South Korea’s Hanwha Aerospace has agreed to export 20 K9 howitzers to Vietnam in a deal worth US$250 million, according to multiple news reports in mid-August.
The first indicators of a potential deal emerged in March 2023, when Vietnam’s Minister for Defense, General Phan Van Giang, visited Seoul and observed an in-person demonstration of the K9 howitzers, alongside other Korean arms.
While South Korea’s arms export capabilities had already been proven through its watershed deal with Poland and sustained military product demand across multiple markets, the K9 deal with Vietnam is a first in Southeast Asia (SEA), representing the asset’s successful penetration into a new regional market.
While the deal cements “K-Bangsan (방산)”, which translates to K-Defense, as a cross-administration cornerstone of South Korea’s economic growth and national development, there are also potential significant follow-on developments.
Korean arms merchant
Under the previous Yoon administration, South Korea had committed significant resources to developing and expanding its military industrial complex, with original goals to become one of the world’s top four arms suppliers by 2027.
A March 2025 report by the Stockholm Institute Peace Research Institute ranked South Korea as 10th on its global list of major arms exporters, with its total export share a mere 37.2% of China’s (which ranked 4th on the list) total figures.
Industry insiders have alluded to a year-on-year decline in exports since 2022, presumably due to concerns over financing uncertainties and delays in deals with Middle East states, with these issues compounded by the reversed martial law declaration in December 2024 and its accompanying political upheaval.
Nevertheless, newly elected South Korean President Lee Jae Myung retained defense exports as a key feature in his new five-year blueprint announced on August 13, 2025. The Vietnam K9 deal was officially announced the next day.
On Vietnam’s side, after General Giang’s 2023 visit, its Ministry of Defense expressed official interest in procuring the K9s in April 2024, with Vietnamese military personnel participating in a South Korean education program in November the same year, designed to provide participating soldiers a better operational understanding of Korean assets such as the K9s and K2 tanks.
People’s Army of Vietnam (PAV) personnel’s presence in a similar July 2025 training program served to affirm Vietnamese interest in understanding K-Defense assets, with a potential eye towards replacing its existing Soviet-era and older-model US artillery pieces.
Existing pieces such as the Korean War-era M101 howitzers and the Vietnam War-era D-20 howitzers are legacy collections from past conflicts, most being significantly inferior to modern assets in terms of weight, manpower requirements and overall mobility. That leaves Vietnam particularly vulnerable to swift attacks from aerial drones, including possibly from China.
Previous reports pointed to the PAV’s interest in upgrading its artillery assets since 2015, a recognition of the need to enhance its military technologies to maintain competitiveness on the land battlefield. Furthermore, the Russia-Ukraine war has essentially forced Vietnam to pivot from its longstanding dependence on Russian arms.
An interesting quirk about the Vietnam-South Korea deal is its government-to-government nature, a different agreement model compared to South Korea’s past export deals, most of which have been direct supply agreements between the arms exporter and the importing state itself.
This exemplifies the South Korean government’s level of participation and interest in expanding bilateral cooperation with Vietnam, with Vietnamese President To Lam’s August 2025 state visit to South Korea culminating in a bilateral agreement to expand inter-state trade to US$150 billion by 2030.
The 20-piece, $250 million sale shines light on the PAV’s intentions. Firstly, 20 pieces would be grossly insufficient in satisfying Vietnam’s defense requirements from a tactical standpoint, considering the extended length of its land borders with neighboring China, Cambodia and Laos, as well as its coastlines overlooking the hotly contested South China Sea.
These operational realities mean that the deal can and should be better understood as a sampler purchase, considering that the PAV had purportedly explored a deal for 108 French-produced CAESAR artillery assets in 2015.
There are two ways to view this: the first being both parties’ intentions to maximize unit purchase numbers for asset testing and personnel training purposes, and the second being the potential for a second follow-through contract, assuming both parties are satisfied with the first deal.
Artillery remains king
The ongoing Russia–Ukraine war serves as stark evidence of the irreplaceable role artillery plays in modern warfare. Despite the prominence of drones and precision-guided munitions, massed artillery fire has remained the decisive factor in determining battlefield control.
Russia and Ukraine have both demonstrated that sustained artillery barrages can degrade enemy positions, dictate maneuver space and impose both physical and psychological pressure on adversaries. Artillery, in other words, continues to define the tempo of land combat.
For countries such as South Korea facing potential flashpoints with unpredictable neighbors like North Korea, artillery forms a crucial backbone of national defense.
