South Korea Plans To Train Entire Military As 'Drone Warriors' (arstechnica.com) 84
"South Korea plans to train every single member of its nearly half-million-strong military to operate drones as easily as they handle personal firearms," reports Ars Technica:
The goal is to make drones a "universal combat tool" for all troops by training them to use drones like a "second personal weapon," said Ahn Gyu-back, South Korea's Minister of National Defense, in a June 26 briefing reported by Reuters and other media outlets. The announcement coincides with broader plans to equip individual military units with more cheap and expendable drones for surveillance and strike missions, along with deploying more counter-drone lasers and microwave weapons.
Meanwhile, South Korea's former drone operations command headquarters that used to have direct command authority over combat units will be reorganized to focus on collaborating with South Korean industry on developing and procuring commercial drone technology, according to The Korea Times. The South Korean defense minister specifically cited the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East as inspiring such military reforms with a focus on drone technologies... Ukraine's use of drones and military robots as a force multiplier to offset its numerical disadvantage on the battlefield versus Russia's larger military may carry special resonance for South Korea, given that the South Korean military's current active-duty strength of 450,000 personnel faces a numerical disadvantage against North Korea's active-duty military consisting of more than 1.2 million soldiers...
The defense ministry is starting out by providing 11,000 "training drones" to military personnel this year, with the goal of eventually deploying 60,000 drones across the military by 2029. An additional complication comes from the South Korean military looking to procure drones with 100 percent domestically produced components and no Chinese components due to security concerns, according to the defense minister's comments reported by Reuters... South Korean companies are building new military attack drones, but the defense ministry may struggle to find enough commercial drones made without Chinese components to train hundreds of thousands of military conscripts, said Min-Cheol Jung, a cofounder of the Team Retriever counter-drone red team based in South Korea, in a War on the Rocks article.
Meanwhile, South Korea's former drone operations command headquarters that used to have direct command authority over combat units will be reorganized to focus on collaborating with South Korean industry on developing and procuring commercial drone technology, according to The Korea Times. The South Korean defense minister specifically cited the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East as inspiring such military reforms with a focus on drone technologies... Ukraine's use of drones and military robots as a force multiplier to offset its numerical disadvantage on the battlefield versus Russia's larger military may carry special resonance for South Korea, given that the South Korean military's current active-duty strength of 450,000 personnel faces a numerical disadvantage against North Korea's active-duty military consisting of more than 1.2 million soldiers...
The defense ministry is starting out by providing 11,000 "training drones" to military personnel this year, with the goal of eventually deploying 60,000 drones across the military by 2029. An additional complication comes from the South Korean military looking to procure drones with 100 percent domestically produced components and no Chinese components due to security concerns, according to the defense minister's comments reported by Reuters... South Korean companies are building new military attack drones, but the defense ministry may struggle to find enough commercial drones made without Chinese components to train hundreds of thousands of military conscripts, said Min-Cheol Jung, a cofounder of the Team Retriever counter-drone red team based in South Korea, in a War on the Rocks article.
Good luck with that (Score:4, Interesting)
the South Korean military looking to procure drones with 100 percent domestically produced components and no Chinese components
Even if they do spend the next several years building up (an extremely expensive) drone production infrastructure they still have to go to China to buy the materials to build those components. While Western corporations were unloading low-profit mining and refining operations in favor of investments which would provide higher short term profits China saw an opportunity to take control of the very base of industrial production and now control most of the truly important material streams.
Re:Good luck with that (Score:5, Insightful)
Ukraine seems to have done it in just 4 years of war. Their drone components are made primarily in Turkey, Germany, and the US. I don't see why South Korea couldn't find a way.
Re: Good luck with that (Score:2)
China doesnâ(TM)t want its civilian tech used in the war, so Ukraine has had to build its own droneâ'component industry.
Re: Good luck with that (Score:4, Insightful)
If Ukraine could, for South Korea it should be much easier, considering their electronics industry is much stronger
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China doesnâ(TM)t want its civilian tech used in the war,
Perhaps they should stop supplying Russia then.
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Are they getting the rare earths they need from those places too? Even when batteries are made in Europe and the US, critical raw materials often come from China. Chinese companies control over 90% of the supply, and 95% for some things like permanent magnets.
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They're getting their rare earths partly from their own mineral deposits, partly from the US, but largely from China. Yes, even though China is aligned with Russia.
The ore still in the ground, available (Score:2)
However, that ore remains in the ground and is still available. In a military situation predatory pricing would no longer work.
Like Rolex watches (Score:2)
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just like Rolex watches. Chances are the pure carbon battery anode is made in China.
Rolex watches don't have batteries. That is why they are so expensive.
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Pretty sure he means "made in" like a new VW can say "Made in the USA", but all the components were made in Germany, Mexico and China and it's just assembled here.
