Pentagon to replace joint drills with peninsula-wide healing circle
Live-fire exercises are out. Feelings-fire exercises begin Monday.
President Trump has ordered the Pentagon to curtail military exercises with South Korea. In their place, defense officials announced a pivot to trauma-informed readiness. The armed forces will stop rehearsing war and start rehearsing vulnerability.
Officials stressed that the Korean peninsula has been holding seventy years of unprocessed conflict in its body. The DMZ will be reframed as a boundary, which clinicians agree is actually very healthy. Boundaries are not walls. They are invitations to do the work.
"You cannot deter what you have not first validated," said one senior Pentagon empathy strategist, lighting a candle in the tank simulator.
North Korea's participation is unconfirmed. Kim Jong Un once called the president a "mentally deranged dotard," language the working group now codes as a bid for connection. Hurt regimes hurt regimes. I want to hold space for that.
Seoul asked whether the alliance still includes actual defense. Washington called the question "a little activating" and suggested Seoul sit with its need for security and ask where it first learned it.
The 28,500 American troops in South Korea will remain, but as accountability partners. Their new mission is simply to witness.
