million—about one-quarter of the population—were displaced. Property damage was estimated at between $2 and $3 billion. Following the war, the need to maintain one of the world's largest armies was far beyond the economy's capacity. As a result, through the 1950's the vicious cycle of poverty, inflation, and overwhelming dependence on U.S. and other foreign aid continued. Nevertheless, in several ways, the war and its results paved the way for solutions to South Korea's economic and social, if not its political, problems. Much of the old order was swept away, in some measure simplifying the social system. The traditional order was undermined by the weakening of the hold of the family on its members in the wartime chaos, by the influence of foreign troops and technicians, and by war-born urbanization.
Modernization was primarily the result of the creation of a modern and effective military force and extensive U.S. aid. The almost overnight build-up of South Korea's army during the Korean war brought with it a rapid mobilization of the population. Thousands of farm boys were enlisted and exposed for the first time to modern organization and technology. Far beyond this, however, was the appearance of a huge subsociety—the military organization—something quite foreign to Korean tradition and general experience.
Prior to liberation in 1945, a small nucleus of Korean officers had been trained by the Japanese in Japan or Manchuria. A few others were trained in China or Russia and were engaged largely in guerilla-type operations against the Japanese in Korea. During 1946-48, the U.S. forces in South Korea organized and trained a small constabulary from a variety of such elements. Its leaders were mostly bitter rivals because of the factionalism generated by their diverse backgrounds and experience. Following the establishment of the republic, the constabulary was converted with U.S. assistance into an army that had reached nearly 100,000 men by the outbreak of the Korean war. During the war, the army was expanded almost seven fold; the ROK Army today has over 500,000 men and is the fifth largest in the world.
U.S. military assistance has helped to make the ROK military forces by far the most modern entity in South Korea, possessed of technological and managerial skills still scarce in the society at large. The army replaced President Syngman Rhee's ubiquitous police as the dominant force in the land. It possesses a very different outlook and morale, having been exposed to concepts of national ideals and goals far above the limited royalties of the police. Training in the United States, particularly of some of the senior officers of the postwar crop, has helped develop Korea's economy.
The cutting edge of this new force in Korean society is the officer class, both commissioned and noncommissioned. This class had come to constitute a social group rivaling in numbers the traditionally prestigious teaching profession, which has maintained its wonted precedence by also expanding rapidly, having presided over the educational explosion that has occurred since 1945. Both groups have their followers: the officers with their men; the teachers and intellectuals with great hordes of students, concentrated primarily in the capital where so many new educational institutions have sprung up. Both groups are far more modern in their outlook—though in different ways—than the society around them, and both became increasingly impatient with the stagnation and corruption during the 1950's under the Rhee regime. In sequence, they engineered a major generational change that brought Rhee's regime down and subsequently established a very different order.
Determined young officers saw economic development as a way both to end Korea's crushing poverty and its humiliating dependence upon the United States. A military coup was briefly forestalled by the student revolution, whose democratic leaders appeared to share the young officers' ideals, though not their authoritarian methods. When delay and indecision on the part of the hitherto untried and little understood democracy was established by Prime Minister Chang Myon seemed to offer little hope for the economic reforms that the young military officers wanted at once, they seized power in May 1961 and set up the
