mutinies in other armies.71

This fantastic eulogy, which would have been rejected as outlandish if peddled by a North Korean propagandist, became an additional piece of evidence for the North Korean danger within the matrix of meanings that the Americans spawned about the North. The binary juxtaposition of “us” against “them” that lay at the very core of America’s self-definition relied on an inversion similar to the Orientalist pattern of identifying the “West” as everything the “East” was not, and vice versa.72 According to one critical review, American scholarship on North Korea betrayed deeply ingrained Orientalist discourses within which the totalitarian thesis, which had grown out of studies of the Soviet Union and China, conveniently combined Cold War hostility, scholarly rationale, and latent Orientalist prejudices.73

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The totalitarian thesis, largely sidelined in Sovietology or Sinology, dominated perceptions of North Korea held by scholars and others in the United States, while the stereotypes of Oriental despotism, long a part of American perceptions of the East, remained virtually intact in American scholarship, all the more so because they consisted largely of hidden, unstated biases and assumptions.74 Although it is practically impossible to pinpoint the origins of such stereotypes, the process of perceiving and representing the North as the Oriental other was well under way during the Korean War, when the North was represented as “a Soviet satellite” that was committing many atrocities.75 Many officially sanctioned reports—not to mention pamphlets distributed by the military to demoralize the North’s soldiers—portrayed the North Koreans as “puppets” commanded by the Communist dictators, who themselves were controlled by the Soviet Union. The crux of the puppet theory held that Kim Il-Sung, the North Korean leader, was an imposter, who was impersonating the real anti-Japanese guerilla leader. Even though the U.S. intelligence had known since the 1940s that Kim led one of the most active resistance groups under the Japanese colonial rule, the Order of Battle Information on the North Korean army provided to the U.S. commander described him as a fake.76 Such discourses, which denied agency to North Koreans, were so pervasive that the image of an irrational, threatening North Korea was unproblematically recycled by the mass media. Commenting on North Korea’s peace overture toward South Korea, the Los Angeles Times cavalierly summarized 50 years of inter-Korean relationships as “North Korea’s history of duplicity and erratic policy swings where the south is concerned.”77 As evidence, the editorial mentioned the unsuccessful summit meeting between the South and North Korean presidents in 1994, blaming Pyongyang for the failure while ignoring the pushes and pulls between the two Koreas. The image of North Korea as “crazy” was so natural in the United States that otherwise reputable reporters did not hesitate to use the term “crazy” to describe a leadership that they admitted they knew very little about. Kevin Sullivan and Mary Jordan, after four years in the region, wrote, In the end, one of the world’s most menacing little empires is still unknown. It might have a nuclear bomb or two, it might not. It might be crazy enough to use them, it might not. Despite all the high-tech clues and relentless scrutiny, nobody knows why President Kim Jong Il runs his country like Evel Knievel driving a motorcycle at 90 mph toward Dead Man’s Curve on a rainy night.78

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Admitting that they did not know North Korea, they explained that what they needed to know about North Korea was not whether it was crazy, but how crazy it was and why. That it was crazy was a given, background knowledge shared by all, and not worth explaining. Given this knowledge, all that remained for public scrutiny and intelligent reportage was to accurately calibrate the degree of irrationality: why, not whether, Pyongyang was pursuing irrational, reckless policies. As reporters and analysts endeavored to answer these questions within the frame of the North as a crazy menace, they in effect reproduced that frame, entrenching the “reality”: the North, the eccentric; the North, the dangerous.79 A structural bias in the media, of course, was not unique.80 A parallel could be found in the U.S. media’s coverage of the conventional military balance in Europe, which betrayed a consistent inclination to inflate the Warsaw Pact’s threat.81 The discourse on the conventional balance was, observed Mearsheimer, “divided into two distinct debates—the real debate among serious analysts, conducted largely in scholarly publications, and a propaganda debate, conducted mainly in the media.” Everyone in the “real debate” agreed that NATO conventional forces “might be able to defend successfully,” while the “media debate . . . [was] dominated by defeatists, who assert[ed] that the Warsaw Pact enjoy[ed] crushing conventional superiority over NATO.”82 To explain the U.S. print media’s tendency to overemphasize the Warsaw Pact’s threat, Roy turned to “the strength of the conventional wisdom”: the idea of a substantial Soviet lead, repeated for the past 40 years, became so widely accepted that journalists started with this oft-repeated “truth” as an unquestioned basis. The perception of the North as a crazy menace, repeated for over half a century, also became conventional wisdom, often leading journalists to cover the country in ways that reinforced this wisdom. The conventional wisdom, by framing policy makers’ mind-set, affected policy making at the national level, a process that was brilliantly captured by Sigal, who explained the difficulties that American officials faced in dealing with North Korea’s nuclear weapons program in the early 1990s. He described how the “mind-set” widely shared in the U.S. foreign policy establishment interfered with America’s ability to achieve its goal. With a conviction that “North Korea was a ‘rogue’ state, the last redoubt of Stalinist-style communism, . . . implacable and inimical, with a master plan to deceive the world and acquire nuclear arms,” Washington rushed to conclusions about Pyongyang’s intent to develop nuclear arms and the dim prospects for dissuading it. The mind-set “blinded” American officials to evidence that indicated

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Pyongyang’s willingness to accommodate Washington, and “disinclined” them to probe North Korean motives. Thus, the only way to stop the rogue state’s nuclear ambitions seemed to be to “demonize them as outlaws and force them to disarm.”83 The operation of the “mind-set” was two-dimensional. In an individual psychological dimension, which Sigal describes well, it predisposed government officials to favor punitive policies toward Pyongyang. In a social dimension, it multiplied representations of the North as the “danger” by identifying the North’s nuclear facilities as nuclear weapons factories, reading Pyongyang’s intentions to build nuclear capabilities as a plan to build nuclear bombs, and publicizing the policies that were designed to contain its weapons programs. While working within the mind-set, American officials unconsciously repeated these representations, producing the unintended consequence of spreading their mind-set throughout society and strengthening the social reality of the “dangerous North Korea.” All these representations coalesced to identify the North as the danger and to reproduce its identity as such. To paraphrase the acerbic title of one article, there was the glaring presence of a threatening North Korea and the structured absence of an alternative North Korea.84 Because of the authority given to official statements and the relative paucity of alternative representations of North Korea, the North’s identity has rarely been challenged. Buttressed by the institutional framework that stabilizes the North’s identity—as the following section illustrates—North Korea’s role as the other was accepted without question. As America’s roles and duties were identified in opposition to the North’s—in the area of the U.S.-Korea alliance or Northeast Asian security—the North’s identity as America’s opposite became entrenched to the point that the material and the social were so completely conflated as to erase from public discourse the disjunctures between them or uncertainties about them: the North remained a certain threat. Institutional Framework of Identity Preservation The preceding section should not be misunderstood as an argument that the alliance produced a lie that bore no resemblance to the reality. In fact, the representations that the alliance generated were grounded on Northern aggression, guerilla incursions, and other acts that could be seen dangerous and threatening. Moreover, they were real and meaningful to the extent that they were part and parcel of the system of meanings within which the allied people understood their security

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environment. The representations in toto functioned much like an epistemological prism, orienting people to understand a particular set of the North’s past behavior as a basis for its dangerous identity and that narrowing the margin of uncertainty about its future behavior in a way that inhibited the development of alternative possibilities for its identity. The material facts and their representations, when institutionalized, gained another layer of palpability, which empowered them to extend their resiliency beyond what material facts and representations alone could achieve. The Department of Defense, together with its many subunits such as the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), was a key institutional apparatus, producing a stream of representations that stabilized the enemies’ and allies’ identities. If it was chiefly responsible at one time for the conventional wisdom regarding the North’s conventional superiority, it shifted its representational tactics in the 1990s to producing “nuclear threat,” “missile threat,” and “time bomb,” as the next chapter demonstrates. It is sufficient to note here that their practices of identity constitution were made possible in the first place by the institutional arrangement that created these bodies tasked to worry about where dangers might lie and empowered to tell the public whom to worry about. Resolutions and treaties also gave the identity an official sanction. Immediately after the Korean War, for example, UN Security Council resolutions S/1501 and S/1511 identified North Korea as an “aggressor” in 1950, an identification reinforced by the UN General Assembly resolution 376, which was passed soon afterward and which put to rest uncertainty about who initiated the attack. These resolutions remain effective to date despite the fact that the UN has accepted North Korea as a member pledged to honor the UN Charter, including the prohibition of the use of force. Furthermore, General Assembly resolution 376, still in force, tasked the UN Command to pursue unification and establishment of a democratic government in Korea, thus providing a legal ground on which the UN forces might march north and topple the Northern regime! The UN has so institutionalized the North’s identity as aggressor that it now has a member it is legally tasked to destroy.85 If international treaties and resolutions stabilized the North’s identity, the absence of diplomatic relations between the United States and North Korea functioned as a primary institutional restraint on change. The absence of regularized, official channels of communication left only the North’s UN Representative Office in New York as a point of official communication. That absence also deprived officials

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of personal contacts. Washington further consolidated this excommunication by restricting the travel of North Korea’s UN representatives to the headquarter district—that is, a 25 mile radius from Columbus Circle, as per the Foreign Missions Act and the UN Headquarters Agreement. Sanctions, a means of economically isolating a country, were another institution that embodied, reinforced, and extended social identity. The total embargo invoked against North Korea three days after the outbreak of the Korean War remained active almost a half century later, restricting trade and impeding transformation of identity. The foreign assets control regulations, the Trading with the Enemy Act, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, the Trade Agreement Extension Act, and the Commerce Department’s designation of the North in the most restrictive export control group, Group Z, were a constant reminder of a particular identity of the North—that of a transgressor.86 Therefore, they were more than laws and regulations; they were part and parcel of state practices that institutionalized North Korea’s identity. Unlike academic and media representations, state practices were backed by laws, budgets, and organizational structures, none of which were easily changed. State institutions, once they embodied particular identities, abetted identity representations with purse and teeth. The North’s identity as dangerous was further strengthened by its designation as a terrorist country in the State Department’s annual report, Patterns of Global Terrorism, and several congressional resolutions, including the Senate Congressional Resolution 99 and the House Congressional Resolution that condemned the “bombing by North Korean agents of Korean Air Lines Flight 858.”87 North Korea was also placed on the list of countries supporting international terrorism. Such identification invited punitive measures, such as loan denials or trade restrictions, which, while serving a political purpose, also exacerbated social enmity with the target country.88 The law required the president to take an action to remove a country from the terrorist list,89 and a terrorist identity, once institutionalized, is automatically renewed every year. North Korea’s identification as a proliferation threat further fortified its identity as dangerous. The making of the “missile threat,” which is detailed in Chapter 5, was also embedded in institutional arrangements and administrative findings. The Arms Export Control Act and the Export Administration Act authorized the president to impose sanctions for a two-year period if a foreign person knowingly exported, transferred, or otherwise engaged in trade “of items that

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contribute to missile proliferation.” The United States imposed such sanctions on North Korea in 1992, when the North Korean government was found to have engaged in missile technology proliferation activities with Iran and Syria. The findings triggered the imposition of sanctions that denied export licenses for items on the Munitions List and prohibited all U.S. government contracts as well as the importation of any products made by North Korean entities. Not only did these institutional measures identify the North as a proliferation threat, but they also empowered state agents to punish it, thereby bolstering the identity. Some legislation betrayed a curious mixture of pan’gong (anticommunism) and panbuk (anti-North), as they identified the North as communist and penalized it for being so. Section 620(b) of the Foreign Assistance Act, which prohibits aid to any country controlled by the international communist movement, was applied to North Korea in September 1961. In August of the following year, Section 620(f), which prohibits assistance to communist countries and identifies them by name, including North Korea, was added.90 Section 8 of the 1986 Export-Import Bank Act prohibited Export-Import Bank guarantees, insurance, or credits for any purchases by Marxist-Leninist countries, including North Korea. Long after the demise of the communist bloc and the Soviet Union, such identifiers as “international communist movement” and “Marxist-Leninist countries” lost some meaning, but the anticommunist institutions lived on, reinforcing the North’s identity and reproducing enmity with the North. North Korea was also identified as a “gross violator” of human rights in the State Department’s Annual Human Rights Report, an identification that released a host of institutional punitive measures, which then served to stabilize this identification. For example, assistance was prohibited to the government of “any country which engages in a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights, including torture or cruel, inhumane, or degrading treatment or punishment.” Section 7001 of the International Financial Institutions Act required that the U.S. executive directors of international financial institutions oppose any loan, extension of financial assistance, or technical assistance to any country whose government engaged in a “pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights,” or “provides refuge to individuals committing acts of international terrorism by hijacking aircraft.” The Gramm Amendment, Section 42 of the Bretton Woods Agreement Act, also required the secretary of the Treasury to direct the U.S. executive director of the International Monetary Fund “to actively oppose any facility involving use of Fund credit by any Communist dictatorship” unless the Treasury

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certifies to the relevant congressional committee that certain economic criteria are met.91 In 1995, the United States took some measures to ease the sanctions, implementing a policy initiative announced by the Clinton administration in October 1994 to encourage dialogue between North and South Korea and their respective allies, as per the Geneva Agreed Framework. On January 3, an amendment to the Foreign Assets Control Regulations eased some travel restrictions by allowing travel agents to apply for a license authorizing actions necessary for arranging noncommercial travel for U.S. individuals or groups involved in academic, sports, cultural, and certain other areas. On January 10, the State Department announced that it had eased the economic sanctions against the North, thus allowing direct telephone communication, use of credit cards in the North, and establishment of a news agency. On February 2, new Foreign Assets Control Regulations came into effect, allowing the export of informational materials to North Korea and all financial transactions directly related to the purchase and shipping of such materials. Finally, on April 24, part 785 of the Export Administration Regulation was amended to allow the export to North Korea of commercially supplied goods intended to meet basic human needs. The regulations stipulated that shipments would be authorized under an individual validated license on a case-by-case basis. However modest these steps might have been, they greatly helped defuse tensions. These changes, together with the Geneva agreement, had the potential for diminishing the taken-for-granted reality of the “dangerous” North and represented a step in that direction, a step that subsequently ran into the wall of hegemonic discourse. The most conspicuous example of this collision was the “suspicion” raised by the Defense Intelligence Agency in 1998 that the North Koreans were building a secret underground nuclear facility in Ku˘mch’angni. The suspicion was resolved the next year after a U.S. inspection team found nothing but an empty tunnel; despite having been proved false, it served to fortify the “dangerous North” identity and helped stall the process of political rapprochement that was beginning to have the discursive effect of undermining that hegemonic identity.

Alliance and Identity Pyongyang strictly controlled the flow of information regarding its national security, while Washington and Seoul tightly managed whatever information they had about the North. The paucity of information provided fertile ground for representations to flourish, as the news,

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analysis, or knowledge of North Korea amounted to recycling or reprocessing prior representations that might be based on yet other representations. In a frank admission of the difficulties in understanding the North’s military, Edward Olsen described the problem in strikingly Derridean, poststructuralist terms: Guesstimating is the main research tool of the governmental, academic, and journalistic watchers of North Korea in the countries that feel most threatened by North Korea: South Korea, Japan, and the United States. . . . Compounding the inadequacy of data about North Korea is the tendency of foreign analysts to color their assessments with personal biases and their national interests. South Koreans and Japanese of various political leanings do this routinely. Americans, too, tend to inject U.S. biases about North Korea or unthinkingly reflect those derived from South Korean or Japanese sources. The fundamental problem is that the paucity of information about North Korea causes Pyongyang watchers to rely on each other’s analyses and rumors. Many analysts turn to two seemingly impartial sources of information about North Korea: Britain’s International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), and Sweden’s Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). Unfortunately, this is no solution because both institutions derive most of their data from the same dubious South Korean, Japanese, and U.S. sources. Clearly there is a cycle of misinformation at work here which precludes obtaining an accurate picture of North Korea.92

These practices do not objectively reflect reality but are implicated in constituting a particular reality, which is further buttressed by the institutional arrangements and disciplinary power that the state brings to bear upon the politics of signification. Instead of regarding security policy and alliance practices as the external view and rationalist orientation of a preestablished state, the identity of which is secure before it enters into relations with others, the security policy must be seen as an integral part of the discourses of danger that serve to discipline the state. The state and the identity of a human located in it can be regarded as the effects of the discourses of danger, which more often than not employ strategies of otherness. Security policy thus leans toward creating boundaries rather than acting as a bridge. This propensity to create boundaries is inherent in the modern state’s drive to acquire a monopoly of the means of violence within its territorial boundaries. A defining characteristic of the modern state is its monopoly of the means of violence within the state’s territorial boundary. This characteristic involves a twofold process, according to Anthony Giddens: on the one hand, the development of the organization of violence by

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the state; and on the other, internal pacification. The withdrawal of the use of military power in the state’s internal affairs characterizes internal pacification. “What it involves, however, is not the decline of war, but a concentration of military power ‘pointing outwards’ towards other states in the nation-state system.”93 As Kaldor notes, this concurrent process of internal pacification and the externalization of violence is accompanied by “a tendency to channel domestic tensions outwards, against some external enemy. The need to establish some common identity as a basis for legitimacy within implies the existence of an ‘other.’”94 Similarly, alliance practices achieve internal pacification by channeling interallied tensions outward, against external enemies. And in the absence of actual fighting, an alliance, through all its representational practices and institutional arrangements, constitutes the identities of the allies and enemies. The U.S.-Korea alliance not only produced social identities of the United States, South Korea, and North Korea, but also hegemonized the amity between the allies and the enmity between them and North Korea. The hegemonic status of state identities ensured the preclusion of debates about the future of the alliance and only allowed a discursive space for consensus on the need. The hegemonic status of the amity made certain that the American power was accepted as a helping hand whose provision was naturalized within the hegemonic enmity toward North Korea. Within the discursive boundary that the alliance delimited, alternative discourses or opposition had little breathing space. Therein lay a cause of the alliance persistence of the 1990s.

Chapter 5

En d of the Cold War, Beginning of Alliance Persistence

T

he normal operation of the U.S.-Korea alliance had produced, as the previous two chapters show, two sets of by-products that, in turn, affected the alliance: asset specificities that made it more efficient than alternatives and an identity that covered it with a mantle of legitimacy and appropriateness. A functionalist account might conclude that, supported by these two pillars, the alliance survived the 1990s. One cannot, however, rule out the possibility that its survival might be due to other, exogenous factors, unless one shows that indeed asset specificity and identity protected it. Produced by the alliance during the Cold War, the two pillars faced changes in material circumstances in the 1990s that could complicate their existence and impede their effects. The extent of those effects needs to be ascertained, not assumed away. Asset specificity and alliance identity are likely to have strengthened the alliance, but this is not proof that the two produced effects sufficient to maintain it. To assess their effects, one must lay bare the mechanisms by which the specific assets and identities affected the allies’ decision making. This chapter turns to that task. An analysis of the ways in which specific assets generated a self-perpetuating logic concludes that they did cause some measures to be taken to protect the alliance, but that their level was not high enough to explain the alliance maintenance in the 1990s. A more complete explanation, the second section argues, requires an understanding of an interdependent way in which the alliance’s identity as a security provider is contingent upon and mutually constitutive of an enemy identity. Also needed is a better

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appreciation of the identity politics that drew on the staying power of existing identities to reconstitute them under changed material conditions and entrench them in an escalating cycle of interactions between security politics and identity politics. Although the end of the Cold War caused North Korea to be constituted differently than previously, its identity remained that of a threat throughout the 1990s. The resulting perceived constancy of the North’s identity as a threat provides the missing link in the explanation for the alliance’s survival beyond the twentieth century.

Asset Specificities and Alliance Persistence Asset specificities can cause an alliance to persist in two analytically distinct but politically connected ways. First, they can produce an “alliance constituency,” a coalition of domestic actors that prefer to maintain the alliance. This coalition includes officers, military contractors, politicians, and others who, by benefiting from alliance asset specificities, have interests in prolonging the alliance. Second, they can make alliance maintenance cheaper and produce a cost barrier to other security arrangements. When a diminishing threat or an improving power balance presents material conditions for alliance termination, the alliance constituency is expected to assert its influence to protect the interests tied to the alliance—that is, these actors will voice opposition to the termination and act accordingly. In addition, they will base their argument on the objective fact that asset specificities make the alliance more efficient than its alternatives. The two mechanisms whereby asset specificities cause alliance persistence may in this way have a snowballing effect, one strengthening the other, even if they are analytically distinct. Asset Specificities and Alliance Constituency The asset specificities of the U.S.-Korea alliance created a domestic constituency whose interests were tied to the alliance.1 Of the multitude of asset specificities that the alliance produced, human assets in particular endowed a group of officials, officers, businesspersons, and citizens with durable assets that were specific to the alliance and that could not be easily recouped should the alliance be terminated. Korean and American bureaucrats and officers, after developing a set of team and communication specificities, came to identify their interests with the preservation of the alliance and became its advocates. The bureaucrats and soldiers who drew benefits from the alliance specificities made up a substate constituency that supported the status quo.

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They also had a counterpart in society—a societal constituency made up primarily of businesses and civic groups that the alliance created and sustained. The domestic alliance constituents—bureaucrats, the military, civic groups, and defense contractors—sought to sustain the military alliance that sustained them. Chapter 3 detailed the emergence of the substate constituency—bureaucrats and the military; this section focuses on the emergence of private interests and nongovernmental groups that came to develop a stake in the alliance. Writing about Korea’s defense industry in the mid-1980s, Chung-in Moon noted “a potential for the gradual formation of a militaryindustrial complex,” an insight confirmed by developments in the next decade.2 By 1990, Kim Yong-Nam talked of a “military-industrial complex of developing-country-type” being formed in Korea.3 Without engaging in the debate on the existence of this complex, the following suggests that there developed a dense network between the government, the military, and the defense industry, and that the network was of a particular kind—the kind that benefited from the existing security arrangement and thus had a stake in the status quo. The military industry sector was not to be slighted. In 1991 there were 84 defense contractors and hundreds of subcontractors with the total sales of 1.7 trillion won. From the mid-1970s to 1991, military industries had invested a total of 1.2 trillion won in facilities and equipment; if dual-use facilities are included, the total is 3.3 trillion won. As of 1991, defense contractors employed 53,000 personnel; even if the dual industries are excluded, the number is still about 28,000.4 Since the government was their sole client, its defense expenditures were vital to the defense industries’ livelihood. In the government, Korea’s defense contractors had a magnanimous customer that consistently spent one-third of its budget on armaments. In 1991 alone, the MND spent, through the Defense Logistics Agency, 2,950 billion won on local purchases, of which the contracts with Korean defense firms represented “a substantial proportion.” Foreign purchases amounted to 590 billion won, of which over 60 percent were FMS purchases from the United States. The government was not just the sole consumer of military goods but also the major source of funding for defense contractors. In 1996, for example, the MND set up the “Defense Industry Promotion Fund,” through which it disbursed 52.3 billion won to 30 defense contractors as R&D assistance. In the same year, defense contractors were also granted government loans worth 30.3 billion won.5 These structural constraints provided fertile ground for the growth of government–defense industry ties. And grow they did.

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According to an MND document, 326 retired officers were employed in defense industries as of 1996.6 The number, substantial as it is, does not reveal the full extent of government-industry connections. Often the connections were quite personal. An officer who had worked on a particular weapons system would no sooner retire than he would get hired by the company that manufactured the very same weapons system. For example, I Yo˘ng-Chik, a retired brigadier general who as chief of the Tank Project Task Force had overseen the army’s K1 tank development project, became, on his retirement in 1994, executive vice president and chief operating officer of the Defense Systems Division of the Hyundai Precision Industry, which manufactured the tanks. Daewoo Heavy Industry, which produced warships, had as its vice president a retired brigadier general from the Navy Headquarters. Samsung Aviation, the primary contractor of the Korean fighter project, employed a retired major general (former Air Force Education commander) as advisor, a retired major general (former Air Force Logistics commander) as vice president, and a retired colonel (former Air Force Technology School president) as factory president.7 Officers’ amakudari (the practice of sending, “parachuting,” retired officers into private sector positions) was not limited to defense contractors. Trading companies that imported military equipment and software also employed retired military officers en masse. As of 1997, there were 339 arms import agencies, and practically all of them were owned and staffed by former officers. Although the exact amount of the commissions they received from imports in recent years is not known, their total commissions in 1990 alone ran to over $9 million. The amount is likely to have jumped significantly since 1993, when the MND abolished the ceiling on commissions.8 The increase in weapons imports in the rest of the 1990s also helped boost the sum of the commissions that these weapons traders reaped. All in all, under the best of circumstances, these employment patterns constituted a channel that helped smooth the weapons purchase process. Under shadier circumstances, they degenerated into conduits for officers and arms dealers to exchange favors. Under the worst circumstances, they became a “free-for-all,” putting the cart before the horse: defense contractors’ business interests took precedence over defense needs, a common practice in the military’s weapons purchase process. Before a service decides on a weapons system, it prepares a list of ROCs that the service desires. Only after it completes the list does it begin to examine the available weapons systems in order to choose the one that best satisfies the ROCs. This is the process in theory. In reality, however, when a service of the ROK Army sets

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out to prepare its ROCs, the first thing it does, more often than not, is to acquire information about an overseas weapons system. Using that information, the service then makes up its ROC list and ends up selecting the weapons system on which the ROCs were based. And when the military obtains information from weapons importers, who monopolize technical data on foreign weapons systems, “there exists a possibility that weapons system selection is done not by analysis, but by the arms agency’s PR activities.”9 It is a reality that many former officials, who had worked in [acquisition] related offices of the Ministry of National Defense or in a branch of the armed services, are employed by arms import agencies and exercise their direct or indirect influence over ROC, planning, and implementation.10

Also maintaining close connections with military and defense industries were research centers that developed and tested weapons. “To make the best use of research-and-development capability for [the] domestic development of sophisticated weapons systems,” the MND established, under the National Committee for Deliberation on Science and Technology, the Subcommittee on Defense Science and Technology, which was tasked with guiding cooperation among university research institutes, private firms, and government research institutes.11 In 1995, 112 core technology parts were being cooperatively developed by industry, academia, and government, while 27 weapons systems R&D projects were being carried out by government and defense industry researchers. The MND also designated schools such as Seoul National University, the Pohang Institute of Technology, the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, and Military Science College as defense research institutes. According to a KIDA study, 39 of 71 defense industries operated their own research facilities and an additional 21 companies had smallerscale research offices, employing a total of 6,556 researchers. In 1987, defense industries invested approximately 160 billion won in R&D, about 13 percent of total commercial R&D investment.12 Aircraft research, a major focus of R&D efforts in the 1990s, involved all the major governmental and private research centers: from the government side, the Aerospace Research Institute, the Korea Advanced Institute for Science and Technology (KAIST), and the Agency for Defense Development; and from the private sector, Korea Air Lines, Samsung Avionics, and Daewoo Heavy Metal. Although the scale of Korea’s weapons R&D remained small, it was rapidly growing in the

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1990s in response to Seoul’s emphasis on research.13 In addition, as of 1991, the MND had 10,000 technicians in training in 64 fields of technology and encouraged active-duty service personnel to take the state qualification examination for certified engineers: in 1991, 36,492 applied and 9,711 passed.14 The alliance constituency, perhaps an unintended by-product of alliance operations, developed its own interests as it established itself in the society. When it felt that its interests were threatened, it immediately moved to protect them. In the 1990s, when the government was considering a reduction in defense spending, Kukpangkwa kisul (Defense and Technology), the monthly magazine published by the Korean Defense Industry Association, was replete with calls to maintain, or even raise, defense spending. Na Pyo˘ng-So˘n, vice president of the Korean Defense Industry Association, unequivocally stated that “defense expenses must not be reduced for at least the next 3 to 5 years.” Characterizing the reduction plan as based on “fantasy” and “optimism,” Na suggested two reasons why Seoul should increase, rather than decrease, its defense efforts: North Korea was still maintaining a force 1.5 to 3 times stronger than the South’s, and Seoul needed to consider not just North Korea but also the security environment of Northeast Asia, where Japan and China continued to increase their defense spending.15 It did not hurt the cause of the defense industry that people like Na Pyo˘ng-So˘n were elected to the Parliament in this period, yet another example of ties between the government and the defense industry. The defense industry’s interests, under some circumstances, overrode pure security considerations in arms procurement decisions, as the following example of the K-1 upgrading project illustrates. After successfully developing the K-1 tank by 1988, the South Korean Military began to upgrade it in the early 1990s. The “up-gunning” project, which included replacing the K-1 tank’s 105 mm gun with a 120 mm gun, was initiated to deal with the T-72 tanks that the North was thought to be poised to acquire from Russia. The upgrading project was imperative, the MND argued, in light of the fact that the K-1 tank’s 105 mm gun did not have enough firepower to penetrate the T-72’s thicker and stronger armor. By the mid-1990s, however, it became increasingly clear that Pyongyang was not acquiring T-72s and would be unable to purchase them, both because of the country’s worsening economic situation, which was causing massive starvation, and because of Moscow’s reluctance to sell them to the North as it had been expanding its ties with the South since 1990. Ironically, it was the South, not the North, that was receiving Russia’s most sophisticated tanks, the T-80Us,

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by the mid-1990s. Because North Korea had not received a single T-72, and certainly no T-80s, by the end of the decade, its tank stock consisted largely of the 1950s’ models that the K-1’s 105 mm guns could easily destroy. Nonetheless, the up-gunning project proceeded as if the absence of T-72s in the North’s arsenal did not matter. The up-gunning and upgrading of a K-1 to a K-1 A-1 was not driven so much by military need as by the imperatives of the Hyundai Precision Industry, which faced the problem of idling its tank production facilities after completing its order of K-1 tanks.16 The tank project, initiated to counter the North’s T-72 tanks, apparently took on a life of its own and produced work for its own sake, even when it filled no legitimate military need. Another example of industry interests overriding security considerations was provided by Prime Minister Kim Jong-Pil’s call in May 1999 for more funding to keep the F-16 fighter production lines “warm.” The Korea’s Fighter Program (KFP) was scheduled to terminate at the end of 1999, when all of the planned 120 F-16s were to have been assembled, and if that had happened, the production lines would have shut down.17 Defense contractors involved in the KFP, therefore, had an interest in getting more orders. The Aerospace Industry Development Policy Board, established in 1990 to guide a policy for Korea’s nascent aircraft industry, held its second meeting in April 1999 to discuss the Basic Development Plan for Aerospace Industry, over which the MND was at loggerheads with the Ministry of Industry and Resources (MIR). The MND, reflecting the air force’s view, argued for the termination of the KFP and an early start of the KTX project (a supersonic trainer production program), whereas the MIR, representing the interests of the aircraft consortium led by Samsung Avionics, advocated an extension of the KFP. In the end, the Aerospace Industry Development Policy Board sided with the MIR, reflecting the degree to which economic interests born out of military considerations were now overshadowing national security concerns in weapons procurement decisions. As one anonymous air force officer told the Associated Press, “Some cabinet ministers were mixing national defense with business interests.”18 Finally, before closing this section, I note that the constituency contained a very intimate but dark sector riddled with corruption. Hartung brilliantly captures the quality of this sector in his description of Northrop’s failed attempt to sell F-20 Tigersharks to South Korea.19 Featuring such colorful characters as “Wheelchair” Kang, a mob leader who was wheelchair-bound after a gang feud; “Pistol”

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Park, a man known for his “pistolmanship” and a confidant of President Chun Doo-Hwan; and Northrop’s chairman and CEO Tom Jones, the fiasco involved elaborate illegal schemes to exchange millions of dollars for a contract. It is impossible to ascertain the extent of this dark sector, which spanned the Pacific and involved government officials, military officers, and businesspeople. It would suffice to note that every major weapons purchase or production contract to date has at least been accompanied by charges of corruption. The magnitude of this corruption was reflected in the fact that Korea’s force modernization effort begun in 1974 was so tainted with massive scandals that the MND felt compelled to change the name from the Yulkok Program to the Force Improvement Program (FIP).20 This section has described how alliance specificities engendered the alliance constituency and how its interests were beginning to override national security considerations. As the last two examples illustrate, weapons procurement decisions were often being made more with a view to protecting defense industries’ interests than to addressing the military power balance. If this section has been limited to showing the existence of a constituency that developed and protected its own interests, even to the point of overriding military considerations, the next sections argue that the constituency’s interests were not limited to domestic concerns but spilled over to alliance matters. The constituency, out of its narrow self-interest, acted to prolong the alliance, in the process of which it took advantage of the cost barriers that alliance specificities had generated. Alliance Constituency, Security Costs, and Alliance Persistence If the defense industry as a whole had a clear interest in protecting its own business, it also had a vital stake in maintaining the existing alliance arrangement as a source of parts, equipment, materials, technologies, and, to a lesser extent, markets. The equipment and process specificities that the alliance had generated during the decades of its operation ensured that the weapons systems imported or manufactured by the Koreans were of U.S. design or at least compatible with it. The assets that the allies had acquired for the effective operation of the alliance were now a liability that tied their hands and limited their choices. Furthermore, alliance asset specificities lowered the cost of running the allied militaries and raised the cost of instituting a different security arrangement, thus providing a basis for the argument by officials, officers, and weapons merchants that alliance maintenance was the most cost-effective means of security provision.

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The MND openly recognized the constraining effects that alliance specificity had on the choice of weapons systems: It is true that our dependency on the U.S. is high, given that 77% of our weapons imports are commercial or FMS purchases from the U.S. and only 23% are from other countries. That is because our stock of weapons systems, that began with American military assistance in the 1950s, continuously generates the need for American inputs for their operation and maintenance, . . . and because U.S. equipment is advantageous in terms of combined operation and uninterrupted supply during peace and war.21

The constraining effects were well illustrated by the KTX-2, a training aircraft project that the air force adopted to manufacture 150 supersonic platforms at an estimated cost of $1.8 billion. The initial design work was conducted between 1990 and 1995 with technical support from Lockheed Martin, a U.S. aerospace company, because the KTX program had been offered as part of Lockheed Martin’s offset arrangements with the KFP. Thus there was a kind of domino effect: a company that had received one contract was awarded another because the latter was part of the former. Equipment specificity gave Lockheed Martin a first-mover advantage not just in the project it was involved in but also in another project it did not even start. This chain reaction of weapons production deepened the ties between the Korean and U.S. arms industries, and then as beneficiaries of the existing alliance, each was predisposed to support the status quo. The alliance specificities’ domino effect did not stop at the reproduction of weapons projects but continued to trigger a chain reaction of contracts in related areas, such as leasing of training equipment, training of technicians, and other arrangements. To continue with the KTX-2 example, since its prototype for a production beginning between 2003 and 2005 was not due until around 1999, 30 T-38 trainers and a simulator would be leased meanwhile from the United States under a $90 million contract in order to meet the operational requirements. The air force was also aiming to have its own mobile air combat maneuvering instrumentation range within five years, perhaps using a Loral system, another U.S. product. The alliance specificities’ binding effects also manifested themselves in defense ministry officials’ predilections for U.S. weapons systems and a U.S. ally, a bias that could be easily documented. When the MND was deliberating on the choice of a new missile system in 1998, Minister of National Defense Ch’o˘n Yongt’aek made public his preference for U.S.made Patriot antiaircraft missiles as replacements for the ROK’s aging

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Nike missiles, although a French or a Russian system was arguably as good as, or even better than, the Patriot missiles: “If we select a replacement for the Nikes, the first thing we have to consider is ‘inter-operability’ with our existing weaponry. In addition, we have to ensure that we are guaranteed emergency supplies of parts in a time of conflict.”22 The FIP had initially been intended to expand South Korean military capability in response to the perceived superiority of the North’s military might. More recently, in the 1990s, however, the FIP started to reflect a “strategic vision” that looked beyond the North-South rivalry to plan for an eventually unified Korea’s regional role. Reflecting such a vision, the MND was making efforts to develop a more balanced force, with increased emphasis on maritime and air capabilities that would find limited application in an intra-Korean conflict. The navy was on its way to acquiring a blue-sea capability, while the air force was planning to acquire longer-range aircraft. While it is at least debatable that Korea had an immediate need to prepare for an eventual conflict with Japan or other neighboring countries because of the anarchic nature of the international system, it is notable that Seoul’s strategic vision required mostly American weapons systems. The minister of national defense favored American missiles, the air force was clamoring for American F-15s, the army was repeating the American argument about a “Revolution in Military Affairs” (RMA) and the navy was eyeing American Aegis-class destroyers. Also, asset specificities produced pressure on Korea to emulate the trend in the ally’s weapons R&D, since the Korean Army needed to ensure that its weapons systems and doctrines remained interoperable with those of its ally in the future. Korean weapons researchers and officers, therefore, constantly looked to their American counterparts to keep up with their research. For example, Paek Yo˘ng-Hun, president of the Korea Defense Industry Research Association and director of the Korea Institute of Development, advocated that Seoul should increase its defense spending even if Pyongyang gave up the idea of future military confrontation, because “our defense industry must advance our defense capability one level higher so that we may resolve conflicts with neighboring countries.”23 Reflecting his wider concerns with economic development, he suggested that defense industry investment, which he recommended be concentrated on high-tech weaponry, must be strategically linked with commercial technology development. Such technology-driven, futuristic arms R&D arguments resembled a parallel debate in the United States about an RMA.24 Just as the RMA was driving the arms R&D in the United States in the 1990s, so was it starting to affect Korea’s debate on

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the future of its arms industry. Specifically exploring Korea’s possible response to the American debate on the RMA, No Hun and I Chae-Uk argued that “it is natural that the Korean military follows American trends in the RMA and uses them as a base to explores Korea’s own way of RMA” (emphasis added).25 Weapons research was developing a life of its own, being driven more by its own needs or by developments in the ally’s weapons research than by the security environment. Summing up the perverse effects that alliance specificities have on alliance relationship, Nolan, in her discussion of the defense industry in Taiwan and Korea, notes a paradox: U.S. efforts to promote independent defense capabilities in the two countries have deepened the United States’ involvement in their defense.26 Hence the alliance constituency did not limit itself to protecting its share of government budget or ensuring business-to-business cooperation; its concerns spilled over to the alliance itself. It was therefore not surprising to see the constituency issuing calls to maintain or even strengthen the alliance, as exemplified by an appeal by Yu Chun-Hyo˘ng, vice president of the Korean Defense Industry Association: By continuously cooperating on defense industry issues with the U.S., we should reconfirm the traditional friendship between the U.S. and Korea, and work with Washington to secure a security assistance guarantee in case of an emergency.27

To promote the clear interests that defense contractors had in maintaining the status quo security arrangements and in promoting defense cooperation, Korean and U.S. defense industry representatives established a number of joint organizations and held conferences.28 The Korea Defense Industry Association and the American Defense Preparedness Association jointly held an annual U.S.-ROK Defense Industry Conference; they also set up binational organizations such as the Defense Technology and Industry Cooperation Committee, and the Korea-Oregon Defense Industry Committee, whose mission was unambiguously laid out in their terms of reference (TOR): Recognizing the importance of further expansion of contacts and dialog between ROK and US defense industries in the Pacific Rim, both sides assume the role of a contact window for the firms in this region seeking cooperative business opportunities such as reciprocal procurements, investments, technological collaborations, subcontracting and other joint ventures. . . . Both sides are to make common efforts to remove or alleviate the existing limitations and restrictions imposed by both governments on defense industrial cooperation between the private sectors of the two countries.29

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To fully appreciate the cost factor in alliance persistence, one would have to compare the alliance cost with a counterfactual alliance termination that would engender two kinds of costs. First, if the alliance were terminated and the American military withdrawn, Korea would have to fill the void with its own forces at its own cost. Some 40,000 American soldiers would have to be replaced with Koreans, and all the facilities operated by Americans would have to be managed by Koreans. Seoul would have to pay these extra personnel and bear the operating costs of the facilities. This is exactly the argument that the MND made in its latest defense of the alliance: The U.S. Forces in Korea help us [Koreans] reduce our defense spending, which contributes to our continued economic development. If we take into account all the equipment and materials that the USFK maintains in-country as well as the several billion dollars it spends on maintenance and operations, its opportunity cost is tremendous. If the USFK should be withdrawn, it would take an astronomical amount of additional defense expenditures to compensate for its absence.30

