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High-level military officials from South Korea and the United States started a two-day meeting to discuss the issue of delaying the transfer of wartime operational control of South Korean troops from Washington to Seoul, a government official said Monday.
"The meeting will continue for two days from today. It is a preliminary discussion to reach a final conclusion on the timing and conditions for the transfer of wartime operational control," the official told Xinhua on the phone, requesting anonymity.
The meeting was being held in the Defense Ministry's building. Such high-level talks will be held once a month until October in Seoul or Washington, the official said.
The South Korean delegation was led by Ryu Je-seung, chief of the Defense Ministry's planning and coordination office, and David Helvey, deputy assistant secretary of defense for East Asia of the United States.
The deputy ministerial-level talks came after South Korean Defense Minister Kim Kwan-jin and his U.S. counterpart Chuck Hagel agreed last month to fix the schedule and conditions for the transfer by Oct. 23, when defense chiefs of the two allies will hold their annual Security Consultative Meeting (SCM) in Washington.
South Korean President Park Geun-hye and his U.S. counterpart Barack Obama agreed in April during the summit meeting in Seoul to reconsider when to transfer the wartime command of allied forces from the U.S. Forces Korea commander to South Korea.
Seoul handed over the wartime command of its troops to Washington during the 1950-53 Korean War, and some 28,500 U.S. troops have been stationed in the country as a legacy of the war. South Korea regained the peacetime operational control in 1994.
The wartime operational control of combined forces was initially supposed to be transferred to South Korea in 2007, but was postponed twice to December, 2015. Seoul has asked Washington to delay the transfer following Pyongyang's third nuclear test in February last year.
