Scrapped US-S Korea military drill would have cost $14 mn: Pentagon

When President Donald Trump announced the US would halt joint military drills with South Korea, he backed his controversial move by citing the "tremendous" costs of such exercises. On Monday, the Pentagon put a dollar amount -- about $14 million -- on the costs of Freedom Guardian, a large-scale joint drill that was to kick off in August but which was shelved after Trump met with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in a historic summit Singapore last month. "We will be stopping the war games, which will save us a tremendous amount of money, unless and until we see the future negotiation is not going along like it should," Trump said after meeting Kim in a bid to solve the crisis over the North's nuclear weapons. Trump later added on Twitter that the decision would "save a fortune." The approximately $14 million is not an insignificant sum, but represents only a tiny portion of the Pentagon's $700 billion budget. Pentagon spokesman Colonel Rob Manning, who disclosed the figure, did not provide a breakdown of how it was calculated.