Second, if the alliance were terminated, it could disrupt the flow of parts and materials, causing an incalculable disaster in equipment maintenance and production, which might even compromise the ROK Army’s readiness. The work of many of Korea’s defense contractors would grind to a halt if Korea failed to obtain the necessary parts, and many U.S. contractors would lose customers. These secondary costs were difficult to estimate but were frequently used as a reason for maintaining the alliance. Alliance specificity therefore provided a convenient excuse for those who favored the alliance’s maintenance. Typifying such justifications, Hwang Tong-Jun, director of the Weapons Systems Research Center, ADD, argued that, despite the need to diversify the sources of weapons imports, “we need to focus on our cooperation with the U.S., which has developed over the past 20 years and which has sustained weapons interoperability.”31 The alliance itself, of course, served as the main proponent of such an argument. Because the two allies’ defense ministers foresaw a problem in their alliance at the “twilight” of the twentieth century—North Korea’s threat was in decline and reunification even seemed possible, two worst-case scenarios that would threaten the alliance’s raison d’être—at the 24th U.S.-ROK SCM of October 1992, they directed the RAND and the KIDA “to assess whether and how the United States and the ROK can maintain and invigorate their security relationship should North Korea no longer

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pose a major threat to peace and stability on the Korean peninsula.”32 The study unequivocally laid out one of the principal challenges that the United States and the ROK confronted at the time: “developing and articulating a logic for future security collaboration, assuming diminution of the North Korean threat and the ultimate unification of the Korean peninsula.”33 The cart was squarely placed before the horse: the need to defend the alliance preceded the need to defend it from the North. Silent Consensus Despite the presence of the alliance constituency, its material interests in the status quo, and its actions to protect them, however, its efforts to maintain the alliance were not so vigorous as expected. Despite some instances where its economic interests overrode national security considerations and it took action to protect those interests, particularly in the early 1990s, the level of such activity was low. Immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the alliance constituency engaged in a flurry of activities: a number of articles appearing in monthly journals emphasized the need to keep up defense spending; the Korean Defense Industry refurbished its publicity campaign; and defense ministry officers and weapons researchers voiced concerns about a potential weakening of the alliance. But the period of activity was short-lived, as the alliance constituency soon realized that neither its own nor the alliance’s existence was fatally threatened by the end of the Cold War—thanks to the emergence of a silent consensus that the alliance remained a necessity even in the post–Cold War world. Because of the consensus, the alliance constituency was able to continue its business as usual—without defensive maneuverings. The consensus emerged out of a heated debate in the 1990s on the future of the U.S.-Korea alliance, a debate that revealed the boundaries of Koreans’ imaginative space by rarely straying from questions about how to best configure the alliance. Few participants discussed whether or not the alliance was still needed. The need to preserve the alliance remained at the core of three groups of arguments that defined the security debate of the 1990s. The first played on the 50-year-old theme of the Northern threat, while the second projected historical experiences into the strategic uncertainties of the future. If the first two represented subtle arguments for the status quo, the last thread proposed an outright acceptance of, and justification for, the present security arrangement. The three engaged one another in what seemed to be a lively, healthy debate on the future, when, in effect, they coalesced

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to reinforce the consensus about the alliance’s necessity and smooth its extension into the twenty-first century. The first thread, with its familiar “dangerous North” rhetoric, was not difficult to find even in the 1990s. Pak Myo˘ngso˘, professor of political science at the Graduate School of Reunification and National Security, Kyo˘nggi University, titled an article clearly, if too bluntly: “Pukhan taenamjo˘khwajo˘nryako˘n pyo˘nhaji anatta [North’s Strategy to Communize the South Has Not Changed].” In the text, he argued, As long as the North’s regime lasts, it will never give up its official objective of communizing the Korean peninsula by means of force but will maintain its offensive military policy. . . . As long as North Korea sticks to its dark desire to achieve reunification under communism, our [South Korea’s] North policy must be based on a firm national security posture.34

To some, North Korea was an ever-present danger because its evil intention would never change.35 It presented a constant threat, unaffected by any change in capability. While some kept their threat assessment constant on the basis of the North’s ideological nature, others argued for preparation for a possible shift in Pyongyang’s strategy or tactics. They argued that Pyongyang’s repertoire was no longer limited to a conventional all-out attack but had come to encompass surprise attack, unconventional operations, biochemical weapons, and even a suicide attack.36 No mere exercise in Ivory Tower analysis, this argument was so entrenched in Seoul’s North Korea policy-making that even chief advocates of Kim Dae-Jung’s sunshine policy justified it in terms of the North’s military threats. For example, Lim Dong-Won, then presidential senior secretary for foreign affairs and national security, nicknamed the “sunshine policy missionary” for his public advocacy for engaging the North, maintained that the sunshine policy was called for because North Korea not only maintained military superiority but might “unleash a suicidal war if driven to corner.”37 The second thread underlined the uncertainties and potential threats to be found throughout the region.38 The future, according to this view, would be characterized by competition and distrust: States surrounding Korea are potential threats, inherently uneasy about the emergence of a stronger Korea, bound to compete for influence on the peninsula as in the past. Thus Korea has to prepare to use its elbows in the regional jockeying for power and influence that will take place.39

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While there was a debate within this school regarding which “neighboring country” would become Korea’s primary security threat, all agreed that the United States remained, and ought to remain, Korea’s ally in maintaining peace into the twenty-first century. Epitomizing this consensus, Cho˘n Cho˘nghwan, professor at the Korean National Defense University, noted, The Korea-U.S. security cooperation does not only remain one of the elements essential to maintaining peace on the Korean peninsula for the period of North-South confrontation and to successfully achieving a peaceful reunification. But it is also an element indispensable to guaranteeing security for a reunified Korea and preserving peace and stability in Northeast Asia after Korea’s reunification.40

This “strategic uncertainty” argument was so pervasive that even those who advocated streamlining Seoul’s military repeated its logic.41 Others relied on a power transition theory to argue that since under conditions of uncertainty power preponderance is the only guarantee of survival, the existing alliance must be strengthened.42 Finally, “status quo” arguments constituted the third thread of the security debate. Although diverse in threat assessments and policy suggestions, all shared a theme: Korea’s policy must follow America’s lead. Kim Yo˘ng-Ki, councilor for military affairs at Joint Chief of Staffs, for example, maintained that “U.S. Forces in Korea must remain for a long time, and will inevitably remain” because that is what Americans have said they will do: Secretary Cohen said in June 1998 that “U.S. military will remain after reunification,” while the Council on Foreign Relations argued for the need for “long-term measures to maintain an appropriate level of U.S. forces in Korea for regional stability after a Korean reunification.”43 In Kim’s imaginative space, U.S. views took precedence and limited policy choices open to Korea. Such an orientation was not limited to uniformed officers. Hong Kyu-Do˘k, in his exploration of policy options, asked how Seoul could find a policy that would fit in with Washington’s “game plan”: Within the Four Party Talk framework, the U.S. has a clear game plan. It is trying to stabilize the North, to gradually tie the North Korean system to the capitalist market economy, and to ultimately transform it into a political economic system that can depend on the U.S. What is Korea’s role in this game plan? How is the Kim Dae-Jung administration going to adapt to this game plan?44

For Hong, the American policy represented the starting point for Seoul’s policy, the master plan to which Seoul must adapt. For him,

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it was a foregone conclusion that the U.S.-Korea alliance must remain in place because it was Washington’s declared official policy. If Hong’s view seems extreme, a consensus favoring the status quo can easily be noted. At the symposium “U.S.-Korea Relations on the Eve of the 21st Century Asia-Pacific Era,” Paik Chinhyo˘n, professor of political science at Seoul National University, argued that the idea of South Korea pursuing a balanced diplomacy toward the United States and the People’s Republic of China is nothing more than a “fantasy.” Although South Korea needed to maintain a close partnership with China, he stressed that the foundation for Seoul’s unification diplomacy lay in the strong U.S.-Korea alliance.45 At the same conference, Richard Christenson, deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy, noted in a luncheon speech that the United States and Korea needed to create a “new status quo” for the new millennium by extending the status quo into the twenty-first century: In order to help create a new status quo, the U.S. will need to continue to play an active and constructive regional role. We will need to maintain a military alliance with Japan, one that is prudently formulated to be a source of regional stability.46

Hence there were heated debates on national security among the three groups. Opinions clashed on the nature of the security threat, and views were divided on the best means of handling it. Notwithstanding the divisions, however, no such clash transpired on the necessity of the U.S.-Korea alliance; and no fault line separated Koreans’ views on the American military presence. On the issue of the alliance, a silent consensus prevailed in the 1990s. This prevalence is significant because maintaining an alliance is not free. An alliance demands material resources and attention, which often leads to a competition for resources. Thus, on the way to its persistence, we expect to observe debates, competitions, or even conflicts, as was observed in the struggles over the best institutional arrangements for the post–Cold War Europe, with NATO, OSCE, WEU, and EU competing for a majority share of resources. In the post–Cold War Japan, political entrepreneurs proposed different security arrangements, the U.S.-Japan alliance being just one option, while some Japanese passionately opposed extending the alliance. That kind of debate or competition, however, did not transpire with respect to the U.S.-Korea alliance in the 1990s. This absence provided the social context within which alliance constituents could continue their business without having to justify the alliance’s existence.

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The End of the Cold War and the Persistence of Identity If the silent consensus provided an invisible protection, a vociferous consensus gave the alliance visible support. While silence kept the taken-for-granted nature of the alliance’s security-enhancing identity out of the public’s purview, loud identity politics brought North Korea’s identity as the familiar, yet new, threat to public attention. The North, whose identity had been established during the Cold War by the ensemble of material, representational, and institutional practices, reemerged in the 1990s as a country now threatening the South with its missiles, nuclear weapons, and even fragility. The constancy of the threat, albeit newly reconstituted, provided another stable basis for alliance maintenance. Within the new social reality of the post–Cold War world framed in terms of these threats, the U.S.Korea alliance, built to wage Cold War battles, was now presented as the instrument not only useful but also necessary for dealing with new dangers. North Korea as a “Missile Threat” If the Cold War danger had been embodied by the totalitarian Soviet Union, the post–Cold War security environment was constructed in opposition to proliferation threats, as exemplified by the Bush administration’s National Security Strategy, which painted a picture of a dangerous world inhabited by rogue states seeking to acquire weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and terrorists desiring to harm the United States in any way they could.47 Ever since the early 1990s, when the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) made public its suspicion that North Korea was engaged in a nuclear weapons program, the proliferation threat headed the security challenges faced by the U.S.-Korea alliance. The new framework drew on the North’s material reality to constitute the social reality of a missile threat that demanded alliance countermeasures, which in turn prompted the North to respond, escalating a vicious cycle of insecurity and entrenching the social reality of the proliferation threats. Naming an object is a crucial first step in governance, as Confucius noted thousands of years ago. A name places the object in a particular location in a social order of things, imputing a status and a meaning to it, a consequential act that enables social actors to understand what the object is and how to deal with it. This consequential nature of naming could be seen immediately after Pyongyang launched a

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rocket at the end of August 1998. The U.S. intelligence immediately called it a “missile test,” a name the media picked up and circulated as a fact. Government and military officials then cited media reports to explain what Pyongyang had done and what they were about to do in response. These official statements lent more credence to the media reports of the “missile test.” Foreign policy experts and North Korean observers then offered assessments of the possible motives behind this “missile test.” Some argued that it yet again demonstrated Pyongyang’s dangerous aggressiveness, while others suggested that it was designed to extract more concessions from the West. Security specialists also joined in with their analyses of the security implications of this “missile launch”: Japan was now under immediate danger of a direct attack from North Korea; even the United States was seen as within the range of the North’s missiles. These specialists busily debated the best means to counter this new threat: deploying Patriot batteries, developing theater missile defense, employing preemptive measures, and so on. Amid all these reports, statements, analyses, and speculations, it had become accepted that the North had fired a missile. Not only did all these significations coalesce to produce what Stuart Hall called the “reality effect,” but the “reality” also triggered real responses, which in turn had the effect of entrenching the “Hobbesian culture”—to use Wendt’s apt phrase—between the North and its neighbors.48 The Japanese government immediately took punitive measures, such as cutting airline travel to North Korea and freezing the funding to the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization (KEDO). The United Nations Security Council adopted a resolution condemning the North’s missile test. The U.S. Senate passed a resolution tying U.S. funding for heavy oil to the president’s certification that Pyongyang did not export missiles. The U.S. House cut off funding to KEDO. Four days after it fired the “missile,” Pyongyang caught everybody off guard by announcing that it was a satellite launch. With unusual candor, it went so far as to provide a detailed description of the satellite’s orbit. On September 14, U.S. State and Defense spokespersons publicly acknowledged that it had indeed been a satellite launch, but one that had failed to put the satellite in orbit. By then, however, the discursive struggle over this event was over. It had become the social reality that North Korea fired a missile over Japan. It had become a given that the North’s missile test had undermined peace and stability in the region. By then, the missile had even been named Taepodong by Western experts despite its being called Paektusan 1 ho by the North Koreans.49

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The Japanese even coined a new hybrid term, Taepodong shoku, to describe the shock they felt when the “Taepodong missile” flew over their heads. The politics of naming the space projectile was played out after the fact, but a year later the same politics were repeated before any action occurred. As before, U.S. intelligence picked up indications that the North was preparing to fire a “missile,” which was then dutifully reported by the media as a fact. Then policy makers and analysts acted on this fact, issuing statements, producing analyses, and implementing policy measures. South Korean, Japanese, and U.S. officials expended a considerable amount of political capital to persuade the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) chairman to issue a statement criticizing North Korea’s “missile” test-firing. They also worked assiduously to convince the Chinese government to jump on the bandwagon. These diplomatic maneuverings had immediate political implications, of course, but it is notable that a considerable amount of work had to be done to make certain that everyone on the bandwagon saw the same social reality. At the level of social reality, these statements and diplomatic gambits added another layer to the reality, thus multiplying the “reality effect.” To grasp the full significance of the establishment of the social reality of missile test, we need to juxtapose it with other possible, less threatening realities. There was, of course, the North Korean official “reality” that it had launched a satellite. This reality was consistent with the available data about the projectile’s trajectory and was conceded by the U.S. government. To the extent that the North Koreans did have a scientific program to place a satellite in space, this reality was as credible as the reality of a missile test. Since there are few technological distinctions between a satellite launch and a missile test-fire, however, this reality may not have made much difference in terms of security implications. Whether or not the North had placed a satellite in space, it demonstrated to the world that it had the scientific know-how, technical prowess, and political will to produce a projectile that it could use for a military purpose. What mattered the most to South Korea and the United States, then, was that they believed that Pyongyang intended the rocket to be a military device with which to undermine the region’s peace and stability. To them, the distinction between a missile and a satellite was immaterial for either was seen as a threat, as U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright bluntly articulated: “We stressed that another long-range missile launch, whether it is declared to be a missile test or an attempt to place a satellite in orbit, would be highly destabilizing

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and would have very serious consequences for our efforts to build better relations.”50 Their shared understanding of the reality was repeated in a stream of statements. The South Korean President Kim Dae-Jung and President Clinton warned in their summit in July 1999 that if North Korea test-fired another missile, it would “pose a serious obstacle to peace” on the Korean Peninsula. The U.S. Secretary of Defense Cohen said after meeting Japan’s Defense Agency Director General Hosei Norota, “Another missile test by North Korea would create an element of instability and uncertainty in the region.” The U.S. Secretary of State Albright, the ROK Foreign Minister Hong Soon-Young, and the Japanese Foreign Minister Komura Masahiko, meeting trilaterally on July 27 in Singapore to coordinate their respective policies on the DPRK, agreed that this action “would adversely affect peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula and beyond,” and they called on North Korea to “choose to build a positive relationship with its neighbors by foregoing such testing.”51 This series of statements, produced by those who had powerful, privileged access to the public discourse, also had the effect of establishing the perimeters of a social reality that was taken for granted. North Korea’s “dangerous missile” became a reality. That the social reality of North Korea’s projectile as “missile,” “threat to peace,” was not an automatic, objective reflection of the material reality but was maintained by an intense effort to discipline the production of social understanding can be seen in an episode surrounding the U.S. ambassador’s remarks in 1999. In July, amid fears that the North’s missile test was imminent, Ambassador Stephen Bosworth, in response to reporters’ questions, remarked, “North Korea is a sovereign state and retains a right to test its missiles. But the North should give up its (missile) sovereignty to peacefully coexist with the world community.”52 His comment was made in the context of his appeal to Pyongyang to stop another missile test: “Firing a missile would have bad effects on neighboring countries, which are seriously concerned about North Korea’s possible test. Such a test would worsen security environments in the region.” Despite his warnings against a launch, which were consistent with Washington’s and Seoul’s official political objective, Ambassador Bosworth came under criticism merely because of his reference to the North’s “sovereign right” to conduct missile tests.53 The Korea Herald reported on the following day that ROK diplomatic analysts had said that Bosworth’s comment was made at the wrong time and in the wrong place. A diplomatic analyst at a private research institute

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said, “Bosworth’s remarks could be misunderstood by the North” because, “whether intended or not by the ambassador, they are identical to the Pyongyang regime’s insistence” (emphasis added). Another diplomatic observer stated, “The U.S. envoy was too naive, acting like an academician. He, who should represent the U.S. government’s official stance here, should have avoided making such a straightforward comment” (emphasis added). The U.S. Embassy immediately responded that Bosworth’s remarks were misinterpreted. But asked if the ambassador’s comment on the DPRK’s missile-test sovereignty represented the U.S. government’s official position, Gerald McLouchlin, U.S. Embassy spokesman, deflected the question for fear that a direct answer would appear to confirm Pyongyang’s claims: “It is not about sovereignty, but about whether or not such a (missile) test would be wise.” No one suggested that Bosworth’s comment was factually wrong or misinformed, as it would be impossible to argue that international practices, laws, or norms denied a state the right to test-fire a rocket or missile.54 Indeed, North Korea had the sovereign right to test a missile, whether or not this statement was identical to Pyongyang’s assertions. This reality of international affairs, however, was not consistent with or convenient to the reality of a dangerous, renegade North Korea. If the former were recognized as a reality, the latter could not be sustained, at least in this issue area; this situation would jeopardize Washington’s and Seoul’s joint efforts to prevent the North’s missile test. For the allies to succeed in this task, they had to establish that the projectile was a missile, and its firing the act of an outlaw. Bosworth’s remarks provided an occasion that disciplined the production of representations in a way consistent with the prevailing social reality. Seen in this perspective, the crisis triggered by Ambassador Bosworth’s remarks was as much about identity preservation as about missile nonproliferation. Entangled in this little fiasco were both the politics of naming and that of security. The allies’ understanding of the North’s identity combined with the North’s projectile to constitute the social reality of the North Korean missile threat, which then prompted the allies to react with such defensive measures as missile defense and missile-site busters. But the allies’ defensive steps, seen from within the North’s understanding of the alliance’s identity, constituted “offensive maneuvers,” which then triggered Pyongyang’s defensive moves, which then reinforced the “dangerous North” reality, ad infinitum. In an escalating cycle of insecurity in which security measures and identity politics fed into each other, one side’s defense fed into its antagonistic identity, which compelled the other to take

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its own defense measures, which in turn reinforced its threatening identity, and so on. The vicious cycle constituted a security dilemma. North Korea as a “Nuclear Threat”55 To illustrate the argument about the social reality of nuclear threat, it is useful to begin with a curious disjuncture between material and social realities. On the one hand, some states were known to possess nuclear weapons and to have proliferated their materials and blueprints. Some of these were politically, religiously, and geographically close to countries that harbored terrorists. One such country, Pakistan, had even provided the Taliban with weapons and monetary assistance in recent years, while expressing little interest in dismantling its nuclear weapons programs in exchange for monetary and political compensation. On the other hand, North Korea might or might not have acquired nuclear weapons in the 1990s. It might or might not have been be able to field long-range missiles that could hit the United States. It was far from typical terrorist hotspots, and its relationship with terrorist groups was limited and likely a thing of the past. Above all, it expressed in a consistent and persistent manner its desire to give up its nuclear weapons programs in exchange for an improved, normalized relationship with Washington. Despite these material facts, it was a social reality that North Korea, not Pakistan, represented a proliferation threat. An adequate explanation of threat, therefore, must combine an assessment of the material factors with an analysis of the social understanding that American actors have about the North’s roles, desires, and nature. The crisis involving North Korea’s “nuclear threat” repeated the same kind of recursive cycle between security politics and identity politics that was observed in the missile crisis. But if the missile politics showed a discursive tug-of-war between Washington’s and Seoul’s charges and Pyongyang’s denials, the nuclear crisis was the product of both parties’ charges and admissions that bound them in a tightening security dilemma. In launching its nuclear program, Pyongyang may have believed that it took an evidently defensive measure because it was facing what it believed to be an undoubtedly aggressive opponent in the United States. Its action was in turn seen as aggressive by the U.S.-Korea alliance, which held a mirror image set of the identities: the United States and South Korea as status quo states, and North Korea as aggressive. In the nuclear politics, furthermore, the North sought to convince the other of its willingness, and capacity, to inflict unacceptably costly damage, whereas in the missile politics it tried to

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hide or deny its capability. While it may have engaged in this rhetorical tactic and behavior with the intention of producing a strategic effect of deterrence, its behavior also had an identity effect of strengthening its image as truly aggressive. The same dynamic was repeated on the other side of the border as the alliance engaged in what it considered defensive or deterrent measures, producing their own strategic and identity effects on the North. As a result of the antagonistic interdependence, both sides’ words and actions reinforced the Hobbesian culture of enmity, within which the alliance and the North escalated the vicious cycle of insecurity.56 There is another important way in which the nuclear crisis was different from the missile politics. Although the nuclear politics was a higher-stakes game, its short history—from the early 1990s— contained some episodes of negotiation.57 These instances suggest that it is possible for the alliance and the North to take steps out of the insecurity dilemma, but the moments of confrontation show the extent to which the Hobbesian culture can complicate, and even derail, those steps.58 Steps suggesting the possibility of negotiation began in 1991, when President Bush decided to withdraw tactical nuclear weapons from South Korea and Kim Il-Sung reciprocated by signing the North-South Denuclearization Declaration and the Safeguards Agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). This pax quid pro pax quo began to deescalate tensions and unravel the Hobbesian culture, thus paving the road to the summit meeting between the two Koreas and the exchange of highest-level officials between Pyongyang and Washington in 2000. Despite some ups and downs caused by mutual suspicions, the process seemed to be leading toward a loosening of the insecurity dilemma by the end of 2000. The end of the global Cold War contributed to the loosening of the local enmity on the Korean Peninsula, which was further promoted by the regional rapprochement early in the 1990s, when China and Russia became more favorably disposed toward South Korea and Japan. The single most important event, however, was a change in the United States’ behavior—namely, Washington’s withdrawal of tactical nuclear weapons from Korea. Also critical was that Pyongyang, rather than launching a surprise attack on the South—as in the realists’ “ worst-case scenario”—reciprocated with its own disarming moves. Washington’s pax quid was returned by Pyongyang’s pax quo, initiating a virtuous cycle of security enhancement that helped the alliance and the North begin to disentangle themselves from the security dilemma that held them captive. Quickly taking advantage of the opening, the two Koreas

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held a series of exchanges—reunions of separated families, cultural performances, and sports events—propelling the virtuous cycle ultimately to the summit in 2000. In a series of negotiations with Pyongyang, Washington too came close to resolving many issues of concern. Clinton’s visit to Pyongyang at the end of 2000 might have led to the end of the Hobbesian culture of enmity and the beginning of a new chapter in the history of the two countries. Subsequent events, however, are history. The virtuous cycle was halted in 2001, when President George W. Bush ordered a review of his predecessor’s engagement policy. In his 2002 state of the union address, President Bush restored the North’s identity as an “evil” that must be removed, thereby effectively ending the virtuous cycle. Bush’s name calling was angrily returned by Pyongyang, which labeled the United States the “empire of the devil.” Such vitriolic exchanges were triggered by no obvious changes in material power. It was a change in the actors’ social understanding that broke the virtuous cycle and restored the vicious cycle. The new Bush administration brought to American decision making its Manichaean understanding of a world where the North, together with Iraq and Iran, constituted the “axis of evil” that spread the danger of terrorists, missiles, and nuclear weapons. And Pyongyang immediately returned to the social reality familiar to it for the past 50 years. Not only did the verbal exchanges reflect the new, yet old, understanding of the actors’ identities but they also provided the ideational context within which Washington and Pyongyang took actions that restored the vicious cycle. Because the former could not trust the “intransigent North” to honor the Geneva Framework Agreement, it halted the shipment of heavy oil; because the latter feared the “aggressive Washington,” it restarted its nuclear programs. Within the restored Hobbesian culture, the other was always a suspect that compelled defensive measures. Within the enmity, one’s such defensive steps were perceived by the other as reneging, aggression, or preparation for an attack. With vengeance, the vicious cycle of insecurity was restored. The social structure of enmity served as a perceptual prism that privileged an interpretation of facts and uncertainties about the North’s nuclear program. It discounted the possibility that the North, as well as the United States, was caught in a security dilemma; it amplified the possibility that the North lied, cheated, and deceived. It skewed the discursive space in such a way as to dismiss as a deception Pyongyang’s offer to negotiate, while accepting as true its rhetoric of war. Its denial of a weapons program was a lie, its admission a truth. The enmity constituted the ideational context within which realists had it both ways.

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To understand the significance of the North Korean nuclear crisis as a social reality, it is imperative to acknowledge that although there were facts that lent themselves to the interpretation that Pyongyang had been in the process of manufacturing a nuclear bomb and although there were many uncertainties about the North’s nuclear program that warranted security concerns by the alliance, these uncertainties and facts could be interpreted in a number of different ways. One interpretation held that Pyongyang had run its nuclear programs for the dual purpose of nuclear energy and weapons, but that it dropped its weapons program in 1991.59 Alternatively, as Leon Sigal suggests, the uncertainties and facts can be interpreted as representing Pyongyang’s desire to negotiate with Washington for political and economic normalization.60 What is striking about the nuclear crisis is the ease with which many of the uncertainties and facts about the North’s nuclear program were assumed away or disregarded. Alternative interpretations were quickly brushed aside as the threat of the “North’s nuclear weapons” established itself as a reality. Even if Pyongyang had been successful in developing nuclear weapons, it was not a priori obvious that it posed a national security threat to the United States. After all, the British and the French possessed nuclear weapons and yet did not pose a threat to the United States. Unlike London and Paris, furthermore, Pyongyang was likely years away from acquiring a missile that could deliver a nuclear warhead to the United States. Add the fact that Pyongyang expressed its explicit desire to improve and normalize its relationship with Washington.61 Kim Jong-Il sought a summit meeting with Clinton and proposed to address all the concerns that Washington had about its WMD. Yet, inconvenient facts that did not support the “proliferating North Korea” image tended to be unrecognized, ignored, or dismissed on the weight of the North’s identity as a threat. North Korea as a “Time Bomb” In the 1990s, North Korea experienced a series of natural calamities as well as artificial disasters, which weakened its economic, political, and military might significantly. In a zero-sum competition such as the one between North Korea and the U.S.-Korea alliance, the North’s loss of power should have been welcomed because its loss was the allies’ gain, because its troubles would portend the allies’ victory. That was not to be the case, however. The discourse of danger worked an interesting twist on the situation and managed to produce a new post–Cold War danger: North Korea as a “time bomb,” something that could out of

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desperation unleash a suicide attack, a massive exodus of refugees, or a chain of economic crises. Now the North was a danger because it was weak and on the verge of collapse. This discourse, particularly prevalent in the mid-1990s, when many believed that the North’s collapse was imminent, suggested two possible futures: that the collapse would inevitably cause chaos by unleashing a massive stream of refugees across the DMZ, or that Pyongyang would launch a suicidal attack immediately before the collapse. As many analysts discussed when the Northern regime would disintegrate and what security measures would best protect the allies’ interests, it was taken for granted that the North would collapse and that its demise would be a security threat one way or another. This new danger of North Korea as a “time bomb” was insinuated in 1992, at a time when North Korea was showing signs of a fuel shortage and other economic difficulties that would hamper its military operations. General Robert RisCassi, commander-in-chief of the U.S. forces in Korea, was one of the first to raise this specter. While he recognized that the North’s pilot training sorties and large-scale exercises were significantly limited by shortages of fuel, spare parts, or equipment and that the North Korean military was emphasizing training at the regimental and lower levels, rather than at the corps and division level, he emphasized that the military had not yet tapped its strategic fuel reserves and added that “North Korea could wage a ‘short violent war’ against South Korea.”62 Citing a fact well known throughout the 1980s as if it were a new development, he estimated that 65 percent of the equipment needed by North Korean activeduty forces had been “forward deployed” within 100 km of the 38th parallel, including “enormous amounts of artillery.” In the event of conflict, Seoul could be quickly attacked and allied command centers hit by waves of North Korean Special Forces. As the North’s economic problems worsened during the 1990s, General RisCassi’s view was elaborated upon: North Korea still was a potential bomb, but now its future was unpredictable—it might be a time bomb with a short fuse. Toby T. Gati, assistant secretary of state for intelligence and research, represented the threat as follows: There remains a continuing threat to US and South Korean forces from the North Korean military. But domestic economic pressures are narrowing the Pyongyang regime’s room for maneuver. We remain uncertain about many aspects of the domestic situation in the North, but it is clear that the economy is in even more serious trouble than last year, including a chronic food shortage. Kim Jong-Il appears to be both actively and effectively in charge, even though he has not formally

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succeeded to his father’s official positions, but new and growing internal pressures could change the decision-making calculus that has long prevented conflict.63

The North’s weakened economy and political instability were not celebrated but were received with the worry that they could lead to a disruption of peace and become yet another source of security threat.64 General Garry Luck, commander of the USFK, was quoted in the report: “We worry that in a very short period, this country will either collapse, or take aggressive actions against the South in a desperate attempt to divert attention from its internal situation.” Lt. General Patrick Hughes, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), made the point bluntly: the potential for war on the Korean Peninsula was the agency’s “primary near-term concern.” “We are threatened right now,” he explained, “by a North Korea which is fragile and . . . volatile.” The possibility that the main adversary would collapse under its own weight should have, within a level discursive framework, been welcomed as a scenario where the allies win an easy victory without firing a shot; but within the allies’ mindset, even such a scenario represented a worrisome development, a threat that could undermine their security. That the alliance perceived the North’s possible collapse as a threat not so much because of material evidence as because of social facts can be seen in a statement made by the CIA Acting Director George Tenet. He put North Korea at the top of a list of nations that threatened peace because the “continued deterioration of the North Korean economy [wa]s weakening the stability of the regime.” Tenet said that the dangers facing Pyongyang included the possibility that food shortages then affecting the general populace could spread to frontline military units, that security services could become reluctant to crack down on dissent, and that elite groups could desert the North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il. He then added a frank and revealing statement: “We have no evidence that any of these conditions are present at this time, but we remain concerned about how the regime’s evolution will play out.”65 It was not because he had evidence for any of the dangers that he listed the North as one of the top security concerns. He was concerned because he understood the North within the context of the scenarios generated by the alliance itself. The material fact that he had no evidence did not matter so much in identifying the North as a security concern as the social fact that he was concerned, as most in the alliance were, about the scenarios of collapse or lash-out. Kurt Campbell, deputy assistant secretary of defense for East Asian and Pacific affairs, reproduced the twin image of the North—as

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conventional danger and as “time bomb”—in a congressional hearing in the following way: The need for a combined U.S.-ROK military command and force structure to protect our common values is more compelling than ever. Today the United States and South Korea confront twin security challenges on the Korean Peninsula—deterrence of armed conflict and preparation for crises short of war. . . . [The North’s conventional forces] threaten the security of the Republic of Korea. Two-thirds of its 1.1 million military personnel are positioned within 100 kilometers of the Demilitarized Zone, with a substantial artillery force capable of striking Seoul with little advance notice. In addition, North Korea possesses missile and other weapons programs that heighten concern over its intentions. . . . At the same time, deteriorating economic conditions within North Korea and the recent defection of a senior DPRK official raise questions about future developments in the North. Therefore, it is only prudent for the U.S. and ROK to consult closely and be prepared for a range of contingencies that may occur on the Korean Peninsula.66

Therefore the alliance was able to have the cake and eat it, too. When the North was strong, it was a threat because of its strength; when it was weak, it was a threat because of its weakness. The alliance was called for in either case. Such an outcome was possible because the North’s identity as a danger was so entrenched in the allies’ intersubjective reality that the North was seen dangerous no matter what its situation. North Korea as the “Other” At the beginning of the twenty-first century, when North Korea’s conventional military threat was increasingly coming into question, the new social realities of “the missile threat,” “the nuclear threat,” and “the time bomb” added another layer to its conventional identity, “the dangerous North.” Because that identity had existed ever since Korea’s division in 1945, it was all the easier to return to that familiar reality. The relative ease of restoring the vicious cycle and the relative difficulty of maintaining the virtuous cycle provide evidence that the discursive playing field was skewed in favor of the North’s identity as a danger. If the global Cold War enmity had heavily influenced the alliance’s perception of the North as dangerous, the reality of “the dangerous North” was reproduced in the 1990s through the articulation of “the missile threat,” “the nuclear threat,” and “the time bomb.”

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Security practices combined with a constant articulation of danger to constitute the social reality of the danger and national security, in terms of which the allies made sense of the North and the world. The North’s identity, so constituted, was further buttressed by the robust institutions that, as the previous chapter showed, embodied the same identity. This is not to suggest that the nuclear or missile threats were lies fabricated by intelligence officers. It is undeniable that there were material realities that lent themselves to such threat assessments. For example, it is a well-established fact that North Korea had a nuclear reactor and a reprocessing facility; it is also a fact that it fired a projectile into space in 1998. In addition, Pyongyang’s past behavior of aggression, guerilla infiltrations, and other brutal acts warranted caution and suspicion. At the same time these material facts could be seen as different social realities—as, for example, security dilemma, bargaining chip, or economic need—that could explain the material realities as well as the conventional wisdom could. The alternative interpretations had the advantage of marshaling novel facts that did not fit the conventional discourse and that supported the alternatives.67 Therefore, if the public space had been a level playing field, one would expect at least a debate between different discourses. But none was observed. Policy debates, to the extent they existed, were carried out only within the discursive space demarcated by the alliance discourse and predicated on a single understanding of the North Korean identity. It is this skewed nature of the discursive playing field—the hegemonic status of North Korea’s identity as “a danger”—that is being pointed out. In South Korea’s political, cultural, economic, and social spheres in the 1990s, the identity of North Korea was an unquestioned, accepted fact of life that quietly permeated without displaying its overbearing presence. This state of affairs provided the condition for the alliance constituency to continue to enjoy the status quo—an alliance that remained unaltered, undiminished. Alliance as Usual The reestablishment of North Korea’s identity as a threat turned the possibility of alliance survival into a reality of alliance persistence. At the heart of the process lies the interaction between identity politics and security policy, which reversed the early 1990s’ trend toward a weakened alliance by the end of the decade.

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Prior to the “nuclear crisis,” the U.S.-Korea alliance had been weakening. In July 1989 the U.S. Congress passed the Nunn-Warner revised resolution that directed the Department of Defense to draw a plan to reduce the U.S. military in East Asia, including South Korea; the following year the Bush administration adopted its East Asia Strategic Initiative that laid out a three-stage plan to reduce the size of the American military presence in Korea.68 By February 1992, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers 802th Division had been dissolved as the first major step toward implementing the reduction plan. Within the next few months, the U.S. government completed the first stage reduction, in which 5,000 noncombatants were withdrawn from Korea. The Department of Defense had gone so far as to suggest in its report to the Congress in May 1992 that it would decide whether or not to dissolve the Combined Forces Command on the basis of its assessment of the North Korean threat. The reduction of U.S. presence was accompanied by the withdrawal of U.S. nuclear weapons from the South as part of President Bush’s global plan to withdraw all short- and intermediate-range nuclear weapons from overseas. The series of events in this period seemed, therefore, to signal realism’s triumph: the end of the Cold War and the decline of North Korea’s power had begun to bring about changes in the U.S.-Korea alliance in line with realist expectations: the reduction in the adversary’s power led to the drawdown of the alliance’s power necessary to counterbalance it. Not only did these measures amount to a realist response, but the flurry of activities also coalesced to form a virtuous cycle that was beginning to transform the enmity between the North and the alliance into something more benign. Rather than exploiting these unilateral disarming measures, as many had feared, the North reciprocated them by concluding with the IAEA a safeguard agreement and signing with the South in December 1991 the Agreement on Reconciliation, Nonaggression and Exchanges and Cooperation between the South and the North (South-North Basic Agreement) and the Joint Declaration on the Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula (South-North Joint Declaration). The heretofore unthinkable was not just thought; it was being implemented. Although it would subsequently take almost a decade for these measures to lead to a summit and an explosion of exchanges and cooperation between the two Koreas, these measures began to pose a fundamental challenge to the Cold War social reality that could not fathom or allow such measures. Dramatic changes in the material facts made the Cold War social reality increasingly look outdated, incoherent, and perhaps even wrong.

