Preparing for Military Personnel Reduction and Structural Reform Legislation

A national defense reform bill will be submitted to the National Assembly in October. The bill will contain plans to specialize the Army, including personnel reduction and structural and organizational reforms of military capability.

The Ministry of Defense reported this in its 2005 Defense Ministerial Affairs Report for President Roh Moo-hyun, held at the Grand Conference Room of the new government complex on April 28.

At the briefing, Defense Minister Yoon Kwang-woong reported that the ministry’s main focus will be on a few selected innovative projects like the legislation of defense reform, improvement of the military promotional system, and the rational mediation of conflicts between the private and military sectors. The minister also said, “French defense reform methods and processes, which were prepared on a government-wide scale, will be benchmarked in order to carry out a consistent reform while fully taking into account Korea’s special security conditions and situations.”

To this, the president stressed that “the legislation should reflect the case of France and be carried out in the long run based upon a national consensus.”

The president also added, “Another task the military must do is to settle past histories,” and said, “Just like how Germany’s facing its past faults was made possible by their leaders’ resolution and courage to face the national pain that history revealed, I hope that our military will be born anew by inquiring into the actual matters of the past.”

At a press conference after the briefing, Minister Yoon emphasized that “the legislation of national defense reform will put an end to past experiences of having carefully planned reform plans disregarded whenever one administration was replaced by another.”

This bill, which is expected to be prepared by August by the Ministry of National Defense (MND), will include allocation methods to balance out the proportion of the army, marine, naval and air forces within the camps under immediate or joint supervision of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or the ministry, and structural improvement plans of the military.

In particular, the ministry has decided to increase the privatization proportion of the MND headquarters to 70 percent by 2009 while working on measures to have civilian participation in the promotional hearing committee to promote impartiality in the promotion system.

Sang-Ho Yun ysh1005@donga.com