The recent news of North Korea preparing to test fire their Taepodong-2 missile has continued to bring up the subject of missile defense in Korea to include whether Korea should join the US Ballistic Missile Defense network:

South Korea should participate in a U.S. regional missile defense network to thwart the lingering threat posed by North Korea’s missile programs, the top American commander here said Wednesday.

In an exclusive interview with The Korea Times, Gen. Walter Sharp, commander of the U.S. Forces Korea (USFK), said South Korea should develop a multi-layered missile defense system interoperable with the U.S. high-altitude ballistic missile defense (BMD) shield for defense against a possible North Korean missile attack, the top American commander here said Wednesday.

Sharp made the remarks at a time when tension is growing here amid reports that North Korea is preparing to test-fire a long-range missile capable of hitting the United States and has successfully deployed 3,000-kilomter-range short- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles putting neighboring countries, such as Japan, Russia and India within striking distance.

“The ROK does not have a robust missile defense capability in place and this would likely be one of the bridging capabilities the U.S. would provide until the ROK improves this,” Sharp said in an exclusive interview with The Korea Times this week. ROK is the acronym of South Korea’s official name, the Republic of Korea.

In this regard, both the ROK and U.S. would benefit greatly from interoperability and the exchange of data between missile defense systems, said the general, who concurrently serves as chief of the ROK-U.S. Combined Forces Command (CFC) and the United Nations Command (UNC). “We encourage the ROK to develop a layered and robust defense that provides protection at all levels.”  [Korea Times]

Korea has made a lot of recent progress on their domestic missile shield, but it is being done on the cheap with their purchase of older PAC-2 PATRIOT missile batteries from the Germans as well as fielding AEGIS destroyers equipped with SM-2 missiles instead of the more highly advanced SM-3′s. They are also reported to have decided to purchase the Israeli Green Pine radar which is also not top of the line equipment.

Since the Japanese have joined the US BMD program the Japanese Self Defense Force is fielded with both PAC-3 PATRIOT and AEGIS SM-3 missiles, not to mention the FBX-T radar fielded in Shariki, Japan by the US military to detect missile launches over the Sea that Cannot Be Named.

Even though the ROK military has a second rate missile defense it can still be integrated into the US BMD umbrella if the ROK purchases the data link hardware and software plus associated command and control equipment to interact with the rest of the BMD systems.  If they go with developing their own domestic command and control systems then they will not be able to share data interface with other BMD systems in the region.

It will be interesting to see what they do.