Bukang-i successfully guided out after month in which it drew 1.6m visitors and was watched over by YouTubers

In South Korea, they call them jagyeongdan, a word whose meaning sits somewhere between vigilante group and neighbourhood watch. Each night they put on hi-vis vests, picked up their selfie sticks and gathered around the harbour in Busan to keep watch over an unlikely charge: a stranded shark affectionately known as Bukang-i.

On Wednesday, after more than a month in the canal and at the third attempt, the shark was successfully guided out, South Korea’s oceans ministry said. Officials expect her to move into open water in time.

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© Photograph: Kim Hong-Ji/Reuters

© Photograph: Kim Hong-Ji/Reuters

© Photograph: Kim Hong-Ji/Reuters

South Korea will withdraw more staff from its embassy in Kyiv, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Park Doo-soon said on 20 October. Seoul says Kyiv broke an understanding to keep the transfer of two North Korean prisoners of war confidential, which was meant to protect the soldiers and their families in the North. Seoul had conveyed its position through several channels but received no sufficient response from Kyiv, Park added.

The Korea Herald noted, the move comes amid a dispute with the host government itself. That matters beyond the two countries. Good ties with Kyiv serve South Korea’s interests, AP reported earlier this month, citing experts, because Ukraine could share intelligence on North Korea’s expanding cooperation with Russia and its battlefield experience.

Seoul shrinks its Kyiv mission

Officials put the planned withdrawal at about half the embassy’s staff. The Korea Herald added that the timing has yet to be set. A chargé d’affaires and all consular staff will stay in Kyiv to keep diplomatic contacts and protect South Korean citizens.

Zelenskyy told the UN General Assembly in September that Ukraine had transferred two captured North Korean soldiers to South Korea. Ukrainian forces had captured both men in Russia’s Kursk Oblast in January 2025, where Pyongyang had sent troops to fight for Moscow.

On 6 October, South Korean Foreign Minister Cho Hyun said Sybiha’s messages included words of apology but fell short of what Seoul expected. Ukrainian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Heorhii Tykhyi replied that Sybiha had written he regretted the situation reaching an exchange of critical comments.

In an interview published on 12 October, Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha told the dispute stemmed from differing readings of confidentiality at various stages of the transfer. He considers the matter closed. “Ukraine fulfilled all its obligations.”

"This measure was taken because ​we judged it necessary to facilitate an amicable resolution of the ‌issue ⁠and restore trust between the two countries," said Park Doo-soon, a spokesperson for South Korea's Foreign Ministry, according to Yonhap.

Recent media reports projecting South Korea’s per capita GDP to surpass Japan’s have generated considerable excitement across the regional countries that see Korea as a role model. According to the IMF’s October 2026 projections, South Korea’s nominal GDP per capita could reach approximately $49,000 in 2027, compared with Japan’s $37,000-38,000. Its achievements in semiconductors, advanced […]

The post South Korea: A growing national crisis and a strategic warning appeared first on Asia Times.

Earlier this month, South Korea blamed North Korea-planted mines for the Sept. 21 blasts at the border, urging the North to apologize and remove other mines.

Army leaders preparing for a potential fight in the Pacific told us that some of the biggest lessons they’ve learned from the war in Ukraine and America’s now-paused fight against Iran are to move around assets that you can and find a better way to camouflage those that you can’t. While seemingly common sense, these lessons come from watching how war is now waged. The ubiquity of drones in Ukraine providing constant overwatch and strike capabilities, and U.S. troops killed and equipment destroyed or damaged by massive Iranian barrages on static installations are informing changes to how the Army trains, equips and operates.

These conversations took place during the recently wrapped Association of the U.S. Army (AUSA) annual convention in Washington, D.C., which TWZ attended.

“A lot of the things that are happening right now in terms of long-range fires, integrated air and missile defense, and the lessons that we’re learning from them, we’re able to bring a lot of that to our potential challenges in the Pacific,” Gen. Ron Clark, commander of U.S. Army Pacific (USARPAC), told us at a media roundtable. “Specifically, I am thinking through mobility and camouflage. So it’s one of those age-old Army forgotten sciences of how to hide in plain sight and how to camouflage ourselves from observation, because the ability to be able to see surface entities is almost ubiquitous.”

