Jinbu Kim

Most Effective South Korea -- U.s. Combined Forces Command Structure After Returning Wartime Operational Control of the South Korean Military Jinbu Kim

Publisher Marketing: The core of the 50-year South Korea-U. S. alliance, the Combined Forces Command (CFC), was established on November 7, 1978 to employ operational control of the South Korean military and U. S. forces in South Korea with U. S. augmentation from the Pacific and the United States. The CFC has been effective in deterring war on the Korean peninsula. However, impetus for a new combined forces command developed from the diverging U. S. and South Korean perspectives and policies. The necessity for single unified command decreased and the way South Korean people think about North Korea and its alliance with the U. S. changed a lot. With this US strategy and different perceptions toward North Korea, the U. S. began working to transfer operational control of the South Korean military forces to the South Korean government. In 1994, the CFC commander transferred peacetime operational control of the South Korean military to the South Korean government. The CFC is projected to be dismantled during 2012 and wartime operational control of the South Korean military transferred to the South Korean government. The South Korean government needs to focus on how to strengthen the military alliance between the U. S. and South Korea based on an agreement to contribute to the stability on the Korean peninsula and Northeast Asia. The strong military alliance to maintain combat readiness for North Korea conventional threats comes down to CFC structure. Therefore, this paper drew success criteria for an effective command structure from warfighting functions from three historic case studies on multinational command structure (the Korean War, the Vietnam War and the Gulf War) and applied those criteria to identify the most effective South Korea-U. S. combined forces command structure after the wartime operational control of the South Korean military is returned to the South Korean government.