International Perspectives on Military Education
volume 3 | 2026
Building the Foundation before the Crisis
Professional Military Education, Interpersonal Trust, and the Future of Coalition Warfare
Major Hwamok Kong, Republic of Korea Marine Corps
https://doi.org/10.69977/IPME/2026.004
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Abstract: The most consequential moments during coalition warfare are rarely decided by weapons or logistics alone. They turn on whether the commanders making decisions under pressure already know and trust each other. Drawing on the Pacific War’s contrasting cases of trust and its absence, this article argues that professional military education (PME) institutions occupy a uniquely important position in building that interpersonal trust before crises arrive, not by manufacturing specific relationships but by teaching officers to integrate effectively into coalition teams. The U.S.-Republic of Korea alliance serves as the illustrating case, showing how trust built through combat and sustained through combined training and PME functions as a form of strategic capability that no treaty provision or technology can replace.
Keywords: professional military education, PME, interpersonal trust, coalition warfare, U.S.-Republic of Korea (ROK) alliance, combined training, Pacific War, alliance management
Introduction
The most consequential moments in coalition warfare are rarely decided by weapons or logistics alone. They turn on whether the commanders making decisions under pressure already know and trust each other. The Pacific War during World War II (WWII) offers two of the clearest illustrations of this principle in modern military history: a tactical partnership built on shared operational experience that compressed months of planning into a rapid decision and a grand-strategic relationship built on misplaced personal confidence that produced a war termination at maximum destruction and helped set the adversarial terms of the half-century that followed. The difference between these outcomes was not organizational design or technological advantage. It was the presence or absence of genuine interpersonal trust.
This article argues that professional military education (PME) institutions occupy a uniquely important position in building that trust before it is needed, not by manufacturing specific personal relationships but by teaching officers how to integrate into a coalition team and how to build relationships across diverse professional and national cultures. The historical record from the Pacific theater of WWII demonstrates what becomes possible when senior leaders share a foundation of mutual confidence, and what fails when they do not. The author’s experience as a combined training officer planning multinational exercises across the Indo-Pacific, and his current enrollment in the Marine Corps University Command and Staff College at Quantico alongside officers from the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps, and from United Nations Command force-providing nations, offers a practitioner’s vantage point on how PME institutions either cultivate or miss that opportunity. Drawing on these complementary perspectives, this article examines what the Pacific War teaches about trust as a strategic variable, and how combined training and PME function as its primary generators today. The U.S.-South Korea (Republic of Korea, or ROK) alliance, which the author knows from both sides of the partnership, runs throughout as the illustrating case: it shows how trust earned in combat matures into coalition capability, where that capability is now at risk, and why PME must be designed to rebuild it before the next crisis arrives.[1]
MacArthur and Halsey: Trust as an Operational Accelerant[2]
What many strategic historians have described as the most serious organizational weakness in America’s Pacific War was the absence of a unified theater commander. The Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) maintained this arrangement deliberately, arguing that parallel commands offered operational advantages, but the costs in coordination were real.[3] The Southwest Pacific Area under General Douglas MacArthur and the Pacific Ocean Area under Admiral Chester W. Nimitz operated as parallel commands, each guarding its resources and vision, and the relationship between the two men never moved beyond wary professional correctness. MacArthur and Nimitz respected each other’s competence but shared no personal bond, and neither was willing to subordinate their forces to the other. Their commands cooperated when strategy compelled it and competed for resources the rest of the time. This is the baseline against which the MacArthur-Halsey partnership stands out, and the contrast between the two relationships, rather than any comparison drawn from outside the theater, is what most clearly isolates trust as the operative variable.[4]
One factor that prevented this institutional stalemate from becoming operational paralysis was the personal relationship between MacArthur and Admiral William F. Halsey. Thomas Alexander Hughes, in his authoritative biography Admiral Bill Halsey: A Naval Life, reveals a commander of genuine interpersonal sophistication who understood that coalition effectiveness depended on personal credibility as much as on formal command arrangements.[5] Halsey was among the very few senior naval officers who could work effectively under MacArthur. Admiral Thomas C. Kinkaid, who commanded the Seventh Fleet, was another.[6] But it was Halsey whose relationship with MacArthur carried the deepest personal dimension, built during two years of shared operational experience including crisis.
