US, S. Korea to forge plan for military action against North
By William M. Arkin
WASHINGTON: In light of North Korea’s nuclear test, the United States and South Korea have agreed to develop a new contingency plan to take military action against North Korea in scenarios short of North Korea attack or in response to a catastrophic “collapse” in the North.
The new revised plan — CONPLAN 5029 — focuses on pre-emptive action to thwart North Korean moves involving potential export of weapons of mass destruction. Pentagon sources confirm that the new plan will be the first joint US-South Korean plan to take action against North Korea even if the North does not invade or attack the South first.
The development of offensive war plans vis-a-vis North Korea follows two tracks under the Bush administration: The first relates to a general desire on the part of Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld for the military to develop more flexible and timely contingency planning to deal with a broader set of political-military challenges, challenges that go beyond only responding to military provocations by potential adversaries. The second relates specifically to weapons of mass destruction and the national US policy of pre-emption.
In late 2003, in response to Rumsfeld’s “Contingency Planning Guidance” and the Bush administration’s adoption of a policy of pre-emption in its National Security Strategy, the Pentagon began to develop a series of war plans to thwart the development of weapons of mass destruction. The premier plan of the series, CONPLAN 8022, dubbed “Global Strike,” assigned US Strategic Command the responsibility for worldwide planning and coordinating both strikes and raids. [A CONPLAN is an operations plan prepared with less detail than a standing war plan, also known as an OPLAN. The difference between the two is often specificity, but it can also be that the “lesser” CONPLAN just doesn’t necessitate the kind of intricate logistical and force structure planning that goes into a full-fledged war plan.]
CONPLAN 5029 was meant to supplement OPLAN 5027, the long-standing war plan prepared by the US-South Korean Combined Forces Command in case of an all-out war with the North. OPLAN 5027 is solely related to defence of the South in the event of a North Korean attack.
Short of a North Korean invasion, South Korea has a number of national contingency plans relating to North Korea’s collapse. According to the Korean press, the “Chungmoo Plan” deals with a variety of emergencies in the North; Chungmoo 3300, for instance, is a contingency plan to respond to a refugee crisis and mass
migration. Chungmoo 9000 is a southern contingency plan to govern the North.
Originally, CONPLAN 5029 was meant merely to make the South’s planning joint with the United States. But with the development of the US strategy of pre-emption, and with the development of the CONPLAN 8022 “Global Strike” effort, US planners saw contingencies that might necessitate US and South Korean military action as including new focus on Peninsula-specific WMD scenarios and other possibilities involving joint military action.
Thus American planners saw CONPLAN 5029 as including military actions even if there was no direct North Korean attack or provocation, even if there was no internal crisis or emergency justifying external intervention. What is more, the CONPLAN, once turned into a war plan anticipated US “operational control” of joint forces.
When the draft CONPAN 5029 was produced in 2003, South Korea expressed concerns that pre-emptive military action in response to non-attack scenarios would be violation of sovereignty, particularly if the US anticipated unilateral action. [The Constitution of the Republic of Korea stipulates that its territory covers the entire Korean peninsula. In the event of North Korean collapse, the area reverts automatically to South Korean government control, hence the impossibility of unilateral US action.]
The US and South Korea agreed in mid-2005 to limit the focus of CONPLAN 5029 to necessary joint US-South Korean moves should there be one of five catastrophic collapses in Seoul, either as a result of the death of Kim Jong Il, an internal coup or revolt against the communist regime, or some other government crisis with external reverberations.
In April 2005, South Korea further rejected development of CONPLAN 5029 into a full-fledged “war plan” — an OPLAN — until the issue of unilateral US action and command relationships in the event of “collapse” were worked out. The South Korea press interpreted this statement to mean that CONPLAN 5029 was dead, but Pentagon sources say it merely meant that the South had expressed its political concerns about US unilateral action while also limiting the potential scenarios that might precipitate joint US-South Korean action.
On October 10, US and South Korean planners agreed to review CONPLAN 5029 and expand the list of potential North Korean WMD scenarios that might necessitate military action. The US and South Korea are discussing command relationships, rules of engagement, and military actions that might be necessitated in response to ambiguous events that might not fall under the original CONPLAN 5029 “collapse” scenarios.—-Dawn/ Washington Post News Service
