MONDAY, MARCH 17, 2003
US war games go high-tech in South Korea
AP
SEOUL: A "war" was being waged Sunday across the divided Korean Peninsula with communist fighters bombing US 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 US and South Korean forces to practice repelling a North Korean invasion.
The United States has already 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 US 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 US Army Lt. Col. running the countrywide exercises from a high-security building bristling with rows of computers, dangling wires and huge wall-mounted monitors charting everything from body count 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 new concerns about North Korea.
But they come at a sensitive time, when North Korea is locked in a global standoff over its suspected nuclear weapons programs. The North Korean government, which almost daily accuses the United States of planning an invasion, routinely condemns the drills as "escalating the military threat."
On Sunday, Pyongyang's official Rodong Sinmun newspaper said US military moves against the North Korea were "in full swing" and called them "a dangerous military racket to ignite the second Korean war."
Shea said Sunday that the current war games were planned nine months ago, long before current tensions began to spike. He 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 US and South Korean troops drilling in the field.
About 90 per cent of the maneuvers are conducted in cyberspace, with field commanders punching in their countermeasures to enemy attacks. But others are full-blown exercises, such as next week's amphibious beach assault by US and South Korean Marines backed by the carrier Vinson.
Soldiers playing the North Koreans read up on the North's military strategy and comb spy reports to front a realistic enemy.
"Anything we think North Korea would do, we do," said US Army 2nd Lt. James McMillian, who plays his communist counterpart in the computer games.
Tensions in the region have been rising since October, when US officials said North Korea admitted having a secret nuclear weapons program.
Washington and allies suspended fuel shipments; Pyongyang retaliated by expelling UN monitors, withdrawing from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and restarting a nuclear reactor mothballed for years under UN seal.
The computer-assisted war games, which end April 2, are invaluable training in the event a diplomatic end can't be found. 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."
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