American and South Korean forces on Thursday concluded 11 days of joint military exercises amid flaring tensions between the U.S. ally and North Korea.
The annual Ulchi Freedom Shield drills featured land, air, sea, space and cyber assets in multidomain training that “reflected a range of realistic threats across all domains, including the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’s missile capabilities, GPS jamming, and cyber-attacks, along with lessons learned from recent conflicts,” United States Forces Korea said a statement, using North Korea‘s official name.
This year’s drills also featured a nuclear attack by Kim Jong Un‘s regime, in what the North’s Foreign Ministry called a “prelude to nuclear war.”
U.S. Forces Korea
The U.S. stations more than 24,000 troops in South Korea and includes the country under its nuclear umbrella.
Tensions between the Koreas are at their highest in decades amid the North’s progressing ballistic missile and nuclear programs, spy satellite launches by both countries, and the suspension of a 2018 agreement meant to reduce the risk of conflict along the heavily militarized border.
The U.S. has stepped up its presence in the country over the past year in shows of support, such as port calls by aircraft carriers and submarines and joint air drills that included long-range nuclear bombers and South Korean and Japanese fighter jets.
The combined exercises were “inviting a war as dangerous ones led by the warmongers of the United States and the Republic of Korea,” Pyongyang’s state-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) wrote last week, using South Korea’s official name.
The media outlet said some civil society organizations in the South had protested the drills “in denunciation of the large-scale joint military exercises of the United States and the [South Korean President] Yoon Suk Yeol puppet war maniacs.”
The North Korean Embassy in China did not immediately respond to Newsweek‘s email requesting comment.
Also on Thursday, U.S. and South Korean forces concluded five days of drills centered on improving joint strike and reconnaissance capabilities.
These exercises kicked off at the Special Warfare School in Gwangju, which is in the city of Incheon, about 20 miles southeast of the capital of Seoul, the Yonhap News Agency quoted the South Koran army as saying.
The operation included a simulated strike on an enemy facility, with South Korean forces leaving the training zone aboard helicopters, including U.S. Boeing CH-47 Chinooks and Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawks.
Coinciding with the drills on Tuesday, the North test-fired a new multiple rocket launch system, continuing its two-year spate of missile tests that has put Seoul on edge.
Joseph Dempsey, a research associate with the International Institute for Strategic Studies think tank, said in an X (formerly Twitter) post that it was the third time Kim was known to have tested the truck-mounted missile launcher since February.
KCNA praised the platform’s upgraded missile guidance system but did not mention the U.S.-South Korean drills that were ongoing at the time.