The Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies has welcomed five new senior military fellows, including three active duty lieutenant colonels from the U.S. Air Force and two from the U.S. Army, who will spend the next academic year at Stanford pursuing self-directed study of important national issues.

Former U.S. Secretary of Defense and CISAC faculty member Bill Perry created the program to give military officers the opportunity to take a deep dive into an area of strategic interest.

The fellows will be considering a diverse range of topics, from how to adapt Silicon Valley’s innovative work culture to the Army, to China’s actions in the South China Sea, and the effectiveness of U.S. economic sanctions against North Korea.

You can learn more about our fellows’ military backgrounds and the intended focus of their studies from the brief bios below.

John Cogbill and Scott Maytan will be assigned to the Center for International Security and Cooperation.

John Chu, Ryan Blake and Jose Sumangil will be based at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center.

LTC John Cogbill

LTC John Cogbill was commissioned as an Infantry officer from the United States Military Academy in 1994 and has held a variety of positions in both conventional and special operations units. John’s first assignment was as a Platoon Leader and Executive Officer in the 82nd Airborne Division. John then served two years in the 1st Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment as a Platoon Leader and Civil-Military Affairs Officer. Next, John served three years in Alaska as an Airborne Rifle Company Commander and the Aide-de-Camp to the Commanding General. After earning his MPA from the Harvard Kennedy School, John taught Economics in the Social Sciences Department at West Point. Following the Command and General Staff College, he spent two years as a Combined Arms Battalion Executive Officer in the 1st Cavalry Division. He then served as the Strategic Plans and Requirements Officer for the 75th Ranger Regiment. Most recently, John commanded the Reconnaissance and Surveillance Squadron for the U.S. Army Third Corps. John has deployed on three combat and two peacekeeping missions, including two tours in Iraq, one tour in Afghanistan, one tour in Haiti, and a recent tour in Kosovo. He will be exploring how the Army can encourage innovation and use emerging technologies to achieve and maintain a competitive advantage on the battlefield.

Lt Col Scott Maytan, U.S. Air Force

Lt Col Scott Maytan was the commander of a B-52H operational bomb squadron, responsible for ensuring combat mission readiness for any worldwide nuclear or conventional tasking. Lt Col Maytan is a navigator with over 2500 flying hours, primarily in the B-52H, and is a graduate of both the Command and General Staff College (U.S. Army) and the U.S. Air Force Weapons School. He has served four operational assignments, as an advanced tactics instructor, and also a tour at the Pentagon where he developed Air Force positions concerning long-range strike and aircraft nuclear requirements. Lt Col Maytan has served three combat deployments for Operations Desert Fox (Southern Watch), Allied Force and Iraqi Freedom and has also deployed four times supporting USPACOM’s Continuous Bomber Presence mission. Maytan will be studying the “red-lines” that shape Western deterrence posture, and how strategic action and deterrence posture in one region affects others.

LTC John Chu, U.S. Army

LTC John Chu is an active duty officer in the United States Army. Chu has held a variety of leadership and staff positions in his 20 year career. Most recently, he served as the Chief of Intelligence Training at the Department of the Army. Chu has twice been deployed to Iraq and once to Bosnia, with multiple assignments to South Korea, Germany and Turkey. Born in Seoul, he grew up in California and graduated from West Point in 1995. At Stanford, Chu is researching the Korean armistice agreement and the United Nations mission to South Korea. He will also examine U.S. policy toward North Korea, particularly analyzing the “brink of war” tension and developing strategic deterrence measures to reduce risk of unwanted military escalation on the Korean Peninsula. For both research streams, Chu aims to produce analyses and recommendations that could inform a policy audience.

Lt Col Ryan Blake, U.S. Air Force

Lt Col Ryan Blake is an active duty officer in the United States Air Force. Blake was the commander of a flight test squadron where he was responsible for the flight test of new Air Force programs. He has over 2,400 flying hours in over 40 types of aircraft, and has held two operational F-15E assignments, including combat deployments in support of Operations Southern Watch, Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom. He had also been positioned at the Pentagon in defense acquisition and the Office of Security Cooperation in Baghdad. At Stanford, Blake is researching the U.S. policy toward China and its relation to Northeast Asia. He aims to discover areas of cooperation between the U.S. and Chinese militaries.

Lt Col Jose “Ed” Sumangil, U.S. Air Force

Lt Col Jose “Ed” Sumangil is an active duty officer in the United States Air Force. During his career, Sumangil has served in a range of operational assignments, including joint staff officer at U.S. Strategic Command where he was a lead planner of the command’s space campaign. Before coming to Stanford, he was the commander of a B-1 squadron and led airmen through combat deployments in support of Operations Enduring Freedom, Inherent Resolve and Freedom’s Sentinel. At Stanford, Sumangil is examining China’s actions in the South China Sea and the Philippines arbitration case regarding Chinese actions there. He seeks to offer perspectives and policy and strategy options to maintain peace and stability in the South China Sea.

In a new book, David Straub explains why massive anti-American protests erupted across South Korea in 2002 and considers whether it could happen again.

