South Korea on Friday unveiled a plan to acquire 20,000 military drones to ward off threats from North Korea, drawing on lessons learned from wars in Ukraine and the Middle East.
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A small number of expensive weapons systems have previously dominated battlefields, but the mass deployment of cheap drones is transforming the very nature of war.
“Recent conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East clearly demonstrate that drones have become decisive weapons on the battlefield,” Defense Minister Ahn Gyu-back told reporters in Seoul.
South Korea remains technically at war with the North, their 1950-1953 conflict having ended in an armistice and not a peace treaty.
“North Korea also continues to develop a wide range of unmanned aerial capabilities, posing increasing threats not only to South Korean military installations, but also to critical national infrastructure and civilian targets,” Ahn said.
He said the government would work to quickly deploy its Korean Long-Range Unmanned Combat Attack System (K-LUCAS) — a locally developed munition deemed similar to the US LUCAS, which itself was reverse-engineered from Iran’s Shahed attack drones.
The army also plans to acquire more than 20,000 low-cost disposable drones, Mr. Ahn said, without indicating their source.
These would include short-range reconnaissance drones and small attack drones, known as lurking munitions.
The army will also work to develop swarms of drones controlled by artificial intelligence.
South Korea will deploy anti-drone systems along its border areas starting next year.
Longer term, it plans to add directed energy weapons, such as high-power lasers and microwave systems, as well as low-cost interceptor drones, to its arsenal, Ahn said.
The ministry also reaffirmed its objective of training 500,000 “drone warriors”, called to use the drone as a “second individual weapon”.
It will procure around 60,000 domestically manufactured commercial drones for training.
South Korea’s Drone Operations Command, established in 2023, will be reorganized into a new Drone Defense Headquarters, the ministry said.
He was implicated after a drone operation above Pyongyang in October 2024, under then-President Yoon Suk Yeol. The latter has since been sentenced to 30 years in prison for this operation intended to “fabricate” a crisis, before an attempt to establish martial law.
