(Corrects rank to captain in paragraph 7, not colonel)<\/p>\n
By Joyce Lee<\/p>\n
SEOUL, Aug 10 (Reuters) \u2013 South Korea and the United States will conduct major joint military drills from August 17 to \u200b27, incorporating exercises to counter drones, GPS disruption and cyberattacks \u200cas they adapt to North Korea\u2019s evolving capabilities, officials said on Monday.<\/p>\n
The annual Ulchi Freedom Shield (UFS) exercise will test operations and support the South Korean government\u2019s emergency readiness drills, the allies said in a joint statement.<\/p>\n
Colonel Ryan Donald, director of \u200cpublic \u200baffairs for the Combined Forces Command, United \u2060Nations Command and U.S. Forces \u2060Korea, said the exercise reflected the changing character of war, including the growing use of unmanned systems, electronic warfare and cyber operations.<\/p>\n
\u201cDPRK soldiers have deployed and fought in Ukraine, and they\u2019ve taken \u200bthose lessons they\u2019ve learned there and brought them back to North Korea,\u201d said Donald, using the initials of the North\u2019s official name, \u2060the Democratic People\u2019s Republic of Korea.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat \u2060changes the DPRK capability, and our training accounts for \u200bthat threat,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
The drills were strictly focused on threats to the \u200bKorean Peninsula and the defence of South Korea, he added.<\/p>\n
About \u200c18,000 South Korean troops will take part, a scale similar to previous years, said Captain Jang Doyoung of South Korea\u2019s Joint Chiefs of Staff.<\/p>\n
While the allies say the drills are defensive in nature, Pyongyang routinely \u2060denounces the military exercise as a provocation that heightens tensions.<\/p>\n
North Korea, which last week fired a short-range ballistic missile towards the sea, has continued \u2060developing nuclear weapons, ballistic \u200cand cruise missiles, artillery and other conventional systems \u2060in defiance of United Nations Security Council sanctions.<\/p>\n
The \u200bdrills come \u200cas relations between the two Koreas remain strained.<\/p>\n
North \u200bKorea has \u2060hardened its stance toward South Korea, revising its constitution this year to remove references to reunification and define its territory as bordering the South.<\/p>\n
A separate defence clause described the North as a \u201cresponsible nuclear weapons state\u201d and specified that the country will advance nuclear weapons development.<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Joyce LeeEditing \u200bby Ed Davies)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"(Corrects rank to captain in paragraph 7, not colonel) By Joyce Lee SEOUL, Aug 10 (Reuters) \u2013 South…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":808813,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,3,21,19,22,20,25,24],"class_list":["post-808812","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-states","tag-america","tag-news","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/808812","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=808812"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/808812\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/808813"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=808812"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=808812"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=808812"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}