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Joint Civil-Military Discussion for the Development of Operation Plan
Date: 24 June 2014 (Tues), 1400-1700
Place: National Assembly, Member's Office Building, Meeting Room No. 9
Host: Baek Gun-gi, National Assembly Member
Organizer: Korea Research Institute of Defense Installations (KRIDI)
Opening Statement
by Jinwoog Kim, Director, KRIDI
Good afternoon. I am glad to be here with Rep Baek Gun-gi to hold a useful discussion for the Korean forces’ development for our people’s benefit.
When I was an entry-level officer, I kept skeptic about our forces’ defense concept in the peacetime and our readiness on ‘how to fight’ in the wartime, in other words, operational plan and detail enforcement regulations in a battle. I started to think when I participated in the Gulf War and had an opportunity to observe the war that our operational plan was not efficiently coping with enemy’s tactics, or not sufficiently reflecting transforming battlefield circumstances.
I had a meeting with General Chae Myung-sin on the other day who was an expert in the realm of Communist’s strategy and tactics. I listened his honest opinion on how our forces plan our strategy to fight against communist army. Recently I also discussed with Rep Baek about ‘how to fight’ and we agreed to have an experts’ discussion to suggest our ideas to military about North Korea’s asymmetric strategy.
I experienced people’s strong distrust against military during the time I served as an officer. Since then, it became such a fate for me to research into what to do and how to do to restore trust in military. It also motivated me to initiate the Korea Research Institute for Military Affairs. Military operations without the people’s support cannot be successful because military and people are in a relation of ‘fish and water’. Fish will be dead in dried-up without water.
The last thing we forget in the fight against our foe should be to lessen damage to our people. The previous seminar held by our institute attracted couple of groups of interests regarding military installation, and one of the groups was having troubles in their business and property right because of military installations. They had a hope to obtain some idea addressing these troubles through our institute.
‘Agreement on military installations protection’ is a perplexing task for commanders in urban areas due to different fighting methods of each commander and flexibility of standards as well as political relevancy. Commanders often have to calculate a common denominator of national security and economic efficiency and adapt it into tactical and operational review. It is not ordinary and typical review work, however, commanders in operational units have limited advisers to discuss about this problem.
I would like to discuss with our practitioners and best experts on how we can provide objective standards for commanders and lessen their concerns on the ‘agreement on military installations protection’. The agreement is one of the most important tasks in maintaining desirable civil-military relations, but operational commanders are not able to address them due to their other priorities. The disparity between operational concept of military and city development plan would cause dispute between military and civil society. The structural distrust is a by-product problem from the disparity that our military and civil society need to address together.
Our military forces can prevent frustration among people when the military proactively copes with current circumstances and changing environment of military operations. It has been especially strongly requested after the disastrous Sewol ferry incident that brought huge frustration among people. I hope today’s discussion could be an opportunity to check our concept on ‘how to fight’ and reinforce military installations that would support military operations very well. I expect our attempt would make our military win in the future wars and restore the trust between military-civil relations, which is the core factor in the future war’s outcome. Thank you.
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