Seoul must figure out how to replicate Washington’s success in fusing its national security apparatus with Silicon Valley.
Silicon Valley is commissioning coders into camouflage—and it’s not cosplay. In fact, it’s a bold bet on brainpower as the next battlefield advantage. Seoul, with all its talent and tech, should be taking notes and building its own fusion force to fight the next war.
South Korea is many things. A semiconductor juggernaut. A soft power exporter. A rising player in defense manufacturing. But one thing it is not (at least not yet) is a country that knows how to let engineers and colonels sit at the same table without flinching. And that’s a problem.
Because in the age of AI warfare, drone swarms, and autonomous kill chains, the next decisive battlefield won’t just be kinetic. It’ll be cognitive. And for that, militaries won’t just need brigades. They’ll need brainpower.
Enter Detachment 201. This small but symbolic US Army unit recently made headlines for commissioning executives from Meta, OpenAI, Palantir, and other frontier tech firms into the Army Reserve as lieutenant colonels. Their job? To serve in a newly created “Executive Innovation Corps” and bridge the yawning gap between military needs and commercial capability.
Meta’s CTO, Andrew Bosworth. OpenAI’s Kevin Weil. Palantir’s Shyam Sankar. These aren’t lobbyists or defense contractors. They’re the kind of people who get pinged by tech journalists the moment they sneeze on Twitter. And now, they wear the uniform—figuratively and literally—as part of an institutional bet on America’s considerable tech talent.
Why Fusion Works—and Has Always Worked.
Let’s dispense with the myth: military-civil fusion is nothing new. Napoleon’s logistical revolution, which saw mass mobilization powered by standardized conscription and state-led provisioning, changed how Europe fought, and later, how it built railways, ran postal services, and measured time.
World War II gave us radar, synthetic rubber, and the modern aircraft industry. The Cold War brought satellites, the microchip, and eventually the internet. DARPA wasn’t built to launch startups. It was built to beat the Soviets. The byproduct? Google Maps, voice recognition, GPS, and your iPhone’s touchscreen. War doesn’t just change borders. It rewires economies. And America understood early on that civilian technologists can solve military problems.
America’s Secret Weapon Isn’t a Weapon
The United States has spent the better part of a century perfecting the art of weaponized innovation through the open architecture of its technology ecosystem. America has Lockheed Martin, Stanford, MIT, Andreesen Horowitz, and DARPA all speaking, roughly, the same language.
Where else but in America could the same person fund a food delivery app and a missile tracking startup in the same quarter? Where else can a Defense Secretary be on texting terms with tech unicorns, or a drone startup get its first funding from both venture capital and the Pentagon?
That’s why China, for all its slogans about “military-civil fusion,” hasn’t cracked the code. State-led integration is not the same as innovation. Beijing can mandate partnerships between defense SOEs and tech platforms. But what it can’t do—what no command economy has ever done—is manufacture the serendipity, chaos, and friction that make innovation real.
Russia? Its private sector is mostly state-penetrated. Its top engineers are fleeing. Its defense sector is trapped in 1987. Fusion doesn’t work when the reactor is broken.
A Window Worth More Than Optics
For South Korea, some green shoots are emerging from the soil. President Lee’s recent appointment of Ha Jung-woo—a seasoned technologist from Naver’s AI Innovation Center—as South Korea’s first-ever senior presidential secretary for AI is more than symbolic. Ha has long been a vocal champion of AI sovereignty, open-source ecosystems, and the kind of accelerator access that could keep the ROK competitive in a world where GPUs are the new oil.
It’s the right move. And the timing is sharp. With Ha reporting directly to the chief of staff for policy, the Lee administration has effectively elevated AI to the same level as other core pillars of national strategy.
Add to that the appointments of a defense reformist as first deputy national security director, and a seasoned diplomat and economic security expert to round out the trio, and the message is clear: this administration is trying to stack the deck with capability.
But good hires aren’t enough when the task is to rewire the entire DNA of how South Korea thinks about tech, defense, and the fusion of both. What’s needed now is velocity, procurement reform, and use cases where military applications and civilian innovation converge.
With the Democratic Party of Korea holding a commanding majority in the National Assembly, there is a fleeting but powerful window to drive legislation, budget allocation, and structural change. No excuses. No gridlock. No veto politics.
But here’s the risk: the DPK’s well-documented reflex toward strategic appeasement—especially vis-à-vis China and North Korea—could throttle the momentum before it even builds. If old instincts return, if the impulse is to temper ambition in the name of “balance” or to decouple economic and security strategy in the name of outdated realpolitik, we may look back at this moment as the one we wasted.
The Cost of Caution
This is where South Korea should be watching with more curiosity, and frankly, more urgency.
Because while Seoul is investing billions into defense exports, AI, and other critical technologies, the institutional culture still treats military-civil fusion like it’s a security threat. The defense establishment is wary of the tech sector. The tech ecosystem is wary of the defense establishment. And the bureaucrats? They’re mostly just wary in general.
We celebrate when South Korean missiles hit their targets. But we look away when someone asks why the software inside them is still decades behind. We tout our global AI competitiveness. But we forget that the smartest AI people in the country rarely, if ever, touch a single defense program. Why? Because our system is allergic to cross-pollination.
In South Korea, if a Meta executive tried to serve as a reserve officer advising defense procurement, eyebrows would be raised. Legal questions would fly. Headlines would imply undue influence or favoritism. But the real loss wouldn’t be reputational. It would be strategic.
A New Mandate for Allies
The United States doesn’t expect allies to replicate its system. But it does need partners who can contribute meaningfully to the evolving alliance architecture.
That means interoperable weapons and interoperable innovation cultures. It means defense ministries that can work with startups. It means academic researchers who don’t see security as a dirty word. It means tech leaders who view service not only as a civic duty, but also as a national security multiplier.
Japan is already taking cautious steps in this direction, quietly expanding its dual-use research and development footprint. Australia is doubling down on defense innovation hubs. But what about South Korea? It has the talent, the capital, and the ambition. Yet, what it lacks is the connective tissue. But that can change.
The future of South Korean defense isn’t just K9 howitzers and KF-21 jets; it’s also swarms of autonomous drones, zero-trust cyber infrastructure, generative AI simulations, and the ability to out-think an adversary before the first shot is fired.
And for that, you need fusion, not as a buzzword, but as a backbone.
Commission the Future
South Korea doesn’t need to mimic Detachment 201. It needs its own version adapted to its particular environment, rooted in its values, shaped by its institutions, and led by its best minds.
Create a fusion corps and embed technologists in defense planning and operations. Let AI researchers spend rotations in strategic command units. Build a two-way bridge between Gwacheon (the center of administration) and Pangyo (South Korea’s Silicon Valley). Because in the next war, it won’t be the biggest guns or the most battalions that decide who wins. It’ll be the best minds, the fastest loops, and the countries that figured out how to get their coders and colonels speaking the same language before it was too late.
Innovation doesn’t wear a uniform. But maybe it should.
About the Author: Schoni Song
Schoni Song is Director and Global BD Lead at Macoll Consulting Group, South Korea’s premier public and government affairs consultancy, where he advises Fortune 500s and global nonprofits on how to win influence and shape policy in one of Asia’s most dynamic markets. Schoni also serves as Co-Chair of the Chemical Committee at AMCHAM Korea and has previously worked at the US State Department’s INL Bureau, the Korean National Assembly, and the Asia Society. He holds a BA from Yonsei University and an MA from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. His opinions are his own.
Image: Flying Camera / Shutterstock.com.