Halsey arrived in the South Pacific during one of the most difficult periods of the Guadalcanal campaign (1942–43), and his willingness to commit his carriers aggressively in support of Army and Marine ground operations, when the situation was most uncertain, convinced MacArthur that his partnership was worth sustaining.[7] That trust produced a concrete strategic result in September 1944. Halsey’s Third Fleet conducted preparatory air strikes across the central Philippines and found Japanese air defenses far weaker than intelligence had projected, a result of severe Japanese aircraft losses earlier in the campaign. Halsey recommended bypassing the planned invasion of Mindanao and striking directly at Leyte, compressing the timeline by two months.[8] MacArthur was at sea observing radio silence. It was Lieutenant General Richard K. Sutherland, MacArthur’s chief of staff, who accepted the recommendation on his behalf and immediately notified the Joint Chiefs. The JCS approved the proposal on 15 September.[9] An approved operational sequence covering several months was set aside overnight.
The mechanism worth noting is not simply that Halsey provided timely intelligence. It is that MacArthur’s headquarters acted on it without hesitation. Sutherland did not call for a staff review or treat the proposal with the inter-Service suspicion that pervaded Washington. The trust MacArthur had built with Halsey had become embedded in the command. It was an institutional culture of trust that two commanders had created together, and no organizational directive could have replicated it. When the partnership faced its most severe test at the Battle of Leyte Gulf (October 1944), and Halsey made a serious operational error by leaving the San Bernardino Strait unguarded, MacArthur did not call for his relief.[10] The trust they had built was resilient enough to absorb a major mistake. Interpersonal trust does not simply accelerate good decisions. It also provides a buffer when decisions go wrong.
Grand Strategic Failure:Roosevelt, Truman, and Stalin
At the grand-strategic level, the Pacific War offers the inverse lesson. Tsuyoshi Hasegawa’s Racing the Enemy reconstructs the final months of the war as a three-way competition in which each party calculated against its allies as much as against Japan.[11] President Franklin D. Roosevelt believed that cultivating a personal relationship with Joseph Stalin would allow the United States to manage Soviet postwar behavior.[12] At the 1945 Yalta Conference, acting on this conviction, he accepted substantial concessions to secure Soviet entry into the Pacific War. Stalin was a calculating realist who honored commitments precisely as long as they served Soviet interests. Roosevelt’s faith that interpersonal warmth could substitute for structural guarantees was a form of strategic naivete.[13]
When Harry S. Truman assumed the presidency in April 1945 following Roosevelt’s passing, the strategic calculus shifted. The Trinity nuclear test on 16 July 1945 and the Potsdam Conference (17 July–2 August 1945) transformed his options. Hasegawa’s central argument deserves particular attention: Truman and Secretary of State James F. Byrnes deliberately omitted any guarantee of the imperial institution from the 26 July Potsdam Declaration, knowing Japan would reject terms that left the emperor’s fate unresolved.[14] The rejection provided political justification for using the atomic bomb before Soviet forces could enter the war. Stalin, meanwhile, maintained deliberate ambiguity toward Japan’s mediation requests while moving more than a million soldiers into position for the Manchurian invasion.[15] In August 1945, events at Hiroshima, the Soviet invasion, and Nagasaki occurred in rapid sequence.[16] Hasegawa argues that the combination of these blows, not either one in isolation, broke Japanese resistance.
The deeper lesson is what the whole sequence reveals. Three allied nations fighting a common enemy were simultaneously calculating against one another about their real objectives. No genuine trust existed among them at the level where it mattered most, and the competitive logic driving those calculations survived intact into the postwar order. The point is not that Roosevelt erred in seeking accommodation with Stalin; given the wartime imperative of Soviet entry against Japan, his options were genuinely constrained. The error was narrower and more instructive: he treated personal rapport as if it were the same thing as trust built through demonstrated reliability over time. The two are not equivalent, and conflating them is a recurring hazard in alliance management. That distinction carries direct implications for how military professionals think about coalition relationships and PME design today.
