South Korea has announced a landmark plan to transform its entire armed forces into drone operators, training 500,000 military personnel to use unmanned aerial systems as a standard battlefield tool. Defence Minister Ahn Gyu-back, speaking in Seoul on Friday, declared that "all soldiers should be able to use drones like a second personal firearm," framing the initiative as a fundamental shift in how the country conceives of modern warfare.

The plan draws heavily on lessons from conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East, where low-cost drones operated at scale have upended conventional military assumptions. South Korea intends to procure around 11,000 commercial drones for training purposes by the end of 2026, scaling up to 60,000 by 2029, alongside more than 20,000 low-cost disposable combat drones by 2030. The military also plans to develop AI-guided drone swarms and to deploy counter-drone air defence systems along its border regions from next year. Longer-term, the arsenal will expand to include directed-energy weapons such as laser systems and high-power microwave devices.

A centrepiece of the announcement is the fast-tracking of the K-Lucas, a domestically developed long-range loitering munition — sometimes called a "suicide drone" because it destroys itself on impact with a target. The system is modelled on the American Lucas (low-cost uncrewed combat attack system), which was itself reverse-engineered from Iran's Shahed-136, the drone Russia has deployed extensively in Ukraine. The South Korean military's drone operations command, established in 2023, will also be restructured into a dedicated drone defence command.

The announcement is set against persistent and growing concern about North Korea's drone capabilities. The urgency was thrown into sharp relief in 2022, when five small North Korean drones breached South Korean airspace; one entered the no-fly zone above the presidential office in Seoul. Despite scrambling jets, attack helicopters, and firing roughly 100 rounds, the South Korean military failed to down a single intruder. Since then, North Korea's drone programme has advanced significantly, aided in part by its deepening military partnership with Russia — a collaboration that has given Pyongyang access to battlefield data from Ukraine that analysts say would otherwise have taken years to accumulate. On Friday, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un separately oversaw tests of tactical ballistic missiles and upgraded rocket artillery, while reiterating his pledge to expand the country's nuclear arsenal at an "exponential rate."

The two Koreas remain technically at war, as the 1950–1953 Korean War ended in an armistice rather than a peace treaty. South Korea's drone overhaul signals that Seoul views the changing character of warfare — shaped by conflicts far from the peninsula — as directly relevant to its own security, and is moving to close what it sees as a critical capability gap before the threat from the North deepens further.