“Our ability to be able to use electronic warfare, to be able to use just good old-fashioned camouflage, and the ability to deceive our adversary is a must,” Clark added. You can read more about the U.S. military’s camouflage and deception efforts in our story here.

As we have frequently reported about the Ukraine war, both sides have been using a variety of “old-fashioned” tactics to duck, dodge and hide. They range from practices like smokescreens to hide from drones to updates on measures from the past like paint schemes designed to obfuscate vehicles and other equipment from AI-enabled targeting systems.

 As tough as things have been for Ukraine and for U.S. forces in the Middle East, the challenges will be even greater in the Pacific, Clark warned.

In Europe and the Middle East, “it’s not a near-peer adversary that we will be working against,” said Clark, referring respectively to Russia and Iran.

“Whereas in our theater, it absolutely is,” the USARPAC commander noted in a reference to China without naming the country. “So our ability to scale that and to think through the problem sets of how do we fight Type One, Type Two UAS? How do we think through ballistic missile defense holistically in the region? We spend a lot of time working with the joint force for solutions associated with that. How do we maneuver inside an archipelagic environment?”

For the Army, any fight in the Pacific will require soldiers to be able to hop islands and move through vast swaths of ocean, constantly hunted and frequently inside the Chinese weapons engagement zone. Clark said that the Army’s organic fleet of ships like landing craft, small tugs, and modular causeway systems operated by the service’s 8th Theater Sustainment Command will be vital for maneuver.

The Army, however, is struggling to keep its aging fleet of 70 of these vessels in the water and it got rid of a number of others over the years. Concerns about this underappreciated force have been something TWZ has raised for years.

“But we also have to be able to conduct tactical maneuver with forces on the ground that can provide long-range precision fires, as an example, and then move so that fires, radars, sensors are not easily targeted,” Clark added. “Because if they can see you, they can hit you. And if you know they have an opportunity to return fire, they will. So our lessons that we’re learning are, in some cases, are very, very relevant. In some cases, we can learn from some of the changing characteristics of war.”

Still, the wide-open plains and dense cities of Ukraine are quite different from the beaches and jungles of the Pacific, Clark reminded us.

“The way we generally fight does not equate specifically in the Ukraine piece to the maneuver that you would see out of U.S. forces if deployed in a conflict like that,” the USARPAC commander explained. “To be able to use operational maneuver and tactical maneuver in a way that it’s not just simply drone on drone or firing long range fires at one another at scale for an extended period of time. We find our way to work through that problem set and maneuver to positions of advantage and to prevail.”

Ukraine’s 115th Mechanized Brigade has released new footage showing a VB-140 Flamingo interceptor drone attacking a Russian Mi-28 attack helicopter in flight.

The drone approaches from above and flies directly into the helicopter’s spinning main rotor. It’s unclear whether… pic.twitter.com/GCb9FodXG3

— Special Kherson Cat (@bayraktar_1love) October 16, 2026

Regardless of the terrain, the ubiquity of drones in the Ukraine war has made maneuver and resupply deadly endeavors, with much of the front lines bogged down with limited territorial advances by either combatant.

When we pushed further on that point, Gen. Xavier T. Brunson, commander of United Nations Command, Combined Forces Command and United States Forces Korea, weighed in.

“To be able to move with sensors everywhere at all times causes us to achieve positions of advantage from distributed locations,” Brunson pointed out. “So the fight is: you look at maneuver. You might maneuver to a position of advantage, knowing that you’re going to change that again. The ability to utilize not only joint sensors but joint effectors, if you will, joint fires, to be able to use those things from different positions changes the shape of the operating environment.”

The bottom line, he added, is that “maneuver is always going to be maneuver. You’re going from A to B, but you might go from A to A1 to A2 to A3 to get to B, and that’s what I think we realize in this distributed fight that’s going on in Ukraine, and so we continue to watch to see what lessons might be coming back into” effect.

In part reacting to lessons learned from Ukraine and the Middle East, the Army is also changing how it trains, Clark stated. In South Korea, he said the service has to get out of the habit of concentrating so heavily on just two annual major training exercises.

“We recognize… that largely the two big exercises every year in Korea focus on large command posts,” Clark proffered. “We’ve got to move away from that. So what we intend to do is take advantage of the knowledge that we have of the threats that exist or that prevail in the Ukraine fight.”

