South Korea plans to train entire military as "drone warriors"

Limits of the drone warrior plan

South Korea must overcome significant hurdles along the way toward fielding 500,000 “drone warriors.” The first challenge is that South Korea’s conscripted military has been shrinking in recent years due to the country’s declining birthrate, according to The Korea Times. So the South Korean military may struggle to merely achieve and maintain an active-duty force of at least 500,000 troops, and especially as long as the country’s mandatory military service excludes women.

Another practical constraint is that the South Korean military is not planning to equip everyone with drones even for training purposes, ministry officials clarified to The Korea Times. 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. China is North Korea’s main economic and security partner.

However, China also dominates the world’s commercial drone market through leading drone manufacturers such as DJI. 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.