Will South Korea need conscription after reunification?

I have written a personal opinion on whether South Korea will need conscription after the reunification of the two Koreas.

 

Currently, South Korea has a conscription system, requiring all men over the age of 18 and meeting certain standards to serve in the military. With almost all adult males required to serve in the military, the military has become a major concern for many young people, and the country is suffering a huge economic loss as all of its 20-somethings who could be doing much more productive work are going into the military. This is basically because the Korean Peninsula is divided into North and South Korea, which is said to be the world’s powder keg, and it requires a lot of troops because it has many mountains and cities, and the distance of Seoul from the armistice line makes it unacceptable to occupy territory in case of war. It would be natural to think that if unification were to occur and the confrontation between the two Koreas were to be resolved, it would be possible to abandon the conscription system and switch to a recruitment system.
Unfortunately, I don’t think the conscription system can be easily abandoned even if the two Koreas are reunified for practical reasons. First, there are many factors around us that threaten the security of the Korean Peninsula, and even if the conflict between North and South Korea disappears, these problems may become even greater than they are now. The most prominent threat is China, a rapidly developing country that wants to usurp the hegemony of the United States and become the world’s superpower. Even now, China and South Korea are at odds over issues such as the Northeast Passage and illegal fishing in the West Sea. If we look at China’s territorial disputes in the Spratly Islands and the Senkaku Islands, we can expect that a reunified Korea, which will have a direct border with China, will have strong territorial disputes in border areas such as Mount Paektu.
The Korean Peninsula is an attractive maritime bridgehead for China as it is a continental country, and the fact that there is a pro-American country less than 1000 kilometers away from its capital is enough for China to consider a unified Korea as a potential danger and attempt to subdue it.
In addition to China, Japan, South Korea’s neighbor, has conflicts such as the Dokdo issue, not to mention Russia, which will have a new border with South Korea, and Russia, which does not yet have a clear conflict with South Korea, is a military power second only to the United States, so it can be considered a sufficient military threat.
Moreover, as we have seen in the case of Germany’s reunification, any reunification of the Korean Peninsula will require the consensus of neighboring countries, and it is easy to imagine that China or Russia, which share a border with Korea, would demand the withdrawal of U.S. troops as a condition for reunification. In fact, China is demanding the withdrawal of U.S. troops as a precondition for Korean reunification. In such a case, it would be difficult to abandon conscription as the country would have to develop a more self-reliant defense force.
Another reason is that if conscription were to be implemented immediately after reunification, the military would be skewed toward the region of origin of the soldiers. In the South, the declining birth rate has led to a shortage of military resources and a disinclination to join the military, while in the North, young people could easily be expected to join the military in large numbers in order to find jobs immediately after reunification (in fact, the German military kept conscription for 20 years after reunification to prevent this from happening). We can also expect that senior members of the existing North Korean military will be held accountable for human rights abuses and will rarely be included in a unified South Korean army, and that senior positions in the military will be dominated by South Koreans. In this case, the mindset of the newly arrived junior North Korean soldiers and the existing South Korean soldiers who have served in the South Korean military for a long time and occupy senior positions are expected to be very different, which will lead to serious class conflicts in the military. In addition, North Koreans, who are relatively lacking in human rights concepts, are expected to make up a large portion of the military, which is likely to cause serious problems not only internally but also externally. In particular, since the military is a group that can exercise powerful physical force, it is essential for soldiers to understand human rights in order to be part of a democratic society, and if they lack it, they may misuse their physical power, so the issue of human rights awareness among soldiers is an issue that cannot be conceded even if it is controversial, so the issue of bias must be resolved.
In order to prevent this phenomenon, a conscription system that can maintain a certain proportion of North Koreans regardless of where they come from is necessary. Due to the lack of physical condition of many North Korean youths, they are currently unable to meet South Korea’s conscription standards (according to the East Asian Statistical Yearbook, the average height of North Korean men is 158 centimeters, and according to South Korea’s military service examination standards, if you are 146-158 centimeters tall, you cannot serve on active duty as a fourth class), and as the number gradually decreases due to the improvement of nutritional conditions after reunification, the number of people from North Korea in the military will gradually increase, allowing for stable integration.