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Oh? Didn't know that. They still make spring steel in Switzerland?
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The Emmenbrucke plant of Swiss Steel Group produces [swisssteel-group.com] types of Spring Steel [burdeco.com].
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Pretty sure he means "made in" like a new VW can say "Made in the USA", but all the components were made in Germany, Mexico and China and it's just assembled here.
Not all, far from it. For example even a BMW assembled in the USA may have 40% or more US made components. For "US" brands assembled in Canada I've seen 60% US made components.
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Yes, China is indeed the source for many of the components of Ukrainian drones, particularly rare earth minerals. And yet, despite this apparent contradiction in alliances, Ukraine found a way to make it work. South Korea can too.
Re: Good luck with that (Score:1)
... and hosting the most aggressive military in the world - the one that is the cause of the world's problems. They're afraid of the wrong country...
Re:It won't take much training (Score:5, Informative)
It won't take much training to use drones.
Effectively coordinating drones in combat is on par with being a pilot or air traffic controller. It takes a great deal of training. Real enemies don't just stand around waiting to get droned. Comms are exotic, involving terrestrial repeaters, fiber, satellites, etc. Batteries are very limited, so you have to gather intel and use it effectively because you can't just buzz around endlessly looking for targets of opportunity. Plus, the enemy is trying to kill you, and you're radiating RF, so unless you are properly trained in concealment and countermeasures, you die.
It's combat. Combat requires training. Lots and lots of training.
We are in the future (Score:4)
The US needs to get on board too (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, I know the US already has drones. But the US military tends to have big, expensive ones. The wars of the future will rely on mass-production of small, cheap drones. The war with Iran demonstrated that, for all the billions the US spends on weapons, they can run out pretty quickly. Too many million-dollar Tomahawk Cruise missiles and not enough cheap, short-range drones.
Not literally (Score:1)
The military budget is literally a blank check. Has it ever decreased?
It is literally not a literal blank check. But it is a metaphorical blank check.
Re:The US needs to get on board too (Score:4, Informative)
The military budget is literally a blank check.
It is figuratively a blank check, which is the opposite of "literally".
Has it ever decreased?
Many times. The late 1940s. After the Vietnam War. The "Peace Dividend" after the USSR's collapse, etc.
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The military budget is literally a blank check. Has it ever decreased?
Yes, during the Obama era [visualcapitalist.com]. If you adjust for inflation, it dropped even more in other eras.
Re:The US needs to get on board too (Score:4, Informative)
Small drones are munitions, and need to be thought of as that. Even non-FPV drones generally have quite short lifespans - for the smallest categories, just a few missions before they're shot down, jammed, or otherwise crash. They need to be stockpiled the same way you'd stockpile grenades or artillery shells (with the caveat that you'll have a much faster upgrade cycle on the electronics, and need to enable that). It also means short-cycle-life secondary cells, or even primary cells, as the power supply. E.g., with current tech, lithium metal or lithium sulfur are good candidates.
Middle-range strikes are increasingly proving invaluable as well in Ukraine this year. The ability to affordably take out a fuel or ammunition truck dozens of kilometers behind the front line is key.
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Middle-range drones are in use because anti-aircraft measures have gotten so good. Once they've been depleted you'll see single-use drones replaced by reusable aircraft dropping dumb bombs again, which Iran did during the height of the Usrael attacks and Russia occasionally does in lapses of NATO weapons shipments.
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Middle-range strike drones are much cheaper than JDAMs (smaller payload, but you don't care about that against trucks), longer range, and let you operate in fully contested airspace or even when the enemy has air superiority.
Aerial bombs are for entirely different purposes; they're for destroying fortified positions. Whether the aircraft should be manned or not is an entirely separate question, but one thing is unambiguous, it needs to be big enough to carry said bomb (aerial bombs are very heavy).
But agai
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No. The lack of anti-aircraft measures is why middle-range drones are being used so extensively. Ukraine put a lot time and effort into degrading Russian AA, whether radar systems, S-300/400/500, Pantsir, or anything else. The last number I saw was about 1,700 AA of all types damaged or destroyed.
Once AA is reduced, this opens corridors for drones/missiles, which is exactly what Ukraine is doing. Crimea is now e
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Destruction of AA systems is only half the story. Needing AA systems to take out drones is the other. I've seen numerous pictures smuggled out of the conflict that show mobile AA systems with but one or two missiles loaded on the rails - there are extreme shortages of AA missiles on both sides now, so that remaining munitions are being hoarded for defending the highest value targets.
This is the other factor allowing medium and long range drones pretty much free reign throughout the region.
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European nations sent advisors and observers to the US when we were fighting our Civil War. They were there to observe the use of what were then new weapons and developing tactics, and how that played out on the battlefield. The Ukraine is playing a similar role now.