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In the midst of the sea changes, however, the still dominant identity framework reasserted itself. At the 23rd SCM held at a critical time in November 1991, the defense ministers held “intensive discussions on the question of North Korea’s nuclear development, and agreed to postpone the second stage of USFK troop cuts, originally scheduled to begin in 1993, until the North clearly renounces nuclear development.”69 Even if the defense chiefs had expressed their concern about the North’s nuclear program in 1990 for the first time, they still went forward with nuclear and conventional force reductions through 1992. Although aware that Pyongyang was refusing to place its nuclear facilities under IAEA inspections, they thought it desirable in 1991 to use Bush’s unilateral withdrawal decision as an inducement for Pyongyang to bring its nuclear programs under IAEA safeguards.70 Until November 8, when President Roh Tae-Woo announced his nonnuclear Korean Peninsula initiative, the alliance saw Washington’s drawdown of its military power as the right response to Pyongyang’s nuclear capability. On November 22, just 13 days after President Roh’s initiative, however, the defense ministers agreed to postpone the second stage of the military withdrawal plan “until the danger and uncertainties surrounding the North Korean nuclear program and security in the region have been thoroughly addressed.”71 This was a prudent decision from the alliance’s perspective. After all, it was not until December 31 that Pyongyang agreed to the Korean denuclearization declaration, and not until January 30 the following year that it signed the safeguards agreement with the IAEA. By November 1991, when the SCM was held, the allies had already taken unilateral measures but had not yet seen the North’s positive reciprocation. Under such circumstances the militaries thought it prudent to postpone any further reduction of the U.S. military. Such prudence was made all the more compelling by the then dominant discursive framework that still viewed the North as a danger that called for vigilance. Under the weight of the material changes, the discourse of danger allowed for some changes but dictated caution against carrying them further. The frame’s staying power was not to be slighted. Despite the weight of the old Cold War social reality, further steps were taken that challenged it. Following the official signing of the denuclearization agreement that committed Seoul and Pyongyang to give up their nuclear weapons programs, the two Koreas launched, on March 19, 1992, the Joint Nuclear Control Commission in accordance with the agreement. Their signing of the South-North Basic Agreement led not only to further high-level official meetings and the establishment

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of various committees to implement it, but also to more than a tenfold increase in trade between the two Koreas: from $13 million in 1990 to $173 million in 1992.72 Kim Il-Song made it public and official in his 1992 New Year’s address that Pyongyang had neither an interest nor the capability to manufacture a nuclear weapon. Pyongyang subsequently ratified the IAEA safeguards agreement on April 10 and allowed IAEA inspections of its facilities the following month. As IAEA inspections proceeded with Pyongyang’s full cooperation, the new reality was creating, if not increasing, a dissonance with the ingrained social structure of enmity, which placed the latter under increasing pressure to adapt or react. And react it did. In October 1992, at the 14th Military Committee Meeting (MCM), the U.S. and Korean military officers cited “the North Korean nuclear program” as a “destabilizing factor” that called for the suspension of the second stage of Bush’s withdrawal plan. They furthermore agreed to complement the suspension with the resumption of the Team Spirit exercise in 1993, although the cancellation of the 1992 exercise had helped convince Pyongyang to take the above de-escalating measures, and thus its resumption had the potential to stop and reverse the rapprochement process. At the 24th SCM on the next day, the U.S. and Korean defense ministers approved the two recommendations made by the MCM while reiterating Washington’s commitment to extend its nuclear umbrella to South Korea. Although the North had been cooperating with what it used to consider its mortal enemies, the allied militaries did not see its cooperation as such. Although Pyongyang’s measures could have, within a neutral frame of mind, been considered threat-reducing, the allied militaries were instead guided by the entrenched enmity that counseled a strengthened vigilance. By replacing the postponement of further troop reductions with their suspension and resuming the suspended military exercise, they chose the responses that were more consistent with the hegemonic notion of the North as the Other than with the emergent reality. Maintaining both the postponement of the troop reduction and the suspension of the exercise would have been consistent with the hegemonic discourse, but also less divergent with the emergent reality and less confrontational. An intervening development, however, caused the alliance to eschew the cautious, more benign option. The IAEA’s inspections in 1992 had revealed an “inconsistency” in Pyongyang’s declared nuclear activities: although the North had reported a single campaign of nuclear waste reprocessing, it was found to have reprocessed spent fuel more than two times. Within a

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benign frame of mind, such a discovery—as Japan was found to have discrepancy between its declared plutonium stockpile and the actual amount—would be a cause of discomfort that might call for a slap on the wrist. Within a level discursive playing field, such a finding would be a cause of concern that the parties would try to address in negotiations. Within the hegemonic discourse of the dangerous North, however, the discovery was a cause of alarm and confirmation that the North had been engaged in a secret nuclear arms production. It seemed only natural for those in the hegemonic frame of mind to demand ad hoc inspections and, on Pyongyang’s refusal, special inspections of facilities that they suspected were related to weapons production. When the recalcitrant Pyongyang repudiated, in February 1993, the special inspections that the IAEA had demanded, the allies were convinced that their adversary was not about to cooperate with the international community unless it was forced to. It therefore seemed appropriate for them to resume the Team Spirit exercise as a tool of coercion and a punishment for what they viewed as a flagrant transgression. They opted for what they thought was only a sensible response.73 Their sensible response, however, was a brazenly aggressive move in the eyes of the North, which saw the world through its own Manichaean lens: a pacific North facing an inherently aggressive alliance. Seen from within its hegemonic understanding, its cooperation was being met with unreasonable and unfair demands. Although it had opened 16 facilities to inspections, it was asked to open two additional installations—the ones that it had indicated were military facilities off-limits to outsiders—even before the IAEA had completed its initial inspections of the 16 facilities. When Pyongyang thought that it was fully cooperating with the IAEA’s inspections, it was only told that some inconsistencies were discovered. It was not even asked to explain the inconsistencies, and when it offered its explanation and a way to solve the issue, it was given a demand for intrusive special inspections that had never been requested, much less carried out, in the IAEA’s history.74 What Pyongyang considered cooperation was being reciprocated with what it could not but regard as unilateral demands for more concessions. The North found it particularly alarming that the demand for inspections on its military installations was made in concert with the resumption of the Team Spirit exercise. It interpreted the developments in the only logical way it knew: Washington and Seoul were taking advantage of its softening in order to explore the possibility of aggression. On March 8, 1993, a day before the allies began Team Spirit, which the North was convinced was a simulated

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nuclear attack, Pyongyang declared a semiwar status in what it thought was a defensive response to the alliance’s aggressive move. Two weeks after the IAEA board of directors passed a resolution demanding the special inspections, Pyongyang issued what it thought was its defensive response: its withdrawal from the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). What Pyongyang took as defensive measures only confirmed the allies’ worst fears. Within their frame, those steps amounted to unmistakable evidence that the North was uncooperative, cheating, and aggressive. Why else would it refuse the special inspections and withdraw from the IAEA? Why else would it put its military on an even higher level of readiness? The answers seemed self-evident. Oblivious to how their own actions might be perceived by Pyongyang and to the possibility that they might be observing reactions to their own measures, the allies made sense of the reaction in the only way they knew. Once they made sense of what the North was up to, they found it natural to take what they deemed defensive and punitive measures. Because the allies’ as well as the North’s actions and perceptions were embedded in their respective discursive frameworks that identified the other as the threat, both sides were locked in an escalating cycle of insecurity that in turn exacerbated the enmity, which made all the more real the “nuclear threat” for the alliance and the “U.S. threat” for the North. The recursive cycle between actions and perceptions made up the security dilemma that both found real and inescapable. As the “nuclear threat” further materialized in an escalating cycle that entrenched the already established antagonistic identities, the allies agreed at the 25th SCM, in November 1993, to suspend the second-stage force reduction that had been envisioned under Bush’s plan. Their agreement, which reidentified the North as a threat, represented a follow-through of the identification of the post–Cold War dangers that the U.S. Department of Defense had made a month earlier. In a comprehensive review of the new security environment, the Defense Department presented nuclear weapons and regional crises as primary dangers, identifying North Korea as a country that presented both.75 Maintaining the capability to fight a war with the North became, about a year later, one of the main objectives of the U.S. military in the post–Cold War world.76 Consequently, the Defense Department declared that the U.S.-Korea alliance would remain a centerpiece of its strategy, that the number of U.S. troops stationed in Korea would no longer be reduced, and that the total number of U.S. soldiers in Asia would be kept at 100,000.77 The posture statement was the final nail in the coffin of President

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Bush’s plan to reduce the U.S. military in Korea and the Defense Department’s plan to study the CFC’s dissolution. Through the escalating cycle of insecurity, within which the “nuclear danger” was materialized, and which privileged an antagonistic position in the discursive war of positions over how to define the identities of North Korea and the United States, the alliance restored and stabilized a familiar reality: that of the “dangerous North” and of the “security-providing alliance.” North Korea’s “nuclear danger” identity—an effect of the escalating recursive cycle between the politics of security and the politics of signification and between the North’s and the allies’ behaviors—was as real as it could get and was beginning to make its presence felt in policy choices. In the face of the nuclear threat, the Department of Defense not only cancelled its earlier plan to downsize its presence in Korea but also resolved to maintain the U.S.-Korea alliance as a central tool to deal with the North Korean nuclear threat.

Interest, Identity, and Alliance Persistence The beginning and the end of the 1990s offer striking contrasts. In the earlier years, the U.S.-Korea alliance looked ill, perhaps terminally so. Faced with challenges from within and without, the allies implemented measures to reduce the alliance’s visibility within society and took the first steps in a seemingly irreversible course toward its termination. Changes in the distribution of power were bringing about corresponding changes in the international alignment in Northeast Asia, as realists would expect. But by the end of the decade, the alliance was anything but ill. The allies had nullified previous measures and taken steps backward to their original positions. Power redistribution had accelerated in favor of the South, but despite the realist expectations of the alliance’s progressive weakening, the passing of the decade saw only its restoration. The U.S.-Korea alliance, which had been limping toward its deathbed in the early 1990s, leaped out of the decade stronger and healthier. It was able to do so largely thanks to the shared understanding of the North’s threat identity. The status of North Korea’s identity was so entrenched that even defenders of Clinton’s engagement policy and Kim Dae-Jung’s sunshine policy abandoned their efforts to render an understanding of the North more complex by making its “danger” less central and by highlighting its conciliatory gestures. Although these two administrations had planned to break away from the previous confrontational policies and to increase peaceful contacts

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with the North, they immediately came under attack by Republicans in the United States and by opposition party members in Korea. The hegemonic status of North Korea’s identity as a “threat” made the critics’ jobs easy, which facilitated criticism of any conciliatory moves toward the North. On the other hand, defenders faced the challenge of having to realign the hegemonic discursive practices of the “Northern danger.” What was remarkable about the Clinton and the Kim Dae-Jung administrations is that their officials failed to challenge the constraining effect of the dominant discourse. Whether they were promoting an engagement policy or a humanitarian aid, they justified or defended their preferred policy within the confines of the hegemonic identities, repeating that it “remains indisputable that North Korea represents a major threat.”78 Hence the “threat” persisted, largely independent of the North’s intentions or material capabilities, for those were embedded in the discourse that the alliance produced and operated within and were seen and understood only in such discursive terms. The North Koreans’ own hegemonic discourse, which mirrored the alliance’s, led them to react to alliance behavior in a way that not only confirmed but also strengthened the alliance discourse. The interdependent yet oppositional discourses locked the two sides in an escalating cycle of insecurity that resulted in the persistence of the threat. Its persistence then necessitated the continuation of the alliance that had been “born in blood, forged in the crucible of war.”79 According to General Thomas A. Schwartz, commander-in-chief of the CFC, “North Korea remains the major threat to stability and security in Northeast Asia and is the country most likely to involve the United States in a large-scale war.”80 As long as the North’s threatening identity “remains indisputable,” it is only natural for the alliance to go on, to persist into the twenty-first century, as the following Joint Communiqué from the 1999 SCM shows: Secretary of Cohen and I [Minister Cho] reconfirmed our common position of building on our undeviating alliance of half a century. The security situation on the Korean peninsula still remains fluid. . . . We agreed to further strengthen the Korea-U.S. combined defense posture based on this assessment.81

Hence the alliance continued through the end of the 1990s and, as the concluding chapter shows, for the first several years of the twenty-first century. Whether it will continue to exist in the future is, this chapter’s discussion indicates, not so critically contingent on

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the balance of forces that the alliance can achieve against the North’s military as on the extent to which South Korea and the United States see North Korea’s identity eye to eye. While the alliance has a set of potent institutional and discursive sources of identity that privilege its existence, it can be challenged by factors that constitute the identities of South Korea and the United States in a divergent way. As after 9/11 the U.S. security identity is shaped more by counterproliferation concerns than by alliance considerations, and as South Korea’s identity is increasingly animated by nationalistic attributes in the early years of the twenty-first century, the alliance seems to be facing an increasing challenge. Chapter 6 discusses this challenge and the relationship between asset specificity and identity in general.

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Chapter 6

The Past and Fu tu re of Alli ances: Institu tionaliz ation i n World Politics

T

he empirical analysis presented in the previous chapters confirms the book’s core premise: alliance politics, while critically influenced by power considerations, are also embedded in the politics of efficiency and identity. A state’s alliance decisions are affected by its domestic preference configuration and embedded within its identity structure. Therefore, the higher the level of asset specificity and alliance identity supporting an alliance, the more likely the alliance is to survive the changes in power distribution that would, in the absence of such props, lead to its termination. If an alliance is confronted with negative levels of asset specificity and identity, it is likely to be terminated even without these changes. The analysis also corroborates our argument that military alliances generate a set of powerful incentives that create a positive-feedback loop.1 The U.S.-Korea alliance produced high levels of asset specificities that privileged the existing alliance and that made an alliance termination or switch costly. If, however, we expand our horizon and look at other alliances, we note that although many of the Cold War alliances engendered alliance asset specificities and alliance constituents, which provided them with a “first-mover advantage” over other security organizations, they exhibited a variation in alliance identity constitution. NATO operations, for example, reasserted the identity of a Euro-Atlantic community of liberal democracies in a way that justified its continued existence in the changed world of the twenty-first century. Egypt’s alliance identity was challenged and counterbalanced

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by other identity demands, and the Iranian alliance identity, and even asset specificities, was overthrown by its Islamic identity. All in all, these cases show that while alliance produces a potent momentum, its persistence is not a foregone conclusion, because each alliance is embedded in a larger political context wherein power, efficiency, and identity concerns are negotiated among domestic political actors. While the Iranian case seems to corroborate the second constructivist hypothesis (CH-2), it is actually an instance in which an identity framework affects an actor’s appreciation of asset specificity. This chapter starts with a discussion of some of these cases in light of the theoretical predictions presented in Chapter 1. Overall, the case studies confirm the institutionalization theory’s prediction that alliance operations produce asset specificities and constitute alliance identity and that the specificities and the identity coalesce to cause the alliance to survive beyond its normal life expectancy, by which exogenous factors complicate the alliance identity effect. The cases underline one of the book’s central theses: a military alliance is best understood as a path-dependent institution whose behavior is affected by the outcomes of its own past actions. Having established asset specificity and social identity as two pillars of institutional path-dependency, the second section explores the possibility to extend the analytical reach of these concepts. First, it examines the extent to which the Cold War alliances forged by the United States and the Soviet Union produced asset specificity. Second, noting that alliances have a homogenizing effect on the identities of their members, it surveys some historical cases to assess the degree to which alliances bind heterogeneous groups into a new entity with a shared identity. It then relates the theory of institutionalization to the existing theories of domestic politics and transnational relations. Finally, the book ends where it began. The U.S.-Korea alliance faced the most challenging test yet in the sunshine policy of the Kim Dae-Jung administration and the candlelight vigils at the turn of the century, and yet our theoretical expectations were borne out by the turn of the events. The book concludes with some speculations about the alliance’s future, noting that identity remains the most potent source of troubles. As the two governments try to manage their relationship in the complex post-9/11 world, the most challenging task before them is not so much to find the best configuration of allied militaries and bases as to forge alliance identity in a way that harmonizes it with rising nationalist identities in both societies.

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Power, Interest, Identity, and Alliance Persistence Chapter 2 conducts a careful analysis of military balance between the two Koreas in the 1990s and concludes that the South possessed the military capability to deter and defend against a North Korean attack. After further examining various alternative realist explanations for the maintenance of a U.S.-Korea alliance in that decade, it finds that these explanations fail to account for both the alliance persistence and the process leading to it. The balance of power theory can readily explain the alliance’s origin and behavior in the early 1990s, when the allied governments acted to reduce the level of allied military capability in accordance with changes in power distribution in the South’s favor at both local and regional levels. But the reversal of those reductions and the continuation of the alliance in subsequent years confound capability-based theories, because the alliance increased its military capability as the North’s material capability continued to decline. The balance of threat theory shows similar success and failure in explaining the alliance’s origin and behavior. The termination of the Soviet threat and the decline of the North’s threat at the turn of the 1980s brought about the decision to reduce the allied levels of military capability on the Korean Peninsula. But as the North’s material capability plummeted and the number of observable threat indicators decreased through the rest of the 1990s, the alliance continued— contrary to the threat-balancing theory’s expectations. Liberal theories of alliance are agnostic about the origins of military alliances but expect them, once they are established, to behave like any other institution. An alliance should remain so long as it serves a useful function for the allied states. The theories can explain the persistence of the late 1990s in terms of a number of asset specificities that made alliance operation cheaper and smoother than alternative security arrangements. It was useful, so it remained. If the liberal theories account for persistence, they are less successful at explaining the process by which that outcome was obtained. Unlike neoliberal theory, and functional theories in general, which focus on the demand for an institutional function and are agnostic about the supply side of the equation, its liberal counterparts predict competition, if not a conflict, for resources among societal actors who desire different outcomes. That kind of competition was not observed in the process leading to alliance persistence in the 1990s. Finally, identity-based constructivist theories are agnostic about the alliance’s origin, although one could point to the absence of shared norms and identity between the United States and South Korea in the

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1950s as disconfirming the constructivist arguments that a common identity provides a basis of alliances or security communities. These theories are better, however, at accounting for both the process and the outcome of the alliance persistence than any other explanation. They not only inform us that enemy identities led the alliance to persist in the 1990s but also explain the process by which the alliance continued amid silent consensus (Table 6.1). Relationships between Institutional and Identity Frameworks All of the foregoing discussion brings us to the conclusion that no single theory can explain the whole life cycle of the U.S.-Korea alliance. Realist theories do better at explaining the origin and the early 1990s reduction of the alliance, but their expectations are not met by the events in the following years. Liberal theories fill in the gap left by the realists and account for alliance persistence, but they do not offer an adequate explanation for the process leading to persistence. Constructivists may have little to say about the alliance’s earlier behavior, but they offer the only viable explanation for the process as well as the outcome of its ongoing existence. This conclusion may not be satisfactory to a scholar who seeks a grand unified theory of IR that is capable of explaining all important IR events, but it gives the pragmatic suggestion that the main goal of a scholarly inquiry should be to illuminate important and interesting political phenomena, and not to prove the superiority of one theoretical paradigm over others.2 Although an eclectic theorizing may be called for to account for the entire life cycle of the alliance, it is apparent from the above that the liberal and constructivist theories are most useful in understanding Table 6.1

Major IR Theories’ Expectations versus U.S.-Korea Alliance Behavior

Realism Power Balance Threat Balance Liberalism Constructivism Institutionalization

Alliance Origin

Early 1990s’ Reduction

Y Y A A Y

Y Y N N Y

Late 1990s’ Persistence Outcome

Process

N N Y N Y

N N N Y Y

Note: Y indicates that the alliance behavior was consistent with theoretical expectation; N, that it was inconsistent with theoretical expectation; and A, that the theory was agnostic about the phenomenon.

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the ways in which the institution of military alliance produces the factors that extend its life expectancy. As the book’s central theoretical concern lies in understanding why and how an institution might persist, Chapters 3 through 5 analyze the two-way processes by which alliance operations produce asset specificities and constitute state identities, which in turn generate the institutional inertia that prolongs the institution’s life. The book’s findings are summarized in Table 6.2. As the institutionalization theory predicts, the U.S.-Korea alliance and NATO have engendered a high degree of asset specificities within each allied society, while consolidating an identity among the allies. The existence of both factors and the reinforcing nature of their interaction helped both alliances to remain active well after they outlived their original objectives. The institutionalization theory’s generalizability is made, at least, plausible by the fact that NATO, a multilateral institution with members that are less asymmetric in terms of their capabilities, produced a degree of asset specificity and identity constitution and that the presence of these two factors led to NATO’s persistence.3 That an institution without asset specificity or institutional identity will not persist constitutes the null hypothesis, and it is indirectly confirmed by alliance behavior. A historical survey shows that an absolute majority of 112 alliances between 1815 and 1939 lasted less than 10 years.4 Because pre–World War II alliances were short-lived and required a lower level of durable investments on weapons systems, bases, and soldiers to facilitate alliance operation than did Cold War alliances, which relied heavily on building militaries that would be interoperable, the pre–World War II alliances developed a lesser, if any, degree of asset specificity. Also, because many alliances were designed to confront former allies and were made and broken with little concern for societal consensus, they had little impact on identity Table 6.2 Congruence between Theoretical Expectation and Empirical Evidence

U.S.-Korea NATO Iran-U.S. Egypt-Soviet Most alliances

Asset Specificity

Identity

Alliance Persistence

+ + + + (– with U.S. aids) 0

+ + – 0 0

Yes Yes No No No

Note: The “+” sign indicates the presence of a factor expected by theory; “0,” the absence of the factor expected by theory; and “–,” the presence of a factor opposite from theoretical expectation.

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constitution. While a more careful analysis would increase the confidence in the institutionalization theory, the fact that the majority of alliances that did not develop asset specificities and did not constitute identity failed to persist is consistent with the null hypothesis that the absence of asset specificity and identity leads to the absence of alliance persistence. The U.S.-Iran case illustrates that even a high degree of asset specificity alone is not enough to sustain an institution when identity is so constituted as to make the former ally a new enemy. When asset specificity and identity pull in opposite directions, the status quo can be overridden. A radical transformation of a social identity can finish an alliance even when the cost in terms of power and asset specificity is high, because a rational calculation of costs and benefits is embedded in a discursive structure that skews the calculation in a way consistent with identity. In its subsequent war with Iraq, Teheran paid a high price for abruptly ending its relationship with the United States, with which it had built up a high degree of asset specificity. Iran’s weapons systems and military could not be efficiently operated without U.S. support, but its new social identity, shaped primarily by the Islamic revolution, precluded the possibility of cooperation with the United States, which the new Iran viewed as its arch enemy. The fact that Iran’s identity in 1979 was constituted in a way that was the opposite of what my theory predicts brings out an important aspect of identity politics involved in alliance operation. Although an alliance engenders a number of identity effects that bind the allies in a homogenizing way, it has the potential to alienate a large segment of the allied societies when its positive security contributions benefit a small segment at the cost of the larger one. If a country alienates, or even antagonizes, a majority of its ally’s population by its behavior, then the positive identity effect of normal alliance operation can be eclipsed by a negative identity effect that may be expressed in the form of a social revolution, as in Iran. The fact that the Philippines refused to renew the contract for U.S. bases in the late 1980s, going so far as to revise its constitution to ban foreign military bases on its soil, appears to conflict with my theoretical expectations, but it can be explained in terms of the negative identity effect of U.S. behavior, which triggered a nationalist backlash. The contrast between these cases and the U.S.-Korea alliance could not be more striking. In the latter, a majority of Koreans perceived the alliance as providing the collective goods of security; in the former, the security benefit was unclear and limited, and this limited benefit was monopolized by a few elites

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who managed to antagonize a majority of people. Because the United States was viewed in both Iran and the Philippines as providing security for dictatorial regimes that had lost legitimacy in the eyes of the general population, the U.S. identity was construed as undermining, rather than strengthening, security for those nations. While the politics of identity reinforced the pacific identity of the United States in Korea at least until the end of the 1990s, identity politics in Iran and the Philippines emphasized religious and nationalist identities that constituted the U.S. identity in an antagonistic way. The Egypt case reinforces the message that negative identity effects can neutralize, if not overturn, the positive identity effect that an alliance produces. Because not just alliance operations but also other political processes affect identity constitution, the final shape of identity is not preordained but depends on the ways in which alliance operations and politics affect identity. Because of the suspicions that the Egyptian leadership held about Soviet intentions and its influence on Egypt’s domestic politics, for example, the Soviet-Egypt alliance led to few positive identity effects even though it produced a high degree of asset specificity. The binding effects of asset specificity, in the absence of a positive alliance identity, should have generated the pressure to lengthen the alliance’s existence. But two important developments neutralized the binding effects to bring its termination. First, the United States provided the economic and military aid that more than neutralized the asset specificity of the Soviet-Egypt alliance. Second, changes in the identity structure in the Middle East as a whole placed sovereign state identity at center stage, making sovereignty concerns more salient than alliance interests. These exogenous shocks proved strong enough to overcome the institutional resilience embodied in asset specificity and identity constitution. The Iran and Egypt cases remind the reader of the fact that the alliance identity is in competition for political saliency with other identities even when an alliance reinforces its own positive identity through positive discourse and institutional power. In terms of the degree to which a positive alliance identity acquires political saliency, the Korean case, where the alliance identity was embraced widely and without question in the area of national security, stands on the high end. The Iran case shows another extreme, where an antialliance identity, itself a negative consequence of the alliance, took center stage in 1979. The Egypt-Soviet alliance represents a middle ground, where the alliance’s positive identity competed for saliency with other identities. Alliance produces positive identity effects, but the political outcome is shaped by the balance of identities, which will be an

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important consideration for the future of the U.S.-Korea alliance, as I argue at the end of the chapter. Although the book does not examine a case where the presence of asset specificity is accompanied by an absence of institutional identity, such an institution would be more likely to survive the pressure to terminate it than an institution that lacks both. The absence of such an institutional identity, however, would deprive it of the discursive protection of societal consensus, and a high degree of competition and disputes would likely accompany its survival. If an institution has a shared identity but little asset specificity, it is also more likely to endure, without much competition or dispute, than an institution without either. But once that identity is challenged and overturned, the institution will have no other basis of support and is likely to crumble quickly. The institutionalization model provides a conceptual handle with which to analyze the complex dynamics between multiple loyalties and foreign policy as countries face a choice between staying with an ally and going on a nationalist course. The concepts of asset specificity and discourse shed light on the process through which a foreign policy tool produces conditions that reinforce a particular loyalty and suppresses others. The theoretical model should be applicable not just to minor, deviant cases of military alliance but also to international institutions, which present states with similar issues of commitment. The U.S.-Korea alliance illustrates the logic of institutional persistence, but my institutionalization theory sheds light on the persistence of such Cold War security institutions as NATO and the U.S.-Japan alliance. The causal dynamics of alliance persistence can also be used to explain the earlier-than-expected, abrupt termination of alliances—for example, the U.S.-Iran split in 1979. Furthermore, as international institutions increase in life expectancy and numbers, the institutionalization model should be applicable to the growing tendency of institutional persistence in modern-world politics.5 A further refinement of the institutionalization theory could involve going beyond the present dichotomous research design to a continuous-scale research. The current method correlates the absence or presence of asset specificity and institutional identity with institutional termination or persistence; a more sophisticated model would measure the degree of asset specificity and institutional identity and correlate it with the degree of institutional strength. Because this book is designed to see whether institutionalization theory has a compelling logic and external validity, it developed a simple, dichotomous model and tested it against a least likely case. Now that the primary and

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secondary cases confirm the theory’s internal and external validity, future research should build on its success to design a continuousscale model. NATO exhibits a notably lower level of collective social identity among its members than is evident in the U.S-Korea case. The identity of the United States has always been contested, and no single identity has emerged as hegemonic. The collective identity of “liberal democracies” has always been problematic, as some NATO members clearly lack some attributes of liberal democracy. Even the social identity of the Soviet Union as the Other has been contested within NATO. Despite the absence of a common hegemonic discourse, NATO members have developed a thin, postnationalist collective identity that is based on liberal, democratic values.6 Also, NATO countries have developed a high degree—albeit lower than in the U.S.-Korea alliance—of asset specificities that have proved useful for post–Cold War Europe. The case of the U.S.-Japan alliance falls between NATO and Korea in the degree to which the military relationship has affected its asset specificity and social identity. Thus, while this book used the absence or presence of asset specificity and alliance identity as the variables that caused an alliance to terminate or persist, a more refined theory of institutionalization would measure the degree of asset specificity and institutional identity and correlate it with the degree of institutional strength. It could then test the hypothesis that the higher the asset specificity and institutional identity, the longer the lifetime of the institution. Although the present study suggests that a commitment to an international institution leads to the development of asset specificity and institutional identity, the condition under which they are likely to develop is less well understood. Does any international commitment create asset specificity and institutional identity? What are the aspects of the international commitment that are conducive to their creation? Intuitively, the more demanding an international obligation is, the more likely it is to lead to the establishment of asset specificity and institutional identity. And the longer an institution exists, the more likely it is to produce the factors that favor its persistence. The tests for these hypotheses await future research. Dialogue between Rationalist and Reflexivist Approaches to IR Granted that the 1990s crisis may help us better understand the persistence of the U.S.-Korea alliance, but why focus on this small and relatively insignificant alliance rather than, for example, studying NATO? Moreover, even if my hypothesis is corroborated and found

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to be applicable to a few other cases, the phenomenon represents a deviant case, because most alliances do not persist. Of the 112 alliances between 1815 and 1939, for example, only three lasted more than 20 years, while a majority lasted less than 10 years. What then is the relevance of an institutionalization theory that explains an insignificant, deviant case? The relevance lies in the theory’s challenges to the rationalistic assumptions that are implicit in realist and neoliberal institutionalist views. First, it constructively addresses the ongoing debate in IR theory among various realist, liberal institutionalist, and social constructivist approaches. This study systematically evaluates the empirical validity claims of realism, liberal institutionalism, and social constructivism and concludes that one is not necessarily “truer” than others and that each claim is partially valid under a well-defined circumstance. Each of the three major strands of IR theory needs to be placed in a particular space within the overall framework of institutionalization to provide a better understanding of institutional politics. More interparadigmatic dialogues are also needed to better understand the interactions between power, interest, and identity. Furthermore, this study addresses the ontological and epistemological debate between the “rationalist” and “reflexivist” approaches in the study of world politics. While the rationalist approach captures an aspect of alliance politics so long as the actors’ interests and identities remain stable, rationalist premises need to be complemented by reflexivist arguments in order to see the possibility/impossibility of fundamental changes in alliances. At a more abstract, philosophical level, this book bridges the gap between the positivist and postpositivist orientations by suggesting an intellectual framework where a positivist epistemology is embedded in a postpositivist frame of reference. This can be illustrated with reference to the intellectual endeavors of both neoliberals and constructivists to explain the causes and mechanisms of NATO’s persistence. The efforts of each have proceeded as if oblivious to the other school’s argument. The former relies on NATO’s institutional features to explain its persistence, while the latter draws on shared identities and norms to account for the same phenomenon. Unlike most disagreements in IR theory, this particular debate has produced parallel arguments with little serious engagement.7 One might be tempted to postulate that there is—and can be—no real clash between the two camps because the case is overdetermined.

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The overdetermination hypothesis, however, is too simplistic a view of the ways in which institutional and discursive variables interact with each other, because it juxtaposes two variables that are premised on incommensurable logics of action. This book shows that a rational calculation of costs and benefits, which the neoliberal logic relies on, is embedded in a discursive structure that skews the calculation. The overdetermination hypothesis presumes the existence of categories within which cost is calculated, thus sidestepping the question of how “cost” and “benefit” are socially produced. In reality, the material structure of cost or benefit is embedded in the discursive categories of evaluation. For example, when Nasser decided to go to war with Israel in June 1967—a seemingly irrational decision because defeat was considered almost certain—he did so within a discursive space that made national defeat a heroic feat for the pan-Arab community. Later, in the mid-1970s, Egypt terminated its relationship with the Soviet Union when the material benefits of associating with the United States looked attractive and viable within a new frame of mind that legitimized the pursuit of narrow state interests over collective goods for all Arabs. Iran severed its relationship with the United States despite the enormous costs this action incurred, because its radical transformation of state identity made the costs seem trivial. The U.S.-Korea alliance and NATO persist because the rationalistic, economistic criterion, which seems the only appropriate framework, values the efficiency gains resulting from asset specificities over the costs of maintaining the alliances. The “bottom line” of any balance sheet depends on subjective judgments about the value of assets, not on objective calculations of costs and benefits.8 Hence what is being proposed here is not a simplistic compromise between two sets of variables or between two logics of action, but a systematic synthesis. Finally, there is an active debate about the future of the transpacific relationship: what America’s strategic role in Asia-Pacific should be in the post–Cold War era. This study sheds light on policy implications for the future of the U.S.-Korea alliance and its potential uses in the post–Cold War world. We have witnessed the end of the Cold War, but there are few signs of the waning of alliances. Many analysts have attempted to identify new threats and opportunities in the new world—without much self-reflexive investigation of their own practices. Institutions can be a tool to forge and maintain peace; at the same time, they can turn into a Schumpeterian atavism that prolongs our habits of fighting and preparing to fight a war that no longer exists. As we probe for a new institution of peace and security, we

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need to reflexively examine ourselves and our existing institutions to understand the degree to which past practices of alliances have constituted us in the mold of the Cold War. My research provides a new conceptual tool with which to understand our allies and adversaries as well as ourselves and to allow us to move forward. The use of this conceptual tool can contribute to the policy debate about the future of the transpacific and transatlantic relationships: what should America’s strategic role be in the Asia-Pacific region and Europe in the post–Cold War era, what is likely to happen to the existing alliances, and what can be done to them in the post–Cold War world. Many IR theorists, particularly neorealists and neoliberals, share the assumption that a state is like a billiard ball, in that it does not change its properties after it has made contact with another ball. My argument suggests that states are more like sticky molecules that bond together if they make contact with one another with sufficient force for a long-enough time. Once joined, they exhibit characteristics that they did not have when alone, just as water molecules display chemical properties different from hydrogen and oxygen molecules. To use an analogy familiar in Asia, states may look like grains of rice, but they can, when properly “cooked,” make a rice ball. Scholars working within a tradition different from rationalism are beginning to look at the surviving security arrangements as an embryonic form of security community. They suggest that a new community has been born in the “West” through military alliance, economic exchanges, and shared norms in which the traditional realist power balancing has been replaced with “binding.”9 They suggest that the relationship among states within this community is less conflictual than realists might predict, as differences and disputes are resolved or at least channeled through institutionalized mechanisms. Such arguments imply that because “the development of mutual identification among states can foster a pacific disposition,” the security community is likely to attenuate militarized behavior and to increase transparency, confidencebuilding measures, arms control, arms reduction, and so on.10 This book, however, points in the other direction. The surviving security arrangements, such as the U.S.-Korea alliance, may represent an “insecurity community”—a community indeed, but one whose existence is predicated on and implicated in the reproduction of danger.11 The multiple asset specificities built into the existing arrangements and the discursive space produced by them have a good potential to bind all the members of the arrangements in a continual reproduction of insecurity. The rice ball of states need not be sweet; it can be sour, too.

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Theory of Institutional Persistence The concepts of asset specificity and social identity are the two building blocks of this book’s theory of institutional persistence. This section considers the Cold War context in which the alliances made by the United States and the Soviet Union developed asset specificity. The Cold War provided a unique circumstance that limited states’ alliance choices for over four decades, and both the constraint and its duration facilitated the development of asset specificity in the alliances. The Cold War’s modern nature—which, as John Herz noted, required heavy investment in equipment and infrastructure—further promoted the establishment of asset specificity.12 Thus the phenomenon of alliance asset specificity is quite extensive among Cold War alliances. While the long-lasting bipolar structure of the Cold War disappeared and is not likely to be replicated soon, the nature of modern military hardware and software is likely to lead post–Cold War alliances to make huge durable investments that prolong the alliances beyond their founders’ original visions. One of the most powerful effects of the institution of alliance stems from its ability to produce a positive identification among allies. Historical cases show that some coalitions made to wage war have resulted in the forging of a new identity among ethnic groups that had previously held quite different identities. Hence alliance has the potential to forge a homogenizing identity out of multiple identities, but an analysis of the homogenizing effect also reveals two important characteristics that place constraints on the form and degree of homogenization. This section, then, concludes by considering the ways in which the institutionalization theory relates to theories of domestic politics and transnational relations. Cold War Alliances and Asset Specificity The process of asset specificity generation is not a sui generis phenomenon that is specific only to the U.S.-Korea alliance but represents a more general mechanism by which military alliances consolidate themselves. NATO and the U.S.-Japan alliance also display strikingly high levels of asset specificities, which at least partially explain their persistence into the twenty-first century.13 The alliances between the Soviet Union and Egypt and between the United States and Iran in the earlier periods of the Cold War, on the other hand, demonstrate the high price that the smaller allies had to pay for terminating alliances that had provided military hardware and software as well as personnel training.

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Overall, the Cold War alliances of the United States and the Soviet Union exhibit high degrees of asset specificity, as Catrina’s study on arms transfers suggests. Using the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency’s data on arms trade, Catrina calculated arms import concentration/diversification indices for most countries from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s. His calculations show that throughout this period a wide-ranging set of countries—including the two Germanys, England, France, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Japan, and South Korea—relied almost exclusively on their key allies for weapons imports. For example, almost 100 percent of Japan’s weapons imports originated from the United States, while Czechoslovakia depended on the Soviet Union for 90 percent of its weapons imports. Since heavy dependence on one particular ally generated a corresponding degree of equipment specificity, the arms import concentration index reflects the extent to which equipment specificity was generated in those countries. Catrina’s study shows that the equipment specificity, reflected in the arms import concentration index, was endemic.14 The impact of weapons import concentration on the equipment specificity is felt particularly strongly by countries that depend on foreign suppliers for a large part of their weapons systems. In the 1960s, for example, South Korea used over 66 percent of its defense expenditures to import weapons systems from overseas, 90 percent of which came from the United States. Given that the Korean military had to allocate a part of its budget for maintenance and operations, one can see that practically all the Korean weapons were of American vintage. The countries with a lower weapons import rate are less severely affected by a high import concentration index, but those that may have a sizable domestic weapons production capacity are constrained by weapons interoperability requirements within their alliances. Production cooperation and military standardization function as a mechanism to create equipment specificity. As early as 1949, NATO established the Military Production and Supply Board “to promote coordinated production, standardisation and technical research in the field of armaments.” In 1954 this board developed into the Defense Production Committee, which supervised joint production programs and standardization. Also, to promote military standardization, NATO established the Military Agency for Standardisation in 1951. Finally, it created the Conference of National Armaments Directors in 1966 and the NATO Industrial Advisory Group in 1968.15 These organizational innovations reflected NATO’s commitment to ensuring weapons interoperability and served as institutional mechanisms to generate equipment specificity among the NATO members.

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Just as equipment specificity is a widespread phenomenon among Cold War alliances, so the process of the human asset specificity generation is common to most modern military alliances. Pilots, for example, are trained to fly a particular type of aircraft and engage specific enemy aircraft, and as a result they acquire knowledge that is specific to the alliance needs in a learning-by-doing manner. This kind of knowledge accumulation happens to every member of the military and maintenance crews. Having become familiar with equipment, processes, and locations specific to the alliance, they prefer the status quo, where their wisdom has value. They do not welcome new arrangements that would require them to unlearn this specific knowledge. Human asset specificity is produced not only by the functional needs of hardware asset specificity but also by such organizational features of an alliance as a unified command, combined forces command, or liaison offices. Furthermore, the human asset specificity includes a transnational dimension. In other words, in addition to domestic actors who have a stake in the status quo, alliances also help build transnational networks among actors within the alliance. The alliance provides the channel by which transgovernmental connections are developed among officers and officials of allied governments; through weapons transfers, joint production, and training, the alliance also brings together some segments of the allied public to generate transnational connections. The alliance spawns cross-level connections between different segments of the allied societies.16 Just as the institutions of a military alliance generate asset specificity, so do international institutions in general. An international institution creates obligations for its member states, and in order to carry out at least some of the obligations, they may have to make durable investments. If the investments meet the condition that Williamson sets out for asset specificity, they give a first-mover advantage to the institution supported by the asset specificity, thus generating an incentive to maintain it rather than look for an alternative. The magnitude of asset specificity produced by an institution is proportionate to the kind and intensity of the obligations created by institutional commitments. In general, the more demanding an institution is and the more intense its demands are, the larger the asset specificity will be. An institutional relationship, just like any other contractual relation, can generate its own asset specificity. The countries bound by an institutional contract generate a consultation mechanism, a planning system, a coordinated authority structure, a common infrastructure, joint implementation processes, interoperable facilities, and

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integrated work forces that are specific to the institution and cannot be modified or terminated without incurring additional costs. Some countries may even go through modification processes whereby they adjust to one another and may even attempt to integrate their respective subnational organizations into a seamlessly integrated body. These countries develop a set of physical and human asset specificities that privileges the institution over other alternatives at institutional renewal intervals. An international institution skews a state’s domestic interest structure by producing a multitude of asset specificities—that is, durable investments specific to the institution—while giving birth to “institutional constituents,” a transnational network of individuals and groups that, working for or with the institution, acquires a stake in maintaining it. The institutional specificities privilege the institution over other institutional arrangements, because they give it a first-mover advantage and because institutional constituents use the advantage as a reason for maintaining the alliance. This explanation shares one of the main insights of neoliberal institutionalism: international institutions bring their members the benefits that can outlast the original purpose, yet it avoids neoliberalism’s functionalist blind spot by analyzing the process by which the alliance constituents provide for functional needs. At the same time, I have expanded on the transnational relations literature by delineating a mechanism by which one particular type of transnational and transgovernmental network is produced as a result of a joint action carried out by the member governments of an institution—a mechanism that the transnational literature misses in its overemphasis on nonstate actors. Social Identity and Homogenization Through representational practices and institutional arrangements, alliance discourse may become entrenched even to the point of constituting the identities of the states involved. An alliance produces its identification effect through dual, mutually reinforcing mechanisms: it identifies the threat against which its members are united and socializes its members to see one another in a positive light. As the allies’ identities are constituted in opposition to the threat, the threat’s identity becomes intimately and inseparably tied to the constitution of the allies’ identity. The identified threat thus provides the shared reference point against which the allies are identified as allies. On the other hand, the alliance provides the organizational site at which the allies socialize to develop a common understanding of the situation, learn

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its normative meanings, and identify with one another. Through this socialization, they develop a deeper understanding of, and a positive identification with one another. As Adler and Barnett argue, Organizations . . . are sites of socialization and learning, places where political actors learn and perhaps even “teach” others what their interpretations of the situation and normative understandings are. Because identities are created and reproduced on the basis of knowledge that people have of themselves and others, learning processes that occur within and are promoted by institutions can lead actors to develop positive reciprocal expectations and thus identify with each other.17

The allies thus identify doubly: as allies united against the threat and as allies united within the alliance. These dual social mechanisms produce an overlapping effect to fortify the identities of allies and adversaries and generate a social momentum that perpetuates the identification effect. Alliance is homogenizing. If the homogenizing thesis is pushed to its logical extreme, one would expect that past enemies might, beginning with a fortuitous alliance, end up as one nation. Historical studies of alliances indeed show that such amalgamation has happened. In his study of the integration of Italy in the mid-nineteenth century, for example, Cronin shows that participation in alliances set off a chain of events that led Piedmont to overcome the rivalries and distrust among the principalities, which ultimately resulted in the emergence of the transnational identity of “Italians.”18 Further developing this theme, Collins traces the history of “transethnic identity” to ancient Greece to argue that a “highly mobilized, long-lasting military alliance can create ethnic solidarity among its participants even if the state structure is minimal.”19 According to him, long-lasting, intense war mobilization that cuts across ethnic cleavages can generate a new transethnic identity that overcomes the familism of the clans. Scholars of state formation have observed that states make war and war makes states. A similar process is observed in the relationship between alliance and identity: alliance nourishes identity and identity sustains alliance. A couple of caveats are in order. First, although alliance is homogenizing, it must be recognized that homogenization may be realized in various forms and to varying degrees. At one end of the scale, military coalitions have led to the establishment of new transnational identities, as in Italy, Greece, and Germany. The long-lasting alliance between the United States and Korea has established a high degree of identification, yet it would be a gross overstatement to suggest that the two

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have formed one transnational identity. NATO has constituted a transnational community largely on the basis of shared political vision, while maintaining its members’ national identities. If the U.S.-Korea alliance is perpetuating the same self-other divide, NATO has shifted the divide to reconstitute itself as a democratic community under the threat of uncertainty and insecurity coming from neighboring countries.20 Alliance affects social identity in various ways, but the outcome of the identity reconstitution contributes to the conservation of an alliance. Second, despite its apparent robustness, social identity as an intersubjective phenomenon is constantly exposed to the possibility that it can change with social practices and changes in material reality. Social identity maintains its objective quality by virtue of the fact that members of a community agree on its meaning and act on it. It exists only to the degree to which the members reproduce it in their social interactions. To paraphrase Wendt, social identity is what states make of it after all.21 Although shared communal understanding militates against deviations from the normative intersubjective reality, which cannot be changed by one or a small number of individuals, deviations can add up to a new norm. The case of Iran dramatically shows that a concentrated upsurge of deviations, as in a social revolution, can quickly unravel the status quo ante and establish a new intersubjectivity. Also, even though the United States and South Korea are unified in their war against the common enemy—North Korea— the nationalist identity that South Korea shares with its “northern brethren” counterbalances its identification with its allied partner. In the issue area of national security, the balance overwhelmingly favors the alliance identity, which leads to the expectation that the alliance will last in the near future on the basis of the asset specificities and alliance identity. Yet nationalist identity exerts a significant countervailing force on South Korea’s policy choice. The difference between Kim Dae-Jung’s “sunshine policy”—and his successor’s engagement policy—and Bush’s “axis of evil” approach not only reflected a disagreement over means but also revealed a potentially more serious divergence in the conceptualizations of North Korea’s identity. The discrepancy has not yet undermined the alliance identity, because the nationalist identity does not carry as much saliency in the issue area of national security as in the issue areas of culture, sports, and humanitarian concerns. But the divergence remains the most potent source of a rift that could undo the bond of the alliance.