Clark said these discussions are underway with his deputy commander, Republic of Korea Army Gen. Sungmin Kim.

“We talk about how we would operate in a distributed fashion. You know as well as I do, there’s a location that we go to to train every year in Korea, and we stay in that place,” Clark said in response to a question from another reporter. “What would it look like if we train from Jeju all the way up to Gyeonggi Province in the north? What would that look like, just with our headquarters alone?”

“So just imagine,” Clark postulated, “if we train across the entirety of the peninsula, and got ourselves in the shape where we would say [to North Korea], ‘You can’t utilize the things that you’ve learned in the fight and the battlefield in Ukraine on us, because we learned the same lessons and we’ve distributed ourselves in such a way that we don’t make ourselves the target. We won’t be moored in place,’ and that’s what I’m talking about when I talk about positional advantage. It might not be the same place to the continuum. It might not be the same place when you’re in crisis or conflict or competition. We might have to change that, and that’s what we’re learning.”

Another lesson from Ukraine that Army leaders should be paying attention to, said another panelist, is how both sides are using aerial and ground drones to supply frontline forces and evacuate the wounded because human efforts have now become too deadly, thanks to drones.

“I think you also can’t talk about Ukraine without talking about autonomy,” said Tara Murphy Dougherty, CEO of a company called Air, which provides AI-based sustainment solutions to the Army.

“One of the advantages that you get from using simulation and automation, and really using models and compute in order to create convoy plans, as opposed to humans with Excel spreadsheets, is you are able to do many fewer actual convoys because you’re using all of your capabilities so much more effectively and efficiently,” Dougherty posited. “And while it’s an indirect example, I think it does tie to soldier protection because you’re putting fewer soldiers out there in vulnerable settings. I see that not as an end-goal outcome; we need convoys.”

Ultimately, however, the Army will have to advance what Ukraine and Russia are doing with the deployment of aerial drones and uncrewed ground vehicles for logistics by creating “convoys” of autonomous vehicles.

“I see the end goal outcome as having as many autonomous convoys as possible, and we’ve heard today already at this event some of those ideas,” the CEO added. “In the interim, until we get to more autonomy in medevac and more autonomy in convoys when it’s non-soldier material that’s going out to the battlefield, let’s try and put fewer out there while actually getting more material and capability into the force where it needs to be.”

The Iranian missile and drone barrages on fixed U.S. bases across the Middle East have created some very costly lessons for American forces. As we noted earlier in this story, several troops were killed and critical air defense radars, aircraft and other important equipment were destroyed or damaged. U.S. installations across the region have also suffered damage.

In another media session, we pressed Army officials operating in South Korea about what they learned from watching the destruction caused by Iran and what they are doing to address it.

You can see a satellite image of damage to a U.S. radar site in Jordan below:

NEW: The radar for a THAAD system was struck and apparently destroyed in Jordan while two other THAAD radar systems may have been hit in the UAE, satellite images show – w/ @ThomasBordeaux7 https://t.co/qiuWVQgyda

— Gianluca Mezzofiore (@GianlucaMezzo) March 5, 2026

“We certainly are watching what’s happening, and we are learning from what is happening in Operation Epic Fury,” Lt. Gen. Joseph “Joe” Hilbert, commanding general of Eighth Army, stationed in South Korea, told us. “We’re learning what’s happening in Ukraine, and we are working through changes in our own tactics and techniques and procedures to be able to react to those threats and to be able to defend against them.”

For more details, he turned the microphone over to Col. Rosanna “Ro” M. Clemente, commander of the 35th Air Defense Artillery Brigade in South Korea.

“Drawing from those lessons learned, a lot of it is trying to understand how our systems are being hunted by the adversary,” she told us. “So, strictly into all of our training plans, and as we conduct our own internal exercises, all of our air defenders are practicing something as simple as mobility and survivability jumps, which is being able to reposition and displace your systems to different alternative locations based on any type of threat warnings that we receive. They’re very, very well trained. I think all of our soldiers know how to move their systems extremely, extremely well. They move them quickly, and they are able to move them and reposition them into different locations across the peninsula that still maintains that ballistic missile defense coverage.”

