The United States and South Korea will push ahead with joint war games next month despite rising tension with communist North Korea over its recent missile tests, military authorities said Friday.
The exercise known as Ulji Focus Lens 2006 will take place here from August 21 until September 1, with 8,000 US troops and an undisclosed number of South Korean soldiers taking part.
The exercise features computer-simulated war games conducted at command posts and will not include field maneuvers, a spokesman of the US-South Korea Combined Forces Command said in a statement.
"Ulji Focus Lens is a regularly scheduled, annual training exercise," it said, adding the annual drill began in 1975.
"The exercise is designed to train, evaluate and improve combined and joint procedures, plans and systems for conducting operations critical to the defense of the (Korean peninsula)," it said.
Ulji Focus Lens is one of the two large-scale annual US-South Korea joint military exercises.
The other series is RSOI (Reception, Staging, Onward Movement and Integration) drill, usually conducted in March.
Some 25,000 US troops backed by a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier took part in this year's RSOI drill, which was aimed at testing the capability of US and South Korean commanders to receive and deploy US reinforcements from abroad.
North Korea fired off seven missiles on July 5, provoking international condemnation.
The UN Security Council last week unanimously adopted a resolution condemning North Korea's missile tests and applying limited sanctions, but the move was rejected by Pyongyang, which vowed to carry out further launches.