Trust and the U.S.-ROK Alliance: From Combat to Coalition
The U.S.-ROK alliance was built on a different foundation. During the Korean War, the performance of General Paik Sun-yup and the ROK 1st Infantry Division at the Pusan Perimeter left a lasting impression on American commanders. Paik’s personal courage under fire, and the demonstrated reliability of his troops in defensive positions along the Nakdong River, convinced General Douglas MacArthur, General Matthew B. Ridgway, and Lieutenant General Walton H. Walker that their Korean counterparts were genuine combat partners.[17] The Korean Augmentation to the United States Army (KATUSA) program, and ultimately the 1953 Mutual Defense Treaty, were downstream consequences of trust earned in combat rather than negotiated in conference rooms.[18]
The Combined Forces Command today operates across multiple domains within a broader Indo-Pacific strategic architecture. But a recent analysis published in Military Review raises a concern that the Pacific War cases help contextualize.[19] The digital liaison teams that historically enabled real-time data sharing between U.S. and ROK commands have been reduced for force management reasons. In contingency scenarios, U.S. commanders may find themselves dependent on telephone reports from Korean liaison officers inside a twenty-first-century headquarters. This is where the argument made here bears directly on a present concern. When the technical bandwidth between two commands narrows, the human bandwidth, the prior familiarity that lets a Korean officer and an American officer interpret a terse phone report the same way and act on it without a confirming exchange, becomes the margin that determines whether the partnership still functions at speed. Reduced liaison capacity does not merely remove a convenience; it raises the premium on exactly the kind of interpersonal trust that combined training and PME exist to build. The gap between technical capability and human connectivity is therefore not a separate problem from the one this article addresses. It is the same problem, viewed from the side of consequences.
The MacArthur-Halsey dynamic offers a useful analogy. That partnership worked because it was built through shared operational experience, including crisis, and the same logic applies to combined operations today. Large-scale field training exercises, officer exchange programs, and sustained unit partnerships are not merely readiness activities. They are the mechanisms through which the trust needed for fast, effective combined action is actually built. The documented experience of the U.S. Army’s 3d Cavalry Regiment’s combined training with the ROK Army’s 136th Infantry Battalion illustrates the payoff: Joint training events produced measurable improvements in command post integration and procedural coordination.[20] Precisely because this human infrastructure is built incrementally, it is also vulnerable to interruption: combined training was curtailed during the COVID-19 pandemic and the diplomatic pressures of 2018 to 2019, and the trust it sustains erodes faster than it accumulates. Restoring and protecting these activities is therefore a strategic priority, not a training preference.
PME as Strategic Trust Infrastructure: Lessons from the Field and the Classroom
The argument that combined training builds trust is well-established in doctrine.[21] What deserves closer examination is the specific mechanism through which that trust is actually generated, and how PME institutions can either reinforce or undermine it. The author draws on two distinct perspectives: his experience planning multinational exercises as a combined training officer, and his experience as a student at the Marine Corps University Command and Staff College.
Combined Training: What Actually Transfers
As a combined training officer at the Republic of Korea Marine Corps headquarters, the author held responsibility for two distinct categories of combined exercise. For ROK-U.S. combined exercises conducted on the Korean Peninsula, including Korean Marine Exchange Program (KMEP) and Ssang Yong, he served as a principal planner, developing the exercise design and coordinating execution in partnership with U.S. counterparts. For multinational exercises hosted abroad, including Talisman Sabre in Australia, Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) in Hawaii, Cobra Gold in Thailand, and Kamandag in the Philippines, his role was to plan and coordinate the Republic of Korea’s participation, working within the framework that host nations established. In both cases, his work was at the staff planning level rather than the tactical field level. The observations that follow about what happens among the troops who execute these exercises draw on conversations with the units involved.
What those conversations consistently revealed is that the stated objectives of combined training, which typically emphasize tactics exchange, interoperability, and benchmarking of standard operating procedures, capture only part of the actual value generated. Troops and officers who train together describe something less formal and more durable: a sense of how their counterparts think under pressure, what they can be counted on to do when communication breaks down, and who to call when the next exercise cycle begins. This network of informal relationships extends beyond the immediate participants. An officer who trained alongside a counterpart develops not only a direct professional relationship but access to that counterpart’s network. The friend of a colleague becomes a colleague. Over time, this web of familiarity reaches into logistics pipelines, planning staffs, and liaison functions in ways that no memorandum of understanding can replicate.
