Analyzing South Korea's Defense Reform 2020

Abstract

Abstract South Korea's defense reform plan aims to transform its defense from manpower-intensive to technology-intensive, from military-dominated to civilian-dominated, and from a service-oriented force structure to a jointness-oriented force structure with a long-term vision until 2020. To achieve this goal, the defense ministry drafted a defense reform basic law, which is awaiting the National Assembly's approval. Since military transformation is not only fashionable in the era of information and globalization, but also necessary to resolve five-decade-long problems existing in South Korea's defense force. The defense ministry divided its overarching tasks into five categories: reducing military manpower and correcting service composition of manpower, civilianization of the defense ministry, strengthening the Joint Chiefs of Staff system, securing long-term defense budget, and maintaining and developing the Korea-U.S. alliance within the framework of a cooperative, self-reliant security policy. In this paper, the aforementioned five major issues are analyzed to discover potential problems and propose alternatives to the discovered problems for a successful defense reform. To achieve success in the long-term defense reform, it is necessary for the government to obtain nationwide political support and legalize the specific policy measures to implement the reform consistently, to finance the reform plan with a stable and steady increase of defense budget, and to coordinate and closely cooperate with the United States on the impact of the defense reform on both Korea's defense reform and the division of roles in the alliance.