Hello, everybody. If you could please turn your cell phone off. It would be really appreciated. Good evening. I hope you enjoyed the food. I would like to thank all of you for coming here to tonights event on behalf of the facility of washington, d. C. , i would like to express my sincere gratitude to our special guest, the director of u. S. Korea and institute,ean assistant director and i am sorry [inaudible] added in 2006, the society operates as a nonpartisan and all volunteer organization dedicated in informing, developing and connecting Young Professionals who are interested in engaged in korean affairs. Our goal is to inspire the next generation regardless of the political affiliations of korea and northeast asia especially. Under the guidance of our Senior Advisor and with support and partnership with the us Korean Institute we have been hosting numerous events such as workshops and panel discussions. Although it puts its members efforts together tonights event is one i was looking forward it to the most. Hoping and planning the longest. Its not only because the general is an inspirational figure who will give us a great talk, but also because he was my commanding general when i was serving in my military duty. So, he is a scholar at the us Korean Institute at john hopkins and a visiting fellow at the center for east asia at the brookings institute. After his retirement 35 years of active duty in july, 2016, his past positions include chief of election support or branch, Civil Military affairs, Strategic Operations Development affairsrector of u. S. At the korean manager he of national defense, commander of a rock special warfare command and the beck Deputy Commander for the first iraq army. As one of the most decorated officers in the iraq military history, his work includes three u. S. Legions of merit and us bronze star medal. Lastly, he is the first korean and a third asian to receive the u. S. Socalled battle metal. Now, ladies and gentlemen please give him a round of applause. [applause]. I know it is customary in the United States to open one of these with a smart joke and im praying i dont become a joke tonight. Andrew, thank you and i also want to thank again the Asian Society for this opportunity. I was tricked into this because andrew said sir, it will only be 20, 30 people. No pressure at all. You can talk about anything and last night he tells me that doctor koo will be here and all that, so ok. I am not going to talk about anything that is confidential or secret. Im going to be very careful in not doing that, but i want to talk about the korea armed forces reform, give you an overview of what your ally has an doing for the past 30, 40 years and try to see where we are right now. Im not going to try to i might sound like that, but im not going to either support one persons agenda or criticize another persons agenda. Im just trying to give you what i think is happening and you can decide on your own and also during our discussion period maybe we can talk about this a bit more. People say that there have been more than 10 to 15 military reforms in the history of the republic of korea armed forces. That can be correct or incorrect as far as how you define reform. Now, most military reform occurs because either you have a new strategy, new way of thinking or if you have a new Weapon System like a machine gun. True guerrilla military reform unfortunately actually comes because you have lost a war and so in most militarys the worst thing that can happen to a military is being successful and if you become successful at it for too long people tend to become comfortable with their situation and you become your worst enemy, but the koreans have been trying to conduct reform for the past 30, 40 years. Now, i would like to start with plan 818. Notice im not mentioning a very important stage in her military history because it was the first time we as koreans started to modernize our armed forces, but we wont park about that today. We will start with plan 818. It started with the president s administration. This is my cheat sheet. So, 818, there are two things for you to remember. The first thing that he wanted to do was create a unified command, creates a chief who would be able to command the ground, air and naval forces. Before this endeavor started, the chief of naval operations, the air force chief of staff, the army chief of staff all had separate command authority to conduct operations for their truth. He wanted because its affected to have a unified command is much more effective peer dots much more effective. It is what the North Koreans have. Thats what most communist states at that time have, so at this time the koreans thought having a unified command would be the most effective way of having a military. Another thing was this concept of dividing command and administrative authority. So, what this means is when you have command of someone you can tell him or her what to do. You can assign that person positions. You can pay them. You can promote them and the whole spectrum. Well, what he wanted to do or what he was forced into doing was he needed to divide the promotion and assignment part from the command part. This was a compromise because the Service Chiefs who had all of this authority were very reluctant to give it up to a supreme chairman. So, in order to come up with a deal that everyone could enjoy he came up with this concept of dividing command and administrative authority. Another challenge that he had was the lingering suspicion by the korean public on creating a super military commander because this was back in 1990, so even then even to this day there was suspicion that if you created a Strong Military strongman, but it was not a politically smart thing to do from a civilian perspective, so because of these two situations it was his idea of having