In addition, “we also have to rely on the other pillars of integrated air and missile defense, most specifically the passive defensive measures that we also have in place,” she added.

Those measures involve “a little bit more than just hardening – but a couple of other techniques that we’ve learned from the Russia-Ukraine war in terms of deception, how to move things around, create distractions, and make sure that we create different types of dilemmas for the adversary in terms of where our capabilities are and where are they positioned to protect its defended assets.”

Contact the author: howard@twz.com

The post What The Army’s Pacific Commanders Are Learning From Ukraine And Iran Conflicts appeared first on TWZ.

By K. J. NOH, POPULAR RESISTANCE

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Contact us: info@strategic-culture.su

Over seventy years ago, the US took control of South Korea’s military. To this day, it still controls it.

Why?

This confounds every notion of state sovereignty: a supposedly sovereign country — South Korea — has its own military subjugated under US control.

Opcon (operational control) of one nation’s army by another country is usually temporary, usually during wartime among allies.

In Korea, it has lasted over 76 years.

South Korea has asked for opcon back, repeatedly. It has been three decades since South Korea first made the demand.

The US has always delayed, filibustered, waffled, and moved goal posts.

More recently, the US has signaled more delay on the return of opcon, despite current president Lee Jae Myung’s demand that it be transferred back before the end of his term in 2030.

The allies are currently assessing the “full operational capability” (FOC) after validating the “initial operational capability” (IOC).

Seoul aims to wrap up the FOC certification and announce a target year for the Opcon transition at the upcoming SCM, before moving on to the remaining assessment of the “full mission capability,” which it expects to take about a year or so….[However] Washington remains firm in its position that Seoul is not ready for FOC certification, weighing on Seoul’s push to accelerate the Opcon transition.

This follows on US Forces Korea Commander Xavier Brunson’s repeated declarations of his opposition to Opcon transfer: only conditions matter, not timelines. According to Brunson, there can be no timeline to return control of South Korea’s troops to South Korea. Seventy six years is not enough.

South Korea had originally insisted on deadlines for the return of opcon. The US delayed, and delayed, and denied. It finally agreed–but only if certain conditions were met. These were agreed to in 2014, and reaffirmed them in 2017. Yet another decade has passed since those agreements.

Conditions for the return of opcon:

Cutting through the fog, there are essentially three conditions that the US has predicated as preconditions for South Korea to regain control over its own troops:

1. Can South Korea defend itself? (Can it operate its own military effectively? Does it have capacity, materiel, systems, and institutions?)

2. Are US and South Korea forces interoperable? (Can they coordinate in war?)

3. Are the conditions stable enough for opcon transfer?

The answer to the first is, of course. South Korea has one of the most powerful and well-equipped militaries in the world.

The second is, of course, the US and South Korea have been rehearsing interoperability for over seventy years.

The third is key: it is a catch-22 designed to undermine the entire process.

Conditions-based Opcon Transfer (COPT) sets specific benchmarks and tests for opcon transfer. These are the goalposts that are being constantly shifted.

However, the third condition is critical. It requires the de-escalation of tensions between North and South:

“Conducive Security Environment: The security environment on the Korean Peninsula and in the broader region must be stable and conducive to a safe, uninterrupted transfer.”

This is the catch-22:

If there is de-escalation of tensions, the required “tests” are not conducted and the benchmarks and certifications are not achieved — they are tied to field-condition wargames. Doing these wargames and tests escalates tensions with North Korea.

If there are tensions, then condition 3 is not met, and Opcon cannot be transferred.

It’s a formula for ensuring opcon is never transferred.

The simple fact is, it does not take 20+years to transfer opcon. “Wartime” opcon is transferred very rapidly. Armies coalesce, and opcon is transferred. Syngman Rhee turned over opcon in July of 1950 and the US was immediately in charge. It doesn’t take years and decades to transfer opcon. It takes hours or days. Returning it should be even faster. But that would require political will.

Here are some other important things to understand about opcon:

Opcon transfer conditions are actually classified:

The US keeps these conditions under wraps, and therefore the South Korean public or its representatives cannot challenge them publicly because they are not known. We only know the general outlines. The South Korean side can only hope the US will agree they have been met. This is yet another abrogation of sovereignty and democracy in addition to the original breach: “We will keep your military, unless you meet our secret conditions, which you cannot discuss, debate or challenge, because they are secret”.