South Korea is often seen as a pro-American ally, a model country that went from a poor, postwar nation into a maturing democracy in just four short decades.

But despite a historic alliance between South Korea and the United States, anti-Americanism flared throughout the Asian nation between 1999-2002 when a series of events and longstanding tensions aligned, according to Stanford researcher David Straub.

“It was a sort of venting of steam,” said Straub, an associate director at Stanford’s Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center.

“Many Koreans at the time were grossly overinterpreting issues and incidents involving the United States. And this was because they were viewing the U.S.-Korea relationship through a lens of historic victimization by other nations, including the United States,” he added.

Straub, who held a thirty-year diplomatic career in the State Department, headed the political section of the American embassy in Seoul during those years and was deeply involved in managing problems in the bilateral relationship.

Boiling point

Since the end of the Korean War, the United States Forces Korea (USFK) has been stationed in Seoul – now about 28,500 uniformed personnel.

In June 2002, a USFK vehicle struck two Korean students in a tragic accident. In December of that same year, after a U.S. court martial found the drivers of the vehicle not guilty of wrongdoing, hundreds of thousands of people protested in Seoul and other major Korean cities. Not only did activists partake but ordinary citizens too, he said.

Straub said the South Korean public had been “unintentionally primed” for such a reaction to the USFK traffic accident; it was the “spark that lit the firestorm” after years of escalation. A series of events led-up to the mass protests, they included:

• A few months before the USFK traffic accident, a Korean athlete was disqualified at the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City during a speed skating competition. American athlete Apolo Anton Ohno instead won gold after a disputed call.
• A non-governmental organization in May 2000 revealed that USFK personnel dumped formaldehyde into a drain that ran into the Han River in Seoul.
• In Sept. 1999, the Associated Press published its first investigative story examining the Nogun-ri incident of 1950, when hundreds of Korean refugees were killed in an alleged massacre by U.S. service members.

Asymmetry of attention

Straub said the shaping of Koreans’ views of Americans and fanning of tensions could be attributed in part to an “asymmetry of attention” on the part of the Korean and American publics to the U.S.-Korean relationship.

While the Korean public put tremendous focus on U.S.-Korean relations and the presence of U.S. military personnel in Korea, the American public was unaware of Korean attitudes and feelings, he said.

Similarly during the 1999-2002 period, Korean media reported hypercritical views of the United States and USFK, while the American media paid far less attention.

In negotiating with U.S. officials, South Korean officials would often allude to strong Korean public opinion and demand U.S. concessions. With no American public opinion on Korea issues to point to, U.S. officials were at a major disadvantage, Straub said.

U.S. officials would sometimes note opinions shared by members of Congress, he said, “however, for Korean officials, those claims weren’t as powerful as having a social movement literally on the front doorstep.”

In plain terms, the United States is much larger than South Korea. This very imbalance – which translates to military and economic power – added to Koreans’ assumption that they were “getting the worse end of the bargain,” he added.

“Most Koreans saw Korea as a victim of great powers,” Straub said. “It’s not just the media. It’s more than that, it was – and still is – a shared national narrative.”

Koreans’ sense of national vulnerability is magnified by their historic victimization to neighbors. South Koreans do not want to become a de facto tributary state of China or a colony of Japan again, he said.

Will anti-Americanism return?

USFK incidents were a main focus of Korean attention during the 1999-2002 period, and while there is always a possibility of problems arising, the intensity is gone now, Straub said.

“Some steam is under the lid again,” Straub said. “But I don’t think it’s nearly at the level like it was back then. I’m doubtful that we’d see an exact repeat.”

The media landscape in South Korea has improved and shifted away from its earlier position of “criticize the United States first and ask questions later,” Straub said.

Today, South Korea and the United States are in good standing at the government-level and among the people. President Obama and Korean President Park Geun-hye have an established rapport.   

What troubles Koreans now is North Korea, a Japan focused on collective defense, and the strategic rivalry between the United States and China and its possible implications for Korea, he said.

“South Korea being sandwiched between the United States and China – based on a perception that China is going to be the world’s dominant power – is a real worry for many Koreans,” Straub said, and a large number of Koreans – albeit still a minority – feel that their country must find a more equidistant ground between the two.

Most Koreans, however, still believe in the need for the continued presence of USFK personnel, at least for the time being, said Straub, and must be reassured of their strategic alliance with the United States.

Obama and Park are expected to meet in Washington in mid-October, and Straub said it will be used as an opportunity for both sides to reinforce the importance they attach to the alliance and to pressing North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons and long-range missile programs.

Links to related articles

NK News: South Korean anti-Americanism dwindles, but roots remain: diplomat

NK News: South Korean anti-Americanism: a thing of the past?

Anti-Americanism in Democratizing South Korea, July 2015

Asia Times: American faces Seoul court over infamous unsolved murder

The Christian Science Monitor: South Korea: 20 years later, Californian son faces trial for Seoul murder

JoongAng Ilbo: Is anti-Americanism dead?

JoongAng Ilbo (Korean): 한미동맹은 빈틈없이 튼실한가 전 미국 국무부 한국과장의 진단