The top military officers of South Korea and the United States on Monday assessed that ‘meaningful progress’ has been made to meet the conditions for Seoul to retake wartime operational control (OPCON) from Washington, the South's military said.South Korean Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) Gen. Jin Yong-sung and his US counterpart, Gen. Dan Caine, discussed such details during the 50th Military Committee Meeting held in Seoul, according to the South's JCS. It marked their first in-person talks in three months.’They agreed to continue efforts to meet the conditions required for achieving the OPCON transition and strengthen the alliance's combined defense posture,’ the military said in a release, cited by Yonhap News Agency.’Gen. Jin and Gen. Caine have the same understanding of the meaningful progress made across various fields, as confirmed through the annual evaluation conducted in accordance with the bilaterally agreed-upon standards of conditions-based operational control transition plan,’ it said.The talks came as South Korea has vowed to regain OPCON from Washington within President Lee Jae Myung's five-year term that ends in 2030.In the meeting, Jin and Caine also held discussions on alliance modernization and agreed to enhance the alliance's capabilities, interoperability and combined readiness posture to better respond to the changing security environment and ’emerging’ threats, the military said.They noted that the security environment in the Indo-Pacific has become ‘increasingly complex’ due to North Korea's advancing nuclear and missile threats, as well as an intensifying global arms race.The two sides concurred on the importance of developing an ‘ever-stronger’ combined defense posture under the allies' mutual defense treaty and pledged utmost efforts to ensure peace and stability not only on the Korean Peninsula but in the region.
