General Kim suggested that, instead of hitting the Kim family compound, the missile strike should destroy the headquarters of North Korea’s Air Force, which was located in Chunghwa and commanded the air defense troops who shot down the aircraft. Chunghwa was a small military town about eleven miles south of Pyongyang. The Air Force headquarters there was a large compound with an office building and a pair of statues of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Un. These could be struck with little chance of civilian casualties. Admiral Um pointed out that North Korea’s Air Force bore responsibility for the mistake and that targeting it was a proportionate response.
“Moon got very angry,” Im explained. “He asked, ‘What’s a proportionate response for more than one hundred schoolchildren? I don’t think there is such a thing.’” Moon then turned the meeting back to Kim Jong Un’s residence. “I think Kim Jong Un must bear some responsibility too. He can’t always get away with things,” Moon finally said.
The South Korean president instructed General Jeong to hit both targets—to use a limited number of long-range missiles to strike both the Air Force headquarters and L-01, the Kim family compound outside Pyongyang.
Foreign Minister Kang made one last effort to take L-01 out of the strike package, raising the idea of consulting with the United States. But Moon turned the discussion aside by stating that this was his responsibility. Im recalled that Moon’s response to Kang’s suggestion that they contact Washington was ambiguous. “What he actually said was, ‘I’ll take responsibility.’ That might have meant that he would personally consult with the Americans, or it might have meant that he would be responsible for not consulting them.”
Moon then asked to speak directly to the commander of South Korea’s Army Missile Command. The subject, Im realized, was no longer up for discussion.
Prior to the events of March 2020, very few people were aware that South Korea maintained an elite military unit armed with long-range ballistic and cruise missiles. Once in a while, a South Korean leader might attend a missile test. But the military units assigned to launch these weapons in wartime were shrouded in secrecy. The South Korean press might allude to the fact that the Republic of Korea (ROK) Army had long-range missiles of its own, but the idea that there were about one hundred such missiles deployed to a half-dozen operational bases scattered across the country was almost never directly acknowledged.
US and South Korean officials did, of course, visit the headquarters of the ROK Army Missile Command in Eumseong County from time to time. Even so, the South Korean military emplaced security measures to conceal the location of this unit, and its precise location was never mentioned in South Korean press reports. When VIPs visited, the location was never described. The main headquarters was also obscured with digital trees in the apps Naver and Daum, South Korea’s versions of Google Maps. Army Missile Command’s soldiers were even required to remove their unit patches, fixed to their sleeves with Velcro, before any photograph could be taken.
On March 21, Major General Lee Jin-won was sitting in his office at the main Army Missile Command outpost when, at 1:42 PM, his secure phone rang. It was President Moon’s staff, informing him that the president wanted to speak with him and that he would soon be in charge of launching a counterstrike. As soon as the call ended, Major General Lee gathered his aides and went into the underground bunker behind the main administrative building.
Photographs from that day show that Major General Lee wasn’t wearing his patch. According to officers under his command, the unit was preparing for yet another VIP visit in a few weeks. The unit was regarded as a “spit-and-polish” unit, although this was largely a function of seemingly endless VIP visits that constantly disrupted training and wreaked havoc on any effort to establish a regular schedule. As Lee walked into his command bunker, the only evidence that he commanded an arsenal of long-range missiles was his dark blue baseball cap with an interlocking A-M-C. The cap was a security violation, but only a very well informed outsider would know what those letters stood for. Most South Koreans did not.
According to transcripts provided by the South Korean Army, in the short teleconference that followed, President Moon directed General Lee to develop a plan to strike L-01, the Kim family compound, as well as the North Korean Air Force headquarters in Chunghwa, with the minimum number of missiles. Moon left it to Major General Lee to determine which units would carry out the strike. All he asked was that the number of missiles be kept to the minimum necessary. He did not want Kim Jong Un to think this was the start of a war.
Major General Lee asked President Moon about his obligation to notify his American counterpart. “General Lee hesitated about taking military action,” explained Lee’s assistant. “He said the plan required him to consult with the Americans. President Moon said that he would take responsibility to inform the Americans. [Major General Lee] seemed uncertain for a moment, but ultimately agreed to follow the order.”
A significant question is why Major General Lee followed President Moon’s directive to disregard established procedures for consultation and ordered South Korean units to launch without informing US Forces Korea, as dictated in contingency plans that had been agreed between Seoul and Washington. The answers offered by officers from the Army Missile Command vary: some blamed Washington, and others observed that in a serious crisis the interests of even close allies may differ. All agreed, however, that the Americans had been slow to recognize that South Koreans no longer saw themselves as junior partners in the defense of their own country and its citizens.
South Koreans of all political stripes had long been irked that, in the event of another war, they would have to surrender control of the country’s military forces to the Americans—the same arrangement that had existed during the Korean War so many decades ago. The humiliation of this arrangement was driven home in November 2017, when South Korean forces had not even been allowed to return fire as North Korea fired heavy weapons across the DMZ to stop the defection of a North Korean soldier. Moon had expressed his frustration with these constraints. “The issues on the rules of engagement… should be discussed, although it is under the [United Nations Command’s] control,” President Moon publicly said. “The people would generally think of a rule of engagement as something that permits our soldiers to at least fire warning shots if a bullet from the North Korean is fired at us.”
On March 21, those frustrations helped drive the crisis forward. The military officials who opposed the strike tried to do so by suggesting that they consult with the Americans. And those who supported the strike wanted to avoid telling the Americans and deal with the consequences later.
Crucially, the officer responsible for actually carrying out the counterattack found himself much closer in his views to the latter camp. Major General Lee saw the choice starkly: following the consultation procedures outlined in the contingency plan would simply result in American pressure to do nothing. “The Americans were just going to tell us no, and we knew that,” his assistant explained. “They said no in 2010. They dragged their feet when we asked for wartime control of our own forces. They came up with reasons why we couldn’t use our rules of engagement in the DMZ. It was always ‘no,’ or ‘maybe later,’ or ‘be reasonable.’ Think of all those dead kids. What’s a reasonable response to that?”
Moreover, in the end, President Moon was Major General Lee’s commander. Whatever ties of professional respect bound Lee to his American counterparts, he was a Korean officer, not an American one. “I think sometimes you know there are rules, but this is still your country,” explained his deputy. “Those students were Korean. President Moon was our commander. We followed his order.”