"Joint South Korea-U.S. Drills Cost Too Much"? How Much Is Actually Spent? [Fact Check]

[Anchor]

U.S. President Donald Trump has repeatedly stated that joint South Korea-U.S. military exercises are being scaled back because they cost too much. Just how much is the United States actually spending on them?

Fact Check examined the details, reported by journalist Lee Gyeong-won.

[Reporter]

This is not the first time President Trump has brought up the cost of South Korea-U.S. drills.

In March 2019, during his first term and right after the Hanoi summit between North Korea and the U.S., he claimed that a single exercise costs 100 million dollars, or about 140 billion won.

[Donald Trump / U.S. President (March 2019): I stopped the [South Korea-U.S.] exercises a long time ago because they cost 100 million dollars every time we do them.]

Looking at the U.S. defense budget documents,

the expenses spent by the U.S. on joint drills with South Korea are lumped together under the category of "strengthening allied cooperation," making it difficult to separate and tally each individual exercise.

Therefore, experts have estimated the exercise costs based on the expenses incurred when strategic assets like aircraft carriers or bombers are sent to South Korea. This was the case when the South Korea-U.S. Ulchi Freedom Guardian exercise was canceled in 2018.

Specific figures emerged for the first time when the U.S. Department of Defense announced at the time that it had saved 14 million dollars.

The Fact Check team additionally found a report on South Korea-U.S. exercises submitted by the U.S. Department of Defense to Congress the following year. As outlined throughout the report, a single exercise generally costs around 20 million dollars, or about 28 billion won.

This amounts to 0.003 percent of the U.S. defense budget at the time, and 0.05 percent of the estimated cost of the war in Iran.

It was extremely minimal.

Recently, the U.S. Congress released a report stating that joint South Korea-U.S. defense scenarios are becoming increasingly important for deterring China and Russia, which suggests that from the U.S. perspective, joint exercises cannot be evaluated solely on the issue of cost.

Criticism has also emerged within the United States that President Trump, cornered by the war in Iran, improvised groundless claims about exercise costs to pivot the political landscape through North Korea-U.S. talks.

Video by Kim Ho-jin | Design by Yeji | Writer by Kim Hyo-jin | Intern by Park Geun-ho
※ Please note: This article was translated by AI and may contain errors.