October 2, 2025
SEOUL – South Korea’s defense minister sought this week to tamp down speculation that the US could scale back its troops’ presence on the peninsula.
Calling such talk unfounded, he emphasized that even as Washington sharpens its military focus on China, the South Korea-US alliance is deepening, not weakening.
In a dinner meeting with reporters Tuesday, Defense Minister Ahn Gyu-back said he had “never once” heard US leaders or lawmakers discuss reducing or withdrawing the roughly 28,500-strong US Forces Korea troops stationed in South Korea. “The words ‘reduction’ or ‘withdrawal’ are not even on the table,” he said.
Ahn alluded to the scale of US facilities in South Korea as evidence of Washington’s long-term commitment, “The US operates massive bases in Pyeongtaek and Osan, covering more than 24 million square meters.”
His remarks come as reports of possible troop shifts to counter China have unsettled Seoul, raising fears that a thinning of US forces could embolden North Korea. The concerns have been amplified by renewed US pressure on allies to shoulder more of the financial cost of hosting American troops. Ahn stressed, however, that South Korea’s most recent cost-sharing deal “cannot be rolled back.”
At the same time, he acknowledged that Seoul must raise its own defense spending sharply by maintaining an average annual increase of some 8 percent — not to appease Washington, but to meet its own security needs.
“This is not about what the US wants,” he said. “To prepare for the transfer of wartime operational control and strengthen our ability to counter North Korea’s nuclear and missile threats, we inevitably have to increase defense spending by as much as 8 percent annually.”
The Lee Jae Myung government has pledged to pursue the long-delayed transfer of wartime operational command from Washington during Lee’s five-year term. Ahn described ongoing talks with US counterparts as “systemic, stable and proactive,” though he underscored that US troop levels are not part of those discussions under the mutual defense treaty.
On the inter-Korean front, Ahn rejected the idea of South Korea unilaterally halting training near the tense border, even as Seoul pushes to revive a 2018 military tension-reduction pact that collapsed under the previous administration. “Basically, soldiers have to train,” he said. “If both sides agree to suspend such training and North Korea ceases to do so, that could be a different case, but we cannot unilaterally stop.”
The defense chief added that restoring the pact in phases remained an option, but only alongside sustained readiness. Since taking office, the current government has already resumed live-fire drills near the Northern Limit Line, exercises that had been banned under the 2018 accord.
Ahn also sounded alarms about deepening military ties between Pyongyang and Moscow. He said North Korea had dispatched an estimated 16,000 troops to Russia since last year in support of its war in Ukraine, with the latest group comprising military engineers. In return, he warned, the North appeared to be receiving technology transfers “in a considerable scope,” short of Moscow’s most sensitive “core technologies.”
Such cooperation, Ahn argued, makes South Korea’s own buildup all the more urgent. Lee used this week’s Armed Forces Day ceremony to pledge a sweeping military restructuring into a “professional, smart, elite force,” backed by an 8.2 percent increase in defense spending, particularly in artificial intelligence and uncrewed systems.
“Our task is to prepare for the future while sustaining deterrence today,” Ahn said. “The alliance is strong, but in the end, this is about what matters the most to us.”
Ahn, a five-term lawmaker with nearly 20 years of experience on the National Assembly’s Defense Committee, became Korea’s first defense minister in more than six decades to take the post without a substantial professional military background. He took office in July.
mkjung@heraldcorp.com