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Domestic Politics, Transnational Coalitions, and International Institutions That an organization generates a self-legitimizing discourse is hardly a new idea, even if it has never been explicitly applied to a military alliance. Sociologists have long studied institutions as “myths” that powerfully reinforce the values, structures, and ideology of an institutional environment.22 Institutionalized organizations, which are consistent with “myths,” are taken for granted as legitimate independent of their productive efficiency.23 In this conceptualization, organizational success depends less on the efficient delivery of promised goods than on the degree of isomorphism with institutional environments. Organizations that achieve such isomorphism gain legitimacy and increase their resources and survival capabilities. Like other organizations, alliances can gain legitimacy both by delivering promised goods and by becoming isomorphic with myths. An alliance persists when its existence depends less on the efficient delivery of security than on the myths of amity and enmity, myths of friends and enemies. An alliance is implicated in the process of generating those myths, and once it and the myths become isomorphic, it gains legitimacy and its survival depends less and less on its contribution to security. Myths may legitimize an organization, but the process of legitimization is not as apolitical or automatic as sociologists assume. Existing political structures or actors facilitate, impede, or refract the process. In his insightful study of imperial overextension, Snyder notes—like the above sociologists—that “myths of empire” legitimize imperial expansion.24 Although he treats the “myths” as rationalizations created and propagated by coalitions of actors with material interests in territorial expansion, military growth, or international competition, he corrects the sociologists’ apolitical bias by bringing an understanding of political structures and domestic coalition politics to bear upon the legitimization process. According to him, overextension occurs as a result of “logrolling” among parochial interests. Groups that benefit in various ways from expansion form cartels within which they compromise to arrive at an expansionist policy that actually hurts the state as a whole. The degree of logrolling in turn depends on the character of political structures: Logrolling works best in a cartelized system that is dominated by a number of interest groups, each with concentrated interests different from those of other such groups. In contrast, it works worst in a democratic system where parochial interests have more trouble controlling state policy.

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Snyder’s argument about imperial overextension parallels my argument about alliance overextension in many ways, and his attention to domestic coalitional politics and political structures in particular provides a useful comparison through which to understand the relationship between corporate and social identities. Just as imperial overextension results from the combination of myth making and coalition building, so alliance persistence results from social identity constitution and corporate identity construction. The amalgamation of social and corporate identity proves a potent power to bring about a policy that overextends an empire or an alliance. There are two important differences, however. First, because democratic systems usually leave decisions on alliance to a small number of politcal actors, they look like a cartelized system. Furthermore, this book has argued that political structures themselves are malleable, whereas Snyder takes them as a given. Alliance operations are accompanied, as the preceding chapters show, by the creation or modification of domestic laws and political institutions. The laws that define a state as an enemy and the institutions that enforce them help solidify the social identity constituted by alliance practices. Whether a political structure is democratic or cartelized matters less for alliance persistence, because the political structure itself is skewed in favor of the alliance. The positive feedback loop between social and corporate identity makes alliance overextension all the more likely. The second difference concerns the nature of “cartels.” Although Snyder conceptualizes cartels as a coalition of domestic interest groups, alliance constituencies are transnational in character. Each allied country has officers and officials who carry out the day-to-day management duties and who, in the process, acquaint themselves with their allied counterparts. The high volume and the intensity of contacts among them have a socializing effect that can result in the development of a transgovernmental coalition.25 Furthermore, an alliance spawns not only transgovernmental coalitions but also transnational coalitions among the civilians who are affected by and have a stake in alliance. The transnational network of military contractors among allies represents the most conspicuous, but hardly the only, form of these coalitions. How a transnational coalition might bring about a change in state behavior is one of the questions that IR scholars have, in recent years, tackled in their renewed attention to transnational relations. In their quest for answers, they have zeroed in on a mechanism that they call the “boomerang effect”: domestic actors make their pleas to outside actors, who then bring their influence to bear upon the initiators’ governments to effect a change in their policy.26 Much of the

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recent transnational relations literatures postulates, perhaps reflecting its focus on social movements, the relationship between state and transnational coalitions in conflictual terms: transnational activism seeks to change a state’s bad behavior. This book, however, suggests that substate governmental actors, which the transnational contention literature usually postulates as receivers of transnational pressure, can take advantage of the same mechanism. As there is usually close cooperation between alliance constituents in the state and civil sector, it is more than likely that there is collusion between transgovernmental coalitions and transnational networks. The “cartel” formed by the alliance constituents is transnational in its scope. Just as Snyder recognizes that political structures can facilitate or impede logrolling, so transnational literature acknowledges a similar relationship.27 The result is that alliance has a tendency to soften political structures to the influence of transnational alliance cartels. Finally, the argument that a security exchange relationship brings about changes in domestic interest configuration and social identity formation finds a parallel in earlier political economy literature that analyzes the effect of economic exchange on social relationship. For example, scholars have intensely debated the effects of the rise of capitalism on the characteristics of state and society. Particularly illuminating is a reading of Hirschman’s The Passions and the Interests, side by side with his article “Rival Interpretations of Market Society.”28 In the book he dwells on the expectation that the expansion of market would restrain the excessive power plays of the state; in the article he emphasizes the expectation that the market exchange would have transformative effects on citizens and civil society. As he argues, “International commerce, being a transaction between nations, could conceivably also have a direct impact on the likelihood of peace and war: once again the [economic] interests might overcome the passions, specifically the passion for conquest.”29 At the same time, commerce is seen as a powerful agent that brings about modifications of human behavior, and even human nature as it is constituted in a set of appropriate behaviors. The market not only affects individuals’ identities but also bonds the individuals. Durkheim observes the bonding effect of market exchange as follows: The members [of societies with division of labor] are united by ties that go beyond the ever so brief moments during which exchange actually takes place. . . . Because we exercise this or that domestic or social function, we are caught in a network of obligations which we do not have the right to forsake. (p. 207)

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If the division of labor produces solidarity, this is not only because it makes each person an exchanger to speak the language of the economists; it is because the division of labor creates among men a comprehensive system of rights and duties which tie them to one another in a durable fashion. (pp. 402–403)30

International alliance, being an international security exchange relationship, produces similar transformative effects. It generates interests in maintaining both enmity and amity, and it creates among allied peoples a comprehensive system of rights and duties that tie them to one another in a durable fashion.

The U.S.-Korea Alliance in the Twenty-First Century While the continuation of the alliance into 2003 largely confirms my argument about its durability, Korea in recent years provided two difficult tests: the 2000 summit, which showed that the North’s identity, hegemonic as it might be, could be changed through a quid pro quo process; and the anti-U.S. demonstrations at the end of 2002, which showed that the South’s perception of the United States as its defender was not impervious to change. If the process of change had progressed to the point where the new identities were accepted as natural, it would have been a strong disconfirmation of my argument that the social identities had a staying power independent of material conditions or institutional framework. By the summer of 2003, however, the attempted identity changes had been repelled and their original identities restored, displaying the resilience of the hegemonic discourse. The two episodes nonetheless provide an insight into how the actors caught in the vicious cycle of insecurity could transform it into a virtuous cycle of security. The concluding section analyzes these two latest events and offers a prognosis for the future of the U.S.-Korea alliance. The U.S.-Korea Alliance Crisis at the Turn of the Century? Before the September 11 terrorist attack, the two Koreas had made historic strides in overcoming their Cold War enmity and in starting to build a community based on amity. At the first-ever summit in 2000, Kim Dae-Jung and Kim Jong-Il laid the groundwork for further exchanges, dialogues, and political rapprochement and even agreed that their reunification policies shared a common basis. Groundbreaking as these changes were, politically and economically, the summit brought about as significant a transformation in the discursive dimension.

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Now the Koreans began to think the unthinkable and to talk the untalkable. The chujo˘k (“main enemy”), as South Korea’s Defense White Paper had designated North Korea, began to lose its discursive binding power as a category that defined the North’s identity. No longer was Kim Jong-Il the head of an antistate organization bent on wiping out the South Korean state—despite the stipulations in the National Security Law. Nor was North Korea the other, in opposition to which South Korea defined its identity. The self-other divide that had been the core of the North-South division was mortally weakened. A so-called Kim Jong-Il syndrome swept South Korean society. For six euphoric months after the summit, the discourse of the North as the other looked anything but hegemonic. This probably represented the culmination of a process set off by Bush senior’s decision to pull nuclear weapons out of Korea. The Koreans brought the process to culmination by sidestepping the intractable national security issues and focusing instead on the activities that would draw on and arouse the nationalist identity deeply felt in both Koreas. A year later, however, Bush’s “axis of evil” speech and Pyongyang’s visceral “empire of devil” retaliation sent a chill over the Korean Peninsula. Several months later, the naval clash in the West Sea (Yellow Sea) between the two Koreas provided the material fact that only added credence to the “evil” rhetoric. Amid the war of words and the skirmish of the navies, the political rapprochement spearheaded by Clinton’s “Perry process” and Kim Dae-Jung’s “sunshine policy” came to an abrupt halt, restoring the North’s identity as the Other and sending the two Koreas back to a confrontation reminiscent of the 1950s’ Cold War. The U.S.-Korea alliance renewed its life once again. If Kim Dae-Jung’s policies and the North-South summit pose a difficult challenge for my argument, the events of late 2002 and 2003 present the most challenging test. South Korea, one of the most loyal of America’s allies, became highly critical of the U.S. military presence, with hundreds of thousands of its citizens pouring into the streets to protest the acquittal of two American soldiers accused of killing two Korean students in an accident. The former human rights lawyer Roh Moo-Hyun—who had in his activist lawyer days advocated the withdrawal of U.S. troops—rode the wave of anti-Americanism into the presidency in the December 2002 election. The rise of anti-American protests and the election of an anti-American president combined to produce the perception that South Korea had become implacably anti-American. The resiliency of the established identities was in doubt; the alliance seemed to have lost its hegemonic status.

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Events following the election, however, proved that the situation was not as it seemed. Anti-American demonstrations quickly died down, even though none of the protesters’ main demands were met. The acquittal stood, no official apology was offered, and no tangible change was made in the Status of the Forces Agreement, on the basis of which the acquittal was granted and which many Koreans considered an institutional expression of the unequal relationship between the two countries. In 2003 the once-popular candlelight vigils failed to draw the public’s attention, much less a crowd. Roh, elected as a president who could say no to the United States, no sooner took office than he caved in to the alliance’s pressure, pleading for a continued U.S. military presence and weakening, if not abandoning, his opposition to military strikes against the North, while making a direct appeal to the public to stop the demonstrations. Taking a cue from the president’s wavering, the Korean Ministry of National Defense in its 2003 guide to military education singled out North Korea as “the most significant enemy that constantly threatens our survival and well-being”—a designation much stronger than chujo˘k, which had been used before the adoption of the sunshine policy. Hence the perception of the North as the threat was restored with a vengeance, thus sustaining the discursive foundation of the alliance, on which it found a renewed life. What remained striking about the U.S.-Korea alliance in recent years was not that there were differences of opinion about how to realign U.S. bases in South Korea or how to adapt the allies’ militaries to new circumstances, but that there was a continuing agreement on the need to keep the alliance despite many changes. The alliance had been established in 1953, immediately following the Korean War, to maintain peace by keeping a power balance on the Korean Peninsula. Throughout its life, the alliance was maintained on the grounds that it was needed to deter and, should that deterrence fail, defeat the enemy, North Korea. In the beginning of the twenty-first century, when such a rationale began to lose its persuasiveness, the alliance still remained more cohesive than in the 1970s. The degree to which it can continue to do so will be critically contingent, as the following section argues, on the extent to which South Korea’s understanding of the North’s identity overlaps with American perceptions. The Future of the U.S.-Korea Alliance The many important changes in the alliance’s history have been seen by most analysts as steps in a transition from patron-client dependency to equal partnership.31 In the 1950s, South Korea was almost

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totally dependent on the United States for security against the threat from the North and the communist bloc. As it grew in economic and military capabilities, Seoul was progressively given more responsibilities, while Washington reduced its share. The number of U.S. soldiers stationed in the South continues to decline, reflecting the overall trend of a weakening U.S. role: it has dropped from a massive 325,000 in 1953, when the Korean conflict was replaced with the armistice and the formal alliance was born, to 43,000 in 1972, when Washington implemented the Nixon doctrine of “Asians for Asian security,” and to 36,450 in 1992, after the first phase of the East Asia Strategic Initiative was completed.32 The distribution of alliance costs follows the same pattern. In the 1950s Washington paid both for its own military in Korea and for grants and loans to subsidize the South’s military expenditures. Washington terminated the grant program in 1977 and the loan program in 1986. Seoul has not only covered the terminated subsidies but also paid an increasing part of U.S. troop costs: it began to contribute to the operating costs of a small advisory group (JUSMAG-K) in 1976 and subsequently widened its contributions to those of other allied forces and force improvement programs, such as the Combined Defense Improvement Program (CDIP). Seoul’s contribution to the costs incurred by the U.S. forces in Korea increased from $150 million in 1991 to $472 million in 2002.33 While the U.S. forces commander retains operational command of the Korean forces, peace-time control was yielded to the Korean commander in 1994. The Status of the Forces Agreement (SOFA), which many critics considered an exemplar of inequality in the ways that it provided U.S. soldiers privileges and protections denied to the Koreans, was revised in 2001, after almost six years of negotiations. The Land Partnership Program (LPP), signed in 2002, commits the U.S. forces to return 41 million p’yo˘ng (approximately 13,555 hectare) of land occupied as bases and training grounds, while Seoul in return pledged to provide 1.54 million p’yo˘ng (510 hectare), reducing the total land used by the U.S. forces by more than 50 percent and the number of bases from 41 to 23.34 The process continued into the first years of the twenty-first century as the South Korean military was given gradually increasing responsibility for Korea’s defense.35 As the Pentagon relocates its ˘jo˘ngbu to Osan/P’yo˘ngt’aek, south of the Han bases in Seoul and U River, it will hand over most of its defense missions near the DMZ to the South Korean military. As part of the “Future of the ROKUS Alliance Policy Initiative,” the two governments are discussing the details of how, how fast, and in what order the missions that the

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U.S. military is now responsible for will be transferred to the South. The speed with which and the degree to which the alliance relationship has become an equal partnership are debatable, but that it has been gradually moving in that direction since 1953 is indisputable. Important though these changes are, however, they are only matters of management. Under this surface, an equally, and perhaps more, important transformation has embedded the two countries in a system of asset specificities and a structure of identities more binding than that of five decades ago. The allied relationship has transformed what might have been an asocial relationship between atomistic states into what must be understood as a social relationship that embeds allied states in amity and adversarial states in enmity. The social relationship is further buttressed by changes in the material structure that skew actors’ cost calculations in favor of the social structure. This is not necessarily to argue that the second set of changes is more profound than the changes in management. Both can be observed in the alliance, but because they are essentially unmeasurable, they cannot be ranked; nor can one be used to deny the importance of the other. Yet incommeasurability does not indicate mutual irrelevance. On the contrary, the two have a positive recursive relationship. On the one hand, the changes in the management have helped the binding process by addressing both the free-riding problem and the autonomy-security trade-off that scholars of alliances have long observed.36 First, the reduction of the U.S. share of the alliance costs has allayed the concerns that some Americans have expressed about what they argued was an unfair, unequal burden sharing in which Seoul was free-riding. Second, the rise of Korea’s role in the alliance has helped stem the rise of the Koreans’ nationalist reaction to what many viewed as a humiliating, unequal relationship in which South Korea was sacrificing its autonomy despite its contributions to U.S. strategic needs. On the other hand, the binding structure has eased the process of management changes, which would otherwise have been more tumultuous. This observation is particularly well illustrated by the events in the first few years of the twenty-first century, when Seoul and Washington were engaged in an effort to reorient the alliance. The “Future of the ROK-US Alliance Policy Initiative,” under which Washington and Seoul agreed in 2002 to hold a series of meetings to discuss the measures needed to adapt the alliance to the new century’s strategic environment, laid down as the first principle the need to “strengthen the alliance relationship.”37 On the basis of this principle, the allies “agreed on the importance of structuring U.S. forces in a

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manner that further promotes regional stability,” an agreement that represented a sea change in the strategic orientation of the alliance from peninsula security to regional security (emphasis added).38 The change in the strategic purpose of the alliance had been studied since the early 1990s. As per an agreement in 1992, the Korea Institute of Defense Analysis and Rand conducted a research on “a new alliance for the next century,” concluding that it would be best to reconfigure the alliance for a regional role.39 The “security dialogue,” held in 1995 and 1996, also produced a similar agreement. The agreed transformation of the alliance began to be reflected in changes in the joint communiqués that Washington and Seoul issue after each annual Security Consultative Meeting (SCM). While the document has traditionally emphasized the contributions that the alliance makes to maintaining peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula, in 2000 it began to add a reference to the alliance’s contributions to peace in the “Asia-Pacific region,” making public the new direction that the alliance was taking in the twenty-first century: Ministers Cho and Secretary Cohen reaffirmed that the ROK-US security alliance plays a pivotal role in maintaining peace and stability on the Korean peninsula. The two ministers expressed their belief that the alliance will serve to maintain peace and stability in Northeast Asia and the Asia-Pacific region as a whole even after the immediate threat to stability has receded on the Korean peninsula. They also agreed that the two countries would most effectively promote their common values and interests by maintaining their bilateral security alliance for the long term, while adapting it to changing circumstances. In this regard, the two ministers agreed to continue their joint efforts for the long-term development of ROK-US relations in the 21st century.40 [emphasis added]

Such a reference to regional security not only indicated a radical departure from the original strategic objective that the alliance had been formed to serve but also ran the risk of violating the Mutual Defense Treaty that provided the legal basis for the alliance and limited its operational scope to the Korean Peninsula. As the alliance specifically designed to provide South Korea with security against the North Korean threat was being reconstituted as an alliance that would play a role in maintaining peace in “the Asia-Pacific as a whole,” one would expect to observe a heated debate about the necessity and desirability of the change. Some might argue that the alliance’s general assets supplied a tool of security management that was both viable and cheaper than any alternative, while others might

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suggest that such an expansion of the alliance’s geographical scope could exacerbate other countries’ security concerns and possibly lead to undesirable countermeasures.41 No such debate transpired.42 Instead, one observed a tug-of-war between Seoul and Washington about the optimal speed for the transformation, with the former favoring a slow transition and the latter a speedy one. The two also had differences over such technical issues as whether newly reconstituted U.S. bases in Korea would be regional hubs or forward-operating bases and such fiscal issues as how the two capitals would divide up the costs of transformation.43 These were important and contentious issues and made the Future of the ROK-US Alliance Initiative process long and difficult. Nonetheless it would have been longer and more difficult had it not been for the capitals’ consensus that the alliance would be needed even after the situation on the Korean Peninsula ceased to justify it and that it would be maintained for regional purposes. A solid agreement on the ends preceded and facilitated the negotiations about the means. The alliance will, of course, not sail on smoothly and indefinitely. In the coming years it will face serious challenges deriving from changes in domestic politics and international structure. In Korea’s domestic politics, actors in civil society are growing in strength and have begun to develop representation inside the state, with the election of Democratic Labor Party members to the Parliament in 2004. In terms of international structure, there is a widening gap between Korea and the United States in their social understanding of the twenty-first-century world. These two changes may coalesce to cause a rift in the alliance in the future, but such an outcome is by no means preordained. The alliance constituency has the advantage of asset specificities and hegemonic identities, whereas the challengers have a new configuration of domestic coalitions and an emerging identity structure in their favor. What may come out of the challenges will be determined by the balance of material capabilities and discursive powers that each side can bring to bear upon the “war of position” about the alliance’s future. At the time of the writing, there is within South Korea’s state apparatus a consensual silence on the identities of the United States and North Korea. Some political entrepreneurs may hold a private belief not consistent with the hegemonic identity, yet no one has openly and publicly expressed such a belief, which is itself a manifestation of the power of the hegemonic discourse. This situation can change as the Democratic Labor Party (DLP) begins to challenge the hegemonic consensus. Unlike other major parties, which operate within the

The Past and Future of Alliances

203

hegemonic alliance discourse, the DLP staked out a position outside what might be called the mainstream consensus that the U.S.-Korea alliance is needed for a regional role. The DLP’s opponents will attempt to make its views look irresponsible, unrealistic, irrelevant, and thus not worthy of serious consideration and discussion. In other words, they will try to systematically exclude from the political discourse the DLP’s arguments and appeals that imply that the institutionalized identities might or should change. Such a systematic exclusion will be additional evidence for the presence of the hegemonic discourse. Yet it is possible that this discourse may break down as a result of a war of position, where changes in the material world (further rapprochement between the two Koreas, for example) and social practices (that help promote Korea’s nationalist identity) combine to create a serious dissonance between the hegemonic discourse and a new social reality. Its breakdown would produce observable behavior. If, for example, rational and ambitious political entrepreneurs present arguments and appeals that, albeit designed to encourage opposition to a particular set of outcomes, imply that significant elements within the dominant political society might consider or prefer an end to the alliance, then that would suggest the breakdown of the hegemonic position. Either way, the DLP’s entry into the National Parliament should lead to observable behavior indicating the persistence or breakdown of the hegemonic identities. If the hegemonic discourse breaks down, a second line of defense for the alliance is likely to kick in. In this stage, arguments and appeals about costs and benefits will play a more prominent role as the alliance constituency will try to justify the alliance in terms of its being the best and cheapest alternative. Korea’s Ministry of National Defense has already completed a number of studies that would provide potent ammunition in this stage of competition about the alliance’s future. One of the studies estimated the total value of the U.S. forces in Korea to be $14 billion to $26 billion, with an additional operating cost of $3 billion per year, implying that the alliance’s termination, or at least U.S. troop withdrawal, would burden Seoul with that much additional cost to compensate for the loss of the American firepower.44 Other studies have assessed the economic impact (read loss) that the withdrawal of U.S. forces would have on the local economy; these studies carry an implicit threat about the negative consequences of the alliance’s termination.45 Recycling the same argument made in the 1990s, still others have pointed to “strategic uncertainties” in Northeast Asia as a reason for maintaining an alliance that they argue

204

Power, Interest, and Identity in Military Alliances

represents the cheapest tool to manage the uncertainties. The societal actors that question the alliance have mainly based their criticisms on political rationales or nationalist appeals, and thus they remain underprepared to face this line of defense.46 Given the balance of forces, the alliance is likely to go on at least for the foreseeable future. This of course does not mean all is well. Persistence, whether because of asset specificities or hegemonic discourses, does not preclude disagreements or disputes about the configuration of the allied militaries, burden sharing, social friction, and other issues that arise out of alliance operations, as the history of military alliances attests. The South Korean and the U.S. militaries are currently engaged in an intense negotiation about the realignment of U.S. forces and bases in Korea and the transfer of operational command, while they manage to keep on the back burner more contentious issues such as the revision of the Status of Forces Agreement. But these technical difficulties do not pose an insurmountable obstacle for the alliance so long as it enjoys a common social reality and draws material benefits from its asset specificities. Social identities pose a deeper challenge to the alliance. South Korea is currently caught between two conflicting identities: the alliance identity that sees the United States as a friendly security provider and the nationalist identity that pits Korean identity against the United States. It has thus far tried to maintain a delicate balance between the conflicting identities by containing each in its own domain: the United States in national security, and North Korea in culture and economy. As the events of 2002–2003 illustrate, this balance is difficult to maintain for long.47 As the dividing line becomes thin and blurred with the rising tension over the North’s nuclear capabilities and with the deepening intercourse between the Koreas, the delicate balance will become increasingly untenable. Also, generational changes in South Korea make the balancing act more difficult. Mostly people in their twenties and thirties attended the “anti-U.S.” candlelight vigils, and opinion polls show that the younger generation views the United States in a more negative light and the North in a more positive light than older generations.48 A shift in the U.S. perception of its own identity after 9/11 further complicates the balancing act. The terrorist attack, with thousands of American civilians killed in the Continental United States for the first time in the country’s history, brought to the fore the United States’ identity as an injured nation that Americans had never before taken seriously. Such an identity made the sense of insecurity salient, creating a condition under which the United States looked seriously at

The Past and Future of Alliances

205

security measures that other states were likely to see as destabilizing and aggressive. Such thinking accepted the possibility of a preemptive strike on North Korea, which might remove the North’s threat, but at the cost of disaster for the South Koreans. What was deemed a justifiable defense by the injured United States came across as an unjustifiable security risk to the South Koreans. Hence the tension over the North’s WMD capabilities is a doubleedged sword. On the one hand it draws on the hegemonic identities of the friendly United States and the dangerous North and reinforces them with a new theme: that the latter is now adding WMD capabilities to its dangerous arsenals, whereas the former is protecting the South from the new threat. On the other hand, the tension might backfire on the alliance identities if Washington is seen to be menacing the peace on the peninsula by brandishing its preemptive strike doctrine, while Pyongyang is perceived to be protecting the status quo by floating a peaceful quid pro quo proposal.49 The tension over the WMD issue constrains the tempo and scope of North-South exchanges, but they have a momentum of their own and a support from diverse segments of the South’s society. If the North-South intercourse proceeds further and faster, independent of the strategic tension, it has the potential to undermine the alliance identity and underpin the nationalist identity.50 In the months ahead, such security issues as North Korea’s nuclear weapons and missiles are likely to continue to confront the United States and South Korea as the two governments try to find a mutually agreeable formula for dealing with the North. The transfer of the operational command control as well as the size, location, and missions of U.S. troops in Korea will also remain a thorny issue over which the two governments haggle. In the long run, however, the clash of identities represents the more intractable, more fundamental challenge that they are likely to face.51 The long-term future of the alliance will be shaped in the tug-of-war between the nationalistic bond that joins the two Koreas and the alliance security bond that connects the U.S. and South Korea, although the nature of the relationship between these two identities is not necessarily antagonistic or unidimensional. Much hangs in the balance of the identities.

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Appendix A

Adaptive Dynamic M odel Simu l ations

I

simplify Epstein’s equations by dropping the close air support component, since I consider air support in Appendix B.1. The equations I use are  Ag (t ) ⫽ Ag (t ⫺ 1)[1 ⫺
(t ⫺ 1)] ⫹ RAg (t )  D (t ) ⫽ D (t ⫺ 1) ⫺
(t ⫺ 1) A (t ⫺ 1) ⫹ RD (t ) g g g  g (t ⫺ 1)  where Ag (t ) ⫽ attacker’s ground lethality surviving at start of t th day,
(t ) ⫽ attacker’s ground lethality attrition rate per day, RAg (t ) ⫽ attacker’s ground lethality reinforcement at start of t th day, Dg (t ) ⫽ defender’s ground lethality surviving at start of t th day, (t ) ⫽ exchange ratio(attacker lethality killed per defender lethality kiilled), and RDg (t ) ⫽ defender’s ground lethality reinforcement at start of t th day. I run the equations for the following four scenarios: A.1. exchange ratio ⫽ 2:1 and force ratio ⫽ 1.4:1, A.2. exchange ratio ⫽ 2:1 and force ratio ⫽ 1.6:1, A.3. exchange ratio ⫽ 1.75:1 and force ratio ⫽ 1.4:1, and A.4. exchange ratio ⫽ 1.75:1 and force ratio ⫽ 1.6:1.

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Power, Interest, and Identity in Military Alliances

Each scenario is complicated by the inclusion of a surprise case where North Korea maintains an even exchange ratio and suffers 10 percent attrition rate for the first two days. The outcome of a surprise simulation is represented by dotted lines (Figures A.1–A.4). An extra simulation is done for the A.4 surprise case to assess the effect on the battle outcome of a one-time reinforcement at the end of day 2. Exchange Ratio = 2:1 Force Ratio = 1.4:1

Surviving ADEs

4.5 4

NK

3.5

SK NK (surprise)

3

SK (surprise)

2.5 2 1.5 1 0.5 0 1

3

5

7

9 11 13 15 17 19 21 23 25 27 29 31 33 35 37 39 41 43 45

Time (days)

Figure A.1 Simulation Results with Exchange Ratio of 2:1 and Force Ratio of 1.4:1.

Exchange Ratio = 2:1 Force Ratio = 1.6:1 3.5

NK

Surviving ADEs

3

SK NK (surprise) SK (surprise)

2.5 2 1.5 1 0.5 0 1

3

5

7

9 11 13 15 17 19 21 23 25 27 29 31 33 35 37 39 41 43 45

Time (days)

Figure A.2 Simulation Results with Exchange Ratio of 2:1 and Force Ratio of 1.6:1.

Adaptive Dynamic Model Simulations

209

Surviving ADEs

Exchange Ratio = 1.75:1 Force Ratio = 1.4:1 4.5 4 3.5 3 2.5 2 1.5 1 0.5 0

NK SK NK (surprise) SK (surprise)

1

3

5

7

9

11 13 15 17 19 21 23 25 27 29 31 33 35 37 39 41 43 45

Time (days)

Figure A.3 of 1.4:1.

Simulation Results with Exchange Ratio of 1.75:1 and Force Ratio

Exchange Ratio = 1.75:1 Force Ratio = 1.6:1 3.5 NK SK NK (surprise) SK (surprise) NK (s + re) SK (s + re)

Surviving ADEs

3 2.5 2 1.5 1 0.5 0 1

3

5

7

9 11 13 15 17 19 21 23 25 27 29 31 33 35 37 39 41 43 45

Time (days)

Figure A.4 of 1.6:1.

Simulation Results with Exchange Ratio of 1.75:1 and Force Ratio

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Appendix B

H ypothetical Ar mored Bat tl e i n a Break throu gh Sector

T

he rate of losses of South Korean tanks is proportional to the number of North Korean tanks, Nnk, that fire on them and the rate of South Korea’s attrition that can be achieved by each North Korean tank, ank. That is, dN sk (t ) ⫽⫺ a nkN nk dt dN nk (t ) ⫽⫺ askN sk dt The solution of the Lanchester equations for a directed fire battle is given by N nk (t ) ⫽ N nk (0)cosh 冢 a nk ask t 冣 ⫺ N sk (0)

ask sinh 冢 a nk ask t 冣 a nk

N sk (t ) ⫽ N sk (0)cosh 冢 a nk ask t 冣 ⫺ N nk (0)

a nk sinh 冢 a nk ask t 冣 ask

where Nnk(t) ⫽ number of surviving North Korean tanks at time t, Nsk (t) ⫽ number of surviving South Korean tanks at time t, ank ⫽ attrition coefficient of the North Korean tanks, and ask ⫽ attrition coefficient of the South Korean tanks.

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Power, Interest, and Identity in Military Alliances

North Korea commits a total of 1,500 tanks to the sector, while South Korea deploys only 500 tanks. Although the force ratio overwhelmingly favors the North, the North can deploy only 700 tanks in the first line of battle with the rest standing ready behind because of the terrain restriction. (1) Homogenous force The North and the South have homogeneous forces: each tank on either side has the same rate of fire, probability of kill, and vulnerability. Then the initial condition is as follows: Nnk(0) ⫽ 700 Nsk(0) ⫽ 500 ank ⫽ ask ⫽ 0.127 (see the next section for this figure) If we plot the number of surviving tanks on each side, Nnk(t) and Nsk(t), against time, we get the graph shown in Figure B.1. As we can see, the South will be quickly defeated and the North will achieve a breakthrough. (2) The South has better tanks Since the South’s tanks are qualitatively more effective and less vulnerable than the North’s, I estimate the effect the qualitative

Number of Surviving Tanks

800

North Korea South Korea

700 600 500 400 300 200 100 0 0

1

2

3

Figure B.1 Homogeneous Force Battle.

4 Time (tu)

5

6

7

Hypothetical Armored Battle in a Breakthrough Sector

213

differences have on the effectiveness coefficients, ank and ask, as follows: Time needed for a North Korean tank to destroy a South Korean tank is T nk ⫺ sk ⫽ t acquire ⫹

1 Frate Pk

where tacquire is the time needed for a North Korean tank to acquire a South Korean tank, Frate is the firing rate of a North Korean tank while engaging an acquired South Korean target, and Pk is the single shot kill probability of a North Korean tank against a South Korean tank. This means that the attrition rate of South Korean tanks by each North Korean tank engaged in battle is given by South’s attrition rate ⫽

1 T

nk ⫺ sk

Therefore, the attrition coefficient for the North Korean force in the Lanchester equations, ank, is given by a nk ⫽ South’s attrition rate ⫽

1 T

nk ⫺ sk

⫽

1 t acquire ⫹

1 Frate Pk

We assume, as the baseline, that the time to acquire the target is 5 time units (tu), the rate of fire is 0.5 rounds per tu, and the single shot kill probability is 0.7. Then T nk ⫺ sk ⫽ t acquire ⫹

1 1 ⫽5⫹ ⫽ 7.86 tu Frate Pk 0.5 ⫻ 0.7

Therefore, the attrition rate of the South Korean force, that is, the attrition coefficient for the North, is ank ⫽ 1/T nk – sk ⫽ 1/7.86 ⫽ 0.127 This is the attrition coefficient used in the above section on “homogeneous forces.”

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Power, Interest, and Identity in Military Alliances

If the South Korean tank is less vulnerable because of its stronger armor, it will degrade the kill probability of the North Korean tank. Let us assume that North Korea’s kill probability is decreased by 25 percent—that is, a North Korean tank now has to expend 1.25 times more rounds to kill a South Korean tank. Then T nk ⫺ sk ⫽ t acquire ⫹

1 1 ⫽1⫹ ⫽ 8.81 tu 0.5 ⫻ 0.7 ⫻ 0.75 Frate Pk (1 ⫺ 0.25)

Therefore, the attrition rate of South Korea, and thus the attrition coefficient for the North is

a nk ⫽

1 T

nk ⫺ sk

⫽

1 ⫽ 0.114 8.81

If the South Korean tank cuts the acquire time by half (because of the thermal sight) and doubles the fire rate (because of integrated fire control and automatic loader), then T sk ⫺ nk ⫽ t acquire ⫹

1 1 ⫽ 2.5 ⫹ ⫽ 3.93 tu 0.5 ⫻ 2 ⫻ 0.7 Frate ⫻ 2 ⫻ Pk

I also assume that the effects that tank obstacles such as mines and barriers have on attrition rates are included in this calculation. Since the North’s tanks are slowed down and channeled into a “kill zone,” the South’s ability to acquire and fire upon targets is improved. Therefore, the attrition coefficient of the South Korean force is ask ⫽ 1 Ⲑ T sk ⫺ nk ⫽ 1 Ⲑ 3.93 ⫽ 0.255 On plotting the Lanchester equations for these coefficients, we get the following graph. As we can see, the qualitatively superior South holds up against the numerically superior North Korean force. At about 5 tu, the South begins to have a numerical advantage and decimates the North’s tanks by 10 tu. (See Figure B.2.) (3) North Korea reinforces Although the North’s frontline tanks may not fare well against the South Korean tanks, the North has a large stock of tanks in the rear, which it can use to reinforce the front line, whereas the South does not have any reinforcement. At the end of 1 tu, the North has 582 tanks left in the front line. Immediately at that point, the North sends

Hypothetical Armored Battle in a Breakthrough Sector

Number of Surviving Tanks

800

215

North Korea South Korea

700 600 500 400 300 200 100 0 0

1

2

3

4

5 Time (tu)

6

7

8

9

10

Figure B.2 South Korea’s Superior Tanks.

Number of Surviving Tanks

800

North Korea South Korea

700 600 500 400 300 200 100 0 0

1

2

3

4

5 Time (tu)

6

7

8

9

10

Figure B.3 North Korea Reinforces at 1 tu.

118 more tanks to the front to keep the frontline strength at the maximum possible level, 700. Then the North decimates the South’s tanks at 10 tu and has 286 remaining tanks in the front and 682 tanks in the second echelon, enough to exploit the breakthrough. (See Figure B.3.) (4) North Korea attacks South Korea in a prepared defensive position Now assume that the South’s tanks are in a prepared defensive position: in other words, they are placed in a ramp dug underground, connecting a deeper, turret-down position and a shallower, hull-down location.

216

Power, Interest, and Identity in Military Alliances

In a turret-down position, the entire tank is below the ground level, and thus cannot fire its gun or be fired upon by opposing tanks. A turret-down tank is masked from opposing observation while its commander, standing in the open hatch, can observe and search for targets. A hull-down tank has only its turret exposed above the ground level, still keeping its main body under the ground. It can fire and be fired upon; but its fire effectiveness is not affected by this position while its vulnerability to opposing fire is smaller than that of a fully exposed tank. If the South Korean tanks expose only the turret to fire upon the North, the attrition coefficient of the North becomes a nk ⫽

1 1 t nk ⫺ acquire ⫹ Fnk ⫺ rate Pnk ⫺ kill

⫽

1 1 5⫹ 0.5 ⫻ 0.25

⫽ 0.0769

Now if the South Korean tanks expose only the turret to fire upon the North for 10 percent of the time while remaining in “hulldown turret-down” position for the rest of the engagement, the attrition coefficient of the North becomes a nk ⫽

1 t nk ⫺ acquire ⫹

⫽

1 Fnk ⫺ rate Pnk ⫺ kill ⫻ 0.1

1 5⫹

1 0.5 ⫻ 0.25 ⫻ 0.1

⫽ 0.0118

If the South’s tanks fire for 10 percent of the time, I assume that their firing rate is reduced by 60 percent. Since the commander can observe the front and acquire the target in turret-down position, the posture does not affect the acquire time or the kill probability. Therefore, the attrition coefficient of the South becomes ask ⫽

1 1 t sk ⫺ acquire ⫹ Fsk ⫺ rate Psk-kill

⫽

1 1 2.5 ⫹ 0.5 ⫻ 0.4 ⫻ 0.7

⫽ 0.104

Although it may seem extreme that the South’s attrition coefficient is now almost 10 times as big as the North’s, the U.S. Army’s study largely corroborates this result. The Army studied the exchange ratio, ask /ank, of M60A1 tanks against T-62 in a variety of cases, and found that the combination of obstacles and prepared defensive positions

Hypothetical Armored Battle in a Breakthrough Sector

217

results in the exchange ratio of 17.4 for a 1:1 force ratio and 10.1 for a 2:1 force ratio.1 In my analysis, since the force ratio in the front line is 1.4:1, the exchange rate should fall somewhere in between 17 and 10. As the South’s T-88s are more powerful than M60A1s and South’s M48A5s are close to M60A1s in their capability, one would expect the exchange rate to be closer to 17. Again, the exchange rate of 10 represents a conservative estimate. As expected, this results in a dramatic decrease in the South’s loss, while the North’s loss is only slightly affected. In this case, the South succeeds in holding the line. (See Figure B.4.)

