The joint exercises are critical for maintaining a prepared army in a theatre that could flair into war at any time. These are huge annual events involving all kinds of tactical readiness training. A sizable portion of the SK army are conscripts that may or may not know which end of the gun to point at the enemy, and these exercises are critical for them to learn from the best trained army in the world.

We have no reason to believe that NK will continue in good faith, they reneged on similar "promises" many times in the past We need both the US standing army, and the SK army to be prepared for the worst.