About 8,000 U.S. and South Korean sailors and airmen are preparing for a big joint military exercise this weekend to tell a wilding-out North Korea to rethink its recent aggression. Get ready forInvincible Spirit.
According to Admiral Robert Willard, the commander of American forces in the Pacific, the carrier *U.S.S. George Washington and a bunch of destroyers from the Navy's Seventh Fleet will head to the Sea of Japan, along with surveillance aircraft and "destroyers, frigates, and some patrol craft" from the South Korean Navy, including the South Korean transport ship Dodko. Over 100 aircraft from the Air Force's Seventh Air Force and the South Korean Air Force are going to fly above. And since a torpedo from a North Korean submarine sank the South Korean warshipCheonan *in March, there'll be anti-submarine exercises as well. It's going to unfold over several days. And if you happen to find yourself in the southeastern South Korean city of Busan, you'll be able to catch the action as it happens.
Special Air components for the exercise include four F-22 Raptors -- the Air Force's beloved jet that Defense Secretary Robert Gates put on ice last year. (Awkward.) The ground forces are taking a knee on Invincible Spirit, contrasting the exercise with last year's mock attack on North Korea. But they'll be involved in follow-on exercises over the coming months, Willard said, just as Naval and Air Forces will also drill later this year in the West Sea, where the Cheonan was attacked. (According to the South Korean paper Chosun Ilbo, China wasn't too keen on the exercise kicking off in the West Sea, and judging from Admiral Mike Mullen's comments in South Korea warning of a lack of Chinese "transparency" about its military intentions, the exercise implicitly sends a message of U.S. potency to the Chinese as well.)
All this comes four months after the North Koreans sank the Cheonan, killing 46 Korean sailors and once again heightening fears of renewed warfare on the peninsula. That makes Invincible Sprit "the first show-of-force exercise post-provocation that’s been conducted by [South Korea] and U.S. for many years," Willard told the Pentagon press. "We fully expect that this will send a strong signal to Pyongyang and to Kim Jong-il regarding the provocation that* Cheonan *represented." When asked what behavior the U.S. wants to see the Norks end, an anonymous Defense official dryly replied, "not blowing up and attacking [South Korean] naval vessels would be a good start."
That was part of the message Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton previewed in a joint trip to the demilitarized zone separating the two Koreas early Wednesday. "Our military alliance has never been stronger and it should deter any potential aggressor," Gates said, with Clinton adding that the North should know "there is another way" for the world to deal with it -- if Pyongyang finally stops its incessant, violent freakouts.
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