The practical effects are tangible. When planners who have worked together before sit down for the next exercise cycle, coordination friction drops measurably. Requests that would take days through formal channels move in hours through established relationships. Supply chains that depend on mutual trust function more reliably when the people on each end already know each other. Combined training builds this infrastructure incrementally, exercise by exercise, year by year. Its value is not visible in any single readiness assessment. It accumulates in the human network that makes the alliance function at speed when the situation demands it.
The MCU Seminar Model: A Different Kind of Trust Building
The author’s experience at the Marine Corps University (MCU) Command and Staff College has produced a different but complementary insight. The most significant product of this educational environment is not found in any particular course of instruction. It is found in what happens when officers from different Services, different nations, and different professional cultures are required to think through the same problems together and defend their conclusions against informed challenge.
The MCU model pairs a civilian faculty member with a military faculty member in each seminar, combining academic rigor with operational experience. Students prepare independently, engage in structured discussion, complete written assignments, and receive detailed feedback. This three-stage cycle of preparation, discussion, and post-submission feedback produces a qualitatively different kind of intellectual development than lecture-based instruction. The author found that his thinking on any given subject deepened substantially at each stage: once in preparation, once through the pressure of defending a position in seminar, and once more through reviewing feedback that identifies the gaps and assumptions he had not noticed. The effect across an academic year is cumulative.
What makes this process particularly valuable in the context of alliance education is what happens when officers from different cultural and professional backgrounds apply it to the same historical material. During seminar discussions of the Pacific War, the Vietnam War, and other shared points of reference, the author observed that officers from different nations and Services frequently interpreted the same events through significantly different frameworks. These differences are not errors to be corrected. They are the product of different educational traditions, national experiences, and professional cultures. Working through those differences in structured discussion, narrowing the interpretive gap through sustained engagement, produces something that no briefing or liaison procedure can substitute for: genuine familiarity with how a counterpart thinks, and confidence in one’s ability to anticipate their reasoning under pressure. This is precisely the quality that allowed Sutherland to act on Halsey’s recommendation without hesitation in September 1944. It is also precisely what is at stake when allied officers meet each other for the first time in a combined headquarters at the onset of a crisis.
Comparative Perspectives: Korean and American PME Models
A candid comparative assessment reveals both strengths and gaps in current PME practice on both sides of the alliance. Korean military education at the intermediate level has historically relied more heavily on structured lecture and instructor-led group discussion than on the Socratic seminar model characteristic of American PME.[22] This approach efficiently transfers established doctrine and institutional knowledge. Its limitation is that it provides fewer opportunities for the kind of sustained peer-to-peer intellectual friction that builds genuine familiarity between officers. Most of the author’s counterparts from other Asian militaries enrolled at MCU have noted similar patterns in their national PME systems.
The American model, in the author’s assessment, is stronger precisely where the Korean model is weaker. The combination of civilian and military faculty brings perspectives to bear that no single institutional culture can provide on its own. The seminar format distributes intellectual authority rather than concentrating it, which more accurately reflects how decisions are made in complex organizations under pressure. The feedback loop built into the assignment cycle creates a habit of reflective self-assessment that strengthens over time.
Korea’s Joint Forces Military University, however, offers a structural complement to what the American PME system already does well.[23] The MCU Command and Staff College seminar is already Joint in its daily composition: a typical seminar of 12 students includes officers from the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps, alongside representatives from external agencies and allied nations. Cross-Service intellectual friction is not a special event at MCU. It is the baseline condition of every class discussion. Korean intermediate-level PME, by contrast, has historically been organized along Service lines, with officers primarily educated within their institutional cultures. Seminars at the Korean Joint Forces Military University in Daejeon have not routinely integrated the same degree of cross-Service diversity that an MCU seminar takes for granted.
Korea has recognized this gap and moved to address it directly. The Korean Joint Forces Military University now designates a sustained period, approximately one month, during which officers from all four Services are brought together physically for Joint instruction in strategy, operational art, and planning. They share classrooms, work through problems together, and conduct exercises as a genuinely Joint group. The physical consolidation compensates for what the daily seminar structure does not yet provide. The result is that Korean intermediate-level officers finish their PME with a period of deliberate, structured cross-Service exposure that leaves a durable professional network behind it.
