US Secretary of Defense James Mattis made the decision to “indefinitely suspend select exercises,” the department said in a statement, with those exercises including the upcoming Freedom Guardian drills in August and two Korean Marine Exchange Program training exercises.
US President Donald Trump unexpectedly announced the decision to suspend US drills with South Korea at a press conference following his summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un on June 12.
Trump described the “war games” as “very provocative” and “tremendously expensive” during the press conference, and said he’d decided to put them on hold while negotiations with Pyongyang were ongoing.
“It really is something that I think they very much appreciate,” Trump said at the time.
But in the statement, chief Pentagon spokeswoman Dana White said any additional suspensions would “depend upon (North Korea) continuing to have productive negotiations in good faith” with the United States.
The United States and South Korea have been close military allies since the armistice ending hostilities on the Korean Peninsula in the 1950s. They regularly hold a number of large-scale military exercises every year.
In 2017, the Freedom Guardian drills involved 17,500 US service members practicing their readiness for a scenario in which the Korean Peninsula was plunged into a crisis, and then open conflict, a defense official said.
Source : Nbcnewyork