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U.S.-South Korean War Games Go High-Tech

Posted on: Sunday, 16 March 2003, 06:00 CST

U.S.-South Korean War Games Go High-Tech

Source: Associated Press Tech News

By HANS GREIMEL, Associated Press Writer

SEOUL, South Korea - A "war" was being waged Sunday across the divided Korean Peninsula with communist fighters bombing U.S. troops, submarines torpedoing ships and tanks shelling enemy bunkers.

But casualties weren't filling field hospitals. This battle was happening in cyberspace, the backbone of massive maneuvers being staged here by U.S. and South Korean forces to practice repelling any North Korean invasion.

The United States already has deployed an intimidating array of weaponry for the war games, including the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson and a wing of radar-evading stealth fighters, which is here for the first time in a decade.

But underpinning the monthlong drills is the Korean Battle Simulation Center in Seoul, where soldiers role-playing U.S. and North Korean forces square off over keyboards 24 hours a day, plotting each other's destruction.

"This is not a video game," said Jude Shea, the retired U.S. Army Lt. Col. who is running the exercises.

The simulation center is in a high-security building filled with rows of computers, dangling wires and huge wall-mounted monitors charting everything from body counts to weather developments.

"Ground is being taken or lost, casualties are being assessed," Shea said. "Equipment is being damaged and destroyed, enemy and friendly aircraft are engaging each other... there are ships that are steaming."

The United States, which bases 37,000 troops in South Korea, says the annual maneuvers are not related to heightened tensions over North Korea's suspected nuclear weapons programs.

But they come at a sensitive time and North Korea objects to the U.S. military maneuvers, calling them a rehearsal for invasion.

Pyongyang's official Rodong Sinmun newspaper reported Sunday that U.S. military moves against the North Korea were "in full swing" and called them "a dangerous military racket to ignite the second Korean war."

South Korea wants the two adversaries to use both direct and multilateral approaches to end the dispute peacefully.

Shea said the current war games were planned nine months ago, before tensions in the region started rising in October when U.S. officials said North Korea admitted having a secret nuclear weapons program.

Washington and allies suspended fuel shipments; Pyongyang retaliated by expelling U.N. monitors, withdrawing from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and restarting a nuclear reactor mothballed for years under U.N. seal.

Shea refused to divulge specific battle scenarios but said they are being used to train 14,000 soldiers.

Another 1,000 computer operators at five nerve centers, including one in Virginia and another in Hawaii, are creating the war conditions that keep U.S. and South Korean troops drilling in the field.

About 90 percent of the maneuvers are conducted in cyberspace, with field commanders punching in their countermeasures to enemy attacks. Others are full-blown exercises, such as next week's amphibious beach assault by U.S. and South Korean Marines backed by the carrier Vinson.

Soldiers playing the North Koreans read about the North's military strategy and comb spy reports.

"Anything we think North Korea would do, we do," said U.S. Army 2nd Lt. James McMillian, who plays his communist counterpart in the computer games.

The computer-assisted war games end April 2.

But no matter how lifelike they become, Shea admits they can't duplicate one of war's grimmest realities.

"The concern about being killed or maimed," he said. "I don't think we will ever achieve that."

The Koreas were divided in 1945, and their border remains tightly sealed.

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