SINGAPORE - Defense ministers of South Korea and the United States on Saturday reaffirmed their military alliance and agreed with the progress made so far in the relocation of U.S. troops in Korea, a Korean government spokesman said.
South Korean Defense Minister Yoon Kwang-ung and U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld met on the sidelines of an Asian defense and security meeting in Singapore.
"In this meeting, the two countries reaffirmed that their alliance is significant for stability on the Korean Peninsula and also for the Northeast Asian region and agreed that issues related to their alliance are making smooth progress," said Kwon An-do, assistant defense minister for policy who attended the meeting.
The defense chiefs were attending the Shangri-La Dialogue forum, an annual meeting of defense and security delegates from the Asia-Pacific region that started Friday and ends Sunday.
Rumsfeld expressed his appreciation of the South Korean government's efforts to assist with the realignment of U.S. Forces Korea, Kwon said.
Seoul and Washington agreed in 2004 to expand a military base in Pyeongtaek, 70 kilometers south of Seoul, to make way for the USKF headquarters and other military personnel by the end of 2008. The realignment project, however, has faced fierce protests from resident farmers and activists opposed to the stationing of U.S. troops in South Korea.
The two defense chiefs also reaffirmed their 2003 agreement to transfer the wartime control of South Korea's armed forces from the U.S. military to the government in Seoul, Kwon said.
South Korea voluntarily put the operational control of its military under the American-led U.N. command shortly after the Korean War broke out in 1950. It regained the peacetime control of its forces in 1994, but the right to wartime operational control still remains in the hands of the USFK commander.
The U.S. currently stations 30,000 soldiers in South Korea, a legacy of the 1950-53 Korean War. It plans to cut the number to 25,000 by 2008.
During the conference, Rumsfeld hailed an expanding network of multilateral security cooperation in Asia and called on China to "demystify" its military spending.
Joint actions against terrorism and piracy, and disaster relief helped flesh out a system for an Asian region that has lacked institutions like NATO in Europe and instead relied on U.S. bilateral alliances, the Pentagon chief told defense officials and experts in Singapore.
"Now we see an expanding network of security cooperation in this region, both bilaterally between nations and multilaterally among nations, with the United States as a partner," he said.
"We see this as a welcome shift," Rumsfeld said.
The Pentagon has built close ties with Asian countries ranging from Mongolia to Vietnam, reached out to China and dramatically overhauled America's linchpin alliances with Japan and South Korea, he said.
Rumsfeld used last year's Shangri-La forum to sound the alarm about China's rising military spending and secrecy about its budget and strategy, angering Beijing.
Revisiting that theme gently on Saturday, he said the Chinese had the right to spend on the military as they saw fit but would "benefit by demystifying to some extent the reasons why they are investing in what they are investing in."
With China's growing economic importance, "over time it will be in their interest to be reasonably transparent" and erase suspicions among its neighbors, he said.
At the same meeting, Japanese Defense Agency chief Fukushiro Nukaga said his country
