The U.S. and South Korea will kick off large-scale summer military exercises next week but will not conduct training based on a hypothetical North Korean nuclear attack, despite Seoul’s past suggestion that they would.

In a joint briefing on Monday, the two sides announced that this year’s Ulchi Freedom Shield (UFS) drills will run from Aug. 19 to 29 and feature “expanded” combined field training exercises in land, sea and air.

Approximately 19,000 ROK troops will participate, with 48 combined field training exercises planned, according to Col. Lee Sung-jun of Seoul’s Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS).

The drills will “reflect realistic threats in the combined scenario, including North Korea’s increasing missile threats, GPS disruption, cyberattacks … as well as recent warfare patterns,” the allies announced in a joint statement.

But the two sides stated that there will be no drills based on DPRK nuclear use scenarios, reiterating what U.S. Forces Korea commander Gen. Paul LaCamera said earlier this month.

South Korea’s Deputy National Security Adviser Kim Tae-hyo first mentioned the possibility of such drills last December, following a meeting of the allies’ Nuclear Consultative Group responsible for joint nuclear planning in Washington.

Instead, this year’s UFS will focus on “responding to North Korea’s weapons of mass destruction” in general, including “nuclear and missile threats, and deterring the use of nuclear weapons,” Lee of JCS said, similar to previous years. 

And while allies won’t train for nuclear attack scenarios, South Korea will do so on its own as part of drills that will run alongside the joint exercises, according to Lee.

“As part of the Ulchi exercise, we will conduct North Korean nuclear response drills. This will be carried out with the participation of regional units participating in South Korean government exercises,” he said.

The ROK military will “support government departments’ wartime preparedness exercises and actual training, such as cyber attack and terrorism response, and support for public safety, to enhance the nation’s total war capability at the government level to protect people’s lives and safety,” he announced.

Jina Kim, a military analyst and professor at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, noted that Seoul had discussed the possibility of including nuclear attack scenarios in UFS until earlier this month.

She suggested that the U.S. may have concluded it was premature to despite Seoul’s desire to do so.  

“South Korea cannot independently include such things like a North Korean nuclear attack response scenario in the training. We operate based on a shared scenario, which is practically decided by the U.S,” she said, adding that scenario-writing takes several months. 

The allies recently finalized new guidelines on how to integrate U.S. nuclear weapons and ROK conventional forces into a joint strategy for deterring and countering North Korean threats, but the two sides confirmed on Monday that this strategy will not be implemented in this year’s UFS exercises either.

The expert Kim noted that current U.S.-led operational plans are designed for conventional scenarios, making it challenging to incorporate nuclear scenarios into exercises.

“It’s not possible to change this in just a few months,” she said.

Next week’s drills come as North Korea has built new anti-tank barriers and expanded defense lines near the inter-Korean border in recent months, implementing its policy of viewing the ROK as a hostile foreign state. 

But Col. Ryan M. Donald of the Combined Forces Command (CFC) and U.S. Forces Korea told NK News that this year’s UFS will not feature any drills near the demilitarized zone or ROK border islands in the Yellow Sea, stating that training will take place at the same places as the past.

The U.S. side declined to comment on whether it will deploy strategic assets to the peninsula for the drills, after sending nuclear submarines, aircraft carriers and strategic bombers on multiple occasions in recent years.

The expert Kim said the upcoming U.S. presidential election may make it more difficult to incorporate new weapons or assets into the drills.

“The process of bringing in new weapon systems or assets into drills involves proposals from U.S. Forces Korea, which are then sent to INDOPACOM, forwarded to the JCS for review, and then sent back down,” the expert said. “Given that the government will change and people in charge will also change, it’s even more difficult to do anything new right now.” 

Meanwhile, Lee of JCS said there are no plans for trilateral exercises with Japan during UFS, but he noted that South Korea will carry out a final test for its new Strategic Command before launching it later this year to oversee responses to DPRK nuclear weapons.

Edited by Bryan Betts