a military reform in the kind of fashion. It did not succeed. It did partially succeeded in that he was able to have a much stronger chairman who now had the authority to conduct operations especially during armistice, so in 94 operational control of Korean Forces were retained by the koreans, so during armistice the chairman had operational control of Korean Forces. Again, due to Political Considerations and because of Service Rivalries and suspicions his aspiration to create a unified command did not come into fruition. During the administrations there was not something you could call a military reform. Yes, they had changes, that none of that. Does not read here, but what is knows full is that during this time because he truly believed peace on the Korean Peninsula was possible that he envisioned a korea that could have the piece. The first notions of korea coming a smaller military started to spring up during this era so, during this time that im talking about south korea had about 700,000 men under arms. The administration is the First Administration that said we could probably do good with about 500,000 and it was a good estimate at that time in these concepts by the time that he became president fulfilled itself into defense reform 2020 and defense reform 2020 had three main focuses, number one was a more balanced tri service , so the koreans thought the army had it too much influence and so they said we need to have a military that is more balanced, which was a little against what our allies thought. Our allies thought we have a great air force. We have a huge navy and we can take care of that for you, but it would be really nice if you did the ground battle. Well, that concept was i wont say challenged, but was different from the defense reform and 2020 concept. Secondly, they wanted a more robust civilian control and during this process wartime operational control became an issue that wartime operational control needed to be retained or transferred back to the South Koreans. Finally, they wanted a smaller force, so in the beginning of the administration they were quite confident they could do this, so the catchphrase at that time was a smaller military, but hightech. Not moving around as much as i usually do because of you. [laughter] one of the things that happened thereafter, so when the administration came in about 75 of the total force was comics total force was conscripts. So we have an increase of 40 more what you would say professionals, so these are at the stay minimum of 4. 5 years in service, normally six to seven years minimum. Its become a much more career force during the past 15 years. Incomes and then comes plan 307. This plan became we had a failure. This plan came about because the North Koreans were able to sneak frigates,k one of our and because he had the audacity to fire about 250 rounds at one of our islands. During these two Critical Incidents we found out that we had a major problem in in our defense. Namely because the Service Chiefs could promote you and page you an aside i find you, guess what the local commanders, were not calling the chairman like they were supposed to. They were calling their Service Chiefs first and so we recognize the fact that we cant lead we cannot leave this like this. So what he wanted to do with plan 307 was give the chairman the authority for promotion at least for the staff on the joint chiefs to be able to train the troops to make some assignments and especially authority on mobilization, so really beefing up the chairmans authority. As a compromise the Service Chiefs who until then had no command authority, the Service Chiefs could promote you and assign you and pay you, but they could not tell you to conduct operations, so as a compromise the chairman would have these new authorities, but the Service Chiefs would have command responsibility as well as authority. This plan met with a lot of obstacles. Again, triservice, rivalry, jealousies and a lot of political elements started to bobby about, well, we cant have a super good group military guy because he might do the unthinkable. Ladies and gentlemen, no military person in korea will never ever again conduct anything against the wishes of the Korean People, but he was a good excuse and during his administration he was unable to pass these laws and so no change occurred, but they established the Western IslandsDefense Command and they were able to reorganize some of the priorities for weapons for pitch four procurement. So until this time korea wanted like i said a more balanced tri service. They wanted bigger ships to go out in the ocean. They wanted longerrange fighters that could cover a wider area. They wanted air refueling capabilities and so forth. The 307 fit plan was focusing on the north korean artillery threat towards soul so theyd bought more could precision guided bombs and of the cyber threats, so they established Cyber Command and the north Korean Special forces threats, against immediate threats they started to change their pure kermit priorities the mets would happen then. Now, we come to the new administration, president clintons administration, so president moons administration. So they recently announced, they are calling it the socalled defense reform 2. 0 because it is an extension of the reform that the administration had started, so they are saying they are going to focus number one on the north Korean Nuclear and missile threat and what this means is , kamdf the kill chain which is the korea area defense the full system and the km pr, korea massive punish men punishment and retaliation. What is that . Punishment and retaliation. Its a rough translation, not even a good translation, but if the North Koreans do something we will hit them hard, so continuation of that policy. Also, this 2. 