Vietnam, with its long borders with China, Laos, and Cambodia, as well as its extensive coastline exposed to South China Sea contingencies, shares similar requirements. The K9 howitzer directly addresses these operational needs, with its cost-effective blend of firepower, mobility and protection being combat-proven in diverse environments.
With a firing range of over 40 kilometers, rapid shoot-and-scoot capability, and an automated fire control system, the K9 offers clear battlefield performance advantages over Vietnam’s legacy Soviet and US-era systems.
Compared to wheeled alternatives such as the French CAESARs and Swedish Archers, the K9’s tracked platform provides superior mobility across challenging terrain, while its armored chassis enhances troop and asset survivability against counter-battery fire and drone attacks.
Equally important, the adoption of the K9 is a first step towards standardizing Vietnam’s usage of the 155mm caliber, the most widely used artillery round in the world.
Considering that the PAV’s old artillery systems utilized a mix of 105mm, 122mm, 152mm and 155mm-calibre ammunition, this shift would both simplify its logistical requirements and ensure long-term ammunition availability from a host of suppliers.
In an era where artillery ammunition shortages have become a defining challenge in Ukraine, such standardization would give the PAV a more sustainable and resilient inflow of ammunition.
The K9, therefore, is not just an artillery platform but also a catalyst for modernizing Vietnam’s broader land warfare doctrine and ensuring its military supply chain resilience.
Start of something new
Beyond the tactical significance, the Vietnam K9 deal signals a new stage in South Korea’s arms export trajectory. Until now, Korean defense sales in Southeast Asia had been relatively modest, with markets dominated by Russian suppliers or Western alternatives.
The K9 sale breaks new ground as the first major Korean artillery penetration into the region, showing that “K-Defense” is gaining region-specific credibility as both technologically reliable and politically viable.
This process could also be accelerated by high levels of mutual political trust between Korea and Southeast Asian nations, with the success of Korea’s soft power reach in the region potentially serving to smooth the process of establishing defense and military agreements of a more sensitive nature.
This development also comes at a time when ASEAN states are increasingly reconsidering their force modernization strategies. The legacy dependence on Soviet equipment has become a strategic liability, both in terms of spare part availability and political alignment, especially after Russia’s deepening entanglement in Ukraine and ensuing isolation from much of the US-aligned international community.
Countries such as Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines are now exploring alternative suppliers. South Korea’s proven track record of delivering high-quality systems on time, at competitive cost and often with generous add-on training and industrial packages positions it as an attractive middle ground between expensive Western platforms and politically sensitive Chinese equipment.
The Vietnam case could also generate spillover demand, with potential for the K9 deal with Vietnam to serve as a proof of concept for the viability of Korean-made military technologies in Southeast Asia’s unique tropical climate, and its successful integration in the PAV’s warfighting setup, encouraging neighboring states to pursue similar acquisitions.
This is particularly true for artillery, a military domain that remains under-addressed in much of Southeast Asia. Beyond artillery, South Korea’s aerospace sector, with platforms such as the KF-21 fighter and light attack aircraft like the FA-50, could also find traction in the region.
Together, these developments suggest that South Korea is gradually embedding itself into ASEAN’s long-term defense modernization cycle, across the air, sea and now land domains.
Strategically, Seoul’s ambitions extend beyond mere one-off sales. The establishment of a regional maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) hub could follow once sufficient regional export scale is achieved, lowering life-cycle costs for partner states while binding them more closely to South Korea’s defense industry.
Such a move would also align with South Korea’s broader diplomatic outreach, including the recent elevation of ASEAN-South Korea relations to a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership (CSP).
The K9 deal with Vietnam, therefore, is not only a commercial transaction but also a stepping stone toward embedding South Korea as a durable security partner in Southeast Asia’s evolving defense landscape.
Thomas Lim is associate research fellow with the Military Studies Program of the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, a policy-oriented think tank located in Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University. He conducts professional military education for members of the Singapore Armed Forces, covering topics in international relations, military history and strategic studies. He earned his BSc in International Relations from the University of London, and an MSc in International Relations from Nanyang Technological University.
Jihoon Yu is the director of external cooperation and research fellow at the Korea Institute for Defense Analyses. He was a member of the Task Force for South Korea’s light aircraft carrier project and Jangbogo-III submarine project and is the main author of the ROK Navy’s Navy Vision 2045. His area of expertise includes the ROK-US alliance, ROK-Europe security cooperation, inter-Korean relations, national security, maritime security, hybrid threats, and strategic weapons systems. He earned his BA in international relations from the ROK Naval Academy, an MA in national security affairs from the US Naval Postgraduate School and PhD in political science from Syracuse University.
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