Analyzing South Korea’s Defense Reform 2020

Abstract

South Koreas defense reform plan aims to transform its defense from manpower-intensive to technology-intensive, from military-dominated to civilian-dominated,and from a service-oriented force structure to a jointness-oriented force structurewith a long-term vision until 2020. To achieve this goal, the defense ministry drafteda defense reform basic law, which is awaiting the National Assemblys approval.Since military transformation is not only fashionable in the era of information andglobalization, but also necessary to resolve five-decade-long problems existing inSouth Koreas defense force. The defense ministry divided its overarching tasks intofive categories: reducing military manpower and correcting service composition ofmanpower, civilianization of the defense ministry, strengthening the Joint Chiefs ofStaff system, securing long-term defense budget, and maintaining and developingthe Korea-U.S. alliance within the framework of a cooperative, self-reliant securitypolicy. In this paper, the aforementioned five major issues are analyzed to discoverpotential problems and propose alternatives to the discovered problems for a successfuldefense reform. To achieve success in the long-term defense reform, it is necessary forthe government to obtain nationwide political support and legalize the specific policymeasures to implement the reform consistently, to finance the reform plan with a