Senator: It's time for US military families to leave South Korea

Conducting a non combatant evacuation communicates certain things to allies, adversaries, and internal audiences. It must be employed carefully. I agree that doubling down on stupid, i.e. Injecting more dependents into a destabilizing situation is unwise. In previous conflicts, evac of dependents has been a signal that the situation is about to go to open hostility and kinetic operations. The 1973 Yom Kippur War, Russian dependents from their deployed advisors and diplomats were evacuated from Egypt and it was a tip off.

Evacuatuation of dependents, US nationals, and select third nation nationals (at the request of,our allies) is a deliberate operation that has been rehearsed and the plans updated annually. This was in an effort to improve the one time we did it in Korea...1950. There was no plan. Someone conned the master of a Norwegian fertilizer ship into taking the families off peninsula to Japan. By the time they got to Japan, the families were all ill from exposure to the chemicals. Since then we have done others, becoming a major battle drill for Marine Corps MAGTFs afloat. Notably executed in 1975 during the fall of Saigon and multiple times in several unstable African nations over the last 20 years. CPT(P) Nathan W.