• ing. Both of these recommendations were approved and implemented, and
to the best of my knowledge, they are still part of the Korean Foreign Area
Specialist Program today. The final section of the report dealt with my im-
pressions of the ROK armed forces, particularly their army. At this time I
had neither the expertise nor the background to write a truly comprehen-
sive or detailed report, but I did make some points that would later prove to
be quite prophetic. These points are paraphrased as follows:
My experience with South Korean forces in Vietnam and my observa-
tions over the past year have convinced me that the ROK Army is a first-
class fighting force. They are well disciplined, physically tough, and adapt
well to training. The individual Korean soldier is in every way equal to or in
some cases superior to his American counterpart. Their officers are gener-
ally competent and intelligent. They plan cautiously, and for every conceiv-
able contingency, prior to deployment. They are generally by-the-book in
regard to their tactics. Weak points may be a certain lack of flexibility and a
system that does not always reward innovative thinking. At the higher lev-
els their generals sometime appear more concerned with politics than with
strictly military matters.Generals in the United States are hardly novice in the ways of politics,
but their South Korean counterparts during the s and s were in
another league—a reality that I had only begun to comprehend.