First female deputy commander named to allies' Combined Division
Brig. Gen. Moon Han-ok of the South Korean Army has assumed the post of deputy commander of the Korea-US Combined Division, becoming the first female general to hold the Korean position, the military said Monday.
Under the binational unit, South Korean and US forces form a single combat division in the event of a contingency and conduct joint operations. The division commander is a US major general, while the deputy commander is a South Korean brigadier general.
Moon, commissioned in 1997, has built her career in combined defense and alliance operations. She was promoted to brigadier general on Jan. 9 before taking the deputy commander post.
As a major, she served as a strategic analysis officer at the allies' Combined Forces Command — the top-level binational command that holds wartime operational control and develops operational plans — handling exercise scenarios and strategic environment assessments. As a lieutenant colonel at South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff, she worked on wartime operational control, or OPCON, transition affairs.
Moon was also part of the Combined Division’s founding staff in 2015 and later served as the Korean chief of staff of the unit in 2021. Most recently, she headed the International Military Cooperation Division at the Joint Chiefs of Staff, overseeing alliance-related coordination, including Military Committee meetings between Seoul and Washington.
“It is a great honor to assume the post of deputy commander of the Combined Division,” Moon said, adding that she hopes to enhance interoperability between the allies at a critical juncture in the OPCON transition and help foster junior officers' professional identity within the alliance framework.
In wartime, the Combined Division is organized around subordinate units of the US 2nd Infantry Division and a brigade from the South Korean Army’s 8th Mechanized Infantry Division, tasked with missions including the neutralization of North Korean nuclear and missile facilities.
In peacetime, the division operates mainly through a combined staff that develops contingency and training plans. In wartime, it would form an integrated combat division.
At its launch in 2015, the formation marked the first time the US military created a single integrated division with a foreign military. The mixed division structure was also the first of its kind globally.
The Combined Division conducts more than 100 joint training events annually across maneuver, firepower, aviation, engineering and chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear defense fields.
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