Kim GumHyok, People Power Party Media Spokesperson
The Lee Jae-myung administration is moving rapidly to complete the transfer of wartime operational control, or OPCON, within President Lee’s term.
At a meeting of the Future Defense Strategy Committee in May, Defense Minister Ahn Gyu-back remarked, in language that left room for ambiguity, that there would be no major problem even if South Korea were to assume OPCON tomorrow. After being informed of the remark, President Lee went so far as to publicly rebuke the defense minister’s equivocal position, saying that a defense minister should declare that “there would be no problem at all even if we were to take it over tomorrow.”
Washington also appears to view the transfer of OPCON to South Korea favorably. At the Shangri-La Dialogue later that month, U.S. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth described South Korea’s desire to assume more operational control, more quickly, as encouraging and said that the United States should continue to support such moves. On the surface, Seoul and Washington appear to be speaking with one voice for the first time in years.
Hegseth’s support reflects the Trump administration’s desire for allies to shoulder a greater share of the regional security burden. As the United States seeks to reduce the burden of involvement in conflicts around the world, it is urging South Korea to step forward and assume greater responsibility after seventy years of sharing responsibility for the country’s defense.
Yet Hegseth’s welcome for an earlier transfer does not mean that he endorsed the specific political timetable being pursued by the Lee administration. He emphasized that a balance must be found in a manner that respects the operational plans and responsibilities the U.S. military has carried for decades, while the Trump administration’s position also remains that any OPCON transfer must be based on conditions. Seoul and Washington may agree on the general direction of the transfer, creating a positive atmosphere and making the underlying rationale appear reasonable, but there are still critical questions that must be examined.
I, too, believe that, when the necessary time comes, South Korea should regain control over wartime operations so that it can fight a war under its own command. There is also some validity to the argument that genuine self-reliant defense can be achieved only when a country possesses the operational capability to conduct a war. This effort has continued for nearly two decades since the Roh Moo-hyun administration formally advanced it through an agreement between the South Korean and American presidents in 2006. For a country whose military is ranked among the five strongest in the world, the desire to command its own forces in wartime may be entirely natural.
The problem is not the legitimacy of transferring OPCON, but the Blue House’s impatience in forcing a decision of such magnitude into the timetable of a presidential term. The concern is that the administration, as though racing against some unseen deadline, has set the timetable first and believes it can simply reach the desired conclusion while disregarding preparation and process, ultimately creating a major breach in national security. The first and most fundamental question is whether South Korea is truly prepared to assume wartime operational control.
In 2014, South Korea and the United States agreed on three conditions for the transfer: the South Korean military’s ability to lead the combined defense of the peninsula, the alliance’s comprehensive ability to respond to North Korean nuclear and missile threats, and a stable security environment. The first condition—whether the South Korean military can lead combined operations—is evaluated through a three-stage assessment of the future Combined Forces Command under a South Korean four-star general: Initial Operational Capability, or IOC; Full Operational Capability, or FOC; and Full Mission Capability, or FMC.