What the Comparison Teaches: Designing Trust into PME
The comparative analysis above invites a natural question: Should the American PME system adopt something like the Korean model, designating a period during which the intermediate-level schools physically consolidate for Joint instruction? On reflection, the answer is probably not, and the reason is instructive. Korea moved toward physical consolidation precisely because its intermediate-level education has historically been organized along Service lines, so a deliberate period of Joint instruction was needed to manufacture cross-Service exposure that the daily structure did not provide. The American system faces a different situation. The MCU seminar is already Joint by composition, mixing officers from every Service with civilian faculty, interagency representatives, and allied students as its baseline condition. The cross-Service and cross-national friction that Korea must schedule into a special month is, at MCU, simply the texture of an ordinary weekday. Importing the Korean solution wholesale would therefore solve a problem the American model has already solved.
This does not mean the American system has nothing left to consider. Intermediate-level schools already run capstone exercises in which students from multiple Services, agencies, and allied nations collaborate in demanding simulations, and these are genuinely valuable. What such events provide is intense collaboration inside a single school’s culminating scenario; what they do not yet provide is sustained, structured contact across the intermediate-level schools, so that the future field-grade officers of the Command and Staff College, the School of Advanced Military Studies at Fort Leavenworth, the Naval War College at Newport, and Air University at Maxwell Air Force Base build familiarity with one another before they are assigned to the same headquarters. Whether that is worth pursuing, and whether the existing exchange and fellowship programs already address it sufficiently, is a judgment for those institutions to make. The point of the comparison is not to prescribe a particular mechanism for the United States. It is to surface the principle that both systems, by different routes, have arrived at: the interpersonal trust that makes Joint and combined action possible does not appear on its own. Korea builds it through a scheduled period of physical consolidation because its structure requires that; the United States builds it through the daily composition of its seminars because its structure allows that. The lesson is not that one model should copy the other. It is that trust-building is something each system must design for deliberately, in whatever form its own structure makes most effective.
This way of framing the question does not require dismantling existing institutions or importing another nation’s structure. It requires only the recognition that the trust which makes alliances function is one of education’s primary products rather than an incidental benefit, and that each PME system should design for it deliberately in whatever form fits its own structure, rather than leaving it to form only where students happen to overlap.
Conclusion
The Pacific War was decided by industrial production, logistics, and military skill. Its most consequential turning points, however, were shaped by the quality of personal relationships among the people making the decisions. The trust MacArthur and Halsey built during two years of shared operations allowed MacArthur’s headquarters to compress a two-month operational sequence into a rapid decision. Roosevelt’s misplaced confidence in Stalin yielded lasting strategic costs. Truman’s distrust of Stalin, combined with Stalin’s calculations, produced a war termination at maximum destruction and established the adversarial framework that defined the next half-century of international relations.
The author writes from a vantage point that connects these historical lessons to present practice. His experience planning combined exercises across the Indo-Pacific taught him that the operational value of Joint training accumulates in ways that readiness metrics do not capture. His experience at MCU confirmed that PME institutions generate a comparable and equally unmeasurable product: the familiarity, mutual confidence, and interpretive common ground that allow allied officers to function as genuine partners rather than parallel actors. Both forms of investment are essential. Neither is sufficient alone.
The U.S.-ROK alliance motto, “We Go Together” (Katchi Kapshida), describes a form of strategic capability that no treaty provision or technology can replace.[24] Building it requires deliberate investment in the human infrastructure of trust, through combined training, officer exchange, and PME that treats interpersonal familiarity as a deliberate objective rather than an incidental benefit. The two allies have arrived at this same conclusion by different routes. Korea, whose intermediate-level education has been organized along Service lines, now brings its officers together for a sustained period of Joint instruction to build the cross-Service familiarity its structure would not otherwise produce. The United States generates that same familiarity through the daily composition of its seminars, where officers from every Service, alongside civilian faculty and allied students, think through hard problems together as a matter of routine. Neither model is the template for the other. What they share is the recognition that trust must be designed for, not left to chance, and it is that recognition, rather than any particular schedule or venue, that the evidence from the Pacific War to the present alliance most strongly endorses.
Endnotes
[1] The Army Human Dimension Strategy, 2015 (Washington, DC: Department of the Army, 2015), 3.
[2] Portions of the historical analysis in sections 2 and 3 of this article are based on the author’s forthcoming article, “The Hidden Engine of Strategy: Interpersonal Trust in the Pacific War and Its Implications for the Modern ROK-U.S. Alliance,” Marine Corps Gazette (August 2026).
