South Korea folds two postponed US drills into its Hoguk field exercise

South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) said on Thursday, 15 October 2026, that this year's Hoguk field training exercise will run from 19 to 30 October, and that two of the seven combined field drills with US forces that were dropped when the allies' Ulchi Freedom Shield exercise ended early in August will be held alongside it. The JCS said the remaining five allied field manoeuvres will be completed before the end of the year.

The Hoguk exercise, first held in 1996, is a large-scale field manoeuvre staged in the second half of every year to strengthen South Korea's ability to defend itself under the leadership of its own military. The JCS said this year's drills would involve roughly the same number of troops as in previous years and that some US Forces Korea units would take part to improve interoperability with South Korean troops.

According to the JCS, the exercise will integrate joint forces across the land, sea and air domains. To better reflect realistic threats, it said, units will train against an opposing force in two-sided, force-on-force manoeuvres, while the JCS battle staff runs a computer-simulated command post exercise and a series of tactical discussions in parallel as part of efforts to keep a robust readiness posture.

Regional commands have started to announce their own segments. The army's 17th Infantry Division said it would exercise from 19 to 23 October across Incheon, Gimpo and Bucheon, working with local government, police and fire services to check response procedures under wartime and peacetime operation plans. A JCS official warned that large numbers of troops and pieces of equipment would move along major roads during the exercise period and asked residents to accept some traffic congestion and noise.

The allied drills now being folded into Hoguk are a leftover from this summer's cutback. Ulchi Freedom Shield, originally scheduled for 17 to 27 August, was cut by nearly half after US President Donald Trump ordered a substantial reduction in the joint drills, in what was seen as a conciliatory move towards North Korea, and the allies also scaled back their field training.

Lt. Gen. Joe Hilbert, who commands the US Eighth Army in Korea, said at the Association of the United States Army convention in Washington on 12 October that the order applied only to Ulchi Freedom Shield, whose live portion was halved and parts of which became unilateral rather than combined. He said US troops were still training with South Korean forces throughout the year, including soldiers of the 2nd Infantry Division on a rotational deployment to South Korean ranges.

At the same convention Gen. Xavier Brunson, commander of US Forces Korea, said the two big annual allied exercises focus too heavily on large command posts. Drawing on lessons from the war in Ukraine, he floated training spread across the peninsula from Jeju Island to Gyeonggi Province and more frequent training between the main exercises. The JCS did not say which of the postponed allied drills would run during Hoguk or which US units would join.

Taiwan, which faces its own pressure to train for a fast-moving war, has pushed its largest annual exercise in the same direction. Its Han Kuang drills, the island's biggest war games since 1984, ran for 10 days from 5 August 2026 in an unscripted format, with command centres at every level fully operational for the first time and units responding to changing orders based on developing threats, Defence Minister Wellington Koo said as the exercise ended on 14 August.