Of course, there are many problems with the conscription system itself. As we can see from South Korea’s current conscription system, the biggest problem is the human rights of conscripts in the military. No matter how much better the treatment of conscripts and the culture of the military improves, these problems cannot be avoided, as they are forced to join a military that, by its very nature, violates many of their personal freedoms. Also, as mentioned earlier, there is the problem that all of the 20-somethings who could be used for productive work end up in the military, which is a huge loss for the country. There is also the problem that conscripts, who only serve for a certain period of time, cannot be sufficiently skilled to respond to increasingly advanced weapon systems.
This is why some have advocated for a conscription system, which would allow for a highly trained and elite army and only recruit civilians in emergencies. However, since the culture of a country’s military is an important factor in the problem, adopting a conscription system will not eliminate the problem, as seen in the case of Japan’s Self-Defense Forces, and may even exacerbate it due to a lack of public attention to the problem. First and foremost, the Korean Peninsula, which is only 1,000 kilometers long from north to south and is bordered on three sides by the sea, which allows for direct firepower projection from the sea to the rear, has a critical disadvantage in that it is extremely short on time to recruit, train, and deploy civilians into combat, and if an opposing country targets them, they will be too easily defeated. In addition, the recruitment of civilians has the problem of inadequate training for only a month or two, and the quality of the conscripts who go to the battlefield is likely to be poor, and the military’s image is likely to suffer, even in peacetime. In fact, in the case of the United States, which abolished conscription in 1973 and switched to a recruitment system, the rate of military abandonment rose sharply in the 2000s due to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and recruiters recruited mentally ill people and criminals to fill the gap in human resources, causing major ripples in American society. This process has also resulted in poor-quality soldiers joining the military and committing human rights abuses against the local population in Iraq and Afghanistan, which has led to a loss of public trust.
As we have seen above, it seems necessary to maintain conscription in a unified Korea, but the problems of conscription itself cannot be ignored, so what is the best solution?
I would like to propose a militia system as a solution. A militia is a subcategory of conscription, in which officers are selected from among applicants, while the rest are enlisted upon call-up from their regular jobs, and are trained for a short period of time each year and organized into a regular army in case of emergency. Switzerland is a representative country that is actually practicing this system. If a militia system is adopted, it can meet the needs of modernization of the military by allowing professional soldiers to take over tasks that require high skills, and since it is basically a type of conscription, it can solve the problem of bias in the place of origin mentioned above, and it can respond to external threats by convening a large reserve army in a short period of time in case of emergency. In addition, since the actual period of military service under the militia system is only a short-term service of a few months, and after that, the soldiers participate in regular training as civilians, the problem of harsh behavior in the military can be greatly reduced, and the problem of infringement on personal freedom and loss of labor force will be greatly reduced compared to the current conscription system. In fact, in Taiwan, which maintained a conscription system with a 20-month service period in 2003, gradually reduced the number of days of service and switched to a civilian system with only four months of service in 2014, the number of deaths, including suicides and accidents in service, decreased by about 30%, even excluding the effect of the reduction. In addition, the lack of public attention to problems in the military, which is a problem of the conscription system, is also solved, further reducing the problem of harshness. In addition, military tensions with neighboring countries are expected to be reduced, as there is no need to maintain a large army that could pose a threat to neighboring countries in peacetime.
Considering the human rights violations of conscription, such as the restriction of fundamental rights, it would be preferable from a human rights perspective. Unfortunately, the reality of the Korean Peninsula today and in the near future is not favorable for the implementation of conscription. It is right to pursue a conscription system in the long term under the assumption that peace will come to the Korean Peninsula, but due to the nature of conscription, which is easy to abolish but difficult to reimplement, a permanent peace in a unified Korea guaranteed by international treaties should be a prerequisite for the transition to a conscription system, and until then, it seems reasonable to maintain a conscription system in the form of a civilian militia.