By Kang Seung-woo

With the need to achieve both an advancement in inter-Korean ties and recovery of wartime operational control (OPCON) of its military forces, the government here is in a quandary over how to program its springtime combined exercise with the United States.

As part of efforts toward inter-Korean reconciliation, South Korea is advised to consider suspending or scaling down the annual joint exercise that North Korea denounces as a rehearsal for an invasion, but considering its plan to regain OPCON from the U.S., Seoul is also required to carry out a set of large-scale drills to verify its preparedness.

On the one hand, the OPCON transfer, seen as the nation's restoration of military sovereignty, is one of the Moon Jae-in administration's major projects and it wants to take it over before the end of its term in May 2022. But on the other hand, the President also prioritizes engaging Pyongyang in his "peace efforts."

According to the Ministry of National Defense, the allies are in talks over how to configure the upcoming military drill in March.

Since the Hanoi summit between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un failed to reach a deal on denuclearization in February 2019, the allies have adjusted their joint exercises to revive stalled denuclearization diplomacy without provoking the totalitarian state.

In March 2019, they replaced Key Resolve, a simulation-driven command post exercise (CPX), with another CPX, Dong Maeng ― alliance in Korean ― while terminating Foal Eagle, a field training drill, and launching smaller-case exercises. In addition, Max Thunder, the allies' combined air exercise, was also scrapped.

Despite the downsized exercises, however, the North strongly responded with a show of force by firing two short-range ballistic missiles. In addition, the North Korean leader made a complaint of the joint exercise during his meeting with Trump at the border village of Panmunjeom in June 2019.

In fact, in his party congress report, released Saturday, Kim urged the South to "stop imports of latest military hardware and joint military exercises with the U.S."

"Worse still, they are getting crazier about modernization of armed forces, labeling our development of various conventional weapons, which pertains entirely to the just exercise of our sovereignty, a 'provocation,'" he said, according to the state-run Korean Central News Agency.

In that respect, the Kim regime may stage a military provocation if the South and the U.S. carry out an exercise, which would deal a hard blow to the Moon administration which sees the first half of the year as the last opportunity within his term to pitch its peace initiative to engage the North.

"In any case, I would expect North Korea to criticize any drill that will take place," said Ramon Pacheco Pardo, the KF-VUB Korea chair at Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Belgium.