US Army generals propose larger-footprint, more frequent military exercises in Korea — SkimNews
Get the Geopolitics newsletter
Daily geopolitics — wars, elections, sanctions, the diplomatic moves that move markets. Free.
- Gen. Xavier Brunson, commander of US Forces Korea, proposed moving away from the current model of two big command-post exercises per year toward training "in between those exercises" and spanning the entire peninsula, a distance of nearly 300 miles from Jeju Island to Gyeonggi Province.
- Brunson said lessons from Ukraine's war prompted the shift, arguing forces must train in a "distributed fashion" so adversaries like North Korea cannot apply battlefield lessons learned in Ukraine against US and South Korean troops.
- Lt. Gen. Joe Hilbert, commander of the Eighth Army, clarified that Trump's August 16 Truth Social post on reducing exercises applied only to Ulchi Freedom Shield — whose live portion was cut in half and some joint elements made unilateral — not to joint training writ large.
- Hilbert confirmed that troops from the Army's 2nd Infantry Division were currently training on South Korean ranges in a rotational deployment, and joint training would continue "throughout the year, except from that particular timeline and that particular exercise."
- Brunson cited a recent troop-less exercise that drilled mass garrison evacuation scenarios as evidence of the kind of smaller, adaptive training the command wants to add between the two annual large drills.
- Brunson explicitly acknowledged "ongoing collusion and information sharing" between Russia, China, and North Korea as the backdrop for redesigning exercises, noting adversaries are watching how the Ukraine war is evolving.
Why it matters: The Pentagon is publicly signaling that Trump's peace gesture toward Kim Jong Un narrowed the exercise calendar by one drill, not the joint-training relationship as a whole — giving the administration political cover while the Army reorganizes its force posture for distributed warfare across the full 300-mile peninsula.
Ask SkimNews
