INCHON II IF BY SEA: South Korea Has a Secret Weapon If North Korea Starts a War.

Under the mentorship of the U.S. Marine Corps, South Korea has maintained one of the largest marine forces in the world. As one USMC colonel put it during the Vietnam War, which saw a brigade’s worth of South Korean marines (and their U.S.-trained officers) sent to Southeast Asia, “We taught them everything we know, and now they know it better than us.” Today, the Republic of Korea Marine Corps (ROKMC) consists of twenty-nine thousand marines organized into two divisions and a brigade.

In past years, the ROKMC has operated as a theater reserve, capable of rapidly reinforcing areas where invading North Korean forces might stage a breakthrough. This could be accomplished by moving troops over land, but it could also be done by sea: in 1975, the ROK Navy had twenty landing ships, including eight tank landing ships, and sixty other amphibious craft. If necessary, the ROKMC could stage its own, smaller-scale version of Inchon, though staging an attack into North Korea was not yet feasible.

After the end of the Cold War and the abandonment of North Korea by its Soviet ally, contingency plans involving the ROKMC began taking a more audacious tone. OPLAN 5027-94, one of the Pentagon’s contingency plans for the Korean Peninsula, envisioned a U.S. and South Korean amphibious landing at Wonsan to make an end-run on Pyongyang. The ROKMC would be used not just to defend South Korea, but to destroy the North Korean government.

I don’t know how to say “Semper Fi” in Korean, but I’d wager the men and women of ROKMC do.