Republic of Korea Armed Forces (1953): Mutual Defense Treaty signed — Section 779: Mutual Defense Treaty signed

English-language memory under-teaches the ROK as an institution and over-teaches it as a US appendix. Korean civic memory is the opposite risk: parade modernity that skips 12.12 (12 December 1979) and the army's political interventions. This atlas splits those files: korea-1979 for the coup, this page for defensive force structure, Hanwha for the works. Intensity is mid because 1950-53 was existential; scale is regional. No current ORBAT.

A frontier army that had to be rebuilt twice -- in 1950 and in industry The ROK military is a 1948 institution that survived 1950 by alliance, then spent Yulgok trying not to be only an alliance appendix -- a political history of a defensive force. Constabulary origins, June 1950 collapse, Pusan, Inchon, a Chinese intervention, and an armistice that was not a peace treaty. Paik and Chung are named because the English file still forgets ROK officers beside MacArthur.

Casualty ranges belong on the Korean War page: hundreds of thousands of ROK military dead in scholarly bands, plus a larger civilian disaster. The 1953/54 treaty, US wartime command arrangements as a dated legal-political fact, and a long argument about OPCON transition -- history of a bargain, not a present command diagram.