Number of Surviving Tanks

(5) North Korea reinforces while attacking South Korea in a prepared defensive position The attrition coefficients are the same as case 4, because the North attacks the South in a prepared defensive position. If the North reinforces the front only once at the end of 1 tu, it still loses because the South enjoys a very low attrition rate. If the North keeps reinforcing the front at the end of each time interval to keep 700 tanks in the front line at the start of the next time interval, it fights much better until reinforcements run out. In this simulation the North runs out of its reinforcement tanks at the end of 18 tu, after which it suffers heavy loss. It fights a long battle, longer than any other cases, but still loses. The South holds the line. (See Figure B.5.)

800

North Korea South Korea

700 600 500 400 300 200 100 0 0

1

2

3

4

5 Time (tu)

6

Figure B.4 The North Attacks the South in Defense.

7

8

9

10

218

Power, Interest, and Identity in Military Alliances

Number of Surviving Tanks

800 NK keeps reinforcing

700

North Korea South Korea North Korea South Korea

600 500 400 300

NK reinforce at 1 tu

200 100 0 0

3

6

9

12

15

18 21 Time (tu)

24

27

30

33

36

Figure B.5 North Korea Reinforces While Attacking.

(6) North Korea mobilizes antitank guns and antiaircraft guns while South Korea deploys TOWs, attack helicopters, and aircraft This amounts to solving the following simultaneous differential equations  dN nkj (t ) i⫺j i ⫽⫺ ask N sk (t )  dt  i  dN sk (t ) ⫽⫺ a j ⫺ i N j (t ) nk mk  dt where i ⫽ 1 tank, 2 TOWs, 3 helicopters, and 4 aircraft, and j ⫽ 1 tank, 2 antitank guns, and 3 antiaircraft guns. For example, ask2⫺1 represents the attrition rate that South Korea’s TOWs can inflict on North Korea’s tanks, and Nsk2(t) indicates the number of surviving TOWs at time t. Now we can estimate all 12 attrition coefficients using the procedure used above. We can restrict the condition by requiring that certain weapons be available for a certain period of time, since the helicopters and ground support aircraft cannot be present for the entire duration of the battle.

Hypothetical Armored Battle in a Breakthrough Sector

219

In other words, if 50 helicopters arrive at t ⫽ 4 and surviving helicopters return to the base at t ⫽ 6, N sk 3 (t ) ⫽ 0 for 0 ⬍ t ⬍ 4 and 6 ⬍ t ⬍ 10 ⫽ 50 for t ⫽ 4 While this kind of analysis is certainly feasible, it requires an exponentially increasing number of assumptions and judgments to derive the attrition coefficients and the number and time of available weapons systems. Hence, the reliability of the model decreases exponentially. Also this model has to assume that there is no interference between two weapons systems. For example, it requires that there are no “double kills”: no target is killed twice by absorbing two shots. While this assumption is a reasonable approximation of a tank duel, it becomes a less tenable proposition as more and more platforms are involved. Furthermore, this Lanchesterian model would require that there be no synergetic effect among weapons systems, another doubtful proposition. In the Gulf War, for example, the air and ground campaigns combined to produce powerful synergetic effects that contributed to rapid destruction of the Iraqi force.

Acknowledgment I thank Professor Ted Postol for providing the equations.

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Appendix C

Ai rpower’s Contr ibu tion to Grou nd War

T

o analyze the contribution that airpower might make to the ground tank battle without getting entangled in these intractable problems, I resort to a totally different methodology. For this analysis, I assume that the North has succeeded in making a breakthrough in the sector, and that it now has 1,500 tanks to exploit the breakthrough. This requires that the North has substituted fresh tanks for all destroyed or tired ones in the breakthrough battle. Under these heroic assumptions, I now assess the possibility of stopping the exploitation force from arriving in Seoul, its tactical objective. The exploitation force would have to travel, before reaching Seoul, about 40 km if it moved in the Munsan corridor and much longer in the Ch’orwon corridor. I assume that it advances at the speed of 20 km per day as it has to overcome many natural obstacles (such as the Imjin river), man-made barriers (such as prechambered roads and bridges and tank mines), and urban sprawls (such as Uijongbu and other satellite cities north of Seoul). I also assume that it survives any resisting ground fires on the way: it is vulnerable only to air fire. Then the South has about two days to stop the advancing force. If the South takes the North’s breakpoint as 0.5—the North stops its advance if it loses half of its force—then the South’s objective becomes killing 1,500 tanks ⫻ 0.5 within two days (Table C.1). This translates into the requirement of destroying 375 tanks per day. Now if we assume that one aircraft carries 4 munitions with the kill

222

Power, Interest, and Identity in Military Alliances Table C.1 Number of Aircraft Needed to Stop North’s Exploitation No. of NK Vehicles 1,500 1,500 4,000 4,000 4,000

NK’s Breakpoint

No. of SK A /C Needed

0.5 1.0 0.5 0.75 1.0

94 188 250 333 500

probability of 0.5 and that each aircraft flies two sorties per day, the number of aircraft needed to achieve the defensive requirement is No. of A Ⲑ C ⫽

375 ⫽ 94 4 ⫻ 0.5 ⫻ 2

If we assume that the North’s breakpoint is 1 (all of its tanks need be destroyed), then No. of A Ⲑ C ⫽

750 ⫽ 188 4 ⫻ 0.5 ⫻ 2

If 4,000 vehicles (1,500 tanks plus 2,500 APCs) are involved in the North’s exploitation effort, and if the breakpoint is 0.5, then No. of A Ⲑ C ⫽

2000 ⫻ 0.5 ⫽ 250 4 ⫻ 0.5 ⫻ 2

South Korea has a total of 528 aircraft—143 helicopters and 385 fixed wing aircraft that it can use to fire antitank guns and missiles as Table C.2 shows. Undoubtedly some of them would be unavailable because of maintenance problems, or enemy fires; and some will be used to fight North Korean aircraft. However, the ground interdiction requirements do not pose serious strains on the South’s airpower unless it aims to destroy all 4,000 North Korean vehicles moving south. Even under that scenario, if the South increases the sorties to 3 per day, it needs to mobilize only 333 aircraft for the interdiction.

Airpower’s Contribution to Ground War

223

Table C.2 South Korea’s Aircraft Available for Ground Interdiction Category

Aircraft

Fixed Wings

F-16C / D F-5E / F F-4D / E AH-1F/5 Hughes 500 MD

Helicopters Total

Number 60 195 130 75 68 528

Acknowledgment I thank Professor Barry Posen for introducing this methodology to me.

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Appendix D

Military Effectiveness of North Korea’s M issiles

We assume that the North wants to use its Scud-B missiles to

cripple air bases or command/control centers so that it may incapacitate or degrade the South’s rapid takeoff capability, and that its ScudBs will be used with a conventional warhead. On the basis of these assumptions, I assess the total numbers of missiles needed to “kill” the intended targets: runways in air bases, command centers, and radars. The accuracy of the North Korean missiles are not known, but estimates of the circular error probable (CEP) of the Soviet Scud-B and NK Scud Mod-B run from 450 m to 1,000 m at a range of 300 km.2 Given that most of South Korea’s airbases are located about 50 – 400 km away from the DMZ, I assume the CEP to range from 50 – 300 m. This amounts to giving North Koreans the ability to strike the target with the CEP of 0.1 percent of the range, a much smaller figure than the published estimates (0.15 – 3.3%). For a target within 50–60 km from the DMZ, the North can use its short-range missiles, FROGs, but since they are less accurate than Scud-Bs (their CEP is about 6% of the range), they will be less effective in destroying their intended target. In other words, my analysis represents a worst-case scenario for the South. Most of the airfields in South Korea are within 400 km from the DMZ with the single exception of the Cheju International Airport that is 473 km away. The Seoul and the Osan airbases are only 55 and 84 km away from the DMZ respectively while the more distant Taegu base is 116 km farther south.3 Their runway sizes vary, but the Osan and the Taegu bases have runways with the dimension of

226

Power, Interest, and Identity in Military Alliances

9,000 ft ⫻ 150 ft (approximately 3 km ⫻ 50 m). Since they represent two of the most important airbases, I assess the possibility that North Korea will disable them. (1) Probability of damage The probability that a single missile will significantly damage a target is the product of multiple factors: P (damage) ⫽ P (launch) ⫻ P (survival during flight) ⫻ P (penetrating defense) ⫻ P (kill) where P (launch) is the probability of a successful launch, P (survival) is the probability that the missile will successfully fly without encountering problems, P (penetrating defense) is the probability that the warhead will survive or evade the adversary’s defensive measures such as Patriot missiles, and P (kill) is the probability that the warhead will explode within a lethal distance, RL. Since South Korea has no theater missile defense, P(penetrating defense) ⫽ 1. The product of the first two factors amounts to the reliability of the missile. Given that P (flight) is estimated to range from 0.7 to 0.9 for Soviet tactical missiles,4 on which the North’s Scud-B is based, I take the product of the first two factors to be 0.8 for my analysis.  RL   CEP 

2

P (kill) ⫽ P (RL ) ⫽ 1 ⫺ 0.5 where

RL is the lethal radius: the target is destroyed if the missile impacts within RL from the target. (2) Scud-B requirements for command center attack The North Koreans may aim to destroy command centers in the airbases or other military installations to degrade the South’s ability to effectively counter the North’s advances across the DMZ. I assume that a typical command center is square in shape with the size of 400 sq. m (20 m ⫻ 20 m) and 40 psi hard (reinforced concrete building), and that 25 percent of the structure has to be damaged to be rendered militarily insignificant.

Military Effectiveness of North Korea’s Missiles

227

If the North fires missiles with a unitary warhead with a 1 ton payload of high explosives, they will generate pressure 40 psi or higher within about 17 m from the point of impact.5 Since I assume that the North Koreans aim to destroy at least 25 percent of the structure, the lethal radius, RL, is about 22 m. To derive the number of missiles needed to achieve the objective, I assume that the North Koreans want the confidence probability of 75 percent or higher (for destroying 25% of the target) (Table D.1). For a square,  a  1.273258 ⫻   CEP 

2

P (kill) ⫽ 1 ⫺ 0.5 where

a ⫽ width / 2, P (damage) ⫽ P (launch) ⫻ P (survival during flight) ⫻ P (penetrating defense) ⫻ P (kill) ⫽ 0.8 ⫻ P (kill), and N (command center, P (confidence)) ⫽

Table D.1 CEP (m) 50 100 150 200 300

log (1 ⫺ P (confidence)) . log (1 ⫺ P (damage))

Number of Scud-Bs Needed to Destroy a Command Center P (kill)

P (damage)

N (com. ctr.)

0.157063 0.041816 0.018806 0.010622 0.004735

0.125650 0.033453 0.015045 0.008498 0.003788

10 41 91 162 365

Table D.2 Number of Scud-Bs with Chemical Warhead Needed to Slow Down Command Center Reaction CEP

P(kill)

P(damage)

N(com. ctr.)

50 100 150 200 300

1 0.997869 0.935028 0.785139 0.495128

0.8 0.798295 0.748023 0.628111 0.396103

1 1 1 1 3

228

Power, Interest, and Identity in Military Alliances

The North will have a much better chance of disabling a command center by using a chemical warhead as Table D.2 shows.6 For this analysis, I assumed that the North delivers 300 kg of sarin nerve gas with its Scud-Bs and that the gas is distributed evenly in a circular area with RL. I estimate RL to be about 265 m. Since the personnel at the center can take protective measures such as wearing a gas mask, it is unlikely that the command center will be completely disabled. A more likely outcome of this chemical attack is to slow down the personnel’s movement as they have to work with chemical gears on them. Thereby, the North may be able to delay the initial takeoff of aircraft by a few minutes. (3) Scud-B requirements for aircraft runway attack If the North uses missiles with a unitary warhead carrying 1 ton payload, the probability of a missile to hit the runway at a distance less than b from the runway centerline is 7 Prunway ⫽ ERF (

b 2⫻d

),

where ERF(x) is the Gaussian error function, d ⫽ 0.849322 ⫻ CEP, and   w  2 ⫻ CEP 

2

Prunway ⫽ 1 ⫺ 0.5

as an approximation (see Table D.3).

Prunway gives the probability that a missile will hit anywhere on the runway. Since the runway is about 50 m wide and a typical runway crater created by a 2.2 ton bomb is 26 m wide (I assume 20 m for 1 ton), the North would have to land two missiles on each half of the runway side-by-side to effectively “cut” it. The probability that two Table D.3 CEP

Number of Scud-Bs Needed to Cut an Airbase Runway

P (runway hit)

P (1damage)

N (1 damage)

P (2 hits)

N (runway cut)

50

0.398878

0.319102

4

0.050913

27

100 150 200 300

0.205905 0.138094 0.103788 0.069296

0.164724 0.110475 0.083031 0.055437

8 12 16 24

0.013567 0.006102 0.003447 0.001537

101 226 401 901

Military Effectiveness of North Korea’s Missiles

229

missiles aimed at the same point will cut the runway so that it may not be usable is P (kill) ⫽ P (cut) ⫽

Prunway 2

⫻

Prunway 2

⫹

Prunway 2

⫻

Prunway 2

If P (confidence) ⫽ 0.75, N(runway) ⫽ log(1 ⫺ P (confidence))/log(1 ⫺ P (damage)) where P (damage) ⫽ 0.8 ⫻ P (kill). Even if the North succeeds in cutting the runway at one point, it does not necessarily mean that the runway is disabled since F-16s typically need a runway space of less than 400 m in length and less than 10 m in width to take off. This means that one of the two bases, whose runway is 3 km long and 50 m wide, could contain about 3–5 strips of runway, each of which provide sufficient space for an F-16 to take off. In order to disable an airfield so that no aircraft may take off or land, the North would have to cut the runway at least at 7 points to deny any strip longer than 400 m. This would require the North to fire 57 ⫻ 7 ⫽ 399 missiles even under the best scenario: the seven cut points are evenly spread out with the interval slightly less than 400 m to make sure no strips of runway are available. In other words, Pyongyang has to destroy all 35 strips within an airbase to deny the South the ability to use the base to fly its aircraft. This objective can be achieved more effectively with submunitions than with a single warhead. Submunitions create many craters that are sufficient to disable the strip while a unitary warhead creates one large crater, which airplanes can avoid more readily. It is not clear whether the North Koreans have the capability to fit cluster munitions in their Scud-B missiles.

Acknowledgment I thank Professor Ted Postol for providing the equations.

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Notes Chapter 1 1. Samuel S. Kim, ed., North Korean Foreign Relations in the Post-Cold War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Chung-In Moon, ed., Understanding Regime Dynamics in North Korea: Contending Perspectives and Comparative Implications (Seoul: Yonsei University Press, 1998); S. S. Kim and T. H. Lee, North Korea and Northeast Asia (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002). 2. For a more careful and sophisticated treatment of military balance on the Korean Peninsula and power/threat balance in the region in the 1990s, see Chapter 2. 3. P. H. Park, Self-Reliance or Self-Destruction? Success and Failure of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’s Development Strategy of Self-Reliance “Juche” (New York: Routledge, 2002); Meredith Woo-Cumings, Political Ecology of Famine: The North Korean Catastrophe and Its Lessons (Tokyo: Asian Development Bank Institute, 2002). 4. According to a report, even in the 1980s, soldiers spent one-third to half of their time on such nonmilitary activities as farming and construction. Asia Watch and Minnesota Lawyers International Human Rights Committee, Human Rights in the DPRK (Washington, DC: Asia Watch, 1988). Hamm argues that such a practice became more widespread in the 1990s to the point where the North’s soldiers functioned more as an organized labor force. T.-Y. Hamm, Arming the Two Koreas: State, Capital, and Military Power (New York: Routledge, 1999). 5. Chang-Ho Yoon and Lawrence J. Lau, eds., North Korea in Transition: Prospects for Economic and Social Reform (Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2001). 6. Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, SIPRI Yearbook 2001: Armaments, Disarmament and International Security (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 280. 7. Chung-In Moon and D. I. Steinberg, eds., Kim Dae-Jung Government and Sunshine Policy: Promises and Challenges (Seoul: Yonsei University Press, 1999); Chung-In Moon et al., eds., Ending the Cold War in Korea: Theoretical and Historical Perspectives (Seoul: Yonsei University Press, 2001).

232

Notes

8. Pak Sunso˘ng, Pukhan kyo˘ngjewa hanbando t’ongil (Seoul: P’ulbit, 2003); KOTRA pukhant’im, 2003nyo˘ndo pukhanu˘i taeoimuyo˘ktonghyang (Seoul: KOTRA, 2004). 9. Leon V. Sigal, Disarming Strangers: Nuclear Diplomacy with North Korea (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998); Don Oberdorfer, The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History (New York: Basic Books, 2001). 10. Kim Ilyo˘ng and Cho So˘ngro˘l, Chuhanmigun: yo˘ksa, chaengcho˘m, cho˘nmang [U.S. Forces in Korea: History, Issues, and Prospect] (Seoul: Hanul, 2003). 11. I thank Ian Lustick for introducing this phrase to me. 12. Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1979); Joseph M. Grieco, “Anarchy and the Limits of Cooperation: A Realist Critique of the Newest Liberal Institutionalism,” International Organization 42, no. 3 (1988): 485–507. 13. Stephen M. Walt, The Origins of Alliances (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987). 14. Stephen D. Krasner, “Westphalia and All That,” in Ideas and Foreign Policy: Beliefs, Institutions, and Political Change, ed. Judith Goldstein and Robert O. Keohane (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 235–264. 15. Robert O. Keohane, After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984). 16. Celeste A. Wallander, “Institutional Assets and Adaptability: NATO after the Cold War,” International Organization 54, no. 4 (2000): 705–735. 17. Andrew Moravcsik, “Armaments among Allies: European Weapons Collaboration, 1975–1985,” in Double-Edged Diplomacy: International Bargaining and Domestic Politics, ed. Peter B. Evans, Harold Karan Jacobson, and Robert D. Putnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 128–167. 18. This criticism is more applicable to neoliberal theories than to other variants of liberal theories. Moravcsik, for example, proposes a liberal theory that looks at how societal ideas, interests, and institutions shape state preferences. Andrew Moravcsik, “Taking Preferences Seriously: A Liberal Theory of International Politics,” International Organization 51, no. 4 (1997): 513–553. 19. Michael N. Barnett, “Identity and Alliances in the Middle East,” in The Culture of National Security: Norms and Identity in World Politics, ed. Peter J. Katzenstein (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), pp. 400–447; Thomas Risse-Kappen, “Collective Identity in a Democratic Community: The Case of NATO,” ibid., pp. 357–399. 20. Stephen D. Krasner, Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).

Notes

233

21. If earlier studies of the population of international institutions found that their number increased markedly after the world wars, more recent studies report that international institutions are durable. Michael Wallace and J. David Singer, “Intergovernmental Organization and the Preservation of Peace, 1816 –1964: Some Bivariate Relationships,” International Organization 24, no. 3 (1970): 520–547; Harold K. Jacobson, William M. Reisinger, and Todd Mathers, “National Entanglements in International Governmental Organizations,” American Political Science Review 80, no. 1 (1986): 141–159; Richard Cupitt, Rodney Whitlock, and Lynn Williams Whitlock, “The (Im)mortality of International Governmental Organizations,” International Interactions 21, no. 4 (1996): 389 –404; John Boli and George M. Thomas, eds., Constructing World Culture: International Nongovernmental Organizations since 1875 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). 22. Michael N. Barnett and Martha Finnemore, “The Politics, Power and Pathologies of International Organizations,” International Organization 53, no. 4 (1999): 699–732; Giulio Gallarotti, “The Limits of International Organization: Systematic Failure in the Management of International Relations,” International Organization 45, no. 2 (1991): 183–220. 23. For an excellent analysis, see Michael Barnett and Martha Finnemore, Rules for the World: International Organization in Global Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004). 24. Harry Eckstein, “Case Study and Theory in Political Science,” in Strategies of Inquiry, ed. Fred I. Greenstein and Nelson W. Polsby (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1975), pp. 79–135. 25. J. J. Suh, Peter J. Katzenstein, and Allen Carlson, eds., Rethinking Security in East Asia: Identity, Power, and Efficiency (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004); Rudra Sil and Eileen M. Doherty, eds., Beyond Boundaries? Disciplines, Paradigms, and Theoretical Integration in International Studies (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2000); Colin Elman and Miriam Fendius Elman, eds., Bridges and Boundaries: Historians, Political Scientists, and the Study of International Relations (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001). 26. Although Moravcsik makes an attempt at theory synthesis in his twostage model of state behavior, he still wants to establish “the priority of liberalism.” Moravcsik, “Taking Preferences Seriously.” 27. Wallander, “Institutional Assets and Adaptability”; Keohane, After Hegemony. 28. Alexandra I. Gheciu, NATO in the “New Europe”: The Politics of International Socialization after the Cold War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). 29. Robert Sugden, “Spontaneous Order,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 3, no. 4 (1989): 85–97; David M. Kreps, “Corporate Culture

234

30. 31.

32.

33.

34.

35. 36.

Notes and Economic Theory,” in Perspectives on Positive Political Economy, ed. James E. Alt and Kenneth A. Shepsle (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 90–143. Paul Pierson, “When Effect Becomes Cause: Policy Feedback and Political Change,” World Politics 45, no. 4 (1993): 595–628. John W. Meyer and Brian Rowan, “Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony,” American Journal of Sociology 83, no. 2 (1977): 340–363. The logic of consequences sees actions and outcomes as the product of rational calculating behavior that is designed to maximize a given set of preferences. The logic of appropriateness understands actions and outcomes as a product of rules, norms, and identities that constitute appropriate behavior in a given situation. James G. March and Johan P. Olsen, “The Institutional Dynamics of International Political Orders,” International Organization 52, no. 4 (1998): 943–969; March and Olsen, Rediscovering Institutions: The Organizational Basis of Politics (New York: Free Press, 1989). Judith Kelley, “International Actors on the Domestic Scene: Membership Conditionality and Socialization by International Institutions,” International Organization 58, no. 3 (2004): 425–457; Kelley, Ethnic Politics in Europe: The Power of Norms and Incentives (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); James Fearon and Alexander Wendt, “Rationalism versus Constructivism: A Skeptical View,” in Handbook of International Relations, ed. Walter Carlsnaes, Beth A. Simmons, and Thomas Risse-Kappen (London: SAGE, 2002), pp. 52–72; Jeffrey T. Checkel, “Why Comply? Social Learning and European Identity Change,” International Organization 55, no. 3 (2001): 553–588; Ronald Jepperson, Alexander Wendt, and Peter J. Katzenstein, “Norms, Identity, and Culture in National Security,” in The Culture of National Security: Norms and Identity in World Politics, ed. Peter J. Katzenstein (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), pp. 33–75. For the former, see R. Rogowski, Commerce and Coalitions: How Trade Affects Domestic Political Alignments (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). For the latter, see Ted Hopf, Social Construction of International Politics: Identities and Foreign Policies, Moscow, 1955 and 1999 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002). Oliver E. Williamson, The Economic Institutions of Capitalism: Firms, Markets, Relational Contracting (New York: Free Press, 1985). Alexander Wendt, “Collective Identity Formation and the International State,” American Political Science Review 88, no. 2 (1994): 384–396; Peter J. Katzenstein, ed., The Culture of National Security: Norms and Identity in World Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996); David Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998); Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

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37. Williamson, Economic Institutions, p. 55. 38. Ibid., p. 116. 39. As Williamson develops the theory, he assumes that individuals are boundedly rational and opportunistic and that they operate in an uncertain economic and strategic environment. These are the conditions that are usually met in international politics if states are substituted for individuals, rendering Williamson’s insights applicable to IR . For a well-known example of an IR theory building under the conditions of bounded rationality, opportunism, and uncertainty, see Keohane, After Hegemony. 40. Furthermore, consideration of transaction costs and uncertainty work in favor of maintaining existing institutions. Ibid. 41. Terry M. Moe, “Political Institutions: The Neglected Side of the Story,” Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization 6 (1990): 213–253. 42. Ronald D. Asmus, Richard L. Kugler, and F. Stephen Larrabee, “What Will NATO Enlargement Cost?” Survival 38, no. 3 (1996): 11. 43. James D. Morrow, “Arms versus Allies: Tradeoffs in the Search for Security,” International Organization 47, no. 2 (1993): 207–233. 44. William R . Thompson, Robert D. Duval, and Ahmed Dia, “Wars, Alliances, and Military Expenditures,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 23, no. 4 (1979): 629–654; John A. C. Conybeare, “Arms versus Alliances: The Capital Structure of Military Enterprise,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 38, no. 2 (1994): 215–235; Gerald L. Sorokin, “Arms, Alliances, and Security Tradeoffs in Enduring Rivalries,” International Studies Quarterly 38, no. 3 (1994): 421–446. 45. While she rightfully notes that the usefulness of NATO’s institutional assets goes a long way toward explaining NATO’s existence and enlargement in the 1990s, Wallander muddles the difference between national and NATO assets. Wallander, “Institutional Assets and Adaptability.” 46. Mark Granovetter, “The Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness,” American Journal of Sociology 91, no. 3 (1985): 481–510; Granovetter, “Economic Institutions as Social Constructions: A Framework for Analysis,” Acta Sociologica 35, no. 1 (1992): 3–11; Martha Finnemore, National Interests in International Society (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996). 47. Moe, “Political Institutions”; Lloyd Gruber, Ruling the World: Power Politics and the Rise of Supranational Institutions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). 48. Peter Bachrach and Morton S. Baratz, “Two Faces of Power,” American Political Science Review 56, no. 4 (1962): 947–952. 49. Campbell, Writing Security; Jonathan Mercer, “Anarchy and Identity,” International Organization 49, no. 2 (1995): 229–252; John W. Meyer and Ronald Jepperson, “The ‘Actors’ of Modern Society: The Cultural Construction of Social Agency,” Sociological Theory 18, no. 1 (2000): 100–120.

236

Notes

50. Timothy Mitchell, “The Limits of the State: Beyond Statist Approaches and Their Critics,” American Political Science Review 85, no. 1 (1991): 77–96. The concept of social identity was limited to the one relevant to the issue area of national security. 51. Hopf, Social Construction. 52. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (New York: International Publishers, 1999). 53. Ian S. Lustick, Unsettled States, Disputed Lands: Britain and Ireland, France and Algeria, Israel and the West Bank-Gaza (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993). 54. K. M. Fierke, “Dialogues of Manoeuvre and Entanglement: NATO, Russia, and the CEECs,” Millennium 28, no. 1 (1999): 27–52. 55. Charles L. Glaser, “The Security Dilemma Revisited,” World Politics 50, no. 1 (1997): 171–201. 56. Alastair I. Johnston, “Beijing’s Security Behavior in the Asia-Pacific: Is China a Dissatisfied Power?” in Suh et al., Rethinking Security, pp. 34–96. 57. J. J. Suh, “Bound to Last? The U.S.-Korea Alliance and Analytical Eclecticism,” in Suh et al., Rethinking Security, pp. 131–171. 58. Meyer and Rowan, “Institutionalized Organizations,” p. 340. 59. Lisa L. Martin and Beth A. Simmons, “Theories and Empirical Studies of International Institutions,” International Organization 52 (1998): 729–757. 60. Yuen Foong Khong, Analogies at War: Korea, Munich, Dien Bien Phu, and the Vietnam Decisions of 1965 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). 61. Walt, Origins of Alliances. 62. Kenneth N. Waltz, Man, the State, and War: A Theoretical Analysis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959). For a second-image reversed argument, see Peter Gourevitch, “The Second Image Reversed: The International Sources of Domestic Politics,” International Organization 32, no. 4 (1978): 881–912. For interactive approaches, see Robert Putnam, “Diplomacy and Domestic Politics: The Logic of Two-Level Games,” International Organization 42, no. 3 (1988): 427–460; Peter B. Evans et al., eds., DoubleEdged Diplomacy: International Bargaining and Domestic Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); H. Müller and T. Risse-Kappen, “From the Outside In and from the Inside Out,” in The Limits of State Autonomy: Societal Groups and Foreign Policy Formulation, ed. D. Skidmore and V. M. Hudson (Boulder: Westview, 1993), pp. 25–48. 63. Thomas Risse-Kappen, “Bringing Transnational Relations Back In: Introduction,” in Bringing Transnational Relations Back In: NonState Actors, Domestic Structures, and International Institutions, ed. T. Risse-Kappen (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 3–33.

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64. Sigal, Disarming Strangers ; Ronald Bleiker, Divided Korea: Toward a Culture of Reconciliation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005). 65. Eric V. Larson et al., Ambivalent Allies? A Study of South Korean Attitudes toward the U.S. (Santa Monica, CA: Rand, 2004). 66. Richard Ned Lebow, “Thucydides the Constructivist,” American Political Science Review 95, no. 3 (2001): pp. 547–560; Vendulka Kubálková, “The Twenty Years’ Catharsis: E. H. Carr and IR ,” in International Relations in a Constructed World, ed. Vendulka Kubálková, Nicholas Greenwood Onuf, and Paul Kowert (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1998), pp. 25–57; Albert O. Hirschman, “Rival Interpretations of Market Society: Civilizing, Destructive, or Feeble?” Journal of Economic Literature 20, no. 4 (1982), pp. 1463–1483; E. H. Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919–1939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations (New York: Harper & Row, 1964).

Chapter 2 1. The 1990s are chosen as the time period of analysis because the book’s central analytical question is concerned with the U.S.-Korea alliance in the decade. This analysis also has a direct implication for the current military balance, because if the South had the capacity for defense in the 1990s, it certainly would be more capable as a result of its faster growth. 2. Optimists: Stephen D. Goose, “The Comparative Military Capabilities of North Korean and South Korean Forces,” in The U.S.-South Korean Alliance: Time for a Change, ed. Doug Bandow and Ted Galen Carpenter (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1993), pp. 37–57; Peter Hayes, Pacific Powderkeg: American Nuclear Dilemmas in Korea (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1991), pp. 153–167; Tae-Hwan Kwak, “Military Capabilities of South and North Korea: A Comparative Study,” Asian Perspective 14, no.1 (1990): 113–143; Thomas H. Moorer, “The Balance of Power in the Western Pacific,” in The Korean Peninsula: Prospects for Arms Reduction Under Global Detente, ed. William J. Taylor Jr., Young-Koo Cha, and John Q. Blodgett (Boulder: Westview, 1990), pp. 77–89; Trevor N. Dupuy, “New Perspectives on the Security of Korea,” Korean Journal of Defense Analysis 1, no. 2 (1989): 199–216; Young-Sun Ha, “The Korean Military Balance: Myth and Reality,” in The Future of South Korean–U.S. Security Relations, ed. William J. Taylor Jr., Young-Koo Cha, John Q. Blodgett, and Michael Mazarr (Boulder: Westview, 1989), pp. 89–101; and Stephen Goose, “The Military Situation on the Korean Peninsula,” in Two Koreas—One Future? ed. John Sullivan and Roberta Foss (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1987), pp. 55–93.

238

Notes Alarmists: Ministry of National Defense, Defense White Paper, 1997–1998, www.mnd.go.kr/97whitepaper; “S. Korea President Warns Invasion by North More Likely,” AP–Dow Jones News Service, March 12, 1997; Yu Seok-ryol, “North Korea’s Military Policy toward South Korea,” Vantage Point (Seoul) 18, no. 8 (August 1995): 41; Defense Intelligence Agency, North Korea: The Foundations for Military Strength—Update 1995 (DIA, 1991), www.fas.org/irp/dia/ product/knfms95; Yoo Young Ock, “Fundamentals of and Prospects for Change in North Korea’s Military Policy,” East Asian Review 5, no. 2 (1993): 87–96; Oh Kwan-Chi, “The Military Balance on the Korean Peninsula,” in Korean Peninsula, ed. Taylor et al., pp. 91–104; Chae-Hap Pak, “A Grand Strategy for Korea’s Defense,” Korean Journal of Defense Analysis 1, no. 2 (1989): 167–197; Richard T. Detrio, Strategic Partners: South Korea and the United States (Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, 1989); Jong-Chun Baek, “Military,” in A Comparative Study of South and North Korea, ed. Moon-Hyun Choi (Seoul: National Unification Board, 1988), pp. 255–315; Kyongsoo Lho, “The Military Balance in the Korean Peninsula,” Asian Affairs 19 (1988): 36–44; and Larry A. Niksch, “The Military Balance on the Korean Peninsula,” Korea and World Affairs 10, no. 2 (1986): 253–277. 3. See, for example, I Yo˘ng-Ho, “Pukhan kunsaryo˘ku˘i haebu: wihyo˘pu˘i chongdowa sujun—nambuk kunsaryo˘k kyunhyo˘ng p’yo˘nggaru˘ l chungsimu˘ro [Analysis of North Korea’s Military Power: Degree and Level of Threat—with a Focus on Assessment of North–South Military Balance],” Cho˘llyakyo˘n’gu [Strategic Studies] 4, no. 3 (1997): 135–176; Stuart K . Masaki, “The Korean Question: Assessing the Military Balance,” Security Studies 4, no. 2 (1994/95): 365–425; David Kang, “Preventive War and North Korea,” Security Studies 4, no. 2 (1994/95): 330–363; Nick Beldecos and Eric Heginbotham, “The Conventional Military Balance in Korea,” Breakthroughs 4, no. 1 (1995): 1–8; and Michael O’Hanlon, “Stopping a North Korean Invasion: Why Defending South Korea Is Easier Than the Pentagon Thinks,” International Security 22, no. 4 (1998): 135–170. 4. On a close reading of the literature, almost all optimists bring in the American force to their analysis of military balance. The only exception so far is I Yo˘ng-Hu˘ i, who argues that South Korea’s military capability is superior to that of North Korea. See I Yo˘ngHu˘ i, “Nambukhan cho˘njaengnungnyok pigyoyon’gu: hanbando p’yo˘nghwa t’odaeu˘ i kuch’ugu˘ l uihan mosaek [Comparative Study of South and North Korea’s War Capability: An Exploration to Establish a Foundation for Korean Peninsula’s Peace],” in Nambukhan kunbigyo˘ngjaenggwa kunch’uk [South–North Korea’s Arms Race and Disarmament], ed. Kyongnam University Far East Institute (Seoul: Kyongnam University Press, 1992), pp. 117–144.

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5. For example, O’Hanlon argues that U.S. force reinforcements alone would exceed the North’s ground force and the sum of all Korean air forces by a factor of 3, while the South’s military capability alone is on a par with the North’s. See O’Hanlon, “Stopping a North Korean Invasion,” pp. 146–147. 6. In all my analyses, I explicitly leave out the contribution of the U.S. forces to the South’s military strength. I do not count U.S. infantry divisions, air wings, marines, or even C3I assets as part of the South’s military strength, even if they are currently deployed in or provided to the ROK. 7. For a brief, and critical, review of the methodologies, see Charles A. Kupchan, “Setting Conventional Force Requirements: Roughly Right or Precisely Wrong?” World Politics 41, no. 4 (1989): 536–578. 8. For ADE or WEI/WUV, see War Gaming Directorate, U.S. Army Concepts Analysis Agency, “Weapons Effectiveness Indices/Weighted Unit Values (WEI/WUV),” April 1974; and William P. Mako, U.S. Ground Forces and the Defense of Central Europe (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1983), pp. 114–125. For updated figures, see Joshua M. Epstein, Conventional Force Reductions: A Dynamic Assessment (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1990), appendix C, pp. 110–269. For TASCFORM, see Michael O’Hanlon, The Art of War in the Age of Peace: U.S. Military Posture for the Post–Cold War World (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1992), pp. 66–67. For references on Lanchester and non-Lanchester models, see my footnotes 48 and 49. 9. For a more recent analysis of the military balance, see J. J. Suh, “Assessing the Military Balance in Korea,” Asian Perspective 28, no. 4 (2004): 63–88. 10. Blitzkrieg, a lightning war, is a strategy to defeat the defender by mobilizing large-scale armored formations (tanks) to effect deep strategic penetration(s). For a discussion on the blitzkrieg strategy, see John Mearsheimer, Conventional Deterrence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), pp. 35–43. I note that Mearsheimer’s definition of conventional deterrence is not consistent with the way “deterrence” is understood in strategic studies, which define it as a strategy of preventing an attack by a threat of overwhelming and disproportionate retaliation. Although I adopt Mearsheimer’s definition of deterrence, it should be taken to mean “defense by denial.” I thank Avery Goldstein for clarifying this point for me. 11. Ibid., p. 35. 12. Geoffrey Blainey, The Causes of War, 3rd ed. (New York: Free Press, 1988), pp. 35–56. 13. A Japanese source notes a decline of 24.2 percent, while a British publication estimates, citing U.S. intelligence sources, a decrease of more than 50 percent. Yabuuchi Masao, “Kita Chosen no boeki, 1992” [North Korea’s Trade, 1992], in Kita Chosen no Keizai to

240

14. 15. 16.

17.

18.

19. 20.

21.

Notes boeki no tenbo [The Outlook for the Economy and Trade of North Korea] (Nihon Boeki Shinkokai [Japan Trade Promotion Association], 1993), p. 47; Barbara Starr, “North Korea’s Collapse Is Threat to Stability,” Jane’s Defense Weekly, June 12, 1996, p. 31. Barbara Starr, “Fuel Shortages Limit N Korea,” Jane’s Defence Weekly, October 24, 1992, p. 12. This also explains the nearly half-a-century-long cease-fire on the Korean Peninsula. See I Yo˘ng-Ho, “Pukhan kunsaryo˘ku ˘ i haebu,” p. 170. The CFC adopted a defense-in-depth strategy in a small scale in the 1970s and deployed South Korean forces in the “Hollingsworth line,” made up of three lines of defense: Alpha, Bravo and Charlie. Eight of the 19 ROK infantry divisions are deployed in the first line, with the rest in the second and third lines, beyond the range of the bulk of North Korea’s artillery. The Air Land Battle Doctrine, first devised to deal with the Follow-on Forces problem in the European theater in the 1970s, was applied to Korea in the 1980s and is reflected in the CFC’s current OPLAN. I chose not to adopt it as my base strategy because South Korea can defend the border without employing the extensive interdiction campaigns called for by the doctrine (see the section on airpower below). As Edward Luttwak notes, “The loss of 50 kilometers might induce a collapse of public confidence in the South Korean government and demoralize the armed forces. . . . As a result, not surprisingly, South Korea’s theater-defense policy ignores the logic of strategy at the theater level and seeks to provide a preclusive (‘forward’) defense of [the] whole territory.” Edward N. Luttwak, Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), pp. 114–115. The Air Land Battle Doctrine demands a higher degree of military requirements for ROKA and has a destabilizing impact on the Korean situation, since it invites a forward deployment of the North Korean army that is kept on a “launch-on-warning” status. As a solution to the tense situation, I call for its replacement with a more static defense-in-depth as an interim strategy for the South until a more stable peace mechanism, including a reduction of North Korea’s artillery and soldiers from the forward positions, is implemented. Crucial to this suggestion is the South’s ability to deter the North without resorting to an air-land battle as I demonstrate in this chapter. International Institute for Strategic Studies, The Military Balance, 1997/98 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 183–186. Malcolm Chalmers and Lutz Unterseher, “Is There a Tank Gap? Comparing NATO and Warsaw Pact Tank Fleets,” International Security 13, no. 1 (1988): 23–45. Andrea Matles Savada and William Shaw, eds., South Korea: A Country Study (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1992), p. 284. See also John C. “Doc” Bahnsen, “The Koreans Build Their

Notes

22. 23.

24.

25.

26.

27.

