Korea fast-tracks homegrown attack drone, reorganizes drone command as battlefields shift

Korea will fast-track a homegrown long-range attack drone and convert its Drone Operations Command into a policy body stripped of operational authority, the Defense Ministry said Friday, as it overhauls a military strategy increasingly defined by cheap, expendable drones.

The move reverses an earlier plan to abolish the command altogether.

The military had pushed to dissolve the unit after it became central to the scandal over former President Yoon Suk Yeol's December 2024 martial law bid, but as drones proved decisive in Ukraine and the recent U.S.-Iran war, the ministry opted to reorganize and repurpose it instead.

Under the new drone and counter-drone policy, the Drone Operations Command will become the National Defense Drone Headquarters (translated), a body reporting directly to the Defense Ministry. Its operational missions will be transferred to the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps, while the new headquarters focuses on identifying requirements and supporting acquisition in coordination with the services. It will be led by a major general, the same rank that headed the command.

At the center of the plan is the K-Lucas, or Korea Low-cost Uncrewed Combat Attack System, a domestically developed long-range loitering munition the military wants in service years ahead of schedule. The system is modeled on the U.S. Lucas, a low-cost attack drone that Washington built by reverse-engineering Iran's Shahed. Korea already has a comparable design in hand: the Agency for Defense Development has completed a Shahed- and Lucas-like munition called the KUS-LM, which the military now plans to put into operational use as the K-Lucas.

Originally slated for the mid-2030s, the K-Lucas is now set to enter service before 2030 following a revision of the military's requirements.

"We are preparing to deploy and use it in the military for the first time before 2030 by leaving out some functions that take a long time to develop and by allowing the use of prototypes built during development," a Defense Ministry official said.

By 2030, the military also intends to acquire more than 20,000 low-cost, expendable drones, including short-range reconnaissance models, as well as next-generation systems such as AI-powered drone swarms. In the near term, it will deploy systems to counter small drones along the front line. Equipment with proven performance will be fielded as early as next year.

"In the mid- to long-term, we will develop and field directed-energy weapons such as lasers and high-power microwaves, which require advanced technology," a Defense Ministry official said.

The ministry also pledged a faster, more flexible procurement track that would validate civilian technology in military settings before adoption and field commercial drones through a dedicated certification process. The shift answers calls inside and outside the military to make acquisition nimbler as drones reshape the battlefield.

"The pace of technological development in the drone and counter-drone field is very fast," Kim Hong-cheol, deputy minister for defense policy, said. "We will pursue legislation to rapidly secure advanced capabilities."

Personnel from units under the Drone Operations Command, along with its drone assets, will be parceled out among the services. Medium-altitude reconnaissance drones (MUAV), which require runways and can fly long-range missions, will go to the Air Force, for example.

"We will enable each service to directly carry out surveillance, reconnaissance and strike operations using drones," a Defense Ministry official said. "We will move toward all-domain integrated operations that include drones."

The Drone Operations Command was created in September 2023, after North Korean drones crossed into the airspace over the greater Seoul area in 2022, with the stated aim of bolstering drone forces against North Korean threats. It later became the center of controversy over a 2024 operation in which drones flew over Pyongyang.

The special counsel investigating the martial law declaration indicted Yoon and former Defense Minister Kim Yong-hyun, among others, on charges that the command sent drones over Pyongyang in October 2024 to provoke North Korea ahead of the martial law declaration that December.

A court convicted the two men on June 12. The Pyongyang drone operation "was intended to create the conditions for declaring martial law," the bench said. It sentenced Kim Yong-dae, the former command chief who carried out the operation, to three years in prison, suspended for five years.

In January, a special civilian-government-military advisory committee at the Defense Ministry had recommended scrapping the command, ostensibly because of overlapping functions. However, some analysts read the recommendation as driven more by politics than by military need. Others, however, say the military ultimately chose to reorganize the unit rather than abolish it because of the rising importance of drones on the modern battlefield.

"This is an evolutionary reorganization of the missions and functions of a command that was set up hastily, without much deliberation, to fit its original role," a Defense Ministry official said. "We will rebalance issues such as overlapping missions with the services and the drawing of personnel from them."

BY SHIM SEOK-YONG [[email protected]]