The South Korean Defense Ministry debuted a new office to oversee the development and use of military drones, the Defense Drone Agency, on Monday, intended to make the country more independent from relying on foreign manufacturers and more competitive with communist North Korea.
The agency reportedly replaces an initial iteration of a drone office, the Drone Operations Command, which the leftist current government of South Korea reportedly considered a risk as it did not operate fully under the command of the rest of the military. The Drone Operations Command was involved in a scandal during the presidency of imprisoned former leader Yoon Suk-yeol in which the president was found to have ordered a military drone to violate North Korea’s airspace and fly over Pyongyang, causing a major diplomatic crisis and jeopardizing the decades-old armistice agreement between the two Koreas.
The new agency is fully under the command of the nation’s Defense Ministry, rather than being an independent actor within the government, according to the Korea JoongAng Daily.
Beyond the need to streamline drone maintenance and development, South Korean news outlets reported, citing the Defense Ministry, that the Defense Drone Agency would invest in the development of indigenous drone technology and expand domestic manufacturing, making South Korea less reliant on Chinese drone components or business with major drone powers such as Turkey.
A medium-altitude unmanned aerial vehicle (MUAV) is displayed during a media day event for the 78th Armed Forces Day ceremony at the Gyeryongdae runway in Gyeryong, South Chungcheong Province, South Korea, on September 29, 2026. (Chris Jung/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
The announcement was interestingly made during a visit by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to Seoul this week in which he expressed a wish to expand defense cooperation with South Korea, potentially including sharing Turkey’s popular armed drone technology.
“With the establishment of the Defense Drone Agency, we will strengthen each military branch’s capabilities to conduct drone and counter-drone operations,” the Defense Ministry announced on Monday, “and lead the development of drone warfare capabilities and innovation in military systems and technology across the defense sector.”
JoongAng described some of the priorities laid out for the agency as including “drone acquisition and the development of operational concepts for drone systems, including the Korean Low-Cost Uncrewed Combat Attack System (K-Lucas), a Korean version of Iran’s Shahed suicide drone.” The Shahed is an inexpensive, easy to manufacture “suicide drone,” or loitering munition, that has played a major role in the ongoing invasion of Ukraine by Russia. North Korea is notably the only other nation to have officially admitted to be participating in that invasion, sending troops to aid the Russian side on the battlefield.
“The South Korean military plans to acquire more than 20,000 low-cost, expendable drones, including short-range reconnaissance drones and small suicide drones,” JoongAng reported.
South Korean media cited North Korea’s apparent rapid advancement in drone technology as a major factor for the creation of the new agency. Since expanding relations with Russia in 2023, North Korea has received suicide drones from the country and announced domestic production of its own drones in late 2024. By May 2025, communist dictator Kim Jong-un was publicly claiming that his armed forces possessed AI-powered suicide drones.
“Saying that the field of unmanned equipment and artificial intelligence should be top-prioritized and developed in modernizing the armed forces, [Kim] stressed it is important to correctly shape the state long-term plan for promoting the rapid development of the work to use intelligent drones,” the state-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported at the time.
“North Korea is moving ahead first in training ‘500,000 drone warriors.’ They are mass-producing standardized small suicide drones. The reality is that we have not even started yet,” Shin Jong-woo, the secretary-general for the Korea Defense and Security Forum, told the South Korean news agency SBS this week. Using Chinese components presents a particular risk for South Korea as China was traditionally North Korea’s closest ally, before Kim’s realignment towards Russia, and remains a top supporter of the fellow communist regime.
The Defense Ministry indeed said in its statement on Monday that it was taking North Korea’s drone development “very seriously.” It noted that it is also looking to expand importing components when necessary from allies such as America, rather than China.
The Defense Ministry did not explicitly discuss drone development alongside Turkey, but Erdogan and Lee did address expanding bilateral cooperation in remarks on Tuesday.
“Today, President Erdogan and I agreed to expand the horizon of bilateral cooperation, based on the deep friendship and trust forged in blood,” Lee said. Among the areas of expanded trade mentioned were “defense manufacturing.”
