S. Korea, U.S. wrap up drills

South Korea and the U.S. wrapped up their four-day joint military exercise in the West Sea on Wednesday, which was largely seen as a move to pressure North Korea in the wake of the Nov. 23 artillery shelling of Yeonpyeong Island.

The large-scale maneuvers, which were initially planned in response to the March sinking of the corvette Cheonan, blamed on the communist state, ended with a logistic support exercise and an operation to escort the carrier strike group. 

During the exercise, the allied militaries showed off their combined military capacity against North Korean provocations by mobilizing some of their core assets such as the 97,000-ton nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS George Washington and the 7,600-ton KDX-III Aegis-equipped destroyer King Sejong the Great.

“We conducted an exercise (on Wednesday) where the allied militaries practiced protecting key military assets such as the aircraft carrier through monitoring and close communication among warships making a vigilant formation around the carrier under multiple enemy threats,” Captain Kim Young-cheol, an official in charge of maritime operations at the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in a press briefing.