The Korean Army is an active user of social-networking services.

The Army uses it to communicate with parents of enlisted men. To the parents, the 21 months their precious sons are away for their mandatory military service is a nail-biting wait. One common scene is mothers weeping at the gates of Army boot camps as their sons file in to report for duty.

Parcels are delivered home about a week later containing the personal belongings of new recruits. Mothers weep again unpacking the parcels. My mother once told me how she had wept when she got mine.

In a country of mandatory military conscription, parents’ concerns are legitimate. Life-threatening danger is a constant presence during military service: These days roughly 150 soldiers die each year, and many more injured.

So, to alleviate the concern of the worrying parents, the Army is now using SNS and using it very actively. In some instances, schedules of military drills in the boot camps are posted. So are the physical conditions of enlisted men. Through the SNS accounts, parents leave comments and put requests for drill sergeants. Photos are uploaded for parents to find the faces of their sons.

The two-way communication through KakaoTalk or Band continues to be busy once the enlisted men are deployed to permanent duty stations after the basic drill. Master sergeants, platoon leaders and company commanders talk to the parents through SNS accounts to keep them posted about their sons’ situation. Again, a stream of comments, requests and responses.

Officers’ robust SNS communication with parents is just one snapshot of the no-accident and no-controversy priority of recent days in the military, where management of personnel takes precedence over combat readiness. This phenomenon might explain a recent episode of a commanding officer contacting soldiers’ parents for permission to deploy them in a risky operation. Before soldiers were assigned to mine-clearing operations, their parents had been contacted for permission.

What would ordinary parents say to an officer when they received such a phone call or an SNS message? Some parents offered their consent and others didn’t. Soldiers with parents who did not agree were exempted from the duty.

If the logic is extended, in case of a real battle commanding officers would have to inform parents and get their permission before their sons (and daughters) are dispatched for military missions. In fact, the military has long had a policy of asking for parental permission before soldiers are dispatched for overseas peacekeeping operations. There are many different ways to train and maintain the military, but certainly this is not what other countries usually do.

Speculation is that commanding officers are scared of possibility of accidents and resulting disciplinary or legal fallouts. Telling the parents and checking with them first (and having their signatures on file) may be officers’ best defense in case of accidents. Most likely, it is a typical recipe for the armed forces -- strong on paper, weak in real battle.

While the Army apologized afterwards and promised it wouldn’t initiate such parental contact any more, the episode has drawn our attention to one facet of the management-intensive phenomenon in the military camps. Even if phone calls asking for permission to send their kids for risky operations are not going to be made, parental engagement of many different types will continue to expand under the apparent priorities of minimizing responsibility. Two-way communication and Q&As between officers and parents will continue to flood the SNS accounts.

All these transparency-enhancing, parent-accommodating new experiments are good virtues for most of the social activities. But extending the experiments to the military camps, without careful qualification, seems to defy common sense. A phenomenon which looms large given the grave security environment Korea is in at the moment.


By Jaemin Lee

Lee Jae-min is a professor of law at Seoul National University. He can be reached at jaemin@snu.ac.kr. -- Ed.