[3] Jason B. Barlow, “Interservice Rivalry in the Pacific,” Joint Force Quarterly (Spring 1994): 1.
[4] Barlow, “Interservice Rivalry in the Pacific,” 2.
[5] Thomas Alexander Hughes, Admiral Bill Halsey: A Naval Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 213.
[6] Gerald E. Wheeler, Kinkaid of the Seventh Fleet: A Biography of Admiral Thomas C. Kinkaid, U.S. Navy (Washington, DC: Naval Historical Center, Department of the Navy, 1995), 255–58.
[7] Hughes, Admiral Bill Halsey, 219.
[8] Trent Hone, Mastering the Art of Command: Admiral Chester W. Nimitz and Victory in the Pacific (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2022), 267–68; Samuel Eliot Morison, History of United States Naval Operations in World War II, vol. 12, Leyte, June 1944–January 1945 (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1958), 13–15; and Michael M. Trimble, Douglas W. Burkman, and Michael L. Simmons, “Movement and Maneuver at Leyte, October 1944,” Joint Force Quarterly 117 (May 2025).
[9] Ronald H. Spector, Eagle Against the Sun: The American War with Japan (New York: Free Press, an imprint of Macmillan, 1984), 430.
[10] E. B. Potter, Bull Halsey (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1985), 291; and Hughes, Admiral Bill Halsey, 256. Hughes argues that Halsey’s decision, though operationally flawed, reflected a coherent offensive philosophy rather than simple recklessness.
[11] Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, an imprint of Harvard University Press, 2005), 3.
[12] Frank Costigliola, Roosevelt’s Lost Alliances: How Personal Politics Helped Start the Cold War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 201.
[13] Hasegawa, Racing the Enemy, 44.
[14] Hasegawa, Racing the Enemy, 155. Hasegawa demonstrates that Truman and Byrnes deliberately omitted any guarantee of the imperial institution from the Potsdam Declaration, knowing Japan would reject the terms.
[15] Hasegawa, Racing the Enemy, 107.
[16] Hasegawa, Racing the Enemy, 238.
[17] Gen Paik Sun-yup, From Pusan to Panmunjom (Washington, DC: Brassey’s, an imprint of Macmillan, 1992), 27.
[18] For more on the history of the KATUSA program, see David Curtis Skaggs, “The KATUSA Experiment: The Integration of Korean Nationals into the U.S. Army, 1950–1965,” Military Affairs 38, no. 2 (April 1974): 53–58, https://doi.org/10.2307/1987235; and Mutual Defense Treaty between the United States and the Republic of Korea (1 October 1953).
[19] Col John A. Bonin and LtCol Mark Balboni, “Mission Essential: Digital Interoperability during Multi-National Joint All-Domain Operations,” Military Review (November–December 2022): 50.
[20] LtCol Josh Silver et al., “Tactical Interoperability through Combined Training: A KRF Story,” U.S. Army, 30 June 2025.
[21] Multinational Operations, Joint Publication 3-16 (Washington, DC: Joint Chiefs of Staff, 2019). The publication identifies respect, rapport, knowledge of partners, patience, mission focus, team building, trust, and confidence as the tenets of multinational operations.
[22] This characterization reflects the author’s service in the Republic of Korea armed forces and the observations of international officers at Marine Corps University. Korean intermediate-level PME, as institutionalized at the Joint Forces Military University, emphasizes lecture-based instruction and instructor-led discussion, whereas the Marine Corps University seminar model is characterized by student-led discussion. See “Hapdong Gunsa Daehakgyo” [Joint Forces Military University], Encyclopedia of Korean Culture, Academy of Korean Studies, accessed July 2026.
[23] Established in December 2011 under the Republic of Korea Ministry of National Defense, the Joint Forces Military University (Hapdong Gunsa Daehakgyo) provides Joint intermediate-level PME for officers of the ROK Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps. See the Joint Forces Military University, official website, accessed July 2026; and “Hapdong Gunsa Daehakgyo,” Encyclopedia of Korean Culture.
[24] MSgt Thomas Duval, “Combined Forces Command Underlines Ironclad Commitment during Ceremony,” Indo-Pacific Command, 8 November 2023.