South Korea's Greater Engagement with NATO and Europe: Becoming a Reliable Security Partner Through a Thriving Defense Industry

Consecutive rounds of defense reforms across progressive and conservative administrations have resulted in South Korea being the world’s eighth largest arms exporter. Particularly under former President Moon Jae-in, the government leveraged high defense budgets to develop more homegrown capabilities, with an eye to ratcheting up military sales. That was based on a national defense approach, which assumed the contours of an all-out push for greater self-reliance within and beyond the U.S.-ROK alliance. As the global and regional security environment are in flux, current President Yoon Suk Yeol has set an even more ambitious goal of joining the “Big 4” suppliers of weapons and military systems. In the wake of Russia’s aggression of Ukraine, South Korea’s security engagement with NATO and Europe has scaled up also through some lucrative arms deals adding to those previously inked by South Koreans in the Indo-Pacific and the MENA region. While major Western defense industries are undergoing a multi-year process to backfill military transfers to Kyiv, the volume and content of recent defense procurement contracts, particularly the expected supply of South Korean indigenous military hardware to the Polish armed forces, suggest that South Korean companies might be in the position to step in where other defense market actors have stumbled. Although not enough time has passed to make any determination on that, this paper contains some preliminary observations about the kind of advantage that Korean contractors hold vis-à-vis more established competitors, and proposes a series of recommendations for tackling current limitations, which cast some doubt upon the Yoon government’s declared objectives. In the midst of high demand coupled with budget pressures in every country, South Korean industry and government are successfully filling the niche of good defense hardware for the price, but admittedly not the highest available technology.