South Korea to develop ‘stealthy drones’ and ‘drone killer system’
Joel Gehrke
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South Korea will speed up development of stealth drones this year, according to South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol’s team, in response to North Korea‘s threats.
“[Yoon] called for accelerating the development of stealthy drones this year and quickly establishing a drone killer system,” press secretary Kim Eun-hye said Wednesday.
US AND SOUTH KOREA PLANNING FOR ‘COORDINATED RESPONSE’ TO NORTH KOREA
The new emphasis comes in the wake of an incursion of several North Korean drones into South Korean airspace last week, drawing a presidential reprimand for South Korean military officials who struggled to down them. The high-profile embarrassment spurred Yoon to demand that defense officials develop an “overwhelming response capability that goes beyond proportional levels” — and to threaten to scuttle a 2018 military agreement with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un.
“President Yoon Suk Yeol instructed the National Security Office to consider suspending the Sept. 19 military agreement in the event North Korea carries out another provocation violating our territory,” Kim said, per a Yonhap translation.
Yoon has taken a more hawkish line with North Korea than his liberal predecessor, who negotiated the 2018 deal in a bid to mitigate the threat of an accidental clash along the demilitarized zone.
“I think he was quite perturbed that South Korean military couldn’t shoot all these [North Korean drones] down,” Heritage Foundation senior research fellow Bruce Klingner, a former CIA deputy division chief for Korea, told the Washington Examiner. “I think Yoon was both angry that the North Korean drones penetrated South Korean airspace, probably also [angry] that it got so much media attention, seeming to call into question South Korea’s military capabilities.”
Yet Yoon’s response also seems long in the making, with respect both to his distaste for the 2018 deal and his desire for an expanded drone force. “It is not desirable for us alone to abide by the agreement when North Korea doesn’t,” Lee, the defense minister, told South Korean lawmakers in October.
He could have overlapping motivations for such a demonstrative response, for the consumption of viewers in South Korea and abroad.
“These kinds of comments are meant to be domestically reassuring,” Foundation for Defense of Democracies senior fellow David Maxwell told the Washington Examiner. “They’re already developing these capabilities … you want to make a prediction that’s something that you know is probably going to come true. So I don’t think they’re starting from ground zero.”
That likelihood points to a broader dynamic of South Korea’s prospective emergence, under Yoon, as a more dynamic power player in the region. In a first-of-its-kind summary of South Korea’s strategy for the Indo-Pacific, Yoon’s administration declared last week that South Korea “aspires to become a Global Pivotal State that actively seeks out agenda for cooperation and shapes discussions in the region and the wider world.” South Korea has already flexed its defense industrial muscle under Yoon by inking a multibillion-dollar arms sale with Poland in defiance of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Yoon’s team has embraced an “iron-clad alliance” with the United States, anchored in a perception that both countries face common challenges. That strategic outlook dovetails with an apparent ambition to emerge as one of the world’s leading arms exporters.
“Their defense industry certainly has been really capable, and recently we’ve really seen them step up their game,” Klingner said. “So clearly they have an intention of expanding their defense industry and their exports. So drones would be a logical step for them to incorporate into that overall plan.”
Unmanned aerial vehicles have emerged as a hot commodity on the international arms market in recent years, a trend driven of late by Ukraine’s effective use of Turkish-made drones to ravage the Russian military columns and supply lines during the battle for Kyiv.
“I think that they will be developing the full range of armed and reconnaissance drones,” Maxwell told the Washington Examiner. “I think that’s clearly what they’re trying to do. They’re copying models like the Predator, from the U.S. — they see the efficacy of that, what it’s done for the United States.”
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Some of those arms deals might cut into the market share of U.S. defense companies, the FDD analyst acknowledged, but he argued that it would be short-sighted to think of South Korean companies as economic competitors in this regard.
“South Korea is becoming a partner in the arsenal of democracy … and I think that’s really an important capability because the U.S. industrial base is not capable of supporting everybody,” Maxwell said. “In their concept of being a global pivotal state, I think that’s one area where they’re going to excel in because they have a strong defense industry and they build most of their equipment [to be] interoperable with the United States, and therefore interoperable with other U.S. partners, to include NATO. So I think that’s a real positive thing.”