South Korea’s Killer Drones: New Frontier in Defense Against North Korea – Part 2

Killer drones, the most effective deterrent against North Korea’s provocation

The South Korean military has also begun introducing various killer drones, including small suicide drones. Small suicide drones are weapon systems that covertly fly toward a target and then explode to destroy or eliminate the target. It is known that the beheading unit of the Army Special Warfare Command was the first to operate them.

The Special Warfare Command’s suicide drone, which will be used to eliminate the North Korean military leadership in a crisis, is a hybrid form that combines an unmanned attack aircraft and a cruise missile, maintaining the altitude performance of an unmanned attack aircraft while possessing the strike capability of a cruise missile with effective kamikaze-style bombard.

It operates at shorter distances, making it cheaper than cruise missiles. The Special Warfare Command is known to have introduced suicide drones worth about $8.4 million. The drone is known as the |A| Rotem-L and was produced by Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI), a state-owned defense company in Israel. It is a quadcopter with four propellers, a drone weight of 12.8 lbs, an operational range of 6.2 miles, and a maximum flight time of 45 minutes. The explosive 2.6 lbs has the power of about two hand grenades.

A military source said that the introduction of suicide drones by the Special Warfare Command has been underway since last year, and it will be one of the valuable means to deter figures such as North Korean Chairman Kim Jong Un from carrying out nuclear and missile provocations in a crisis.

Suicide drones are small and quiet, making it difficult for North Korean military or North Korean agents’ security personnel to detect and shoot down in a crisis. The soldier recollects the target with the camera mounted on the front of the drone and decides whether to continue the assault. The surrogates carry them on their backs and send them from any location to eliminate the factors carrying out the operation. Depending on the situation, they can also be launched from vehicles or ships.

Moreover, the attack can be stopped and avoided during an assassination mission when the mission is canceled, or the wrong target (person) is identified.

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