South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said on Wednesday that this month’s Ulchi Freedom Shield exercise, the annual combined drill with United States forces, will end several days early and that its combined field training has been reduced. “Following the U.S.’s suggestion, South Korea adjusted the duration and scale of Ulchi Freedom Shield,” the Joint Chiefs said.
The suggestion had been made in public. On Sunday, President Trump wrote on Truth Social that, “based on my very good relationship with Kim Jong Un,” he was unhappy that the United States takes part in joint exercises with South Korea, called them costly and said they send a signal he considers hostile to Pyongyang; he directed the Pentagon to reduce them substantially. Seoul’s defence ministry initially said the drills would proceed as scheduled. By Wednesday the position had changed. The Pentagon said it had “substantially reduced UFS while continuing training that enhances tactical capability.”
Ulchi Freedom Shield is largely a computer-simulated command-post exercise rather than a mass deployment, and the practical loss of a few days is modest. Its scale has long been read as a barometer of alliance signalling, which is why cuts to it register beyond the training calendar — the exercises were also scaled back or suspended during the 2018–19 diplomacy with North Korea. Defence Minister Ahn Gyu-back said that of fourteen planned combined drills at battalion level or larger, fewer than ten would be cancelled, with some run as South Korean-only events or moved later in the year, and that 159 field training events remain planned for 2026.
North Korea had made no public response by the time of writing.