Condition 3, “Conducive security environment” has always been a kill switch:

We know that security conditions have always been a tacit condition because, in the past, whenever opcon transfer looked justified and imminent, the security environment would suddenly degrade, scuttling the whole project. For example, just as the deadline for Roh Moo Hyun-negotiated Opcon transfer was approaching in 2012, the sudden sinking of the ROKS military ship Cheonan-Ho derailed wartime opcon transfer to 2015. That deadline has also passed and gone. Recent North-Korea attributed mine explosions near the DMZ fit this pattern, as have other numerous, suspicious incidents.

The concoction of “peacetime opcon” is nonsense:

The US claims it only has “wartime” opcon because it transferred “peacetime” opcon to South Korea in 1994. However, this very concept is nonsense:

1) Opcon means control of operations. Operations mean warfighting. “Wartime opcon”, ie. “wartime warfighting control” is a pleonasm. The only time operational control of a military is important is during fighting, just as the only time steering a car matters is when it’s moving.

The invention and transfer of “peacetime” opcon to Korea was a booby prize created to give the appearance that something had changed. Think of those Fisher-Price toy steering wheels you stick on the dashboard while someone else steers the car–it’s a political toy. It gives the illusion of control but it means nothing. The fact is, the US would never allow its military to be subjugated to a foreign command, even a shared command. The simple fact is, the US never shares control.

2) Immediately after “peacetime” opcon transfer in 1994, the US instituted CODA (Combined Delegated Authority), which continues US control of planning and execution of war. As Clint Work observes correctly, “The ROK JCS was granted the term OPCON for political purposes, and the US CFC was given the term CODA for accomplishing missions”. So much for peacetime “control”.

3) Last but not least, the US gets to unilaterally decide what constitutes peacetime and what constitutes wartime. When the US declares Defcon III, it’s wartime. Korean troops must fall in line under US opcon. If you get to slice the cake and then decide which portion you take, it’s your bloody cake. If you share a car, but only one party decides when it gets to be driven, and they drive, they own the car, you are maintenance. If one party unilaterally decides when it gets control, it has control, regardless of any protestations to the contrary.

But why does the US need to keep Opcon?

The US needs control over ROK troops because it is planning for war with China in the Pacific. It has been doing so since it drew up formal plans, AirSea Battle in 2009. For war, it needs SK as a military proxy: it needs the cannon fodder. South Korea has 3.6 million combat-ready troops: 500,000 regular and 3.1 million reserve. It has one of the most powerful and advanced militaries in the world, as well as the defense industrial base to sustain it. Furthermore, SK troops have always fought in US wars as proxies: more military-aged men in South Korea saw combat in Vietnam than Americans did as a proportion of population — 325,000 were deployed–the largest foreign deployment after the US. It was also the third largest deployment to Iraq. The US can avoid a draft because SK has one.

USFK Commander Xavier Brunson has made this US agenda of weaponizing South Korea for war against China explicit, comparing South Korea to “fixed aircraft carrier”, a dagger pointed at China, and a critical part of US war strategy because it is already inside China’s defense perimeter.

As the Hankyoreh Newspaper points out:

When his “dagger” comment is tied to his previous remarks, it’s evident that Brunson expects Korea to play an offensive role capable of striking the Chinese heartland, and Japan to play a defensive role supporting Korea…Brunson commented last August that he would like F-35 fighters with stealth capabilities and a multi-domain task force (MDTF) capable of wrecking China’s anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) network to be assigned to USFK. These comments suggest that Brunson means to treat Korea as a forward base equipped with military options for launching direct strikes against China.

Brunson recently announced that the multi-domain task force will be deployed to Korea.  These build on his previous statements on preparing the peninsula for war with China:

…[this] orientation clarifies how forces on the peninsula can impose costs, not only on the CCP’s Northern Theater Army, but also on the [Russian] Northern Fleet, thus demonstrating the significant strategic potential that exists on the peninsula to influence adversary operations in both adjacent seas… existing force positioning, particularly on the Korean Peninsula, may offer greater strategic advantages… advantageously positioned assets already inside the [Chinese] defensive perimeter, capable of immediate cost-imposition [ie. attack] against multiple adversaries.