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This is true, but Western militaries are only going to have limited success replicating what Ukraine has been able to achieve. Western defence systems are structurally not set up to support good enough, fast and cheap innovation cycles and they don't have a battlefield to test it on, and they have safety concerns that Ukraine doesn't have the luxury of affording too. And Western militaries aren't yet sold on cheap swarms as a paradigm. There's lots of yes-but reasoning, eg yes-but drone defences will evolve
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And don't forget to include "board memberships for the family members of generals and admirals" among those incentives.
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I don’t think your statement contradicts mine. I said Western militaries are going to have trouble *replicating* what Ukraine achieved.
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I remember kind of a throwaway small bit in the The Ministry for the Future book by KSR, it was mentioned that a swarm of tiny drones took down a load of private jets one day and no one knew who did it--and it immediately ended all private flights out of fear from the billionaire bellends.
It's nice to think something like that might happen!
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Everyone does. Especially permanent anti-drone defenses.
The next war of aggression between physically adjacent countries will probably be drone blitzkrieg.
Imagine if Russia had already had a million cheap drones. Day one of the war would have seen 100,000+ launched all at once, targeting every piece of infrastructure in Ukraine, almost instantly rendering the country unlivable.
A patient enemy could pre-place thousands of Operation Spiderweb-esqe containers all over the US - using drones assembled in-country
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This isn't a new thing. Soviet doctrine for dealing with carriers was to fire as many missiles as they could at them to overwhelm their defences.
The US focus on expensive, highly capable weapons isn't baseless. The US military is designed to project power, and projecting power is expensive. If you're going to ship equipment halfway around the world and support it there, it might as well be the best you can make. That is very different from Ukraine or South Korea where they are, or expect to, fight in their
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The US military is designed to project power, and projecting power is expensive.
Maybe. But using expensive weapons on Iran for 2-3 weeks and having to stop because you've depleted half your arsenal and will require years to replenish the supplies, does not project power. It projects weakness.
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The US didn't fail in the Iran war due to a lack of offensive air power, and its offensive air power definitely wouldn't have been improved by packing the Bush, Lincoln and the Burkes with cheap drones. It failed because it was a half assed effort organized by clowns who apparently don't know any military history and decdied to disregard all their advisors who do.
You can theoretically win a war with air strikes alone but it depends entirely on your enemy. If they fail to surrender then you lose, and there's
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The US did indeed deplete half of its stockpile on Iran. https://fortune.com/2026/04/24... [fortune.com]
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I didn't say they didn't. Those missiles were very effective. Much more effective than ten times as many drones would have been.
Both missiles and drones are of limited use when you're not willing to send infantry to take and hold territory. Cheap light drones much more so than Tomahawks and GBU-57s.
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They are doing it. There was an article the other day about it. (can't find it in my history now... you could google for it if interested)
There is a major shift towards buying components for small multi-purpose drones that can be built by grunts in the field vs buying big multi-million dollar remote operated specialist craft. Army grunts are being trained to assemble, modify, and operate small drones for field operations. Small drones for short range recon and attack, at the squad level.
The Great Equalization has begun. (Score:4, Interesting)
These past two years have radically redefined what it means to be a military superpower. Nuclear weapons aside, all conventional forms of projected power are either obsolete or under significant pressure. And each time a new advancement is democratized, the problem is compounded,
I say "problem", but it's a problem for some and a relief for others. Small powers move to the middle, and so do great powers. The advantage of hundreds of billions in annual military investment is evaporating. And the barrier to entry is shrinking. Theoretical military matchups formerly seen as decisive, one-sided routs are not guaranteed except in that they will be immensely costly for the traditionally well-equipped.
It's like all the chess pieces are being returned to their origins, and the game starts over with different rules.
This... is going to be interesting.
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all conventional forms of projected power are either obsolete or under significant pressure.
Drone [youtube.com] defenses [youtube.com] are coming [youtube.com].
Once the drone defense gets figured out, drones are just going to be another wrinkle in the strategy map.
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Once the drone defense gets figured out a way to mostly work around it will be encountered. Every countermeasure so far in the drone exchanges has been combatted, with various levels of success.
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Stealth aircraft don't yet have countermeasures.
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> Stealth aircraft don't yet have countermeasures.
Yugoslavia shot one down in the 90s.
Russia regularly shoots down Storm Shadow missiles which are not much easier to detect than an F-35.
So yes, countermeasures are out there and have been for decades. This is why Israel doesn't fly its F-35s over Iran, and never even flew them over Syria.
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Yugoslavia shot one down in the 90s.
So, one time? In the 90s?
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One time under ideal conditions. The SAM battery knew when and where the F-117 was going to fly.