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Own Armor Force While the U.S. Army Fights Pentagon Bureaucrats,” in U.S.–Korean Security Relations: New Challenges and Opportunities (Seoul: Council on U.S.–Korean Security Studies, 1987), pp. 213–222. David Miller, Modern Tanks and Fighting Vehicles (New York: Smithmark, 1992), pp. 66–69. Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, SIPRI Yearbook: Armaments, Disarmament and International Security (New York: Oxford University Press, various years). Estimates of defense spending vary because of the difficulties in obtaining accurate data on the spending itself and also in estimating the exchange rates. SIPRI’s estimates are largely corroborated by the International Institute for Strategic Studies’ annual surveys, but show a wide difference from the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency’s appraisal. See International Institute for Strategic Studies, The Military Balance (London: IISS, various years); and U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, World Military Expenditures and Arms Transfers (Washington, DC: ACDA, various years). South Korea spent as much as 39 percent of its defense budget on force improvement in 1988, and between 30 percent and 40 percent per year in recent years. Republic of Korea, Ministry of National Defense, Defense White Paper, 1997–1998 (Seoul, 1998), appendix 10. Posen makes this observation in the context of Central Europe. See Barry R . Posen, “Measuring the Central European Conventional Balance,” International Security 9, no. 3 (1984/85): 67–70; also Posen, Inadvertent Escalation: Conventional War and Nuclear Risks (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), pp. 70–76. For a brief introduction to and a critique of this measure, see Kupchan, “Setting Conventional Force Requirements,” particularly pp. 545–548. For the U.S. Army’s original study, see War Gaming Directorate, U.S. Army Concepts Analysis Agency, Weapons Effectiveness Indices/Weighted Unit Values (WEI/WUV), April 1974. For an extensive, updated list of WEI/WUV and ADE, see Epstein, Conventional Force Reductions, appendixes B and C. In the immediate aftermath of the Gulf War of 1991, some in Washington used the Desert Storm Equivalent and Iraqi Equivalent as a building block of future American military forces. According to Les Aspen, the then chairperson of the House Armed Services Committee, “South Korea alone can bring to bear about six-tenths Desert Storm Equivalents of total ground combat force to deal with North Korea’s about six-tenths Iraq of total ground offensive power.” Given that the Desert Storm overwhelmingly defeated Iraq, Aspen’s measure may indicate that the ROKA has the ground capability to achieve a similar victory over the NKPA. Although Aspen’s indices cannot be independently verified, they do give some credence to the

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28.

29.

30. 31.

32.

33.

Notes results derived from the ADE measure. See Les Aspen, “An Approach to Sizing American Conventional Forces for the Post-Soviet Era: Four Illustrative Options,” February 25, 1992, p. 24 (unpublished). The same measure shows that the Allies had a 2.6:1 advantage over the German armor, and the Germans had a 2.9:1 advantage over the allied armor, which indicates that both sides should have been able to effectively defend against their opponent’s armor. However, history shows otherwise: the Allies were utterly unable to do so. This is an indication of the inevitable weaknesses of theaterwide force comparisons. They do not account for the employment concepts, doctrine, and tactics that the opposing forces will adopt in the actual employment of weapons. Hence it is imperative to complement such measures with other methodologies that analyze more carefully the various ways of force employment. Although South Korea did not have antitank guns or missiles, the United States had provided it with antitank mines. For some unknown reason, however, it did not plant them before the outbreak of the Korean War. The absence of the mines contributed, at least partially, to the success of the North’s blitzkrieg in the early days of the war. Personal communication with Bruce Cumings, July 30, 1998. O’Hanlon, “Stopping a North Korean Invasion,” p. 161. Phillip A. Karber, Grant Whitley, Mark Herman, and Douglas Komer, “Assessing the Correlates of Forces: France 1940,” BDM Corp., McLean, VA, June 18, 1979. John J. Mearsheimer, “Assessing the Conventional Balance: The 3:1 Rule and Its Critics,” International Security 13, no. 4 (1989): 54–87; and Mearsheimer, “Why the Soviets Can’t Win Quickly in Central Europe,” International Security 7, no. 1 (1982): 139–175. For a critique of this argument, see Richard K. Betts, “Conventional Deterrence: Predictive Uncertainty and Policy Confidence,” World Politics 37, no. 2 (1985): 164–179. Raj Gupta argues that victorious attackers need a force-to-force ratio of 1.74:1. See Raj Gupta, Defense Positioning and Geometry: Rules for a World with Low Force Levels (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1993), p. 257. Joshua Epstein also suggests a ratio much below 3:1. See Epstein, Conventional Force Reductions, p. 58. According to Dupuy’s model, the force strength of a unit in a prepared defensive situation is multiplied by a factor of 1.5. Its force strength is multiplied by a terrain factor of 1.55 for a rugged, difficult terrain. Finally its force is multiplied by a factor of 1.3, because its defensive posture reduces its vulnerability. Therefore, the strength of a unit is boosted by a multiplication of the three factors: 1.5 ⫻ 1.55 ⫻ 1.3 ⫽ 3. Colonel Trevor N. Dupuy, Numbers, Predictions, and War, 2nd ed. (Fairfax, VA: Hero Books, 1985); and Dupuy, “Mythos or Verity? The Quantified Judgement Model and German Combat Effectiveness,” Military Affairs 50, no. 4 (1986): 204–210.

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34. Figures are taken from Roy E. Appleman, South to the Naktong, North to the Yalu: (June –November 1950) (Washington, DC: Center of Military History, United States Army, 1992), and converted into ADEs. 35. For the Pusan breakthrough, see ibid., pp. 542–552. 36. Chung Min Lee, “Holding the ‘Hollingsworth Line’: Conventional Deterrence in the Korean Peninsula,” in The U.S.-Korean Security Relationship: Prospects and Challenges for the 1990s, Harold C. Hinton et al. (New York: Pergamon-Brassey’s, 1988), p. 65. 37. U.S. Department of the Army, Opposing Force Training Modules: North Korean Military Forces, Field Manual 34–71, Washington, DC, 1982, p. 4, cited in Hayes, Pacific Powderkeg, p. 159. 38. Posen, Inadvertent Escalation, p. 114–87. 39. Joseph S. Bermudez Jr., North Korean Special Forces (London: Jane’s, 1988), pp. 156–157. 40. Lee, “Holding the ‘Hollingsworth Line’,” p. 65. 41. Posen, Inadvertent Escalation, pp. 110–115; Mearsheimer, Conventional Deterrence, pp. 181–182. For critiques of their argument, see Epstein, Conventional Force Reductions, pp. 51–65; Eliot A. Cohen, “Toward Better Net Assessment,” International Security 13, no. 1 (1989): 66–72; and Cohen, “Correspondence: Reassessing Net Assessment,” International Security 13, no. 4 (1989): 169–172. 42. North Korea Handbook (Washington, DC: Defense Intelligence Agency, 1994), pp. 3–97; Note that the North Korean doctrinal norm for coastal defense is 25 to 100 km for a combined arms brigade and 5 km for an infantry battalion. See Bermudez, Special Forces, p. 158. See, for U.S. doctrinal norms, William P. Mako, U.S. Ground Forces, pp. 35–40. 43. I note that different analysts gave different figures for this: Beldecos 15 km, Hillier 24 km, and Masaki 50 km for Ch’o˘rwo˘n; and Beldecos 4 km and Hillier 10 km for the Eastern corridor. 44. The Ch’o˘rwo˘n corridor runs Ch’o˘rwo˘n-Yo˘nch’o˘n-Tongduch’o˘n˘ ijo˘ngbu-Seoul and has a parallel corridor to the east leading to U ˘ ijo˘ngbu from Ku˘ mwha through P’ocho˘n. In the beginning of the U Korean War, North Korea’s 105th Armored Brigade, together with the 3rd and 4th Infantry Divisions, made a breakthrough in this corridor to capture Seoul within three days. 45. It is difficult to estimate first how much infantry force would be equivalent to 1 ADE. Since we are postulating that the infantry is moving in the mountains, it is safe to assume that they are armed only with rifles, machine guns, grenade launchers, and mortars. Judging from the information on North Korea’s light infantry brigade in Bermudez’s Special Forces, I estimate 4.4 special infantry brigades to equal 1 ADE. This would mean that the North commits 16,720 soldiers, half of its nine light-infantry special forces brigades, to this sector—an extraordinary number. 46. Ralph N. Clough, Deterrence and Defense in Korea: The Role of U.S. Forces (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1976), p. 11.

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47. General Richard G. Stilwell, “Commentary: The United States, Japan and the Security of Korea,” International Security 2, no. 3 (1977): 93; and Charles A. Sorrels, Planning U.S. General Purpose Forces: Forces Related to Asia (Washington, DC: Congressional Budget Office, June 1977), p. 36n7. 48. Most accounts put the North’s forward presence along the DMZ at 65 percent of its ground forces, which indicates that Pyongyang has to redeploy 35 percent of its forces to the front to fully utilize its military might in a blitzkrieg. For example, the 815th Mechanized Corps and the 820th Armored Corps are stationed about 100 km away from the western part of the DMZ. The 9th Mechanized Corps, headquartered at Kosan about 90 km from the eastern DMZ, have to travel approximately 80 km over high, rough mountains to get to the Ch’o˘rwo˘n corridor. Two other mechanized corps, the 10th and 425th, are headquartered farther north, probably too far away to be deployed to the front (not to mention the possibility that the defensive missions to which they are likely assigned may keep them there). This deployment pattern can be understood only if we acknowledge that the North has defensive needs: it has to defend against a possible amphibious landing on its eastern and western coasts. (Estimates were made from Figure 11 in Andrea Matles Savada, ed., North Korea: A Country Study, 4th ed. [Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1994], p. 222.) On the other hand, the South has most of its active forces along the DMZ: 19 of 21 infantry divisions and both the mechanized infantry divisions are forward deployed, while other units such as special forces brigades are likely to be near the DMZ. See Savada and Shaw, South Korea, p. 283. 49. For Posen’s model, see Posen, Inadvertent Escalation, appendix 3. For Epstein’s model, see Joshua M. Epstein, The Calculus of Conventional War: Dynamic Analysis without Lanchester Theory (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1985); Epstein, Strategy and Force Planning: The Case of the Persian Gulf (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1987), appendix C; and Epstein, Conventional Force Reductions, appendix A. For a critique of Epstein’s model, see Mearsheimer, “Assessing the Conventional Balance” ; and for Epstein’s response, see Epstein, “The 3:1 Rule, The Adaptive Dynamic Model, and the Future of Security Studies,” International Security 13, no. 4 (1989): 90–127. 50. For a brief introduction to the Lanchester equations, see William W. Kaufmann, “The Arithmetic of Force Planning,” in Alliance Security: NATO and the No-First-Use Question, ed. John D. Steinbrunner and Leon V. Sigal (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1983), pp. 208–216. For a critique of the way Kaufman uses or misuses the Lanchester equations, see John W. R. Lepingwell, “The Laws of Combat? Lanchester Reexamined,” International Security 12, no. 1 (1987): 89–134; and Thomas F. Homer-Dixon, “A Common Misapplication of the Lanchester Square Law,” International Security 12,

Notes

51.

52.

53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

58.

59.

60.

61. 62.

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no. 1 (1987): 135–139. For a definitive treatment of the Lanchester equations, see James G. Taylor, Lanchester Models of Warfare, 2 vols. (Arlington, VA: Operations Research Society of America, 1983); and James G. Taylor, Force-on-Force Attrition Modeling (Arlington, VA: Operations Research Society of America, 1981). Since the exact number of divisions in the Third Army is not known, I divided the 19 infantry divisions evenly into the First and Third armies that guard the front line. I also assume that one of the two mechanized infantry divisions is assigned to each army. Pat Hillier and Nora Slatkin, U.S. Ground Forces: Design and Cost Alternatives for NATO and Non-NATO Contingencies (Washington, DC: Congressional Budget Office, 1980), pp. 69–70. For a photograph of a tank trap (a huge concrete slab ready to be blown onto the road below), see Savada and Shaw, South Korea, p. 309. Bermudez, Special Forces, p. 31. Chung Min Lee, “Holding the ‘Hollingsworth Line,’” pp. 69–77. For the modeling, see Appendix B. I assumed for this modeling that the North has perfect military intelligence regarding where and when to reinforce and a perfect capability to carry out the reinforcement, an extremely unlikely situation. For the Battle of the Bulge, see Charles B. MacDonald, A Time for Trumpets: The Untold Story of the Battle of the Bulge (New York: Morrow, 1984). For example, Dunnigan shows that F-16 Falcons exceed the capabilities of MiG-29s in air interception operations. In a similar comparison, the MiG-23s display an inferior ability to conduct air intercept missions, strike ground targets, and perform reconnaissance missions. A Defense Department study corroborates Dunnigan’s assessment. The 1990 edition of Soviet Military Power argues that the MiG-29s “lag behind their U.S. counterpart aircraft in avionics, weapons, and certain other features, but they are a much closer match than previous generations of Soviet aircraft.” See James Dunnigan, How to Make War (New York: Quill, 1988), pp. 108–109; and Department of Defense, Soviet Military Power, 1990 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1990), pp. 294–296. For this analysis, I assume that the South can establish air superiority in its air space, because of its qualitative edge combined with the advantages of fighting within its own air space. This simple model did not take aircraft attrition into consideration, as it involves only four sorties in total. Had the simulation results shown signs of sensitivity to attrition, I would have factored it in; but they did not, and I did not see a compelling reason to do so. For details of the model and its results, see Appendix C. For a simulation of North Korea’s missile attack, see Appendix D. International Institute for Strategic Studies, The Military Balance (London: Brassey’s, various years).

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Notes

63. One threatening scenario, which this analysis can identify for the South, involves a chemical attack in combination with concerted air and land campaigns. With chemical warheads, the NKPA’s missiles can hamper the South’s air operations seriously, since one inaccurate missile such as a Rodong can affect its intended target. Under this scenario, the NKPA would start a war by attacking the CFC’s air command centers with chemical warhead-tipped missiles, while moving its tanks and APCs across the DMZ. The personnel at the command center under chemical attack would be forced to take protective measures such as wearing gas masks and decontaminating the facility, which would hamper and slow down its operations. A chemical attack would certainly put out of Seoul’s reach the three sorties per day that it needs to deal with Pyongyang’s most determined exploitation move. If the North succeeds in slowing down the South’s air response, in making a breakthrough in a sector, and in sending a combination of 4,000 tanks and APCs (with a breakpoint of 1) to exploit the breakthrough, and if the North successfully coordinates all these operations—a possible but extremely unlikely scenario—then the South could be in a serious trouble. 64. Bermudez, Special Forces, p. 31. 65. Paul B. Stares, Command Performance: The Neglected Dimension of European Security (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1991), pp. 25 and 27; and Mearsheimer, Conventional Deterrence, pp. 41–42. 66. Defense Intelligence Agency, North Korea, p. 58; and Niksch, “Military Balance,” p. 263. 67. Russell Spurr, “The Hollingsworth Line,” Far Eastern Economic Review 91, no. 9 (1976): 27. 68. For a detailed discussion of missions, tactics, and organization of assault units, see Bermudez, Special Forces, pp. 47–50. 69. For the light infantry’s organization and missions, see ibid., pp. 77–85. 70. The Federal Research Division in the Library of Congress puts the estimate at 12,000 persons by sea and 6,000 persons by air, while Bermudez suggests 5,000 and 2,000 to 3,000, respectively. Although it is not known how the Federal Research Division reached its estimate, it is quite likely to have counted the amphibious ships and transport aircraft in the North’s inventory and to have multiplied it by their maximum capacity. Using this method, Bermudez reaches similar figures, but he suggests that this estimate “is extremely optimistic as it assumes that all possible aircraft (including VIP transports) and helicopters would be committed to this mission, a 100% ‘in service’ rate would be achieved, and that ROK/US forces would not have air superiority, highly unlikely scenarios!” He concludes that “a more realistic estimate” for the airlift is 2,000 to 3,000. See Bermudez, Special Forces, pp. 95 and 108; and Savada, North Korea, p. 224. 71. Savada, North Korea, pp. 224–226.

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72. James D. Marett, “The Republic of Korea Army: The Light Infantry Division,”Military Review, November 1987, 71n26. 73. Savada and Shaw, South Korea, p. 284. 74. N. Dupuy, “Mythos or Verity?” p. 208. For a critique of his methods and his response, see J. S. Brown, “Colonel Trevor N. Dupuy and the Mythos of Wehrmacht Superiority: A Reconsideration,” Military Affairs 50, no. 1 (1986): 16–20; John S. Brown, “The Wehrmacht Mythos Revisited: A Challenge for Colonel Trevor N. Dupuy,” Military Affairs 51, no. 3 (1987): 146–147; and Dupuy, “A Response to ‘The Wehrmacht Mythos Revisited,’” Military Affairs 51, no. 4 (1987): 196–197. 75. Richard K. Betts, Surprise Attack: Lessons for Defense Planning (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1982), pp. 5–6. 76. Colonel Trevor N. Dupuy, Elusive Victory: The Arab-Israeli Wars, 1947–1974 (New York: Harper and Row, 1978), p. 596. 77. For accounts on the Pusan Perimeter, see Appleman, South to the Naktong, pp. 249–255; and Bruce Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War, vol. 2 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), pp. 655–662. It seems that the force-to-force ratio by then had almost reached parity or favored the U.S.-Korea forces. The forceto-space ratio of the allied forces ranged from 16 km per division to as long as 64 km per division. Given that the strength of a division in the 1950s was much smaller than a U.S. armored division of the 1970s, the force-to-space ratio must have been much below the current doctrinal norm. What is notable, however, is the fact that once the allied forces formed a continuous defensive line with a 1:1 force ratio, they were able to stop the North’s final push. In the Pusan perimeter defense, three American divisions each had 20 (32 km) to 40 (64 km) miles of front (for a total of 65 air miles) to defend, while the South Korean Army (5 divisions) held a total of about 129 km of front. 78. Beldecos and Heginbotham, “Conventional Military Balance,” p. 2. 79. Walter G. Hermes, Truce Tent and Fighting Front (Washington, DC: Center of Military History, U.S. Army, 1966; reprint, 1992), pp. 465–470. 80. Betts, “Conventional Deterrence,” p. 155. 81. Betts, Surprise Attack, pp. 273–282. 82. Stephen Peter Rosen, “Net Assessment as an Analytical Concept,” in On Not Confusing Ourselves: Essays on National Security Strategy in Honor of Albert and Roberta Wohlstetter, ed. Andrew W. Marshall, J. J. Martin, and Henry S. Rowen (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991), pp. 283–301; and Sun Tzu, The Art of War, trans. Samuel B. Griffith (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963), particularly pp. 85–89. Here I adopt Rosen’s interpretation of Sun Tzu’s concept, “tsing,” as one’s “persistent characteristics.”

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83. On “friction,” see Carl von Clausewitz, On War, trans. and ed. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), pp. 119–120. 84. For nonlinearity, see Alan Beyerchen, “Clausewitz, Nonlinearity, and the Unpredictability of War,” International Security 17, no. 3 (1992/93): 59–90. For an attempt to deal with nonlinearity in combat modeling, see J. A. Dewar, J. J. Gillogly, and M. L. Juncosa, “Non-monotonicity, Chaos and Combat Models,” Military Operations Research 2, no. 2 (1996): 37–49; and Thomas W. Lucas, “How One Randomizes Matters: A Study of Non-monotonicity and Randomness in Combat Analysis,” Phalanx 30, no. 1 (1997), pp. 7–10. 85. See, for example, Russell A. Gugeler, Combat Actions in Korea (Washington, DC: Center of Military History, United States Army, 1987); Appleman, South to the Naktong; and Martin Russ, The Last Parallel: A Marine’s War Journal (New York: Rinehart, 1957). 86. Predicting the outcome of a war would require (1) reducing the area of uncertainty in most of the input variables used in my analysis rather than assuming the worst case, (2) analyzing the situation from the North’s perspective as well as from the South’s, and (3) developing a more nuanced understanding of war objectives rather than assuming a determined blitzkrieg by Pyongyang. 87. Beldecos and Heginbotham, “Conventional Military Balance,” p. 2. 88. Gen. Chae Byong Duk, the ROK Army Chief of Staff, ordered, over the objections of the Second Division commander, that Brig. Gen. Lee Hyung Koon’s and KMAG adviser Capt. James W. Hausman’s Second Division move from Taejo˘n 90 miles to the front above ˘ ijo˘ngbu and deploy by the morning of June 26. “The really fatal U error had been General Chae’s plan of operation giving the 2d Division responsibility for the P’och’on road sector when it was quite apparent that it could not arrive in strength to meet that responsibility ˘ ijo˘ngbu by the morning of 26 June.” The ROK counterattack at U failed, leaving Seoul wide open to the North’s exploitation. See Appleman, South to the Naktong, p. 30. 89. It must be noted that in forming the alliance, Washington was as much motivated to keep Seoul from taking an aggressive policy toward the North as it was to keep the North from attacking the South. 90. Department of Defense, Framework for the Asian Pacific Rim: Looking toward the 21st Century, Report to Congress, Washington, DC, April 1990. 91. Ministry of National Defense, Defense White Paper, 1992–1993 (Seoul: Korea Institute of Defense Analysis, 1993), p. 143. 92. Department of Defense, The United States Security Strategy for the East Asia-Pacific Region, Washington, DC, February 1995. 93. In 2003 Seoul and Washington began negotiations on how to restructure the alliance in light of the changed strategic environment

Notes

94. 95. 96.

97.

98.

99.

100. 101.

102.

103.

104. 105.

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of the post-9/11 world and the Pentagon’s military transformation. For more on this topic, see the concluding chapter. BBC, “South Daily Views Direction of Pyongyang-Russia Relations,” BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, February 9, 2000. Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Jutta Weldes, Constructing National Interests: The United States and the Cuban Missile Crisis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). For example, in his address at the Supreme People’s Assembly in 1993, Kim Il-Sung proclaimed that the “North and South should not threaten or invade the other. Nor should either side impose its system on the other or attempt to absorb the other.” This proclamation subsequently became a foundation of Pyongyang’s reunification policies. Ministry of Unification, “Taebukcho˘ngch’aek iro˘kke ch’ujindoegoitsu˘mnida [Our North Korean Policy],” http://www.unikorea.go.kr/ cgi-kr/body.cgi?31C31/C3128.htm. For this analysis, I compared Kim Il-Sung’s New Year’s speeches from 1991 to 1994 with those from 1981 to 1984. In the 1980s the United States was always described in negative terms (such as imperialist, hostile, aggressive); in the 1990s such value-laden words were not used as often. Most dramatic is the change in Pyongyang’s preferred means of dealing with Washington: from military confrontation in the 1980s to peaceful diplomatic negotiations in the 1990s. For texts of Kim’s speeches, see FBIS-EAS, various years. Stephen M. Walt, The Origins of Alliances (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), pp. 25–26. For a similar assessment, see also David C. Kang, “International Relations Theory and the Second Korean War,” International Studies Quarterly 47, no. 3 (2003): 301–324. In the United States, a curious mixture of right- and left-wing intellectuals, such as Bandow and Cumings, have voiced opposition to the continued U.S. military presence in Korea. Their voice remains marginalized, although they are slowly gaining more audience. The Japanese alliance has been ambiguous about the threat against which it is maintained, and its purpose might have also included containing Japan. Bruce Cumings, “Trilateralism and the New World Order,” World Policy Journal 8, no. 2 (1991): 195–222. Kenneth N. Waltz, “Evaluating Theories,” American Political Science Review 91, no. 4 (1997): 915. Stephen D. Krasner, “Structural Causes and Regime Consequences: Regimes as Intervening Variables,” in International Regimes, ed. Krasner (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), pp. 1–12.

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Chapter 3 1. Robert O. Keohane, After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), p.14. 2. John S. Duffield, “NATO’s Functions after the Cold War,” Political Science Quarterly 109, no. 5 (1994–1995): 763–787; Celeste A. Wallander, “Institutional Assets and Adaptability: NATO after the Cold War,” International Organization 54, no. 4 (2000): 705–735. 3. Stephen M. Walt, “Why Alliances Endure or Collapse,” Survival 39, no. 1 (Spring 1997): 156–179. 4. Yu Chun-Hyo˘ng, “Hanmi pangsanhyo˘mryo˘ku˘n chinjo˘ndoego innu˘n’ga [Is Korea-U.S. Defense Industry Cooperation Moving Forward?],” Kukpanggwa kisul [Defense and Technology], April 1990, p. 3. 5. Ku Sang-Hoe, Han’guku˘i pangwisano˘ p: cho˘ nmanggwa taech’aek [Korea’s Defense Industry: Prospects and Suggestions] (Seoul: Sejong Institute, 1998); William D. Hartung, And Weapons for All (New York: HarperCollins, 1994). 6. Since President Bush removed all tactical nuclear warheads from South Korea in 1991 as part of a worldwide withdrawal of U.S. tactical nuclear weapons, the standard operating procedure no longer applies. 7. Peter Hayes, Pacific Powderkeg: American Nuclear Dilemmas in Korea (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1991), particularly pp. 105–122. 8. Kwang-Il Baek, Ronald D. McLaurin, and Chung-In Moon, The Dilemma of Third World Defense Industries: Supplier Control or Recipient Autonomy? (Boulder: Westview Press, 1989), pp. 160–161; John D. Morrocco, “South Korea Drives toward Greater Military Autonomy,” Aviation Week and Space Technology, June 12, 1989, pp. 176–179; Janne E. Nolan, Military Industry in Taiwan and South Korea (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986); Young-Sun Ha, “South Korea,” in Arms Production in Developing Countries: An Analysis of Decision Making, ed. James Everett Katz (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1984), pp. 225–233. 9. Memorandum of Understanding on Technology Use Fee for Defense Material Production in Korea, July 1989. 10. See, for its joint statement issued on January 16, 1990, Kukpanggwa kisul [Defense and Technology], April 1990. 11. Janne E. Nolan, Trappings of Power: Ballistic Missiles in the Third World (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1991), pp. 51–52. 12. John A. C. Conybeare, “Arms versus Alliances: The Capital Structure of Military Enterprise,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 38, no. 2 (June 1994): 215–235; Gerald L. Sorokin, “Arms, Alliances, and Security Tradeoffs in Enduring Rivalries,” International Studies Quarterly 38, no. 3 (1994): 421–446.

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13. The ranking is from SIPRI Yearbook, 2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 368. See also U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Verification and Compliance, World Military Expenditures and Arms Transfers, 1999–2000 (2002), p. 157, and World Military Expenditures and Arms Transfers 1998 (2000), p. 168. 14. “We Arm the World: U.S. Is Number One Weapons Dealer,” Defense Monitor 20, no. 4 (1991): 3. 15. O Kwan-Ch’i, Ch’a Yo˘ng-Ku, and Hwang Tong-Jun, Hanmi kunsahyo˘mnyo˘ku˘i palcho˘n’gwa cho˘nmang [Development and Prospect of Korea-U.S. Military Cooperation] (Seoul: Segyo˘ngsa, 1990), p. 66. 16. Ku Sang-Hoe, Han’guku˘i pangwisano˘p, pp. 24–25. 17. Kim Ki-So˘k, “Urinara chobyo˘nggisul palcho˘nsa (2) [Development History of Korea’s Arsenal Technology (2)],” Kukpanggwa kisul [Defense and Technology], March 1990, p. 24. 18. Foreign Military Sales, Foreign Military Construction Sales, and Military Assistance Facts, As of September 30, 1997, Deputy for Financial Management Comptroller, Defense Security Assistance Agency. 19. Paek Yo˘ng-Hun, “Hanmipangsanhyo˘mnyo˘k—so˘nggwawa tangmyo˘n’gwaje [Korea-U.S. Defense Industry Cooperation: Achievements and Immediate Tasks],” Kukpanggwa kisul [Defense and Technology], April 1990, p. 24. 20. Some argue that the percentage is higher. For example, Kim Tang, citing Parliamentary sources, argues that 90 percent of Korea’s weapons import in 1994 and 1995 was from the United States. See Kim Tang, “Han’guk, michemuki p’yo˘nae ’chungchu˘ng’ [Korea, Too Much in Love with American Weapons],” Sisa cho˘no˘l [Current Affairs Journal], July 10, 1997, pp. 42–45. 21. Until 1987, 56 percent of the offset trade was commercial goods that had no relation to the arms purchased. In the late 1980s, and particularly since 1990, however, the emphasis of the offset trade shifted to weapons systems coproduction and technology transfer. In 1991 and 1992, when Korea’s Fighter Program (KFP), through which Seoul hoped to gain an independent aircraft manufacturing capability, took off ground, the share of technology transfer jumped dramatically to 63 percent and coproduction also increased to 32 percent of the offsets, respectively. 22. I Sang-Ho, “Han’guk kukpangsijang cho˘nmanggwa miguko˘pch’eu˘i yo˘khal [Prospects of Korea’s Defense Market and the Role of U.S. Companies],” Kukpanggwa kisul [Defense and Technology], December 1991, p. 54. 23. Kim Chin-Ch’o˘l, “Kunsacho˘lch’unggyoyo˘ku˘i ch’ujinyuhyo˘nggwa so˘nggwae kwanhan saryeyo˘n’gu [Case Study on the Types and Achievements of Military Offset Trades]” (master’s thesis, Korea Institute of Science and Technology, December 1995), p. 83. 24. Junior officers privately complain that senior officers are more favorably predisposed to U.S.-made systems. See Kim Tang, “Han’guk.”

252

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25. Hearings on Proposed Sale of F-15 Aircraft to Saudi Arabia and U.S.-Saudi Commercial Disputes, Committee on Foreign Affairs, U.S. House of Representatives, Subcommittee on Arms Control and Subcommittee on Europe and the Middle East, September 23, 1992, Federal News Service transcript, p. 28. 26. For Korea’s defense industry, see Kim Hyo˘ng-Gyun, Kunsusano˘bu ˘i sahoehak [Sociology of Weapons Industry] (Seoul: Sejongch’ulp’ansa, 1997). 27. See, for example, O, Ch’a, and Hwang, Hanmi kunsahyo˘mnyo˘ku˘i; and Wookhee Shin, Security, Economic Growth and the State: Dynamics of Patron-Client State Relations in Northeast Asia, Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 1992. 28. Kim Chae-U, “Miguko˘pch’ewau˘i kisulhyo˘mnyo˘k kyo˘ngho˘mgwa kyohun [Experiences and Lessons from Technology Cooperation with U.S. Firms],” Kukpanggwa kisul [Defense and Technology], December 1991, p. 47. 29. Ku Sang-Hoe, Han’guku˘i pangwisano˘p, p. 54. 30. Kukpangkwahakyo˘n’gusobo˘p [Agency for Defense Development Law], Article 1, promulgated on December 31, 1970. 31. For a detailed personal account of Korea’s missile development, see Ku Sang-Hoe, “Mugich’egye yo˘n’gugaebalgwa to˘bulo˘ 30nyo˘n [30 Years of Weapons Systems R&D],” 4–11 Kukpanggwa kisul [Defense and Technology], February 1998 through November 1998; see also Song Mun-Hong, “Kukpangkwahakyo˘n’guso, kukpangyesan nangbiu˘i juyo˘kin’ga [ADD, Culprit of Defense Expenditure Waste?],” Sindonga [New East Asia], no. 414 (March 1994): particularly pp. 420–421. 32. Ku Sang-Hoe, Han’guku˘i pangwisano˘p, p. 52. 33. O, Ch’a, and Hwang, Hanmi kunsahyo˘mnyo˘ku˘i, p. 71. 34. Hwang Tong-Jun, “Hanmi pangsanhyo˘mnyo˘k [Korea-U.S. Defense Industry Cooperation],” Kukpanggwa kisul [Defense and Technology], October 1988, particularly pp. 48–50. 35. Chi Man-Wo˘n, Kunch’uksidaeu˘i han’gukkun ˘otto˘tke talajyo˘ya hana [How Must Korean Military Change in the Disarmament Age], rev. ed., vol. 2 (Seoul: Chinwo˘n, 1992), p. 83. 36. Hwang Tong-Jun, “1990nyo˘ndaero chiniphanu˘n urinara pangwisano˘pu˘i chillo [Direction for Korea’s Defense Industry Entering the 1990s],” Kukpanggwa kisul [Defense and Technology], January 1990, p. 38. 37. For example, about 70 percent (cost-based) of K-1 tank parts are imported. Although in 1993 the Procurement Headquarters signed a 9.6 billion won contract with Hyundai Precision to purchase maintenance parts for K-1 tanks, 7.1 billion won worth of parts were actually imported by Hyundai, who then simply delivered them to the MND. See “Kamsakyo˘lgwa ch’o˘bunyogu naeyong [Requested Action as a Result of Auditing],” Che 180hoe kukhoe imsihoe yogujaryo (Po˘psawi) che 2 kwo˘n [180th Parliament Special Session Requested Material (Legislative Committee), Vol. 2], Comptroller’s Office, August 1996, p. 660.

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253

38. Chi Man-Won, “Han’gukpangwisano˘pu˘i taemiyesok silt’ae [Korea Defense Industry’s U.S. Dependency],” Wo˘lgan mal [Monthly Words], June 1992, pp. 109–110. 39. Dong Joon Hwang, “ROK-U.S. Defense Industrial Cooperation: A New Step in Security Enhancement,” in The Future of South KoreanU.S. Security Relations, ed. William J. Taylor, Jr., Young Koo Cha, John Q. Blodgett, and Michael Mazarr (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1989), p. 197. 40. Kim Yong-Nam, “Kunsajangbi kuksanhwa pangane kwanhan yo˘n’gu [Study on the Means of Domestic Production of Military Equipment]” (master’s thesis, Korean National Defense University, December 1990), p. 76. Also, he estimates that the navy purchased nearly 80 percent of its repair parts from overseas in 1989. 41. Chi Man-Wo˘n, Kunch’uksidaeu˘i han’gukkun ˘otto˘tke talajyo˘ya hana [How Must Korean Military Change in the Disarmament Age], rev. ed., vol. 1 (Seoul: Chinwo˘n, 1992), pp. 162–164 and p. 207. 42. Young-Sun Ha, “South Korea,” p. 231. 43. Ministry of National Defense, Defense White Paper, 1995–1996 (Seoul: Korea Institute for Defense Analyses, 1996), p. 93. 44. Nolan, Military Industry, p. 78. 45. For a history of K-1 tank development, see “Chajukukpangu˘i so˘nbong hyo˘ndaejo˘nggong (chu) [Spearhead of Independent National Defense, Hyundai Precision],” Kukpanggwa kisul [Defense and Technology], May 1998, pp. 10–17; and Hwang In-Mo, “Han’gukhyo˘ng cho˘nch’a powan palcho˘n panghyang [Refinement/Development Direction of Korean Tank],” Kukpanggwa kisul [Defense and Technology], January 1990, pp. 46–53. 46. Hwang In-Mo, “Han’gukhyo˘ng,” p. 51. 47. ’97 Kukcho˘nggamsa yogujaryo (1) [Requested Material for National Audit 1997], Ministry of National Defense, September 1997, p. 257. 48. Interview at Korea Institute of Defense Analysis, November 27, 1998. 49. Chi Man-Wo˘n, Kunch’uksidaeu ˘ i han’gukkun, p. 82. 50. Office of Technology Assessment, Congress of the United States, Global Arms Trade: Commerce in Advanced Military Technology and Weapons (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, June 1991), p. 136. 51. Cho˘ng Sang-Hun, “Cholsok, nangbi, bihyoyulu ˘ i mugidoip hyo˘njang [Weapons Imports of Haste, Waste and Inefficiency],” Sindonga [New East Asia], no. 415 (April 1994): 422; Sin Yong-Wo˘n, “Han’gukkun mugidoipu ˘ i naemak [Inside Story of Korean Military’s Weapons’ Imports],” Wo˘ lgan choso˘n, no. 131 (February 1991): 298–299; and “Pangsano˘p yo˘ngyo˘k mit palcho˘nbanghyang [Defense Business Areas and Development Direction],” submitted to the National Parliament for Annual Inspection, Samsung Electronics, Inc., October 13, 1997. 52. See Table 9, “Domestic Content of Korea’s Indigenous Weapons (1996),” cited in Ku Sang-Hoe, Han’guku˘i pangwisano˘p, p. 76.

254

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53. “Hanggongujusano˘pu˘i san yo˘ksa taehanhanggong [Live History of Aerospace Industry, Korea Air],” Kukpanggwa kisul [Defense and Technology], February 1998, pp. 9–15. 54. “Kungnae hanggongujusano˘bu˘l so˘ndohanu˘n samso˘nghanggong [Samsung Aerospace Leading Domestic Aerospace Industry],” Kukpanggwa kisul [Defense and Technology], March 1998, pp. 12–17. 55. See Kim Chae-U, “Miguko˘pch’ewau˘i,” p. 49. 56. “Kisulijo˘nu˘l chogo˘nu˘ro toiphan mugich’egye hyo˘nhwang [Status of Weapons Systems Introduced under Technology Transfer Conditions],” ’97 Nyo˘ndo kukcho˘nggamsa kukhoepo˘psawi yogujaryo (kunsapo˘pwo˘n sokwan) [1997 National Audit Material Requested by Parliament Legal Affairs Committee (Military Court Jurisdiction)], Ministry of National Defense, October 1997, p. 607. 57. Cho˘ng Do˘k-Sang, “F16ki 3daeeso˘ enjingyo˘lham [Engine Defection Found in 3 F-16s],” Han’gukilbo [Korea Times], May 11, 1999. 58. Process specificity also develops in the area of arms purchases and production: PPBEES, CALS, computerization, and computer networks represent some of the durable investments made to facilitate the flow of arms and technology. 59. This section draws heavily on John H. Cushman, “Command Arrangements in Korea: Issues and Options,” in Taylor, Jr., et al., Future, pp. 155–167. 60. Han Yong-Wo˘n, “Kunpuu˘i chedojo˘k so˘ngjanggwa cho˘ngch’ijo˘k haengdongjuu ˘ i [Military’s Systemic Growth and Political Behaviorism],” in Han’gukhyo˘ndaejo˘ngch’iron I: che1konghwakuku ˘ i kukkahyo˘ngso˘ng, cho˘ngch’igwajo˘ng, cho˘ngch’aek [Modern Politics of Korea I: State Formation, Political Process, and Policies of the First Republic], ed. Han Pae-Ho (Seoul: Nanam, 1990), pp. 253–275; and I So˘n-Ho, Han’gukkun muo˘si munjein’ga [Korean Military, What Is the Problem?] (Seoul: P’albokwo˘n, 1992), pp. 106–107. 61. On July 7, 1950, the UN Security Council adopted a resolution that recommended that member nations provide forces to a military command under U.S. control to fight against the North Korean aggression. The resolution also granted the United States the authority to name the commander of the UNC. On July 10, President Truman appointed General MacArthur, who was then commander of the Far East Command, the CINC UNC. 62. O, Ch’a, and Hwang, Hanmi kunsahyo˘mnyo˘ku˘i, p. 204; and So˘ul Sinmunsa, Chuhanmigun 30nyo˘n [Thirty Years History of U.S. Forces in Korea] (Seoul: So˘ul Sinmunsa, 1979), pp. 322–324. 63. Ministry of National Defense, Defense White Paper, 1995–1996, p. 114. 64. The UN General Assembly passed in December 1974 a resolution that directed the Security Council to consider the dissolution of the UN Command. In the following year, the UN General Assembly passed two resolutions: one recommending the replacement of the Armistice Agreement with a peace treaty; and the other, “arrangements for

Notes

65. 66. 67.

68. 69.

70. 71. 72.

73. 74.

75. 76.

77.

78.

79.

