South Korea’s new drone mothership will serve as a command platform for amphibious operations, precision strikes against high-value targets, and even humanitarian support operations.
In what is sure to be another blow to Lockheed Martin, South Korea’s government has officially abandoned its quest to procure the F-35B fifth-generation multi-role warplane for its arsenal.
Seoul had originally intended to purchase around 20 of the F-35B vertical takeoff stealth fighters. These planes would have been deployed aboard South Korea’s “Large Transport Vessel-II” project. A darling of the administration of former president Moon Jae-in, the Yoon administration fought against its predecessor’s plan on the grounds that the project was simply too expensive. Though Yoon did not ultimately cancel the Large Transport Vessel-II before his acrimonious removal from office, his successor, acting president Lee Ju-ho, finally pulled the plug on the project.
South Korea now intends to swap out the construction of the Large Transport Vessel-II for a unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-focused command ship. Accordingly, they are replacing the F-35Bs with a fleet of drones that will save the South Korean Ministry of National Defense around $1 billion.
South Korea Is Pursuing a Revolution in Military Affairs
Rather than simply being a miniature aircraft carrier, the South Koreans are turning into the ongoing revolution in military affairs that the Americans are only tepidly embracing. The new UAV command ship will be both a drone carrier as well as the mothership—the command ship, not unlike the Trade Federation’s donut-shaped starship in Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace—for those drone swarms.
Furthermore, South Korea’s new drone mothership will serve as a command platform for amphibious operations, precision strikes against high-value targets, and even humanitarian support operations.
All in all, this is a brilliant move by the South Koreans, who must be watching the way that conventional NATO weapons systems have underperformed in the ongoing Ukraine War, or the way that conventional Western tactics and technology have simply not lived up to their hype in either the ongoing Mideast conflict or the recently paused Indo-Pakistan conflagration.
More importantly, Seoul has made some significant changes as to which vendors will have a say in the construction of the systems involved in this massive maritime project. As part of the increasing push toward indigenization of South Korean defense projects, South Korea’s defense sector is looking to HD Hyundai Heavy Industries, South Korea’s mammoth shipbuilding conglomerate, to bear the brunt of the workload.
Don’t get too excited, though. The ship is not even expected to undergo construction until the latter half of the 2030s. One would hope, given how significant the threat from the North Korean military has become to its southern neighbor, that Seoul can get this project going sooner.
Alas, building up South Korea’s indigenous capacity will take time.
Seoul Has Learned from the Failures of the U.S. Defense Sector
And this highlights a much larger problem for the entirety of the Western defense industrial base. No Western nation can build things en masse in any meaningful time frame. In this way, it was both forward-looking on the part of the new South Korean government to embrace drone swarms over expensive and unwieldy F-35Bs as well as vital to spark the fires of domestic production in South Korea with the decision to turn away from the United States on this project.
Washington should not take it personally. They should be encouraging all their partners to do the same. Everywhere American strategists look, they are finding that their proxies are both susceptible to being cut off from American supply chains, as well as being utterly outmatched by the Russo-Chinese Eurasian technological alliance.
Whereas the Americans and their proxies, such as South Korea, have spent years preparing to fight wars that either will never come or will come in a very different form than what we have prepared for, the Sino-Russian entente has real, working platforms—at a far lower cost—ready to unleash destruction.
Seoul’s recognition of the irrelevance of the F-35B for their naval mission set is a necessary, albeit painful, recognition that American and Western methods and technologies are no longer relevant to the modern age of warfare.
Whichever power in the Western alliance structure successfully makes such a pivot from reliance of the American way of doing things to their own way of fighting will blaze a necessary pathway for the rest of the West to follow. All the great powers are looking for new and innovative ways to restore the deterrence that has been lost since the outbreak of the Ukraine War. Let us hope that Seoul’s decision on this project pushes the West toward a saner and more practical policy.
About the Author: Brandon J. Weichert
Brandon J. Weichert, a Senior National Security Editor at The National Interest as well as a contributor at Popular Mechanics, who consults regularly with various government institutions and private organizations on geopolitical issues. Weichert’s writings have appeared in multiple publications, including the Washington Times, National Review, The American Spectator, MSN, the Asia Times, and countless others. His books include Winning Space: How America Remains a Superpower, Biohacked: China’s Race to Control Life, and The Shadow War: Iran’s Quest for Supremacy. His newest book, A Disaster of Our Own Making: How the West Lost Ukraine is available for purchase wherever books are sold. He can be followed via Twitter @WeTheBrandon.
Image: Shutterstock / ranchorunner.
