US and South Korean forces will next week hold annual military exercises -- routinely criticized by the North as a rehearsal for invasion of the communist state.
This year's Ulchi Focus Lens joint exercise will begin on Monday and last through Sept. 2, the US military command in Seoul said yesterday.
The exercise, conducted every year since 1976, is largely a computer-simulated war game "designed to evaluate and improve combined and joint coordination, procedures, plans and systems for conducting operations critical to the defense of the peninsula," the US military said in a statement.
Last week, North Korea criticized the exercise as "large-scale saber rattling" that shows US intentions to "wind up its preparations for a pre-emptive attack on [North Korea] and drive the situation on the peninsula to an extreme pitch of tension."
A North Korean military spokesman said his country was "fully ready to respond to a war in kind any time," according to the official Korean Central News Agency.
About 32,500 US troops are stationed in South Korea as a legacy of the 1950-53 Korean War, which ended in a ceasefire, leaving the two Koreas still technically at war.
RSS