SEOUL – Fallout from the failure of South Korea’s high-tech military to shoot down any of the five North Korean drones that penetrated its airspace on Monday continues to spread.
President Yoon Suk-yeol, presumably operating on the principle of “if you can ‘t beat ’em, join ’em,” has put in place a new doctrine: the counter-deployments of two or three South Korean unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) into the North’s airspace for every North Korean drone that intrudes into the South.
The Ministry of National Defense offered an official apology for its failure. It also released a future defense blueprint, focusing on spending upgrades to secure “overwhelming capabilities.”
On Monday, five North Korean drones of indeterminate design crossed the heavily defended Demilitarized Zone. In Southern airspace, they loitered over a coastal island and over the heavily militarized county north of Seoul. One even patrolled over northern Seoul itself.
A range of South Korean air assets were scrambled – with one light strike aircraft crashing in the process – but despite live fire aimed from an armed helicopter at one of the intruders, none of the drones were downed.
They disappeared from South Korean radars and no wreckage has been recovered, suggesting that they successfully returned to North Korea.
It is unknown what data the drones – presumably on a reconnaissance sweep – gathered. But ominously, their intrusion forced the cancellation of flight operations at both of South Korea’s major airports, Gimpo and Incheon International, for over an hour.
That made the vulnerabilities of Seoul’s Incheon International Airport – a regional flight hub for both cargo and passenger flights – strikingly clear. The halting of flight operations at IIA suggests that the North has acquired a very potent, low-risk, low-cost weapon with which it could feasibly wage economic warfare on the South.
That makes drones, arguably, a better tactic to grab Seoul’s attention than missile tests. And given the difficulty of bringing down such tiny and evasive vehicles, Seoul has apparently chosen a retaliatory strategy.
A presidential official confirmed to Asia Times that local news reports stating that Yoon has personally ordered the military to respond with two or three drone intrusions into the North for every drone that the North sends into the South were accurate.
However, unlike South Korea, North Korea lacks significant international air transit hubs or large numbers of incoming passengers, detracting from the potential effectiveness of Southern drone patrols as leverage over Pyongyang.
Yoon also gave his defense minister a tongue-lashing.
“How can there be no one preparing against North Korean drone attacks?” Yoon asked Defense Minister Lee Jong-sup in a meeting on Tuesday, it was reported on Wednesday. “Are you saying there was no proper training and that you did nothing?”
There were red faces in a military that, despite being armed with a plethora of big-ticket, big-boy’s toys – F-35 stealth fighters, network-linked multiple launch rocket systems and submarine-launched ballistic missiles – proved unable to shoot down any of the North’s drones.
“We feel sorry that although our military detected and tracked the drones, we failed to shoot them down,” Lieutenant-General Kang Shin-chul, operations director of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), said in a statement late Wednesday.
In the future, the military will “aggressively” deploy strike assets against Northern UAV intrusions, Kang said.
Still, it was far from clear whether those assets would be any more effective than those deployed on Monday.
The Ministry of National Defense also released a rare defense blueprint document on Wednesday.
The document calls for continued spend, building up the assets that comprise South Korea’s so-called “three axis” defense system. The system is designed as a response to the North Korean nuclear missile threat.
The system is made up of “Korea Massive Punishment and Retaliation,” an operational plan to incapacitate the North Korean leadership if hostilities commence; “Kill Chain,” a multidimensional, pre-emptive strike capability; and “Korea Air and Missile Defense,” an anti-missile, anti-air system.
Major questions related to doctrine, technologies, capabilities and risk tolerance hang over all of the above.
First, all are predicated on conventional systems, which are clearly under-gunned compared with the North’s widely tested nuclear arms. Second, it is far from clear how effective the South’s intelligence, reconnaissance and surveillance (ISR) assets are, and whether they are capable of tracking key North Korean leadership figures.
Third, as Monday’s drone intrusion shows, the South’s capability of intercepting North Korean airborne weapons is suspect.
Moreover, with North Korea having announced this year a “dead hand” strategy – the launch of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) by unit commanders in the event the leadership is incapacitated – and a doctrine of swift escalation to use of tactical nuclear weapons, the entire concept of the three-axis system is questionable.
The ministerial blueprint also puts forth its costing projections. It hopes to spend some US$261 billion during the five-year period between 2023 and 2027, expanding the defense budget by 6.8% for each of those years.
The plan requires parliamentary approval, and the National Assembly is controlled by the opposition. Even so, with the region engaged in a fast-accelerating arms race, the ministry may be pushing on an open door.
North Korea has this year engaged in its most extensive year of missile tests ever; China is massively upgrading its military capabilities in all domains; and Japan has recently announced that it will double its defense budget by 2028.
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