Why Has Equipment Operation in Frontline Units Come to a Halt?

[Choice Times=Eun-Sik Joo, Director, KRIS(Korea Research Institute for Strategy), Retired Army Brigadier General]

A Retired General’s Blunt WarningNational defense is not an object for policy experimentation. Defense policy is not completed through ideology, symbolism, or speed, but through field verification and operational reality.

Recently, the direction of South Korea’s defense policy has increasingly taken on the classic form of desk-bound reform divorced from the field. Institutions are changing rapidly, yet combat power is hollowing out. This is the most serious crisis currently felt on the ground in the nation’s armed forces.

The reality in frontline units goes beyond a simple shortage of manpower. In many units, more than half of the equipment on hand is standing idle because personnel shortages prevent proper operation. This is neither a matter of efficiency nor a temporary phenomenon. The basic principle of combat units rests on the trinity ofequipment, personnel, and training. Once the personnel pillar collapses, the other two are automatically neutralized.

Despite this, defense policy continues to move primarily around equipment acquisition, organizational restructuring, and downsizing. Increasing equipment while the personnel structure has collapsed amounts to nothing more than a display of combat power that will not function on a real battlefield.

Had policymakers taken even a single opportunity to directly check equipment readiness rates, personnel fill levels, and the realities of guard duty in frontline units, such policies would have been difficult to produce. The first step in defense policy should not be paperwork, but on-site verification. Defense reform without seeing the field is not reform—it is a dangerous experiment.

Plans to integrate military academies, change officer recruitment systems, and reorganize force structures all strike at the very foundation of the military. Yet these policies are being pushed through at speed without public hearings, field testing, or phased pilot programs. When defense policy proceeds in this way, it degenerates from reform into administrative convenience-driven restructuring.

In particular, the integration of military academies is not a simple educational reorganization. Military academies are core institutions that reproduce the professional identity of the armed forces. If pursued in the name of jointness without a genuine joint-force framework, such integration risks undermining specialization and creating identity confusion. Policy decisions must present both structural objectives and a phased roadmap.

An even greater problem is that these critical policies are decided by closed committees dominated by so-called experts. Defense reform is not the writing of reports but the redesign of an organization that must fight wars. It cannot succeed without the participation of field commanders and practitioners. One must ask whether the proposed reforms were reviewed in terms of how closely they align with actual methods of warfare.

Today, the most serious issue is the collapse of junior officers. Despite declining troop numbers, the treatment of officers and their command burdens have not improved. Pay systems and service conditions have instead deepened feelings of relative deprivation. Improving enlisted service conditions is necessary, but if designed in a way that accelerates officer attrition, the military’s command structure cannot be sustained. Complaints from junior officers that they are nearing breakdown due to constant parental interference via phone calls should be taken seriously.

The military is sustained by people. Yet current policies are failing to sustain people. As a result, a structure is becoming entrenched in which equipment exists without operators, units exist without combat power. Added to this are discussions of organizational expansion—such as Marine Corps restructuring—unconnected to operational efficiency, pushing defense toward an inefficient structure with rising costs and declining effectiveness.

The Ministry of National Defense should dispatch an observer mission, in some form, to the Russia–Ukraine war to examine the realities and lessons of modern warfare. In the past, following the October Middle East War, South Korea sent inspection teams to Israel and reflected their findings in defense reform. There is no need to send many people. Even a small team could verify realities and share findings. Instead, time is being wasted on baseless arguments about “deployment.”

Decision-makers must listen carefully to frontline commanders. At present, the Navy lacks sufficient personnel to put ships to sea, and tanks are standing idle because crews are below 60% strength, leaving nearly half of armored equipment unused. In the past, even administrative personnel were trained to operate equipment in emergencies. Today, even that has reached its limits. Proposals born of desk-bound theorizing without understanding the field are not worth considering.

This is not the time to move toward a quasi–four-service structure for the Marine Corps. South Korea is not preparing to deploy its Marines to Taiwan, so why pursue a force of 29,000 to justify a four-star general billet? Even campaign pledges must be adjusted if they do not align with reality. Does the Republic of Korea exist for the Marine Corps, or does the Marine Corps exist to fulfill the purpose of the military? These questions demand responsible answers.

Is it not time to transfer roughly 2,000 Marines to the Navy to help man ships? Such a move is necessary for balance within the armed forces.

What South Korea’s defense truly needs is not another reorganization plan, but a comprehensive reexamination of its policy decision-making structure. Verification must come before speed, and operational reality must come before political symbolism. Reform without seeing the field weakens the military, and restructuring without procedure dismantles combat power.

The Ministry of National Defense must return, even now, to the basic principles of field verification, phased validation, and open debate. Defense is not a laboratory. Once a military collapses, it takes ten years to rebuild. This is why an awakening among policymakers is urgently needed.

#DefenseIsNotAnExperiment #CombatReadinessCrisis #FieldBeforePolicy