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Researchers in England found that they could track the US stealth aircraft outside one of the big bases by its affect on the cellphone network (IIRC it was covered on SlashDot). You can stealth them from the front and to a lesser extent from the sides and rear, but there's not much you can do about the bottom or the top.
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It seems that the most effective "drone defense" thusfar has been "moving in small groups or individually, at night or in bad weather, and then hiding in a basement until there's enough people / supplies to push further".
It's clear that armoured vehicle design needs to change. But hangar/turtle tanks hardly seem a durable approach either (even in Ukraine their use has fallen off). I'm still very much a believer in hybrid armoured vehicles, where you have a battery pack with several dozen km of range, and o
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Oh, and also (re: NERA) worth noting that there would be a brief boost in energy transfer to the generated gas from cell discharge. You wouldn't come close to fully discharging a cell (that requires lithium diffusion), but it can effectively instantaneously discharge the double-layer capacitance at the electrode-electrolyte interfaces, and very rapidly oxidize lithium at the anode surface (such as the SEI) / reduce species at the cathode. So in a way, not an entirely non-reactive armour, and somewhat remini
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This... is going to be interesting.
Especially interesting for these who don't understand and appreciate what they still (somewhat) have.
Y'all may think that you like communism, or (other peoples' exotic) eastern theocracy, but if they get the upper hand, you will find out much too late that you do not really like them at all ...
Makes sense (Score:2)
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If you're close enough to see an enemy, they already have multiple autonomous weapons coming for you.
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There are now anti-net drones.
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Sure, but that's another thing you need to add to your drone to make it useful, just on the offchance that your target is hiding behind a net.
It makes sense to use them when you're attacking one of the transit routes which have nets spread around them because you can cut a hole with one drone and then fly other drones through it. But you don't want to put some kind of net-cutter on every single drone because pretty soon you're carrying ten kilos of things-that-might-be-useful-in-some-circumstances and the d
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Of course, they're dedicated devices. Drones are cheap and easy to customize.
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How many different types of drone are you planning to carry on your back when running across a field while under attack by artillery and the other guys' drones?
I said "Drones CAN be defeated by a mesh net," I didn't say that a mesh net will defeat all drones. And the reason I said it was precisely because that guy I mentioned who has spent much of the last few years working with, fighting with and training Ukrainian troops mentioned it as one of the simplest defences against Russian drone attacks. They do i
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Plus, imagining that all drones are just small FPV anti-personnel drones, when Ukraine has been deploying middle- and long-range drones with great effectiveness over the last several months
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The value of 32 small FPV drones is way less than the value of one tank. And in general you're likely to be talking about "hangar tanks" / "turtle tanks" when talking about things like that, but these take on *massive* disadvantages, including being extremely visible and easily targeted by larger drones or artillery (as well as bogging down easily, difficulty getting through confined areas, poor or no gun
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Re, the terrain of Donbas: compare, at the same zoom level:
Donbas [google.is]
To a stereotypically flat place in the US, like, say:
Kansas [google.is]
Unless you mean the "Smoky Hills" of Kansas: [wikipedia.org]
Smoky Hills [google.com]
Though their relief is only about 2/3rds that of that in Donbas. Donbas's relief is more like that of the Piedmont Province (the area west of the Appalachians), the dissected till-plains of southern Iowa / northern Missouri, the Tennessee / Kentucky western highland rim, or the low glaciated plateaus of the northeastern US (NE. Pen
Training your AI replacement (Score:2)
Never sounded so good.
New marching orders . . . (Score:2)
Korean General: Listen up troops, we all going to stand on our heads and jump up and down. Let me see you do it!!
This makes sense until some organization come up with kryptonite for drones.
They also did this to Spider-Man in the video game (Score:1)
Ukrainian Spitfire FPV interceptor is out to 84km (Score:3, Interesting)
Ukrainian Wovkulaka Spitfire FPV interceptor is out to 84km
https://x.com/LetsArmUKR/statu... [x.com]
This weekend a Ukrainian crew pushed the Wovkulaka Spitfire FPV interceptor out to 84.7 km before it smoked a SuperCam whose operators thought they were safely parked somewhere in the south. Manufacturer's previous record was 69 km. That is not a incremental upgrade. That is the kind of leap that rewrites operational math on the entire theater.
Every extra kilometer we add to the reach of cheap, mass-produced Ukrainian drones is another chunk of Russian rear area that stops being a safe haven. It is not glamorous. It is not the kind of thing that gets NATO generals excited in PowerPoint slides. But it is exactly the asymmetric grind that turns Moscow's quantitative advantage into an unaffordable liability. They lose more meat trying to take villages that had fewer residents before the war than the monthly body count we are stacking with systems like this. Their "meat is cheap" doctrine only works until the bill comes due in rubles, barrels, and replacement pilots they no longer have.
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A good point, but AI-written.