This simultaneous fiction of pretending it doesn’t control South Korea’s troops became necessary when US-opconned SK troops massacred civilians in Gwangju.  The need to avoid accountability created the legal fiction of “peacetime opcon”, but that doesn’t obviate the US need for control as it prepares for and escalates to war.

The real reason why opcon transfer is taking so long is the US is trying to create a structure that maintains control of the SK army while pretending that it doesn’t.   This involves a crazy-quilt of parallel & unified command structures, multiplying command authorities, phased operating assessments, Frankenstein-cobbled-leadership structure, Rube Goldberg carve-outs, and a general have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too mindset.  This is assisted by extreme factions of the quisling South Korea right, who have lashed themselves to the sinking US Empire and see any reclamation of genuine South Korean sovereignty as abandonment–they fear that a South Korean military–the real nexus of power in Korean politics, accountable only to Koreans, would result in a loss of status and power as US quisling collaborators and subcontractors.

With war with China on the horizon, South Korea needs to reclaim opcon rapidly.  It remains to be seen if president Lee Jae Myung can pull off this hat trick.  However, the consequences of not doing so could be catastrophic.

Original article:  popularresistance.org

South Korean President Lee Jae-myung is trying to maneuver between pressure from the United States, which demands participation in the conflict with Iran, and risks to national security and reputation, opting for a strategy of stalling and minimizing a direct military presence. The previous article explained why South Korea refused to join the United States […]

South Korean President Lee Jae Myung welcomed the PanStar Acro and its crew home on Tuesday after the container ship completed the country’s first round-trip commercial trial through the Arctic to Europe, hailing the voyage as a potential alternative to traditional shipping lanes even as questions remain over commercial viability and cooperation with Russia.

Park Ki-chang, South Korea’s ambassador to Ukraine, has returned to Seoul after being recalled in protest at Kyiv’s disclosure of information regarding the handover of North Korean prisoners of war to the South Korean side. Shortly before this, Song Yeon-gil, known for his reputation as a Russophile, was appointed as an adviser to the president. […]

Volodymyr Zelensky probably did not expect two North Korean prisoners of war to create a diplomatic crisis with South Korea. That is nevertheless what happened. During his September address to the United Nations General Assembly, Zelensky disclosed that two North Korean soldiers captured while fighting alongside Russian forces had been transferred to South Korea. Seoul […]

By Joyce Lee SEOUL, Oct 11 (Reuters) – A South Korean container ship completed the country’s first commercial round trip to Europe via the Arctic on Sunday, as authorities bank on the...

The South Korean government has released images from its first successful test of a domestically developed hypersonic boost-glide vehicle. This includes shots of the vehicle impacting the water at the end of its flight. A weapon of this kind would give South Korea a significant new way to hold targets in North Korea at risk amid an ever-deepening arms race on the Peninsula.

South Korea’s Presidential Office, more commonly referred to as the Cheong Wa Dae or the Blue House, announced the test in a Korean-language press release yesterday. The Blue House initially released a video of President Lee Jae Myung and others observing the test from a conference room at the Anheung Proving Ground, which is located in South Chungcheong Province on the country’s western coast. South Korea’s Agency for Defense Development (ADD) manages testing at Anheung. A series of still images from the test itself was subsequently posted on the Blue House’s website.

Included in the still image gallery are shots showing the launch of the missile, a formal name for which has not yet been disclosed, from a wheeled transport-erector-launcher on a platform sitting just off the coast. The low resolution of the pictures makes it hard to tell whether the missile and/or the TEL are of an existing South Korean design or are based on one. We will come back to this later on.

As mentioned, there are also pictures of the hypersonic boost-glide vehicle hitting the water. At first glance, the vehicle looks to have a broadly conical design with stabilizing fins at the base. However, at least one of the fins looks to be truncated. Closer inspection of the available images shows further indicators that might point to it actually having a more wedge-shaped design with a distinct top and bottom, though it is still not definitely clear given the low resolution. Conical boost-glide vehicles are generally understood to be easier to design, relatively speaking, than wedge-shaped ones. Historically, hypersonic boost-glide vehicles of any kind have proven to be technically complex and challenging to turn into viable operational weapons, even by countries with extensive past experience with their development.