255

maintaining the Armistice Agreement.” Nevertheless, both agreed on the need to dissolve the UN Command. Hayes, Pacific Powderkeg, p. 107. Ibid., p. 108. Joint statement issued by the Government of the Republic of Korea and the United States on February 6, 1971. Han’guk anbogwan’gye charyojip [Korea’s Security Related Documents] (Seoul: Oegyoyo˘n’guwo˘n, December 1974), pp. 358–359. O, Ch’a, and Hwang, Hanmi kunsahyo˘mnyo˘ku˘i, p. 206. Ministry of National Defense White Paper, 1995–1996, p. 114. In the face of rising criticism that the command structure compromised Korea’s independence and sovereignty, Washington and Seoul agreed to transfer peacetime operational control after taking two measures to give the ROKA more command responsibility: at the 20th SCM and the 10th MCM in 1987, they decided to give wider responsibility to the deputy CINC CFC, a Korean four-star general, and they delegated more discretionary power to the Korean deputy CINC Air Component Command in 1988. Cushman, “Command Arrangements,” p. 159. Ibid., pp. 166–167n3. Lee Suk Bok, an ROKA officer, argues that the commander of the CFA, who has ROKA combat units under him, affects Korean officers’ doctrinal thinking. Lee Suk Bok, The Impact of US Forces in Korea (Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, 1987), p. 71. Kukpangbaekso˘ 1990 [Defense White Paper 1990] (Seoul: Ministry of National Defense, 1990), p. 231. Ko Kang-So˘k, “Han’gukcho˘k ipch’egidongjo˘n’gyoriu ˘ i palcho˘nbanghyang [Development Direction for Korean Three-Dimensional Maneuver War Doctrine]” (master’s thesis, Korea Defense University, November 1995), p. 104. I Yo˘ng-Wan et al., Kunsagibon’gyoriyo˘n’gu (1) [Study in Military Basic Doctrines, vol. 1] (Seoul: National Defense Institute, 1990), p. 25. Although Lee et al. suggest that the forward-defense strategy was in place since 1968, it was formally adopted in 1973, after a few years of study. Chung Min Lee, “Holding the ‘Hollingsworth Line’: Conventional Deterrence in the Korean Peninsula,” in The U.S.-Korean Security Relationship: Prospects and Challenges for the 1990s, Harold C. Hinton et al. (New York: Pergamon-Brassey’s, 1988), p. 71. John J. Romjue, From Active Defense to AirLand Battle: The Development of Army Doctrine, 1973–1982 (Fort Monroe, VA: U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command, 1984), pp. 3–4. For a discussion on FOFA, see General Bernard W. Rogers, “FollowOn Forces Attack (FOFA): Myths and Realities,” NATO Review 32, no. 6 (December 1984): 1–8. For the AirLand Battle Doctrine, see John L. Romjue, “The Evolution of the Airland Battle Concept,” Air University Review 35, no. 4

256

80.

81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88.

89.

90. 91. 92.

93. 94. 95.

Notes (May–June 1984): 4–15. ; Lt. Colonel John S. Doerfel, “The Operational Art of the AirLand Battle,” Military Review 62, no. 5 (May 1982): 3–10; and FM 100-5, Operations (Washington, DC: Department of Army, May 1986). I Yo˘ng-Wan et al., Kunsagibon’gyoriyo˘n’gu (1) [Study in Military Basic Doctrines, vol. 1] (Seoul: National Defense Institute, 1990), p. 25, cited in Ko Kang-So˘k, “Han’gukcho˘k,” p. 105. Chung Min Lee, “Holding the ‘Hollingsworth Line,’” pp. 72–73. Ibid., p. 57. Memorandum of Understanding on Taegu, Article IV, section 9. Hayes, Pacific Powderkeg, p. 106. Joint Communiqué, 29th Security Consultative Meeting, December 9, 1997, Washington, DC. Memorandum of Understanding on Taegu, December 1981, Article III. Ernest Graves, “ROK-U.S. Security Cooperation: Current Status,” in Taylor, Jr., et al., Future, p. 19. Pauline Jelinek, “Friction Arises over Koreans Serving in U.S. Army: Americans Use Them to Finesse Language, Cultural Differences, But Both Nationalities Express Resentment,” Associated Press, January 20, 1999. Procurement Headquarter, Ministry of National Defense, So˘myo˘nji ru˘idappyo˘nso˘ [Written Answer to Questions], Parliamentary Audit, October 4, 1996, p. 49; and Kwo˘n Yo˘ng-Hyo, “Kukpangjodal o˘mmujo˘lch’awa chedogaeso˘n [Defense Procurement Procedures and System Improvement],” Kukpanggwa kisul [Defense and Technology], January 1998, p. 44. Michael Klare, American Arms Supermarket (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1984), pp. 54–76. William J. Taylor, Jr., “Challenges to ROK-U.S. Security Relations,” in Taylor, Jr., et al., Future, p. 115. Sheryl D. Joyner, Pre and Post Marital Chaplain Ministry to Military Personnel and Korean Nations (Washington, DC: Triton, 1983), cited in Lee Suk Bok, Impact of US Forces, p. 83. For the most reliable and comprehensive data, see Daniel B. Lee, “Korean Women Married to Servicemen,” in Korean American Women Living in Two Cultures, ed. Young In Song and Ailee Moon (Los Angeles: Academia Koreana, Keimyung-Baylo University Press, 1997), pp. 94–123. See also Ji-Yeon Yuh, Beyond the Shadow of Camptown: Korean Military Brides in America, Nation of Newcomers (New York: New York University Press, 2002). Cushman, “Command Arrangements,” p. 157. Graves, “ROK-U.S. Security Cooperation,” p. 18. Robert K. Sawyer, Military Advisors in Korea: KMAG in Peace and War (Washington, DC: Office of the Chief of Military History, Department of the Army, 1962), pp. 60–66.

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96. Cho˘ng To˘k-Sang, “Yo˘ngo˘ k’omp’ut’o˘ mothamyo˘n chinku˘pmothanda [No English or Computer, No Promotion for Officers],” Han’gukilbo [Korea Times], May 18, 1999 (New York edition). 97. O Yo˘n-Ho, “Chuhanmigun 501 cho˘ngbobudaeu˘i han’guko˘ toch’o˘ngyowo˘n yangso˘ngbo˘p” [USFK 501 Military Intelligence Group’s Method of Training Korean Language Eavesdroppers], Wo˘lgan mal [Monthly Words], April 1997, pp. 106–111; see also O Yo˘n-Ho, “Chuhanmigun cho˘njadoch’o˘ngbudae 501-MIu˘i cho˘ngch’e,” [The Identity of USFK Electronic Eavesdropping Unit 501 MI], Wo˘lgan mal [Monthly Words], December 1993. 98. Hayes, Pacific Powderkeg, p. 113. 99. “CSCT 1,” briefing paper and slides, November 2, 1987, p. 1, cited ibid., p. 264. 100. Ministry of National Defense, Defense White Paper, 1995–1996, pp. 115–117. 101. For detailed maps of USFK bases, see Hayes, Pacific Powderkeg, pp. 96–99. It is not coincidental that the USFK bases are being restructured around Osan/P’yo˘ngt’aek area in the twenty-first century, when the alliance is shifting its operational focus to regional stability. See Chapter 7 for more detail. 102. I So˘k-U, Hanmihaengjo˘nghyo˘pcho˘ngyo˘n’gu [A Study on the Status of Forces Agreement] (Seoul: Min, 1995), p. 83. 103. Hayes, Pacific Powderkeg, pp. 107–108. 104. Walden Bello, “Control of the Asia-Pacific Security Agenda,” Nation (Bangkok, Thailand), February 1, 1996. 105. For the bureaucratic politics model, see Graham Allison, Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971). 106. John S. Duffield, “International Regimes and Alliance Behavior: Explaining NATO Conventional Force Levels,” International Organization 46, no. 4 (Autumn 1992): 838. 107. Hartung, Weapons for All, pp. 63–83. 108. I note that the bureaucratic politics model fails to explain the sources of bureaucratic interests and thus their argumentative persuasiveness. I suggest that asset specificity explains them at least partially. 109. Katharine H. S. Moon, “Prostitute Bodies and Gendered States in U.S.-Korea Relations,” in Dangerous Women: Gender & Korean Nationalism, ed. Elaine H. Kim and Chungmoo Choi (New York: Routledge, 1998), p. 151. For a more thorough treatment, see Katharine Moon, Sex among Allies: Military Prostitution in U.S.-Korea Relations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). 110. Bruce Cumings, “Chinatown: Foreign Policy and Elite Realignment,” in The Hidden Election, ed. Thomas Ferguson and Joel Rogers (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981), p. 210. 111. “Cho˘ngch’ie chwaudoen migunch’o˘lsusa [American Military Withdrawal Swayed by Politics],” Ch’o˘lcho˘haebu chuhanmigun [Thorough

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Investigation—U.S. Forces in Korea] (Seoul: Tongailbosa, 1990), pp. 185–189. 112. Michael Zürn, “Bringing the Second Image (Back) In: About the Domestic Sources of Regime Formation,” in Regime Theory and International Relations, ed. Volker Rittberger (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), pp. 282–311.

Chapter 4 1. Choi So˘ng-Bin, “Pangwisano˘p: yuji palcho˘n cho˘ngch’aekpanghyange taehan cheo˘n [Defense Industry: Policy Suggestions for Its Maintenance and Development],” Kukpanggwa kisul [Defense and Technology], no. 169 (March 1993): 15. 2. Herman and Chomsky explain such silence in democracy in terms of the influence that mass media has over public opinion. Although their argument is not specifically about threat perception or state identities, their general argument about the processes that manufacture consensus provides insight into how hegemonic conceptions of state identity are produced. Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, 1st ed. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988). 3. Peter J. Katzenstein, ed., The Culture of National Security: Norms and Identity in World Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). 4. Kim Jinwung, “The Nature of South Korean Anti-Americanism,” Korea Journal (Spring 1994): 36. 5. Tongailbo, January 13, 1982, pp. 10–11. 6. ’95 Kungminu˘u˘isikjosa [National Opinion Poll, 1995] (Seoul: Sejong Institute, 1995), p. 82. 7. For a good account of the politics in this period, see Katharine Moon, Sex among Allies: Military Prostitution in U.S.-Korea Relations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). 8. Ministry of National Defense, Defense White Paper, 1992–1993 (Seoul: Korea Institute of Defense Analysis, 1993), p. 197. 9. Ronald D. Asmus, “Germany in Transition: National Self-Confidence and International Reticence,” in U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Foreign Affairs, Subcommittee on Europe and the Middle East, Hearings, U.S.-German Relations, January 29, 1992, 102nd Congress, 2nd Session (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1992), pp. 16 and 19; German Strategy and Opinion after the Wall, 1990–1993 (Santa Monica, CA: Rand, 1994), pp. 32, 37–39. 10. Gregory Henderson, “Why Koreans Turn against Us,” Washington Post, July 1, 1986. 11. Cho Kuk, “Han’guk ku˘nhyo˘ndaesaeso˘u˘i sasangt’ongjebo˘p [ThoughtControl Laws in Korea’s Modern History],” Yo˘ksabip’yo˘ng [Historical Critique] (Summer 1998): 332.

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12. Tim Shorrock, “The Struggle for Democracy in South Korea in the 1980s and the Rise of Anti-Americanism,” Third World Quarterly 8, no. 4 (1986): 1198–1199. 13. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. and extended ed. (New York: Verso, 1991). 14. Hyun-Chin Lim, Dependent Development in Korea, 1963–1979 (Seoul: Seoul National University Press, 1985), p. 81. 15. Robert K. Sawyer, Military Advisors in Korea: KMAG in Peace and War (Washington, DC: Office of the Chief of Military History, Department of the Army, 1962), pp. 60–66; see also Han YongWo˘n, “Kunbuu˘i chedojo˘k so˘ngjanggwa cho˘ngch’ijo˘k haengdongjuu˘i [Military’s Systemic Growth and Political Behaviorism],” in Han’gukhyo˘ndaecho˘ngch’iron I: chei1konghwakuku ˘ i kukkahyo˘ngso˘ng, cho˘ngch’ikwajo˘ng, cho˘ngch’aek [Modern Politics of Korea I: State Formation, Political Process, and Policies of the First Republic], ed. Han Pae-Ho (Seoul: Nanam, 1990), pp. 253–275. 16. Ernest Graves, “ROK-U.S. Security Cooperation: Current Status,” in The Future of South Korean-U.S. Security Relations, ed. William J. Taylor, Jr., Young Koo Cha, John Q. Blodgett, and Michael Mazarr (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1989), p. 19. 17. Quoted from Kim Min-Ung, “Miguku˘i ch’inmigunbu yukso˘ng cho˘llyak [The U.S. Plan to Produce Pro-American Military Officers],” in Hanmi kwan’gyesa [History of the Korea-U.S. Relationship] (Seoul: Silch’on Munhaksa, 1990), p. 264. 18. Jung-En Woo, Race to the Swift: State and Finance in Korean Industrialization (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), pp. 45–46. Ogle cites $12 billion of American aid going to Korea from 1945 to 1965. See George E. Ogle, South Korea: Dissent within the Economic Miracle (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Zed Books, 1990), p. 35. 19. Jutta Weldes, “The Cultural Production of Crises: U.S. Identity and Missiles in Cuba,” in Cultures of Insecurity: States, Communities, and the Production of Danger, ed. Jutta Weldes (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), pp. 35–62. 20. Lee Su˘ng-Man paksa tamhwajip [Speeches of Dr. Rhee Syngman], vol. 2 (Seoul: Office of Public Information, 1956), pp. 67–68. 21. Chung Hee Park, The Country, the Revolution and I (Seoul: Hollym Corporation, 1962), p. 153. 22. Stuart Hall, “The Rediscovery of ‘Ideology’: Return of the Repressed in Media Studies,” in: Culture, Society and the Media, ed. Michael Gurevitch, Tony Bennett, James Curran, and Janet Woollacott (New York: Methuen, 1982), p. 74. 23. Tae-Jin Yoon, “Mass Media and the Reproduction of the International Order: Presentation of American Culture by American Television Programs Aired in Korea, 1970 to 1989,” University of Minnesota, Ph.D. dissertation, 1997.

260

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24. Hyo˘n Ki-Yo˘ng, Suni samch’on [Soon’s Uncle] (Seoul: Ch’angjakkwa Pip’yo˘ng, 1979). ˘ n-Yong, a survivor of the Nogu˘lli massacre, said he could 25. Cho˘ng U not even think of making public his grievances for fear of punishment. Cho˘ng Ku-Ho, another survivor, stated that he had been harassed by the police on a number of occasions. Interview, March 6, 2000, Washington, DC. 26. Robert L. Bateman, No Gun Ri : A Military History of the Korean War Incident (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2002); Charles J. Hanley, Sang-Hun Choe, and Martha Mendoza, The Bridge at No Gun Ri : A Hidden Nightmare from the Korean War, 1st ed. (New York: Henry Holt, 2001); United States Army, Office of the Inspector General, No Gun Ri Review Team, Report of the No Gun Ri Review (Washington, DC: Dept. of the Army Inspector General, 2001); Cho˘ng Kudo, Nogu ˘ llinu ˘ n saraitta [No Gun Ri Lives On] (Seoul: Paeksanso˘dang, 2003); Department of the Army, “United States Armed Forces Claims Service Korea, [sic] 97-KS-G473G517,” http://wire.ap.org/APpackages/nogunri/index.html. 27. Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: New Press, 1999). 28. Charles K. Armstrong, “The Cultural Cold War in Korea, 1945– 1950,” Journal of Asian Studies 62, no. 1 (2003), pp. 71–99. 29. For a critical evaluation of the influence that the United States has had on Korea’s academia, see Haksuldanch’ehyo˘pu˘ihoe [Korean Progressive Academy Council], ed., Urihakmun soku˘i miguk: Migukcho˘k hakmun P’aero˘daim isike taehan pip’anjo˘k so˘ngch’al [Americanized Paradigms in the Korean Academism: Reflections on the Pro-American Colonization of the Korean Academic Societies] (Seoul: Hanul, 2003), pp. 155–156. 30. Ibid. 31. Armstrong, “Cultural Cold War,” p. 95. 32. Suzuki Masayuki, Kita Chosen: Shakai Shugi to Dento No Kyomei, ed. Shohan (Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai, 1992); Bruce Cumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History, 1st ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997). 33. Meredith Woo-Cumings, Political Ecology of Famine: The North Korean Catastrophe and Its Lessons, ADB Institute Research Paper Series 31 (Tokyo: Asian Development Bank Institute, 2002); Phillip H. Park, Self-Reliance or Self-Destruction? Success and Failure of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’s Development Strategy of SelfReliance “Juche” (New York: Routledge, 2002); Andrew S. Natsios, The Great North Korean Famine (Washington, DC: Institute of Peace Press, 2001); Kang Cho˘nggu, Kim Yo˘nch’o˘l, Im Wonhyo˘k, and Po˘mnyun, Minjoku˘i hu˘imangch’atki [Seeking the Nation’s Hope] (Seoul: Cho˘ngt’o ch’ulp’an, 1999); Chou˘nbo˘ttu˘l, ed., Saramdapke

Notes

34.

35.

36.

37.

38.

39.

40. 41.

261

Salgo Sipso [I Want to Live Like a Human Being] (Seoul: Cho˘ngt’o ch’ulp’an, 1999). Chou˘nbo˘ttu˘l, Pukhan sikryangnan’gwa pukhanin’gwon pogoso˘ [Report on North Korea’s Food Crisis and North Korean Human Rights] (Seoul: Chou˘nbo˘ttu˘l, 2004); David Hawk, The Hidden Gulag: Exposing North Korea’s Prison Camps (Washington, DC: U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, 2003); Cho˘r-hwan Kang and Pierre Rigoulot, The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in a North Korean Gulag, trans. Yair Reiner (New York: Basic Books, 2001); Helen-Louise Hunter, Kim Ii-Song’s North Korea (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999). International Federation for Human Rights, Misery and Terror: Systemic Violations of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in North Korea, Situation Report on the occasion of the examination by the UN Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights of the second periodic report of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, November 2003. I Hu˘nghwan, “‘Salhae’puto˘ ‘cho˘ltan’kkaji sago˘nhyo˘njang ch’walyo˘ng [Pictures Taken from “killing” to “cutting”],” Chugan tonga [Weekly Tonga], August 24, 2000, http:// www.donga.com/docs/magazine/ weekly_donga/news248/wd248ii010.html. Hong So˘ngnyul, “Wigisoku˘i cho˘ngcho˘nhyo˘pcho˘ng: p’uebu˘losago˘ngwa ‘p’anmunjo˘m tokkisalhae’ sago˘n [Armistice Negotiations in Crisis: Pueblo Incident and Panmunjom Ax Murder],” Yo˘ksabip’yo˘ng [Historical Critique], Summer 2003, pp. 57–76; Kim So˘nghwan, “EP-3wa p’uebu˘loho [EP-3 and the Pueblo],” Wolgan mal [Monthly Words], May 2001, pp. 34–35. Patricia G. Steinhoff, “Kidnapped Japanese in North Korea: The New Left Connection,” Journal of Japanese Studies 30, no. 1 (2004): 123–142. Wada Haruki, Pukchoso˘n: yugyo˘ktaikukkaeso˘ cho˘nggyugun’gukkaro [North Korea: From a Guerilla State to a Regular Army State], trans. Nam Ki-Jung and Suh Dong-Man (Seoul: Tolbegai, 2002), pp 162–163. See also Cho Chin’gu, “Chungsodaerib, betu ˘ nam jo˘njaenggwa pukhanu ˘i namjoso˘nhyo˘ngmyo˘ngnon, 1964–68 [The Sino-Soviet Dispute, the Vietnam War, and North Korea’s South Korean Revolution Policy during the Mid-1960s],” Aseayo˘n’gu [Asian Studies], 46, no. 4 (2003): 227–256. Dae-Sook Suh, Kim Il Sung: The North Korean Leader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), pp. 220–223. For the best treatment of the North’s defense policies, see Ham T’aekyo˘ng, “Chuch’esasangkwa pukhanu˘i kukpangcho˘ngch’aek: Chawinoso˘nu˘i o˘pcho˘k mit han’gye [Juche Ideology and North Korea’s Defense Policy: Achievements and Limits of Self-Defense],” in Pukhanu ˘ i Cho˘ngch’iinyo˘m: chuch’esasang [North Korea’s Political

262

42. 43.

44.

45. 46. 47.

48.

49. 50.

51.

52.

Notes Ideology: Juche], ed. Kyo˘ngnam University Institute of Far Eastern Studies (Seoul: Kyo˘ngnam Taehakkyo Ku˘ktongmunjeyo˘n’guso, 1990), pp. 155–183. E.g., see Kukpangbu, Kukpangbaekso˘ [Defense White Paper] 2000 (Seoul: Ministry of National Defense, 2002). This does not necessarily imply that their behavior was conscious and purposeful. It is entirely possible that individual actors participated in the politics of memory without being conscious of the fact, although their individual choices and decisions were informed by the discourse that was dominant and salient for the actors at the time. During the Cold War, the Warsaw militaries adopted such a posture, commonly called the hugging tactic, that would enable them to mingle with NATO forces soon after an outbreak of war, thus making it difficult for NATO to use nuclear weapons against them. See, for example, Nick Eberstadt, The End of North Korea (Washington, DC: AEI Press, 1999). Wada, Pukchoso˘n, p. 90. I Sang-Cho˘l, “Hanbando cho˘ngjo˘nch’ejewa UNC wisang [Korean Peninsula Armistice System and UNC’s Status],” Hanbando kunbit’ongje [Korean Peninsula Arms Control], 34 (2003): 309. It is also significant that when the Korean Workers Party revised its bylaws in 1980, it replaced such aggressive purposes as the “completion of revolution in the South” with more benign objectives such as “reunification on the basis of the principle of grand national unity.” Paek Nakch’o˘ng, Hu˘ndu˘llinu˘n pundanch’eje [Shaky Division System] (Seoul: Ch’angjakkwa pip’yongsa, 1998). Nationalist discourse is so strong in both Koreas that it is unthinkable to conceive of North and South Korea as two nations. See Henry Em, “The Nationalist Discourse in Modern Korea: Minjok as a Democratic Imagery,” Ph.D. dissertation, Department of History, University of Chicago, 1995; Andre Schmid, Korea between Empires, 1895–1919 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002); Gi-Wook Shin and Michael E. Robinson, eds., Colonial Modernity in Korea (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 1999). As far as North Korea is concerned, the South Koreans see little distinction between the state and nation, because the North Korean state is perceived as too totalitarian to leave room for a distinct national identity. Charles K. Armstrong, “The Myth of North Korea,” in Chicago Occasional Papers on Korea, ed. Bruce Cumings, vol. 6, Select Papers (Chicago: Center for East Asian Studies, University of Chicago, 1991), pp. 177–203. Jang Jip Choi, “Political Cleavages in South Korea,” in State and Society in Contemporary Korea, ed. Hagen Koo (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 23.

Notes

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53. Roy Richard Grinker, “The ‘Real Enemy’ of the Nation: Exhibiting North Korea at the Demilitarized Zone,” Museum Anthropology 19, no. 2 (1995): 31–40. 54. Similarly Wada Haruki argues that both North and South Koreas adopted, upon their establishment as a state in 1948, a constitution that asserts its legitimacy over the whole Korea. The conflicting legitimacy claims, according to Wada, laid the ground for the Korean War that broke out two years afterwards. Wada, Pukchoso˘n, 90 55. For the best historical, and critical, overview of the law, see Pak Wo˘nsun, Kukkaboanbo˘pyo˘n’gu (ju ˘ ngbop’an) [A Study on the National Security Law (expanded and revised edition)], 3 vols. (Seoul: Yo˘sabip’yo˘ngsa, 1994); and The National Security Law (Los Angeles: Korea NGO Network for the UN World Conference on Human Rights, 1993). 56. Kwo˘n Su˘ngryo˘l, Constitutional Parliament the 5th Session “The 56th Meeting Minutes,” p. 1382. Cited ibid., p. 102. 57. Jang Jip Choi, Labor and the Authoritarian State: Labor Unions in South Korean Manufacturing Industries (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1990), p. 30. For the text of the Anti-Communist Law, see Pak Wo˘nsun, op. cit., pp. 310–314. 58. Kim Nam-Kuk, Kungminu˘i kundae, ku˘du˘ru˘i kundae [People’s Army, Their Army] (Seoul: P’ulbit 1995), pp. 57–58. 59. For the military’s position in Korea’s society, see So˘ Kwan-Mo, “Han’gukkunbu elitu˘u˘i t’oeyo˘khu min’gan’gyo˘ngryo˘ke kwanhan yo˘n’gu [A Study on Civilian Careers of Korean Military Elite after Retirement]” (master’s thesis, Seoul National University, 1982). For its views on North Korea, see Hong Tu-Su˘ng, Han’gukkundaeu˘i sahoehak, chu˘ngbop’an [Sociology of the Korean Military, rev. ed.] (Seoul: Nanam Ch’ulp’an, 1996), pp. 266–269. 60. See, for example, Anthony Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985); “Nation-States and Violence,” in Social Theory and Modern Sociology (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), pp. 166–182. 61. Maury Feld, The Structure of Violence (London: Sage, 1977); Morris Janowitz, “Military Institutions and Citizenship in Western Societies,” Armed Forces and Society 7 (1976): 107–208; Morris Janowitz, The Reconstruction of Patriotism: Education for Civic Consciousness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). 62. Ministry of National Defense, 21segiru ˘ l chihyanghanu ˘ n han’guku ˘i kukpang [Korea’s National Defense toward 21st Century] (Seoul: Force Planning Bureau, Ministry of National Defense, June 1995), pp. 227–228. 63. Seungsook Moon, “Begetting the Nation: The Androcentric Discourse of National History and Tradition in South Korea,” in Dangerous Women: Gender and Korean Nationalism, ed. Elaine H. Kim and Chungmoo Choi (New York: Routledge, 1998), pp. 33–66.

264

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64. For example, Sara Helman shows how the Israelis’ participation in the military and reserve system generates the subjectivity of IsraeliJewish males. Sara Helman, “Militarism and the Construction of Community,” Journal of Political and Military Sociology 25, no. 2 (Winter 1997): 305–332. 65. Craig S. Coleman, American Images of Korea (Elizabeth, NJ: Hollym International Corp., 1997). 66. Wayne A. Kirkbride, DMZ: A Story of the Panmunjom Axe Murder (Elizabeth, NJ: Hollym International Corp., 1980). 67. David Campbell, Writing Security: U.S. Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992). 68. For American construction of the “Soviet threat” during the Cold War, see Bradley Klein, “How the West Was One: Representational Politics of NATO,” International Studies Quarterly 34, no. 3 (1990): 311–325; Charles Nathanson, “The Social Construction of the Soviet Threat: A Study in the Politics of Representation,” Alternatives 13, no. 4 (1988): 443–483. 69. Patterns of Global Terrorism (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of State, various years); Country Reports on Terrorism (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of State, various years). 70. “Recent Developments in North Korea,” Testimony by Special Envoy for the Korean Peace Process Charles Kartman before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Subcommittee on East Asia and the Pacific, September 10, 1998. 71. FM 34-71 Chapter 4 “North Korean Army Personnel.” 72. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978). 73. Armstrong, “Myth of North Korea.” 74. For a critical examination of Asian Studies in the United States, see Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, special issue, 29, no. 1 (January– March 1997). Recent scholarship has produced analyses that overcome the Orientalist perception, which is still prevalent in common perceptions. Some of these works include Leon V. Sigal, Disarming Strangers: Nuclear Diplomacy with North Korea (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998); Don Oberdorfer, The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History (New York: Basic Books, 2001); Han S. Park, North Korea: The Politics of Unconventional Wisdom (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2002); Phillip Hookon Park, Self-Reliance or Self-Destruction? Success and Failure of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’s Development Strategy of Self-Reliance“Juche” (New York: Routledge, 2002); Bruce Cumings, North Korea: Another Country (New York: New Press, 2004). 75. Office of Intelligence and Research, Department of State, “North Korea: A Case Study of a Soviet Satellite,” May 20, 1951, in Cho˘ng Yonguk and Li Kilsang, eds., Haebangjo˘nhu miguku ˘ i taehanjo˘ngch’aeksa charyojib [Materials on U.S. Policies toward Korea before and after Liberation], vol. 11 (Seoul: Tarakpang, 1995), pp. 503–628.

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76. Cho˘ng Yonguk, “6.25cho˘njaenggwa bbira: Simrijo˘n’gwa pundan naengjo˘n ideologi [The Korean War and Leaflets: Psychological Warfare and Division/Cold War Ideology],” Yo˘ksawa hyo˘nsil [History and Reality], 51 (March 2004): 97–133. 77. “Big ‘If’ over N. Korea Initiative,” Editorial, Los Angeles Times, February 20, 1998, p. B8. 78. Kevin Sullivan and Mary Jordan, “The Last Fortress: Our Futile Search for North Korea,” Sunday Outlook, Washington Post, August 1, 1999, p. B01. 79. Occidentalism, which represents the West as the Other, makes up the other side of Orientalism and is prevalent in the non-Western world. It indicates that binary, oppositional understanding of the world is not limited to the West. See Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit, Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies (New York: Penguin Press, 2004); James G. Carrier, ed., Occidentalism: Images of the West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Xiaomei Chen, Occidentalism: A Theory of Counter-Discourse in Post-Mao China, 2nd ed., rev. and expand eds. (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002). 80. Herman and Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent; Robert M. Entman, Projections of Power: Framing News, Public Opinion, and U.S. Foreign Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). 81. Denny Roy, “The U.S. Print Media and the Conventional Military Balance in Europe,” Armed Forces and Society 16, no. 4 (Summer 1990): 509–528. 82. John J. Mearsheimer, “Correspondence,” International Security 13, no. 4 (Spring 1989): 128–130. 83. Sigal, Disarming Strangers, pp. 11–13. 84. Bruce Cumings, “Bringing Korea Back In: Structured Absence, Glaring Presence, and Invisibility,” in Pacific Passage: The Study of American— East Asian Relations on the Eve of the Twenty-First Century, ed. Warren I. Cohen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), pp. 335–374. 85. Li Sang-Cho˘l, “Hanbando cho˘ngjo˘nch’ejewa UNC wisang [Korean Peninsula Armistice System and UNC’s Status],” Hanbando kunbit’ongje [Korean Peninsula Arms Control] 34 (2003): 275–321. 86. Zachary S. Davis et. al., Korea: Procedural and Jurisdictional Questions regarding Possible Normalization of Relations with North Korea (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, 1994). 87. Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism, Patterns of Global Terrorism (Washington, DC: Department of State, annual), http:// www.state.gov/s/ct/rls/pgtrpt/ (accessed on November 11, 2003); “North Korea on the Terrorism List,” Congressional Research Service memorandum, March 5, 2004, http://www.nautilus.org/DPRKBriefingBook/terrorism/CRS-NKTerrorList.pdf (accessed on March 26, 2004).

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88. For example, U.S. executive directors of international financial institutions are directed to vote against any loan or other program for a terrorist country. Also the Export Administration Act of 1979, as amended by the Anti-Terrorism and Arms Export Amendments Act of 1989, prohibits transactions with North Korea by the U.S. government or any American transactions that include direct or indirect export of any Munitions Control List items as well as reexports by non-U.S. persons. Trade Beneficiary Developing country status and Export-Import Bank guarantees are denied. 89. There are two ways a country may be removed from the terrorist list: the president certifies that there has been “a fundamental change” in the leadership or policies of the government in question, or the president submits to Congress a determination that the government has not supported international terrorism during the preceding six-month period and has provided assurances that it will not do so in the future. 90. Section 620(b) was repealed on December 29, 1981, because of its redundancy with Section 620(f ). 91. The U.S. House and Senate introduced in 2003 the DPRK Freedom Bill, which listed North Korea’s alleged violations of human rights together with recommended actions to alleviate them. Although the bill was not passed at the time of the writing, its introduction embodies another layer of the North’s representations as a rogue. 92. Edward A. Olsen, “North Korea,” in Arms Production in Developing Countries: An Analysis of Decision Making, ed. James Everett Katz (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1984), p. 235. 93. Anthony Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1985), p. 192. 94. Mary Kaldor, The Imaginary War: Understanding the East–West Conflict (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1990), p. 17.

Chapter 5 1. International regimes are known to empower new groups that support the regimes. Helen V. Milner, Resisting Protectionism: Global Industries and the Politics of International Trade (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988). 2. Chung-in Moon, “South Korea: Between Security and Vulnerability,” in The Implications of Third World Military Industrialization: Sowing the Serpents’ Teeth, ed. James Everrett Katz (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1986), p. 258. 3. Kim Yong-Nam, “Kunsajangbi kuksanhwa pangane kwanhan yo˘n’gu [Study on Means to Domestic Production of Military Equipment]” (master’s thesis, Han’guk kukpangtaehakwon [Korean National Defense University], December 1990.

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4. Ch’oe So˘ng-Bin and Han Nam-So˘ng, “Cho˘nhwan’gi pangwisano˘pu˘i yo˘khalkwa chinro [Role and Direction of Defense Industry in Transitory Period],” Kukpangnonjip [Quarterly Journal of Defense Analysis], no. 21 (Spring 1993): 102. 5. ’97 Kukchongkamsa yogucharyo (1) [Requested Material for National Audit 1997], Ministry of National Defense, September 1997, pp. 499 and 502. 6. Changgyo cho˘nyo˘kcha ch’wio˘p hyo˘nhwang [Employment Status of Retired Officers], A Written Answer to the Legislative Committee, Ministry of National Defense, July 1996. 7. Pangsano˘pch’e changgyo ch’wio˘p hyo˘nhwang [Defense Industry Employment Status of Retired Officers], Ministry of National Defense, July 1996. 8. Muyo˘ktaerijo˘m myo˘ngbu [List of Trading Companies], Office of Procurement, Ministry of National Defense, October 1997; and Muyo˘ktaerijo˘m susuryo hyo˘nhwang [Status of Trading Agents’ Commissions], Ministry of National Defense, October 1997. 9. Kim Yong-Nam, “Kunsajangbi,” pp. 77–78. 10. Ibid., p. 78. 11. Ministry of National Defense, Defense White Paper 1995–1996 (Seoul: Korea Institute for Defense Analyses, 1996), p. 101. 12. Korea Institute for Defense Analyses, Kukpangkwahakkisul mit pangsano˘pch’e silt’ae punso˘kyo˘n’gu [Analysis of the Reality of Defense Science Technology and Defense Industry] (Seoul: KIDA, 1988), cited in Kim Yong-Nam, “Kunsajangbi,” p. 72. 13. Korea Air Lines has 62 research personnel and spends 12 billion won a year, Samsung has 43 research personnel and spends 1.8 billion won, and Daewoo has 69 research personnel and spends 2.4 billion won. Hong Chae-Hak, “Hanggongujukwahakkisulu˘i sanghokyohwan mit hyo˘mnyo˘ke puch’ye [On Mutual Exchange and Cooperation of Aerospace Science and Technology],” Kukpanggwa kisul [Defense and Technology], August 1992, pp. 26–27. 14. Ministry of National Defense, Defense White Paper 1992–1993 (Seoul: Korea Institute of Defense Analysis, 1993), pp. 179–180. 15. Na Pyo˘ng-So˘n, “Kukpangbi kamch’uk—ajiku˘n sigisangjo [Defense Spending Reduction—Too Early Now],” Kukpanggwa kisul [Defense and Technology], September 1991, pp. 12–13. 16. Interview with an official of the Hyundai Precision Industry, Seoul, August 1999. 17. “South Korean Premier Calls for Extra Budget to Salvage Fighter Program,” Agence France-Presse (AFP), Seoul, May 13, 1999; Lee Cho˘ng-Hun, “‘Ppalgan mahura’tu˘l so˘ngnatta [‘Red Scarf’ got mad],” Sisajo˘no˘l [Current Affairs Journal], no. 499 (May 20, 1999): 50–52. 18. “South Korea to Build More U.S. F-16s,” Associated Press (Seoul), May 13, 1999.

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19. William D. Hartung, And Weapons for All (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), pp. 253–271. 20. The “Yulkok corruption scandal” began in May 1993 with a special audit of the modernization program, which resulted in an indictment of several officers including a former minister of National Defense. “‘Yulkok’ pudangsahang paekyo˘go˘n hwakin [100 discrepancies found in Yulkok],” Dongailbo [Donga Daily], July 9, 1993. For remaining “suspicions” involving the former President Roh Tae-Woo, see Cho˘ng Hu˘i-Sang, “Not’aeuwa mugisang ‘duitton k’o˘neksyo˘n’ [Roh Tae-Woo and Arms Dealers’ ‘Bribe Connection’],” Sisajo˘no˘l [Current Affairs Journal], November 23, 1995, pp. 50–51; Hong Un-Taek, “Kimusanu˘n yulkokpiri algo isso˘da,” Sindonga [New East Asia], no. 435 (December 1995): 122–132; and O Won-Ch’o˘l, “10nyo˘n ho˘songsewol, toeyo˘kyecho˘ng F16 so˘nt’aekhaetta [10 Years Wasted, Having Selected Soon-to-Retire F16],” Sindonga [New East Asia], no. 435 (December 1995): 136–159. 21. Procurement Headquarter, Ministry of National Defense, So˘myo˘njiru˘i tappyo˘nso˘ [Written Answer to Questions], Parliamentary Inspection, October 4, 1996, p. 918. 22. “SAM-X Program to Be Delayed Until 2000,” Korea Times, September 15, 1998. 23. Paek Yo˘ng-Hun, “Panguisano˘p, ch’o˘ndaebannu˘n kukkaso˘ngjangjo˘ llyaku˘i haeksim [Defense Industry, Neglected Essence of Nation’s Development Strategy],” Sindonga [New East Asia], no. 415 (April 1994): 434. 24. For RMA in general, see Lawrence Freedman, The Revolution in Strategic Affairs (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); and “Perspectives on The Revolution in Military Affairs,” Parameters 25 (Summer 1995): 7–54. 25. No Hun and I Chae-Uk, “Migunu˘i kunsakyori hyo˘ksin’gaenyo˘mgwa han’gukkunu˘i cho˘pku˘nbanghyang [U.S. Military’s Concept of Revolution in Military Affairs and Korean Military’s Response],” Kukpangnonjip [Quarterly Journal of Defense Analysis] 42 (Summer 1998): 219. 26. Janne E. Nolan, Military Industry in Taiwan and South Korea (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986), pp. 131–132. 27. Yu Chun-Hyo˘ng, “Hanmi pangsanhyo˘mnyoku˘ n chinjo˘ndoego innu˘n’ga [Is Korea-U.S. Defense Cooperation Progressing?],” Kukpanggwa kisul [Defense and Technology], April 1990, p. 7. 28. It must be noted that the relationship is not without problems. For example, Korean defense contractors, in the face of operation rates falling below 50 percent in the early 1990s, bitterly complained about the tight export control that theUnited States held over Korean weapons produced with American technologies. They were also unhappy with Washington’s reluctance to transfer high-tech technologies that were sorely needed for the shift to the next stage in arms production. Another source of complaints was the low rate of offset

Notes

29.

30.

31. 32.

33. 34.

35.

36. 37.

38.

39.

40.

41.

269

trade that Washington had so far granted. On balance, however, this kind of friction is more remarkable by its low level, given the huge amount of exchanges. “Terms of Reference (TOR) for Korea-Oregon Defense Industry Committee,” Kukpanggwa kisul [Defense and Technology], January 1988, p. 66. Ministry of National Defense, “Chuhanmigunu˘i yo˘khalkwa chudun p’ilyoso˘ng [USFK’s Roles and Necessity],” March 6, 2000, http:// www.mnd.go.kr/mnd_fileup/02/01/04/162024_IIII.hwp. Hwang Tong-Jun, “Pangwisano˘p, o˘dirogana [Whither Defense Industry?],” Wolgan jungang [Monthly Central], August 1991, p. 298. Jonathan D. Pollack and Young Koo Cha, A New Alliance for the Next Century: The Future of U.S.-Korean Security Cooperation (Santa Monica: RAND, 1995), p. iii. Ibid., p. xv. Pak Myo˘ng-So˘, “Pukhan taenamjo˘khwajo˘nryaku˘n pyo˘nhaji anatta [North’s Strategy to Communize the South Has Not Changed],” Kukpang cho˘no˘l [National Defense Journal], no. 299 (November 1998): 39. Yoo Young Ock, “Fundamentals of and Prospects for Change in North Korea’s Military Policy,” East Asian Review 5, no. 2 (Summer 1993): 87–96. See, for example, Yu Seok-Ryol, “North Korea’s Military Policy Toward South Korea,” Vantage Point 18, no. 8 (August 1995): 41. Lim Dong-Won, “How to End Cold War on the Korean Peninsula,” speech delivered on April 23, 1999, at a working breakfast meeting hosted by the Korea Development Institute at the Intercontinental Hotel, Seoul. (NAPSNET). Paek Yo˘ng-Hun, “Panguisano˘p, ch’o˘ndaebannu˘n kukkaso˘ngjangjo˘ llyaku˘i haeksim [Defense Industry, Neglected Essence of Nation’s Development Strategy],” Sindonga [New East Asia], no. 415 (April 1994): 434. Patrick Morgan, “The US-ROK Strategic Relationship: A Liberalist Analysis,” in US-Korean Relations, Donald Clark, et al. (Claremont, CA: The Keck Center for International and Strategic Studies, Claremont McKenna College, 1995), p. 98. Cho˘n Cho˘ng-Hwan, “Tongbuka anjo˘nggwa hanmigwan’gye cho˘nmang [Stability in Northeast Asia and Prospects of Korea-U.S. Relations],” Kukpang cho˘no˘l [National Defense Journal], no. 291 (March 1998): 37. See also An Byo˘ng-Jun, “Kusoryo˘n Haech’ehu michunggwan’gyewa hyanghu cho˘nmang [Post–Soviet Union Sino-U.S. Relations and Future Prospects],” Cho˘llyak yo˘n’gu [Strategic Studies] 4, no. 1 (1997): 7–30. Chi Man-Wo˘n, Kunch’uksidaeu˘i han’gukku˘n o˘tto˘ke talajyo˘ya hana [How Must Korean Military Change in the Disarmament Age], rev. ed., vol. 1 (Seoul: Chinwo˘n, 1992), preface to the revised edition.

