South Korea’s Yoon slams response to North Korea drones, vows to create drone unit

SEOUL - South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol said on Tuesday he would advance the creation of a military unit specialising in drones, criticising the military response to a border intrusion by North Korean drones.

Five North Korean drones crossed into South Korea

on Monday, prompting Seoul to scramble fighter jets and attack helicopters, and try to shoot them down, in the first such intrusion since 2017.

The incident rekindled questions about South Korea’s air defences at a time when it is trying to rein in the North’s evolving nuclear and missile threats. 

The military fired warning shots and some 100 rounds from a helicopter equipped with a machine gun, but failed to bring down any of the drones while they flew over several South Korean cities, including the capital, Seoul, for about five hours. 

“The incident showed a substantial lack of our military’s preparedness and training for the past several years, and clearly confirmed the need for more intense readiness and training,” Mr Yoon told a Cabinet meeting. 

Mr Yoon blamed the unpreparedness for his predecessor’s “dangerous” North Korea policy, which relied on Pyongyang’s “good intentions” and a 2018 inter-Korean military pact banning hostile activities in the border areas. 

“We have been planning to establish a drone unit to monitor and reconnoitre major North Korean military facilities, and will now expedite the plan as much as possible,” he added, vowing to boost its surveillance and reconnaissance capability with cutting-edge stealthy drones. 

South Korea’s military apologised on Tuesday for failing to shoot down the five North Korean drones.

“Yesterday, five enemy drones invaded South Korean airspace, and our military detected and tracked them, but we apologise for not being able to shoot them down,” the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) said in a statement.

All the drones appeared to have returned to the North, despite an operation to hunt them down.

The JCS acknowledged that, while the military can counter “attack drones that pose a real threat”, there is a limit to their ability to detect and strike smaller spy drones.

“As a result, the military’s lack of readiness has caused a lot of concern to the public,” it said.

The military said it chased one of the five drones over the greater Seoul area, but could not aggressively attack it because of concerns over civilian safety. 

“We operated detecting, tracking and shooting assets, but there were areas where there might be civilian damage,” an official at the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) told a briefing on Tuesday. “So there were difficulties in actually carrying out operations.”

The incident was the latest airspace intrusion by unmanned aerial vehicles from the isolated North, with the two Koreas remaining technically at war after their 1950-53 war ended in an armistice, not a peace treaty. 

In 2017, a North Korean drone believed to be on a spy mission crashed and was found on a mountain near the border.

In 2014, a North Korean drone was discovered on a South Korean border island. Those devices were deemed crude, mounted with cameras. 

The JCS said the latest drones were small, measuring about 2m, but it was unclear whether they are more technically advanced. 

Analysts said the drones might be too small and primitive to conduct full reconnaissance missions, but they could be enough to carry a weapon or disrupt aviation activity, as seen on Monday, when flights departing from the Incheon and Gimpo airports were suspended briefly.

“The incident caught the South’s military off guard, exposing the immaturity of its responses,” said Dr Cha Du-hyeogn, a senior fellow at the Asan Institute for Policy Studies in Seoul. “They will need to check their GPS jamming and overall response systems.”

A 2016 report by UN sanctions monitors said North Korea owns about 300 drones of various types, including for reconnaissance, target practice and combat. The monitor noted that the drones recovered in the South used parts imported from China, the Czech Republic, Japan, Switzerland and the United States.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has publicly shown interest in drones, and pledged at a meeting of the ruling Workers’ Party last year to develop new reconnaissance drones capable of flying up to 500km. REUTERS, AFP