(Patch design inked in the Cheju-do Modified Location (Modloc) during Exercise TEAM SPIRIT 1979)

A pal is reading about the run-up to World War Two through the pages of a biography of Dwight Eisenhower. He wrote to me, marveling at the Louisiana Maneuvers, a vast set of exercises conducted by the U.S. Army in the central Cajun State and West Texas in 1940-41.
 
It was before Pearl Harbor but after the startling collapse of the French at the hands of the panzer legions of Heinz Guderian. There clearly was trouble brewing, and the War Department was galvanized into action.
 
Many of the weapons the troops used were purely imaginary. Many folks hoped it would stay that way. Absent the stunning miscalculation of the sneak attack, it is interesting to think how the Army would have found itself in North Africa by 1942.
 
I think we had more time in the old days. That drawing actually turned into a patch. Must have been the disco-era equivalent of scrimshaw, I imagine. While thinking about Louisiana, I found myself drifting back to other exercises of yore, multi-purpose things that were both political and military.
 
Team Spirit was a joint military training exercise held in the Republic of Korea 1976 and 1993. It featured a mass amphibious landing conducted by US Marines from Okinawa and the ROKs. The morbid highlight was always the number of ROKs who would drown in the process.
 
I do not recall any US casualties in what was intended to be a re-creation of the stunning success of Douglas MacArthur’s assault at inchon that cut the North Koreas in half and almost swept the UN forces across the Yalu River and into Red China, then only a few years old.
 
It was potent imagery. I had a chance to play in three of them, both supporting the landing exercise off the southeast coast from the 7th units, and then in 1980 from the Eighth Army HQ in Seoul. They featured everything. The Russians would fly south from bases in Vladivostok, the Gator Navy came up from Japan, and there were close-air support missions, Fleet Air Defense, and dozens of Korean units going ashore with the Leathernecks. It was quite a show.
 
The exercise was scheduled from 1994 to 1996 but cancelled in each year as part of diplomacy to encourage the Government of North Korea to disable the North Korean nuclear weapons program. I got a chance to be in Pyongyang in 1995, so watching the exercises being treated as carrot and stick was fascinating.
 
Pyongyang abandoned the “Agreed Framework” talks to go their own way on the nukes, and the exercise returned, repackaged as “Reception, Staging, Onward Movement and Integration of Forces” (RSOI) until 2007.
 
 As of March 2008, it was renamed as the suitably resolute-sounding term “KEY RESOLVE.” North Korea has denounced the joint military exercise as a “war game aimed at a northward invasion,” and said it would “torpedo efforts to rid the peninsula of nuclear weapons.”
 
The March 8-18 exercise comes as diplomatic efforts are being reinvigorated to revive six-nation nuclear disarmament negotiations after almost a year. There are minute fissures in the North’s implacable resolve that might be exploited, though I have my doubts.
 
The media package for KEY RESOLVE/FOAL EAGLE claims that 10,000 US troops stationed in South Korea will participate, along with 8,000 from abroad, and an undisclosed but significant number of South Korean troops.
 
The FOAL EAGLE component of all this is the interesting thing. It has gone on unabated as an annual combined field maneuver since 1961, and was never a dedicated component of the great recreation of the landings at Inchon. They were real training, and dealt with the reality that Spring was coming, and with it the Infiltration Season by North Korean commandos.
 
Thus, FOAL EAGLE is billed as a purely defensive exercise, intended to test the ability of the draftee force of South Koreans, assisted by the U.S. volunteer force to rear-area operations against a force of Northerners conducting special operations and sabotage against critical infrastructure targets like dams and electric plants.
 
The North is really uptight. They are confronting regime change, the collapse of what passes for an economy, and holding tight to the few nuclear weapons that might (or might not) actually explode.
 
There have even been the first furtive signs of protest in the wake of the currency change. Things are getting interesting.
 
There is an edge of desperation in the bluster that I can detect even from Big Pink.
 
Last week, North Korean radio military accused South Korean and US troops of planning a surprise attack under the pretext of their military exercises and warned it could respond with atomic weapons.
 
I doubt it, since this has been going on as long as I have been alive. But the long thin line of us are still playing at the game, and some pals are going to show up in the waters where I sat at the mission planning table, and dreamed of Marines in the surf, and gators with two heads.
 
Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Subscribe to the RSS feed!