270

Notes

42. Interview, Seoul, November 13, 1998. See Hwang Yo˘ngbae, “Kunsadongmaengu˘i taeripkaso˘lkwa tongbuka anboch’eje: Seryo˘kkyunhyo˘ng, Seryo˘kcho˘ni, chiptananbo mit tajaanboru ˘ l chungsimu ˘ ro [Alternative Hypotheses of Alliances and Northeast Asian Security System: Power Balance, Power Transition, Collective Security and Multilateral Security],” Chongch’i chongbo yon’gu [Study of Politics and Information] 3, no. 2 (2000): 181–218. For power transition theory, see A. F. K. Organski and Jacek Kugler, The War Ledger (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); and Jacek Kugler and Douglas Lemke, eds., Parity and War: Evaluations and Extensions of the War Ledger (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996). 43. Kim Yo˘ng-Ki, “21segi hanmi kunsagwan’gye palcho˘nbanghyang [Development Direction of 21st Century Korea-U.S. Military Relations],” Kukpang cho˘no˘l [National Defense Journal], no. 298 (October 1998): 104 [emphasis added]. 44. Hong Kyu-Do˘k, “Pukhan’gwa hanmigwan’gye: P’yo˘nggawa taeu˘ngch’aek [North Korea and Korea-U.S. Relations: Evaluation and Suggestion],” Cho˘llyak yo˘n’gu [Strategic Studies] 5, no.1 (1998): 112–162. 45. Key-Young Son, “Equi-Distance Diplomacy to US, China Unrealistic,” Korea Times, April 30, 1999. 46. Ibid. 47. David Mutimer, “Reimagining Security: The Metaphors of Proliferation,” Critical Security Studies, ed. Keith Kruse and Michael C. Williams (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). 48. Stuart Hall, “The Rediscovery of ‘Ideology’: Return of the Repressed in Media Studies,” in Culture, Society and the Media, ed. Michael Gurevitch, Tony Bennett, James Curran, and Janet Woollacott (New York: Methuen, 1982), p. 74; Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 49. U.S. intelligence has called a missile by the name of its first launch site. Although Taepodong is reportedly an old name of what is now called Musudanri in Hamgyo˘ngbukto, it is not clear why the old name, which incidentally sounds like “big cannon city,” was chosen. 50. “US, Japan and South Korea Use Carrot and Stick on North Korea,” AFP, Singapore, July 27, 1999. 51. The U.S. Department of State, “Trilateral Meeting Joint Press Statement,” Washington, DC, USIA Text, July 27, 1999. 52. Jun Kwan-woo, “U.S. Envoy Urges N.K. to Give up ‘Sovereign Right’ to Test Missiles,” Korea Herald, Seoul, July 24, 1999. 53. Jun Kwan-woo, “U.S. Envoy Under Fire for Remarks on ‘Sovereign’ N.K’s Missile Rights,” Korea Herald, Seoul, July 27, 1999. 54. The Missile Technology Control Regime bans exports of missiles with a range of 300 km or higher, but does not prohibit test firing. Peter Hayes argues that North Korea is “in contravention of an

Notes

55.

56.

57.

58. 59.

60.

61.

271

emerging norm” of no right of innocent missile passage, but he acknowledges that “there is no controlling legal authority or legal framework within which to make such a ruling.” He also concedes that the United States as well as other missile states have violated this “emerging norm.” Peter Hayes, “DPRK Missile Test: Violation of Japanese Airspace,” Northeast Asia Peace and Security Network Daily Report, September 3, 1998, http://www.nautilus.org/archives/ napsnet/dr/9809/SEP03.html#item23. For a fuller treatment, see J. J. Suh, “Producing Security Dilemma out of Uncertainty: The North Korean Nuclear Crisis,” Working Paper Series 8-06, Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, Cornell University, October 2006, http://www.einaudi.cornell.edu/ files/workingpaper/08-2006.pdf. Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics; Nicholas Greenwood Onuf, World of Our Making: Rules and Rule in Social Theory and International Relations (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1989). Although the missile politics also had an episode of negotiation, i.e., the Berlin agreement that committed Pyongyang not to test fire missiles, the informal agreement was embedded in the larger negotiation over nuclear issues. On social production of “Hobbesian culture,” see Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics. Both Selig Harrison and I Yo˘ng-Hu˘i suggest that the “doves” in the North’s regime won the debate over the question of developing a fission bomb in December 1991 (November, according to I) when the Korean Workers Party Central Committee decided not to pursue a nuclear weapons program. Selig Harrison, “The United States and North Korea: The Nuclear Issue and Beyond,” p. 11, an unpublished paper prepared for the conference “Korea in Transition: New Challenges and U.S. Policy,” sponsored by the University of Bridgeport, Bridgeport, CT, and the Professors’ World Peace Academy, April 16, 1994; and I Yo˘ng-Hu˘i, “Nambuk hwahaewa kunch’uku˘i sinsidaeru˘l yo˘lja [Let’s Open the New Era of South–North Reconciliation and Arms Reduction],” Wolgan mal [Monthly Words], Seoul, October 1993, pp. 58–63. Leon V. Sigal, “How to End North Korea’s Missile Program,” Global Beat Syndicate, June 2, 1999, http://www.nyu.edu/globalbeat/syndicate/Sigal060299.html. For these two points and a critique of the conventional wisdom, see Jae-Jung Suh, “North Korean ‘Nuclear Threat’ and Cold War Hangover: Northern Exposure or Explosion?” Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 28, no. 1 (1996): 13–26; and Leon V. Sigal, Disarming Strangers: Nuclear Diplomacy with North Korea (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998).

272

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62. Barbara Starr, “Fuel Shortages Limit N. Korea,” Jane’s Defense Weekly, October 24, 1992, p. 12. 63. Toby T. Gati, Statement before the Senate Intelligence Committee, Hearing on Current and Projected National Security Threats to the United States, February 5, 1997. 64. Barbara Starr, “North Korea’s Collapse Is a Threat to Stability,” Jane’s Defense Weekly, June 12, 1996, p. 31. 65. George J. Tenet, acting director of Central Intelligence, Statement before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Hearing on Current and Projected National Security Threats to the United States, February 5, 1997; Jim Adams, “U.S. Agencies See India–Pakistan, Korea Dangers,” Reuters World Service, Washington, DC, February 5, 1997. 66. Kurt Campbell, deputy assistant secretary of defense for East Asian and Pacific affairs, Testimony before the House International Relations Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific, Hearing on US Policy Toward the Korean Peninsula, February 26, 1997. 67. For example, the conventional wisdom fails to explain the material reality that Pyongyang did not shut down its reactor or reprocess spent fuel until May 1994, long after it was expected to do so. Even then, it allowed international inspectors to verify the procedure. Sigal interprets the facts as an indication that “starting in 1991, North Korea was restraining itself somewhat in the hopes of concluding a nuclear deal with the United States.” Sigal, “How to End North Korea’s Missile Program.” 68. Department of Defense, Framework for the Asian Pacific Rim: Looking toward the 21st Century, Report to Congress, Washington, DC, April 1990. 69. Ministry of National Defense, Defense White Paper 1992–1993, p. 143 [emphasis added]. 70. Don Oberdorfer, The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History (New York: Basic Books, 2001), pp. 258–260. 71. Joint Communiqué, Twenty-third Annual US-ROK Security Consultative Meeting, November 22, 1991, Seoul. 72. At’aep’yo˘nghwajaedan [Asia Pacific Peace Foundation], ed., 1995 At’ae t’ongilyo˘ n’gam [Asia Pacific Unification Yearbook 1995] (Seoul: Asia t’aepyo˘ngyang p’yo˘nghwajaedan, 1995), p. 121. 73. For a detailed analysis of the nuclear issue, see Lee Samso˘ng, Hanbando haekmunjewa migukwoegyo [The Nuclear Question and U.S. Policy on the Korean Peninsula] (Seoul: Han’gilsa, 1994). 74. Cho˘n So˘nghun pointed out that because a sample analysis of the declared 5-MW reactor would perform the same function as a special inspection of the undeclared facilities, International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) demand for special inspections was not only unnecessary but also counterproductive. The IAEA made its demand even before it carried out inspections on the reactor as allowed by the safeguards agreement with the North. Cho˘n So˘nghun, Pukhan

Notes

75. 76.

77. 78.

79. 80.

81.

273

haekmunje haegyolu ˘ l wihan chollyakcho˘k so˘nt’aekkwa hyo˘psangtaech’aek [Strategic Choices and Negotiation Tactics to Resolve North Korean Nuclear Problem] (Seoul: Minjokt’ongilyo˘n’guwon [Institute for National Reunification], January 25, 1994), p. 40. Les Aspin, Secretary of Defense, Report on Bottom-Up Review, Department of Defense, Washington, DC, October 1993. In 1994, the U.S. military adopted the two-wars doctrine—that it must be prepared to fight two major wars—one in Korea and one in the Middle East—at the same time. For an analysis of the twowars doctrine, see Jae-Jung Suh, “The Two-Wars Doctrine and the Regional Arms Race: Contradictions in U.S. Post–Cold War Security Policy,” Critical Asian Studies 35, no. 1 (2003): 3–32. Department of Defense, The United States Security Strategy for the East Asia-Pacific Region, Washington, DC, February 1995. “Recent Developments in North Korea,” testimony by Special Envoy for the Korean Peace Process Charles Kartman before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Subcommittee on East Asia and the Pacific, September 10, 1998 [emphasis added]. “North Korea Power ‘Growing,’” International Herald Tribune (Seoul), February 17, 2000. Statement of General Thomas A. Schwartz, commander in chief, United Nations Command/Combined Forces Command, and commander, United States Forces Korea, before the Senate Armed Services Committee, March 7, 2000. Joint Communiqué, Security Consultative Meeting, November 23, 1999.

Chapter 6 1. For a positive feedback loop of an institution, see John G. Ikenberry, After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Rebuilding of Order after Major Wars (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 69–72; and Brian Arthur, “Positive Feedbacks in the Economy,” Scientific American (February 1990): 92–99, reprinted in Arthur, Increasing Returns and Path Dependence in the Economy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), pp. 1–12. See also Paul Pierson, “When Effect Becomes Cause: Policy Feedback and Political Change,” World Politics 45, no. 4 (1993): 595–628. 2. Such a call for pragmatism is reflected in the development of analytical eclecticism led by some scholars. See, for example, J. J. Suh, Peter J. Katzenstein, and Allen Carlson, eds., Rethinking Security in East Asia: Identity, Power, and Efficiency (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004). 3. It is also illuminating to observe that while NATO’s European members identified with the United States immediately after the 9/11

274

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4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10. 11.

12. 13.

14. 15.

attack, they started to drift away from it as the Bush administration implemented policies that they deemed undermined what they held was the common identity basis for their unity. Robert Kagan, Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order (New York: Knopf, 2003). J. David Singer and Melvin Small, “Formal Alliances, 1815–1939: A Quantitative Description,” Journal of Peace Research 3, no. 1 (1966): 1–32. Richard Cupitt, R. Whitlock, and L. Williams Whitlock, “The (Im)mortality of International Governmental Organizations,” International Interactions 21, no. 4 (1996): 389–404. See, for example, Lars-Erik Cederman, ed., Constructing Europe’s Identity: The External Dimension (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2001). For an effort to bridge rationalist and sociological approaches, see Judith Kelley, “International Actors on the Domestic Scene: Membership Conditionality and Socialization by International Institutions,” International Organization 58, no. 3 (2004): 425–457; and Jeffrey T. Checkel, “Why Comply? Social Learning and European Identity Change,” International Organization 55, no. 3 (2001): 553–588. Economic sociologists have suggested that the valuation of many commodities is deeply embedded in social structures. See Brian Uzzi and Ryon Lancaster, “Embeddedness and Price Formation in the Corporate Law Market,” American Sociological Review 69, no. 3 (2004): 319–344; Mark Granovetter, “The Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness,” American Journal of Sociology 91, no. 3 (1985): 481–510. Daniel Deudney and G. John Ikenberry, “The Logic of the West,” World Policy Journal 10, no. 4 (1993): 17–26. See also Ikenberry, After Victory. E. Adler and Michael N. Barnett, eds., Security Communities (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Campbell makes a similar argument with respect to U.S. foreign policy. David Campbell, Writing Security: U.S. Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992). John Herz, International Politics in the Atomic Age (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), p. 124. For an excellent discussion on NATO after the Cold War, see Celeste A. Wallander, “Institutional Assets and Adaptability: NATO after the Cold War,” International Organization 54, no. 4 (2000): 705–735. Christian Catrina, Arms Transfers and Dependence (New York: Taylor and Francis, 1988). For NATO weapons production coordination, see Keith Hartley, NATO Arms Co-operation: A Study in Economics and Politics (London; Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1983).

Notes

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16. Jeffrey W. Knopf, “Beyond Two-Level Games: Domestic-International Interaction in the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Negotiations,” International Organization 47, no. 4 (1993): 599–628. 17. Emanuel Adler and Michael Barnett, “Security Communities in Theoretical Perspective,” in Adler and Barnett, Security Communities, p. 43. 18. Bruce Cronin, “From Balance of Power to Political Community: Transnational Identity Formation and the Integration of Italy,” in The Origins of National Interests, ed. Glenn R. Chafetz, Michael Spirtas, and Benjamin Frankel (Portland, OR: F. Cass, 1999), pp. 270–301. 19. Randall Collins, “‘Balkanization’ or ‘Americanization’: A Geopolitical Theory of Ethnic Change,” in Macrohistory: Essays in Sociology of the Long Run (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 82. 20. The strain in NATO that was evident after the Bush administration adopted unilateralist policies, including its decision to attack Iraq in 2003, can be attributed at least in part to the differences between Washington and its European allies in the ways in which they understood democratic community. Kagan, Of Paradise and Power. 21. Alexander Wendt, “Anarchy Is What States Make of It: The Social Construction of Power Politics,” International Organization 46, no. 2 (1992): 391–425. 22. John W. Meyer and Brian Rowan, “Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony,” American Journal of Sociology 83, no. 2 (1977): 340–363. 23. Ibid., p. 349. 24. Jack Snyder, Myths of Empire: Domestic Politics and International Ambition (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991). 25. Robert O. Keohane, and Joseph S. Nye, Power and Interdependence: World Politics in Transition (Boston: Little, Brown, 1977), p. 36. 26. Thomas Risse-Kappen, Steve C. Ropp, and Kathryn Sikkink, eds., The Power of Human Rights: International Norms and Domestic Change (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 27. See, for example, Matthew Evangelista, Unarmed Forces: The Transnational Movement to End the Cold War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999); and Thomas Risse-Kappen, ed., Bringing Transnational Relations Back In: Non-State Actors, Domestic Structures, and International Institutions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 28. Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph, 2nd print with corrections ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978); and Hirschman, “Rival Interpretations of Market Society: Civilizing, Destructive, or Feeble?” Journal of Economic Literature 20, no. 4 (1982): 1463–1483. 29. Hirschman, Passions and Interests. 30. Emile Durkheim, Division of Labor in Society (1902), cited in Hirschman, “Rival Interpretations,” p. 1471.

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31. Wookhee Shin, Dynamics of Patron-Client State Relations: The United States and Korean Political Economy in the Cold War (Seoul: American Studies Institute, Seoul National University, 1993). 32. Kim Ilyo˘ng and Cho So˘ngryo˘l, Chuhanmigun: yoksa, chaengcho˘m, cho˘nmang [U.S. Forces in Korea: History, Issues, and Prospect] (Seoul: Hanul, 2003), pp. 90–91. 33. “Pangwibi pundam [Defense Cost Sharing],” Policy Planning Bureau, Ministry of National Defense, http://www.mnd.go.kr:8077/ jungchaek/han/leftmenu3_3_4.html (accessed March 3, 2004). 34. Ministry of National Defense, Policy Planning Bureau, Hanmidongmaenggwa chuhanmigun, kaejo˘ngp’an [Korea-U.S. Alliance and the U.S. Forces in Korea, rev. ed.] (Seoul: Ministry of National Defense, 2003), p. 74. 35. Donald W. Boose, Recalibrating the U.S.-Republic of Korea Alliance (Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, 2003). 36. For free-riding problems in alliance politics, see Glenn H. Snyder, “The Security Dilemma in Alliance Politics,” World Politics 36, no. 4 (1984): 461–495; and Thomas J. Christensen and Jack Snyder, “Chain Gangs and Passed Bucks: Predicting Alliance Patterns in Multipolarity,” International Organization 44, no. 2 (1990): 137–168. For autonomy-security trade-offs, see James D. Morrow, “Arms versus Allies: Tradeoffs in the Search for Security,” International Organization 47, no. 2 (1993): 207–233. 37. Ministry of National Defense, Yebihoiu˘i kyo˘lgwa podojaryo [News Release on the Preparatory Meeting], February 27, 2003. See also Joint Communiqué, Thirty-Fourth Security Consultative Meeting, December 5, 2002, Washington, DC. 38. Ministry of National Defense, “Result of the Second Meeting of ‘Future of the ROK-US Alliance Policy Initiative,’” MND News Release, June 5, 2003, p. 2. 39. Jonathan D. Pollack and Young Koo Cha, eds., A New Alliance for the Next Century: The Future of U.S.-Korean Security Cooperation (Santa Monica, CA: Rand, 1996). 40. Joint Communiqué, Thirty-Second Annual US-ROK Security Consultative Meeting, September 21, 2000, Seoul, Korea, http://www. mnd.go.kr/ (accessed March 3, 2004). All the subsequent communiqués also include the same phrase about the alliance’s contribution to peace and stability in the region. 41. A similar debate transpired with respect to NATO enlargement. James M. Goldgeier, Not Whether But When: The U.S. Decision to Enlarge NATO (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1999). Alexandra Ioana Gheciu, NATO in the “New Europe”: The Politics of International Socialization after the Cold War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005).

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42. Although there was no meaningful debate in the United States, South Korea had a belated debate on the “strategic flexibility” that would allow the USFK to operate outside the Korean Peninsula. A small number of politicians, especially Parliamentarians, scholars, and activists argued that the strategic flexibility would invite a negative reaction from China and hence bring negative security consequences for Korea. But their arguments were largely ignored by most politicians and scholars, and sidestepped by the government, which came up with an ambiguous agreement about the exact meaning of the “strategic flexibility.” The critics failed to become a serious challenge or create a vibrant public debate because their opposition was met with fait accompli. The “strategic flexibility” had been adopted at least since the 2000 SCM that agreed to expand the alliance’s role to “Northeast Asia and the Asia-Pacific region as a whole.” The SCM agreement, in turn, was the culmination of the process that began in the early 1990s to transform the alliance’s mission into regional security roles. These changes had been made in the absence of public debate even in South Korea. For more details, see So˘ Chaejo˘ng, “Chuhanmigun chaebaech’iwa hanmidongmaengu˘i so˘nggyo˘k pyo˘nhwa [The Repositioning of the USFK’s and the Changes of the Korea-US Alliance],” in Cho˘nhwan’gi hanmigwan’gyo˘u ˘ i saep’anjjagi [Reshaping Korea-U.S. Relationship] Kang Cho˘nggu et al. (Seoul: Hanul, 2005), pp. 76–104. 43. Kim Ilyo˘ng and Cho So˘ngryo˘l, Chuhanmigun; and Sim Chiyo˘n and Kim Ilyo˘ng, eds., Hanmi tongmaeng 50nyo˘n: popcho˘k chaengjo˘mkwa miraeu˘i cho˘nmang [50 Years of Korea-U.S. Alliance: Legal Issues and Prospects for Future] (Seoul: Paeksanso˘dang, 2004). 44. Nam Cho˘ngok, “Chuhan migunu˘i cho˘njaengo˘kchiryo˘k [Deterrence Capability of the U.S. Forces in Korea],” Ch’oegu˘nsosik/t’u˘kpyo˘lkigo [Recent News/Special Contributions], Kukpangbu, July 3, 2003. 45. Kukpangbu, IMFsidaeu˘i kukkaanbowa kukpangbi [National Security and Defense Expenditure during IMF Crisis] (Seoul: Ministry of National Defense, 1998). 46. A notable exception is a study done by Lee Pyo˘nggu˘n and Yu Su˘nggyo˘ng that convincingly shows positive economic effects of disarmament. Lee Pyo˘nggu˘n and Yu Su˘nggyo˘ng, Hanbando kunbigamch’uku ˘ i kyo˘ngjejo˘k hyokwa [Economic Effects of Korean Peninsula Disarmament] (Seoul: LG Kyo˘ngcheyon’guwon [LG Economy Research Institute], 1998). 47. Meredith Woo-Cumings, “Unilateralism and Its Discontents: The Passing of the Cold War Alliance and Changing Public Opinion in the Republic of Korea,” in Korean Attitudes toward the United States, ed. David I. Steinberg (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 2004), pp. 56–79. 48. Eric V. Larson, Norman D. Levin, Seonhae Baik, and Bogdan Savych, Ambivalent Allies? A Study of South Korean Attitudes toward the U.S. (Santa Monica, CA: Rand, 2004).

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49. Woo-Cumings notes a pattern that an “anti-American sentiment” rose high when Washington’s policies were seen undermining South Korea’s security. Woo-Cumings, “Unilateralism and Its Discontents.” 50. For Korea’s identity politics, see Ronald Bleiker, Divided Korea: Toward a Culture of Reconciliation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005); and Key-young Son, South Korean Engagement Policies and North Korea: Identities, Norms and the Sunshine Policy (New York: Routledge, 2006). 51. The Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, Global Views 2004: Comparing South Korean and American Public Opinion and Foreign Policy (Chicago: Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, 2004).

Appendix 1. Table 5.3, “Effects of Obstacles and Prepared Positions on Exchange Ratios,” in Engineer Studies Group, Department of the Army, Measuring Obstacle Effectiveness: A Fresh Perspective, vol. 1 (Fort Belvoir, VA, March 1975), cited in Joshua Epstein, Conventional Force Reductions, p. 70. 2. David C. Wright and Timur Kadyshev, “An Analysis of the North Korean Nodong Missile,” Science & Global Security 4, no. 2 (February 1994): 134. 3. The location and size of the airbases used here are taken from Joseph S. Bermudez Jr., North Korean Special Forces (London: Jane’s Publishing Co., 1988), pp. 112–120. 4. Benoit Morel and Theodore A. Postol, “A Technical Assessment of Potential Threats to NATO from Non-nuclear Soviet Tactical Ballistic Missiles,” in New Technologies and the Arms Race, ed. Carlo Schaerf, Brian Holden Reid, and David Carlton (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989), p. 127. 5. Estimate from Figure 9.2 in Morel and Postol, “Technical Assessment.” 6. I calculated the lethal radius from Figure 2.1 in U.S. Congress, Office of Technology Assessment, Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction: Assessing the Risks, OTA-ISC-559 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, August 1993), p. 53. 7. For the derivation of the equation, see Morel and Postol, “A Technical Assessment,” pp. 142–143.

Index

Agency for Defense Development (ADD) establishment of, 75 MIL-SPECS and, 79 MND and, 76, 83 TDPs and, 76, 81 weapons development and, 75–76, 82–84 Agreed Framework, 3 Air Component Command (ACC), 90 AirLand Battle Doctrine, 92, 93–94, 119 Albright, Madeleine, 155, 156 alliance constituency asset specificity and, 138–144 security costs, alliance persistence, and, 144 –149 Allison, Graham, 104 American Defense Preparedness Association (ADPA), 98 American Forces Korea Network (AFKN), 103 American military specifications (MIL-SPECs), 79 anti-Americanism, 112–113 anti-communism, 122–124 Anti-Communist Law, 123–124 Appleman, Roy E., 54 Armistice Agreement, 87 Armored Division Equivalent (ADE), 2, 35, 37–38, 39 Arms Export Control Act, 132 Arsenal Administration, 68 ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF), 155

asset specificity alliance constituency and, 138–144 alliance politics and, 13–116 communications specificity and, 98 explained, 64 grant programs and, 68 U.S.-Korea alliance and, 103–107 weapons import and, 66 Axis of Evil, 160, 192, 197 blitzkrieg, 30–32, 35, 36 airpower and, C3I, 45– 48 deterrence and, 31, 32 dynamic analysis of, 41–54 force-to-force ratio and, 37–38, 40– 41 geography and, 32 movement of battle front, 42– 43 ROKA and, 30 special forces and countermeasures, 49–54 tank battles, 44 – 45 Bosworth, Stephen, 156 –157 Bretton Woods Agreement Act, 133 Brzezinski, Zbigniew, 105 Bush, George H. W. denuclearization of South and, 3, 56, 159, 166 East Asia Strategic Initiative and, 55, 166 effect of U.S.-Korea alliance, 4 military withdrawal from South, 104, 167, 168, 170 National Security Strategy, 153

280

Index

Bush, George H. W.—continued Nunn-Warner resolution and, 56 weapons sales and, 72 Bush, George W., 26, 160 C3I (Command, Control, Communications, and Intelligence), 30 airpower and, 45– 48 Campbell, Kurt, 163 Carter, Jimmy arms control policy, 105, 106 criticism of, 107 USFK and, 106 withdrawal policy, 88, 95, 104, 106 China Armistice Agreement and, 87 defense spending, 142 Korean War and, 42, 52 North Korea and, 3, 31, 46, 57, 62 nuclear weapons, 58 Roh Tae-Woo and, 124 Russia and, 2 South Korea and, 57, 152 strategic uncertainty and, 58–59 U.S. and, 127 Ch’oˇn Yongt’aek, 145 Chosin, 125 Choso˘n Yuji, 73 Christenson, Richard, 152 Chrysler, 83 chujo˘k, 198, 199 Chun Doo-Hwan, 69, 144 Clinton, Bill cancellation of troop withdrawal, 3 Kim Dae-Jung and, 171–172 Korean peace process and, 160 North Korea’s identity and, 126 nuclear development of North and, 156, 161 “Perry process,” 197 sanctions against North Korea, 134 Cohen, William, 151, 156, 172 Combined Defense Improvement Project (CDIP), 102, 199

Combined Field Army (CFA), 90–91, 94 Combined Forces Command (CFC), 127 defense strategy, 32 dissolution of, 55–56, 170 threat from North and, 29 command control, 87, 205 communication specificity, 98–101 Confucianism, 117 constructivist IR theories, 176–178, 184 Culver-Nunn Legislation See Nunn Amendment Program Czechoslovakia, 188 Data Exchange Agreement (DEA), 74 Defense Industry Association, 142, 147 Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), 131, 163 Defense Technology Industry Cooperation (DTIC) Committee, 75, 98 defensive positionality, 4 Democratic Labor Party (DLP), 202–203 Denuclearization Declaration, 59, 60 Direct Commercial Sales (DCS), 69 DMZ (Demilitarized Zone) ADEs and, 38–39 blitzkrieg and, 41– 42, 51 CFC and, 90 concentration of North’s forces in, 2, 32, 38, 41 geography and, 32, 39– 40 Hollingsworth and, 93 infiltration tunnels, 126 military movement and, 42 refugees and, 162 tanks and, 45 U.S. and, 90, 199 Doctrine Development Department, 92

Index East Asia Strategic Initiative, 55 Egypt, 175, 181, 185, 187 equipment, alliances and, 64 –67 equipment specificity dependency and, 76, 85 defined, 64 termination of alliance and, 66 – 67 U.S.-Korea alliance and, 64 –67, 96, 97 weapons production and, 65 – 66 weapons transfer and, 67– 69, 71 erasure, 116 European Security and Defense Identity (ESDI), 6 Export-Import Bank Act, 133 Five-Year Force Modernization Plan, 79 Focus Lens exercise, 88 Follow-On-Forces-Attack (FOFA), 94 Force Improvement Plans (FIPs), 79–80, 144, 146 Ford, Carl, 72 Foreign Assets Control Regulations, 132, 134 Foreign Military Sales (FMS), 69 Four Party Talk framework, 151 Future of the ROK-US Alliance Initiative, 202 Gati, Toby T., 162 General Defense Land Systems (GDLS), 83 Geneva Agreed Framework, 126, 134, 160 Gramm Amendment, 133 Gramsci, Antonio, 17 grant aid programs, 67– 69, 72, 73 Greece, 191 guerilla warfare, 118, 128, 130 Han’guk Hwayak, 73 Henderson, Gregory, 112 Herz, John, 187

281

Hirschman, Albert, 195 Hobbesian culture, 154, 159–160 Hollingsworth, James F. “Holly,” 92–93 Hong Kyu-Doˇk, 151 Hong Soon-Young, 156 Hughes Aircraft Corporation, 77, 85 Hughes, Patrick, 163 Hwang Soˇk-Yoˇng, 123 Hwang Tong-Jun, 148 Hyo˘n Ki-Yo˘ng, 116, 123 Hyundai Precision Industry, 83–84 I Chae-Uk, 147 identity effect, 18, 20 identity preservation, 122–125 Inch’oˇn, 125 institutional integration, 86 –91 institutional persistence, 8–12, 187–192 institutionalization IR theories, 21–23, 176, 177, 178–183, 184–186 International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), 159, 166 –170 International Emergency Economic Powers Act, 132 International Financial Institutions Act, 133 International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), 135 International Military Education Training (IMET), 68, 96, 100, 114 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 8, 133 Inmin wiwo˘ nhoi, 112 Iran, 176, 180–182, 185, 187, 192 Italy, 191, 195 Japan arms production and, 68, 73 asset specificity and, 187, 188 colonialism, 73, 115, 128 defense spending, 142 IAEA and, 168

282

Index

Japan–continued Korean security and, 135, 146 North Korean threats to, 60, 118, 154 –56 OPLAN and, 41 post–Cold War, 152, 159 strategic uncertainty and, 58 U.S. and, 1, 62, 112, 113, 152, 182, 183 Johnson, Lyndon B., 69 Joint Coordinating Group (JCG), 96 Joint Declaration on the Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, 166 Joint U.S. Military Assistance Group-Korea (JUSMAG-K), 76, 199 Jones, Tom, 144 Juch’e, 117, 121 K1, 33 K1A1, 34, 142–143 Kartman, Charles, 126 Kennedy, John F., 18 Keohane, Robert, 5, 63 KF-16 Project, 85 Kim Dae-Jung Clinton and, 156, 171–72 Korean peace process and, 196–197 sunshine policy, 150, 176, 192, 197, 198 U.S. and, 151, 176 Kim Il-Sung, 59, 121, 128, 159, 168 Kim Jong-Il, 2, 143, 161, 162, 163 Kim Yong-Nam, 78–79 Ko Kang-So˘k, 30 Korea Air Lines (KAL), 77, 85 bombing of Flight 858, 132 Korea Defense Industry Association (KDIA), 98, 142, 147, 149, 168 Korea Fighter Program (KFP), 85 Korea Institute for Defense Analyses (KIDA), 77

Korean Augmentation to the U.S. Army (KATUSA), 97 Korean Military Academy, 124 Korean Peace Process, 126 –127 Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization (KEDO), 154 Korean War attitudes toward U.S. and, 113–114 Cold War and, 116–117 erasure and, 116 Korean Military Academy and, 124 MND and, 68 North’s aggressive identity and, 117–118 ROKA and, 79, 86, 92 sanctions and, 132 stereotypes and, 128 Taejon Agreement and, 86 UN Security Council resolutions and, 131 U.S. and, 125, 128 veterans of, 98 weapons production and, 73 Krauss-Maffei, 83 KTX program, 143, 145 kuksi, 123 Land Partnership Program (LPP), 199 liberal IR theories, 177–178 location specificity, 101–103 Lockheed Martin, 145 Luck, Garry, 163 MacArthur, Douglas, 87 Magruder, Carter B., 87 Masahiko, Komura, 156 McCloy, John, 104 McLouchlin, Gerald, 157 Middle East War, 93 Military Assistance Program (MAP), 68–69 Military Committee Meeting (MCM), 87, 89, 96, 168

Index military doctrine, homogeneity in, 91–95 Military Organization Law, 86 military specifications (MILSPECs), 79 Miller, David, 73 Ministry of National Defense (MND) ADD and, 76 alliance specificity and, 145, 148 Arsenal Administration and, 68 Basic Development Plan for Aerospace Industry and, 143 defense industry and, 80, 139–140 Defense Industry Promotion Fund, 139 FIP and, 144, 146 GDLS and, 83 K-1 tanks and, 83–84, 142 KF-16 Project and, 85 officer education and, 99 Rhee Syngman and, 73 spending, 139 Subcommittee on Defense Science and Technology, 141 surface-to-air missiles and, 71 technology training and, 141– 42 U.S. and, 83, 92 Na Pyoˇng-Soˇn, 142 Nam Choˇng-Hyoˇn, 123 National Defense Institute (NDI), 92 National Security Law (NSL), 123–124 neoliberal IR theories, 177, 184 –186, 190 Nixon, Richard disengagement policy, 74, 88, 112 Nixon Doctrine, 93, 105 Nogu˘ lli massacre, 116 No Hun, 11 Non-aggression Pact, 59–60 Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), 170 Nordpolitik, 124

283

Norota, Hosei, 156 North American Treaty Organization (NATO) alliance identity and, 1, 152, 175 Armament Cooperation Program and, 75 asset specificity and, 187–188 collective identity and, 183 end of Cold War and, 6 expansion, 14 –16 FOFA and, 94 identity and, 7 institutionalization theory and, 21, 179, 182 military mobilization and, 41 persistence, 60 –61, 184 –185 power and, 62 social identity and, 192 Warsaw Pact and, 129 North Korea, 2, 7, 19, 23–25 as missile threat, 153–158 as nuclear threat, 158–161 as “other,” 164–165 as terrorist state, 113, 125–126, 132, 133, 160 as time bomb, 161–164 Northrop, 85, 143–144 North-South Denuclearization Declaration, 159 nuclear weapons AirLand Battle Doctrine and, 119–120 Chun Doo-Hwan and, 69, 77 Clinton administration and, 58, 129–131, 34 MCM and, 56 North Korea and, 153–161, 167–171, 204–205 North’s security and, 24–25 SCM and, 89 U.S. military strategy and, 92 U.S.-South operations, 65 U.S. withdrawal from South, 3, 56, 166, 197 See also Denuclearization Declaration

284

Index

Nunn Amendment Program, 75 Nunn-Warner resolution, 55, 56, 165–166 operational command control, 205 Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), 6 Paek Yoˇng-Hun, 146 Pakistan, 158 panbuk, 133 pan’gong, 133 Park Chung-Hee attempted assassination of, 121 Carter and, 106 SCM and, 89 Johnson and, 89 U.S. and, 115 weapons development and, 69 weapons purchases and, 74, 83 Patent Secrecy Agreement, 74 Poland, 188 Pratt & Whitney, 85–86 Pueblo interdiction, 117 puppet theory, 128 Reagan, Ronald, 94 realist IR theories, 177, 178, 184, 186 required operating capabilities (ROCs), 72, 83 Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA), 146 – 47 Rhee Syngman anti-North identity and, 124 UNC and, 86–87 U.S. and, 115 weapons production and, 73 RisCassi, Robert, 162 risk management program, 71 Roh Moo-Hyun, 26, 197, 198 Roh Tae-Woo, 70, 124, 167 ROKIT (ROK indigenous tank), 82–84 Roy, Denny, 129

Russia China and, 2 NATO and, 60 North Korea and, 31, 57, 142 oil trade, 31 Poland and, 15 Procurement Headquarters and, 97 Roh Tae-Woo and, 124 South Korea and, 142, 146, 159 Samsung, 84, 85 sanctions, North Korea and, 132–134 sasam sat’ae, 116 Saudi Arabia, weapons purchases, 67, 72 Schwartz, Thomas A., 172 Science Technology Cooperation Agreement, 74 Science Technology Forum, 74 Science Technology Joint Committee, 74 Scientists & Engineers Exchange Program, 74 Security Consultative Meetings (SCMs) 1999 Joint Communiqué, 172 ACC and, 90 ADD and, 76 CFC and, 87 creation of, 89 military industry cooperation and, 75 military reductions and, 56, 170 MND and, 83 North Korea’s nuclear development and, 166 –168 team specificity and, 95–98 U.S.–South Korean alliance and, 148, 201 silent consensus, 149–152 Singlaub, John, 106 social identity, 16 –21 homogenization and, 190–192 South Korea, 2, 7, 19, 25–26

Index South-North Basic Agreement, 166, 167 Soviet Union Afghanistan and, 106 AirLand Battle Doctrine and, 93–94 asset specificity and, 176, 187–188 Cold War and, 38, 41, 116, 153 Egypt and, 21, 181, 185, 187 military doctrine, 38–39 NATO and, 183 North Korea and, 3, 46 South Korea and, 57, 113 tanks, 33–34 totalitarianism and, 127–128 U.S.-Korea alliance and, 62, 104 Warsaw Pact and, 129 special forces, countermeasures and, 49–54 Status of the Forces Agreement (SOFA), 198, 199 Stockholm International peace Research Institute (SIPRI), 135 strategic uncertainty, 58, 149, 151, 203 Sun Tzu, 107 sunshine policy, 176, 192, 197, 198 surface-to-air missiles, 71, 102 T-62, 33, 34, 44 T-72, 34, 142–143 Taejon Agreement, 86 Taepodong missiles, 154–155 TASCFORM, 30 team specificity, 95–98 Team Spirit exercise, 56, 168, 169 technical data packages (TDPs), 75–77, 79, 81 Tenet, George, 163 terrorism North Korea and, 113, 125–126, 132, 133, 160 state sponsorship of, 158 WMDs and, 153 Texas Instruments, 84

285

Trade Agreement Extension Act, 132 Trading with the Enemy Act, 19, 132 Ulchi exercise, 88 United Nations, 121, 131–132 United Nations Command (UNC), 86–90 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, 8 U.S. Forces Korea (USFK), 30, 56, 126 U.S.-Iran alliance asset specificity and, 16 institutionalization and, 21 U.S.-Japan alliance, 1, 152 U.S.-Korea alliance alliance specificity and, 16, 23 asset specificity and, 64, 138–148, 175 at turn of century, 196 –198 China and, 59 CFC and, 89 DEA and, 74 doctrinal integration and, 92 end of Cold War and, 56, 153 equipment specificity and, 64 – 69 future of, 149, 198 –205 George H. W. Bush and, 4, 165–71 identity and, 7, 111, 126, 136 in the twenty-first century, 196–205 institutionalization and, 21 material capabilities and, 57, 58 media and, 116 neoliberal IR theory and, 6 neorealist IR theory and, 5 Nixon and, 88 North Korea and, 57, 59, 62, 121, 130, 161, 164 nuclear threats and, 153–161 persistence of, 1–2, 4 – 8, 23, 30, 61, 177–186 process specificity and, 86

286 U.S.-Korea alliance—continued progression of, 55 public support for, 112 revitalization of, 171–173 security and, 24 sunshine policy and, 176 threat theory and, 60 weapons production and, 73–86 U.S. Military Government (USMG), 112, 114, 116 Vasey, John, 106 Vietnam War, 114, 118

Index Warsaw Pact, 129 weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), 153, 161, 205 weapons production, 72–86 weapons transfer, 67–72 Western European Union (WEU), 6 Williamson, Oliver, 13, 16 World Bank, 126 Yu Chun-Hyoˇng, 147 Yu Soˇng-Hwan, 123 Yulkok Program, 144 See also Force Improvement Program