On a March day in 1995, the President of South Korea, Kim Young-sam stood before the graduating cadets of the Korean Naval Academy . 1 In his address, he called for these new Republic of Korea Navy (ROKN) officers to be part of a blue-water maritime era when, for the first time, South Korean warships would operate across the world. 2 The speech marked a moment when nascent ROKN ambitions to become a modern naval force received public political support. This was a major change and a long-term challenge for a navy that was both operationally and ideationally defined by the post-Korean War mission of deterring North Korea in the littoral waters of the Korean Peninsula. 3 To be successful, not only would it require a substantial leap in technological capability, it would need a shift in mindset within the ROKN, South Korean security stakeholders and the wider public about what a navy is for and the ultimate purpose of South Korean seapower . Is it solely to provide deterrence within the limited context of the North Korean threat or is the ROKN to become representative of a more advanced, independent and globally engaged South Korea?
This is the first English-language book to explore the ROKN and its ongoing process of blue-water modernisation . It examines how South Koreaās understanding of seapower , its strategic environment and political situation has and continues to inform ROKN modernisation. It is a study of how the navy of a previously inward-looking nation, dealing with an existential threat on its only land border, began to look outwards towards the seas that surround it. Although the book delves into the origins of the ROKN, it primarily covers the period after 1988 when South Korea democratised and the foundations for blue-water modernisation were laid. In its current state, the ROKN is one of the worldās most powerful and combat-experienced conventional navies yet it is often ignored within the wider literature on seapower and naval modernisation in Asia.
This book argues that a new perception of South Koreaās maritime security requirements and the ever-evolving threat from North Korea combined with greater South Korean access to modern naval technology facilitated a new and still developing approach to naval operations and seapower, where mobility, multi-functionality, connectivity and lethality have primacy. These strategic and technological factors have coincided with a changing political and alliance landscape that has become more amenable to the concept of an expanded operational role for the ROKN. The book contends that the United States, South Koreaās only ally , first constrained but now facilitates and encourages the ROKNās goal of an expanded operational role. The ROKN has also attempted to leverage the reduced impact of the army (ROKA) in South Korean society after democratisation to engage in a campaign to persuade the public and political elites of the importance of seapower and naval power to South Koreaās security and prosperity. It is shown that this effort has been partially successful and the ROKNās ambitions and arguments for blue-water modernisation have matched the political and strategic vision of successive South Korean presidents. However, this volume emphasises that naval modernisation is a long-term project and resource-intensive endeavour and ROKN ambition remains vulnerable to changes in the strategic environment and the political orientation of the country.
What Is Blue-Water Modernisation?
South Korea has traditionally maintained a singular mindset regarding the development and application of the naval component of its seapower . The existential threat posed by North Korea on land since the end of the Korean War coupled with an asymmetric alliance relationship where the US once controlled the purse strings and still maintains wartime operational control (OPCON ) of the South Korean military framed and constrained the development of the ROKN. Since the navyās inception in 1945, it has been overshadowed by the much larger ROKA. The ROKNās operational approach betrayed its own limitations and the continental mindset of the South Korean government and Ministry of National Defense (MND). The understandable operational priority has been to maintain deterrence at sea in the context of North Korea . In war, the ROKN has been tasked with holding the line until the US Navy (USN) arrives and would, much like in the Korean War , perform missions that would complement their allyās operations. 4
Even as South Korea grew economically and gained the ability to control the direction of its own procurement programs, the ROKNās mission set did not expand. Despite the modernisation of its platforms and the deployment of vessels such as Gearing-class destroyers that were capable of blue-water operations, the ROKN remained focused on the littoral waters around the peninsula. Its modernisation goals were framed by and reactive to the capabilities of the North Korean Navy (KPN) and the ROKN was rarely allowed to take the initiative in terms of the deterrent competition between the two sides. This book shows that the series of army-dominated governments prior to the democratisation of South Korea in 1980s did not consider South Korean seapower as something that could be separated from the strategic situation around the Korean Peninsula and while maintaining parity with the KPN was viewed as important, the investment needed to create a superior ROKN with a wider operational purview was not judged to be of substantial strategic benefit. The constant presence of the US 7th Fleet ensured that the South Korean leadership did not need to consider a more expansive use of South Korean naval power.
It is against this strategic and political background that in the early 1990s the ROKN sought to build its independence, expand its operational roles and make itself more central to South Koreaās current and future security planning. The predominantly northward continental view of South Korean security still dominates in many areas of the MND and the South Korean Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) , yet the introduction of democracy and the gradual expansion of South Korean security and foreign policy interests and goals provided the ROKN with the space to develop and then propose a new operational concept.
The ROKN has framed this modernisation process as the development of a blue-water or ocean-going navy. The term blue-water navy usually implies the ability to operate on the worldās oceans and away from coastal waters, yet its generic nature provides little specificity. 5 The USN describes it as a non-doctrinal term r...