US, South Korea begin joint military drills amid opposition from North Korea

By Aamir Latif

KARACHI, Pakistan (AA) - The US and South Korea kicked off annual joint military drills Monday, a move denounced by their arch-rival North Korea.

The allies began the Freedom Shield exercise, which runs through March 20, to strengthen their combined defense capabilities against North Korean "military threats" and Pyongyang's deepening military cooperation with Russia, the Seoul-based Yonhap News Agency reported.

This year's drills mark the first major military exercise since US President Donald Trump took office in January

"The ironclad commitment to the ROK is as strong as ever. We are fully in Freedom Shield 2025. What we are doing right now is building our readiness, capabilities to defend the ROK against any threat," Col. Ryan Donald, spokesperson for the United States Forces Korea (USFK), said at a press briefing last week.

The ROK -- the Republic of Korea -- refers to the acronym of South Korea's official name.

The exercise features computer-simulated drills and on-field training aimed at strengthening interoperability between the two countries.

South Korea will deploy some 19,000 troops for the exercise, with the two sides planning to stage 16 large-scale on-field drills, up from 10 last year, according to the South's Joint Chiefs of Staff.

But live-fire drills will not take place, as the two countries have agreed to pause such training until further notice after South Korean fighter jets mistakenly bombed a village near the North Korean border last Thursday.

North Korea denounced the joint military drills as a "dangerous provocative act," warning that the "random exercise of strength will result in an aggravated security crisis."

In a statement Sunday, North Korea's Foreign Ministry accused the US and South Korea of "persistently staging the large-scale joint military exercises" despite Pyongyang's repeated warnings, the official Korean Central News Agency reported

"This is a dangerous provocative act of leading the acute situation on the Korean peninsula, which may spark off a physical conflict between the two sides by means of an accidental single shot, to the extreme point," the statement said.

Denouncing the exercise as the US's "military hysteria," the statement said it is "going on irrespective of the policy ambiguity inevitably witnessed with the regime change" and "proves the instinctive anti-DPRK practice of the U.S."

The DPRK stands for the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, the official name of the country.

Such joint drills also compel North Korea to become "the most thoroughgoing and more overwhelming in deterring the enemies' various" nuclear war threats against its regime, the statement added.

"The US should be mindful that its habitual hostile policy toward the DPRK, openly denying the DPRK's legitimate existence and victorious advance, will only add justification to the principle of toughest anti-US counteraction...and face the undesirable consequences," it said.