The Economist - USA (2021-02-06)

TheEconomistFebruary 6th 2021 29

1

W

hen he didhis basic military train-

ing in 2009, Lee Ju-min was so dis-

connected from the world for four months

that he forgot how to use a computer. Josh

Yang got three minutes of phone time dur-

ing his first six weeks in training in 2016.

But by the time Chon Dong-yeong joined

the South Korean army in 2019, he was al-

lowed to use his mobile phone every eve-

ning, from the end of drilling until lights

out. “My experience in the army was very

different from that of my friends, even

those who started a year earlier,” he says.

The easing of restrictions on soldiers

has been one of the more visible changes in

South Korea’s armed forces in recent years.

But it is only one of many. The government

wants to make the army smaller, more effi-

cient and better able to deal with the chang-

ing threats the country faces. At the same

time, politicians want it to become more

attuned to the increasingly liberal society

that it is there to defend.

The reforms are driven partly by demo-

graphy. South Korea is ageing faster than

any other country in the world. Last year

the population shrank for the first time

since records began. That makes the past

reliance on a big army manned by con-

scripts impossible to sustain, says Sheen

Seong-ho of Seoul National University. It

therefore provides an impetus to overhaul

the command structure, to beef up the navy

and air force, and to acquire more ad-

vanced weapons.

More modern forces are seen as all the

more important because South Korea finds

itself in an increasingly alarming geopolit-

ical environment. Security types like to re-

fer to it as a “shrimp among whales”. China

has shown itself to be hostile: in 2017, after

South Korea allowed the deployment of an

American anti-missile system intended

chiefly as a defence against North Korea,

China punished it with a painful economic

boycott. Relations with Japan, a fellow

American ally, continue to be disrupted by

a simmering argument over Japan’s obliga-

tions to elderly Koreans forced to work in

factories and brothels by the Japanese

army during the second world war. North

Korea, though a fellow shrimp, is still tech-

nically at war with the South and is con-

tinuing to build up its arsenal of both nuc-

lear and conventional weapons.

The shifting dynamics of the alliance

with America are of particular concern. Do-

nald Trump kept demanding that South Ko-

rea cover more of the cost of keeping 28,500

American troops in the country, and mut-

tered about withdrawing them altogether.

In 2019 he called off joint exercises that had

been held with South Korea every year

since 1961. Even with a new president in the

White House, America will expect South

Korea to take on more responsibility and

develop its capabilities in areas such as in-

telligence-gathering, planning, and naval

and air defence, says a military officer in-

volved in the defence reforms. “The new

Defending South Korea

Strengthening the shrimp

SEOUL

The armed forces are preparing for a lonelier future in scarier surroundings

Asia

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