Naval defence: US to aid Seoul

Surprised by how easily a South Korean warship was sunk by what an international investigation concluded was a North Korean torpedo fired from a midget submarine...

Surprised by how easily a South Korean warship was sunk by what an international investigation concluded was a North Korean torpedo fired from a midget submarine,senior American officials say they are planning a long-term programme to plug major gaps in the Souths naval defences.

They said the sinking revealed that years of spending and training had still left the country vulnerable to surprise attacks.

The discovery of the weaknesses in South Korea caught officials in both countries off guard. As South Korea has rocketed into the ranks of the worlds top economies,it has invested billions of dollars to bolster its defenses and to help refine one of the oldest war plans in the Pentagons library: a joint strategy with the United States to repel and defeat a North Korean invasion.

But the shallow waters where the attack occurred are patrolled only by South Koreas navy,and South Korean officials confirmed in interviews that the sinking of the warship,Cheonan,which killed 46 sailors,revealed a gap that the American military must help address.

The United States stretched thin by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq has been able to reduce its forces on the Korean Peninsula by relying on South Koreas increased military spending. Senior Pentagon officials stress that firepower sent to the region by warplanes and warships would more than compensate for the drop in American troop levels there in the event of a war.

In an interview last week,Admiral Mike Mullen,chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff,said that the joint training exercise with South Korea planned just off the countrys coast in the next few weeks represented only the near-term piece of a larger strategy to prevent a recurrence of the kind of shock the South experienced as it watched one of its ships sunk without warning. But the longer-range effort will be finding ways to detect,track and counter the miniature submarines,which he called a very difficult technical,tactical problem.

Longer term,it is a skill set that we are going to continue to press on, Admiral Mullen said. Clearly,we dont want that to happen again. We dont want to give that option to North Korea in the future. Period. We want to take it away. NYT