0 is saying they will have better civilian control and are they are going to focus on making sure all of this waste and fraud related to Defense Industry will be a major focus in what they are trying to get rid. Our transition is also an item that they will focus on and human rights for soldiers. This is what has been going on on the defense reform area in korea for the past 30 years. How are we going to know if we have been a success or not is a big question. I think for most koreans here or my american friends i think you would say that there is no real warm and fuzzy feeling that it was a great success, something is wrong and we dont know what it is. I wont support that notion or criticize that, but maybe we can look into why we might have that kind of feeling about defense reform in korea and what do you do when you are in a situation. I was thinking there must be templates, but i decided to ask a dead chinese guy, so this is what we think he looked like, you all know him. He was born about 2500 years ago and he wrote this famous book. Its not a book, actually its a string of bamboos and he wrote 6000 chinese characters on it and its divided into 13 chapters and if you are able to fully understand his writing, its probably the bible for the conduct of war so there is a that google side to war and an art. The technical side is all math and science, but there is an art form in warfare and he pretty much was able to explain to us what he thought was the secrets of the war. Anyway, the art of war is divided into 13 chapters that we know. Some people think there are more and here are the 13 chapters. Today we will look at chapter number one which roughly translated detailed detail assessment and planning and in the detail assessment and planning you can read this the important point is calculate his chances of victory, so he said in this chapter if you look at the five elements, which is if you looked at these five elements and seven other fundamentals that you could pretty much guess what your probability of success would be and i thought it would be interesting to use this template to see where we are with defense reform. So, its translated into morals. What it actually means is to simplify it is the understanding between a sovereign and his people about what they are trying to do and a wide they are doing this. He said if the sovereign is able to make his people understand why they are fighting for this, then he will have a good chance of winning. Chun is having and it means to know the weather, when its going to be hot, when its going to be called. The yen and the yang because they thought it was related with yange yin and the because they thought it was related with of the direction the wind and in ancient times knowing the direction of the wind was very important and how strong the wind was. Xi means terrain. Will it be flat, hilly, how far it is where the critical matter in calculating what kind of challenges you would have. Chung means general, but leadership, so if you thought a good general needs to have knowledge, needs to be a good person, needs to be a man of courage, a man of integrity. He also thought he needs to be trusted, that he could be a person that could command a trust from not only his subordinates, but by his peers and his boss and he said that the general must be strict. Many people think that that means that the general needs to be strict to his troops. This is misunderstanding. What he meant was that he the general needs to be strict on himself. Lastly, this means law, but as you can see up top its translated as management, so if the organization, the chain of relayed,how orders or how the troops are trained and especially how awards and medals are given out and if i go into the thought of it he said always punish bad deeds and always reward good deeds. This is very important because most of us do the punishing part really well, but we seldom do the rewarding part as good as we do the punishing part, but these are the lessons he had for us. So i went to talk about john and gi first. Out chun and in modern times on the terrain, weather, that kind of set this prebasic, so lets translate that into intelligence and information. How have we been during the reform efforts, been with intelligence and information. For one thing, every article pertaining to reform, defense reform in korea always points to the fact that the south Korean Military lacks required information and intelligence about north korea, so clearly the South Koreans know there is a problem or a shortfall in intelligence gathering towards north korea to the surroundings of the republic of korea. What are we doing about this . According to open sources korea is endeavoring to get new satellites. Global hawk is being purchased through the United States. We are getting new uavs and all of this. Still, despite the emphasis i feel that there are things we could do more on the intelligence and information side and especially i think we can all recognize the fact that the North Koreans have a very robust cyber capability that even decided there was their Nuclear Weapons that they might have, they threaten us right now because they can theoretically wipe out all of our Bank Accounts if they wished. So, in the intelligence and information area from a green to black i would say i wont say its red, but it isnt green either. For chung, leadership, korea like a lot of militaries has been going through a lot of criticism against its military leaders. There are 200 countries in the world and from where i see it korea is not that bad. I mean, we are not 200 and not because im a korean officer or was a korean officer, but i think we are within the 100. I think they are within the 50, but we are still not there yet. We have great potential, but we still need to work a lot, work on this issue of leadership. And although even at this very moment for havi