South Korea plans to train entire military as drone operators

South Korea’s defense ministry says it wants every member of the country’s nearly 500,000-strong military to be able to operate drones “as easily as personal firearms,” a training ambition announced on June 26 by Defense Minister Ahn Gyu-back. According to Ars Technica, the plan is framed as a way to keep a technological edge in the decades-long standoff with North Korea. The ministry describes drones as a “universal combat tool” and a “second personal weapon” for troops.

The headline goal is training at scale, but the program is built around hardware procurement and industrial policy. The defense ministry plans to distribute 11,000 training drones and aims to deploy 60,000 drones across the military by 2029, shifting units toward inexpensive and expendable systems used for surveillance and strike missions. It also intends to field more counter-drone lasers and microwave weapons, treating the drone threat as something to be met with dedicated air-defense technology rather than small-arms improvisation.

The organizational changes point in the same direction. Ars Technica reports that South Korea’s former drone operations command headquarters will be reorganized to focus on collaboration with domestic industry to develop and procure commercial drone technology. That is a recognition that the fastest iteration cycles now sit in the consumer and dual-use market, not in slow-moving bespoke defense programs.

Yet the same market structure creates a bottleneck. South Korea wants drones with 100% domestically produced components and no Chinese components, citing security concerns; China is also North Korea’s main economic and security partner. China’s manufacturers dominate the global commercial drone market, which makes “no China” procurement a constraint not just on frontline systems but on training fleets—exactly where ministries typically buy the cheapest airframes available.

Manpower is the other constraint. South Korea’s active-duty force is about 450,000 personnel, and it faces a shrinking conscript pool due to the country’s declining birthrate, Ars Technica notes. Mandatory military service currently excludes women, and the article describes personnel shortages among the noncommissioned officers and officers who would be expected to train conscripts. Ukraine’s experience is often invoked in these discussions, but even there the military does not train every soldier to be a drone pilot; it has instead scaled training to produce tens of thousands of operators as drones become a force multiplier against a larger adversary.

For now, the ministry is not planning to put a drone in every soldier’s hands, even for training. The ambition is to make drone operation routine while simultaneously trying to rebuild a supply chain that the global market has already concentrated elsewhere.