South Korea to acquire 20,000 low-cost military drones
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- South Korea announced on Friday (Jun 26) a plan to acquire 20,000 low-cost military drones, with Defence Minister Ahn Gyu-back telling reporters in Seoul that conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East prove drones are 'game changers on the battlefield.'
- Ahn Gyu-back said the military will rapidly deploy K-LUCAS (Korean Long-range Uncrewed Combat Attack System), a domestically developed munition reverse-engineered from Iran's Shahed attack drones and similar to the US LUCAS.
- The fleet will include short-range reconnaissance drones and loitering munitions, with Seoul also pursuing AI-powered drone swarms, counter-drone systems along frontline areas from next year, and longer-term directed-energy weapons such as lasers and high-power microwave systems.
- South Korea reaffirmed its goal of training 500,000 'drone warriors' to operate drones as a 'second personal weapon,' procuring about 60,000 domestically produced commercial drones for that training.
- South Korea's Drone Operations Command, established in 2023, will be reorganised into a new Defence Drone Headquarters.
- The source notes the command drew scrutiny after a drone operation over Pyongyang in October 2024 under then-president Yoon Suk Yeol, who has since been sentenced to 30 years in prison for sending drones into North Korea to 'manufacture' a crisis ahead of a disastrous martial law bid.
Why it matters: South Korea is explicitly pivoting from small numbers of high-cost weapons to mass-produced cheap drones, with AI swarms and directed-energy systems on the roadmap. The 500,000-operator training pipeline and frontline counter-drone deployments indicate Seoul is sizing its force structure for a North Korean threat landscape where drone saturation decides frontline outcomes — particularly as Pyongyang simultaneously expands its own unmanned capabilities.
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