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The USA’s Buildup Policies of the ROK Armed Forces in the Korean War and its Characteristics

이미숙 1

1안산 시곡중학교

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ABSTRACT

This study examines critically the process by which the Republic of Korea (ROK) Armed Forces, which had 100,000 personnel prior to the Korean War, grew to the size of 6000,000 strong at the cease-fire. What should be the appropriate size of the ROK Armed Forces today? This study returns to the years before and following the cease-fire, when the armed forces began to expand, to find the historical background to the propriety of that size. Notable in particular is the aspect of excessive military buildup, which may have happened because Syngman Rhee’s hard line unification policy and the US military policies were not well coordinated but rather as situations arose. The US buildup plans for the ROK Armed Forces of ten divisions, which it maintained until May 1952, was resonable. Worthy of special attention is that the 10-division plan was being maintained one year into the cease-fire negotiation. This backs up Douglas MacArthur and Matthew Ridgway’s view on the correct dimension of the buildup plan. But the USA changed its policies and augmented the Korean military to 20 divisions surrounding the cease-fire, While the ROK-US Mutual Defense Treaty was signed after the cease-fire, it failed to affect the building plan for the armed forces. The twenty-division plan was already confirmed in February 1953, well before the Mutual Defense Treaty took shape. The buildup achieved despite the signing of the Mutual Defense Treaty was the combined result of Rhee’s concerns over the US Forces withdrawal, his northward strategy, and US Forces’s burden-transferring policies. The excessive size of the ROK Armed Forces, achieved in disregard of the US Forces presence and the Mutual Defense Treaty, became a stumbling block in the ROK’s economic development. Had we trusted more the war-preventing capability of the Mutual Defense Treaty and the US Forces, and limited our active strength to 250,000, the national would have been free from considerable economic strains. In mid-1960s the US judged that US aids and ROK's economy were in difficulty maintaining a 600,000 active force, attempting to reduce it to 500,000 men and diverting the free resource to more economic aid. But an army once built up is not easily downsized, and the matter remains to this day to be solved.

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