“This test launch was conducted to verify, for the first time, the vehicle’s core technologies in a hypersonic flight environment: the performance of ultra-high-temperature heat-resistant materials, guidance and control capabilities, and the ability to perform irregular flight maneuvers at low altitudes,” the Blue House said in its release yesterday, per a machine translation of the Korean text. “The HGV [hypersonic boost-glide vehicle] successfully separated after ascending to the target altitude and executed its planned flight path within the hypersonic environment without any issues.”

With all this in mind, the fact that the vehicle just remained intact through to impact is noteworthy. At the time of writing, South Korean authorities do not appear to have disclosed more specific details about the test, including how far the boost-glide vehicle traveled before hitting the water or what peak speed it reached. Important questions also remain about how the vehicle is guided during the mid-course and terminal phases of flight, challenges that do not appear to have been addressed by this particular test.

In general, unpowered hypersonic boost-glide vehicles need to be brought first to an optimal altitude and speed. This is typically achieved using a sufficiently sized rocket booster, with existing ballistic missile designs often serving as a starting point.

Once released from the booster, a boost-glide vehicle flies along a relatively shallow flight path within the Earth’s atmosphere. The vehicle is able to maneuver along the way, sometimes erratically, while traveling at hypersonic speeds, generally defined as anything about Mach 5.

All of this sets hypersonic weapons of this kind apart from traditional ballistic missiles, even ones with advanced maneuverability capabilities, which all follow a broadly arcing trajectory to their targets. The combination of speed, flight trajectory, and maneuverability offered by hypersonic boost-glide vehicles creates distinct challenges for opponents. They are hard to spot and track, let alone attempt to intercept, and there is less time for defenders to react overall. This ability to penetrate enemy air defenses and cover ground rapidly makes these weapons particularly attractive for strikes on very high-value and time-sensitive targets.

“The HGV [hypersonic boost-glide vehicle] is a ‘key strategic asset capable of changing the game on the battlefield,’ as its unpredictable flight trajectory and overwhelming speed allow it to launch surprise strikes against key strategic targets during contingencies,” the Blue House’s release explicitly noted, again according to a machine translation.

With all this in mind, South Korea does have an entire family of domestically-produced ground-launched ballistic missiles that could be suitable starting places for launching an unpowered hypersonic boost-glide vehicle. President Lee was notably shown a TEL for the country’s newest Hyunmoo-5 ballistic missile at Anheung yesterday, though no explicit connection has been drawn between that weapon and the hypersonic test. The Hyunmoo-5 is itself still a relatively new development, having only entered service around the end of last year.

When it comes to new South Korean arms developments, the Hyunmoo-5, which entered service around the end of last year, has been and continues to be a major point of discussion by itself. It is officially categorized as a short-range design, despite how big it is (35 tons gross weight), which is said to be due largely to the equally substantial size of its warhead (17,000 pounds). Past reports have raised the possibility that it could be capable of flying out to intermediate ranges if the warhead weight were reduced. Short-range ballistic missiles are defined as ones with ranges between 190 and 620 miles (300 and 1,000 kilometers), while intermediate-range ballistic missiles can hit targets out to between 1,864 and 3,418 miles (3,000 to 5,500 kilometers). Medium-range ballistic missiles (MRBM) fall in between these two categories.

With its massive unitary warhead, the Hyunmoo-5 already gives South Korea an important new way to hold deeply buried and otherwise hardened targets in North Korea at risk. This fits in directly with the country’s broader Korea Massive Punishment and Retaliation (KMPR) policy, as TWZ has previously written:

“While the Hyunmoo-5 has been widely reported as a future pillar of the KMPR, its specific ability to penetrate deeply buried bunkers, such as those used by the North Korean leadership, the same functions mean that it can also fulfill elements of the ‘kill chain.’ In this way, it could be used as part of a pre-emptive strike, to try and knock out North Korea’s launch capability by targeting its hardened command-and-control facilities and missile storage areas.”

By virtue of the very high speeds they reach in the terminal phase of flight, hypersonic boost-glide vehicles also offer bunker-busting benefits on top of the other aforementioned advantages they bring to the table.

In addition, the hypersonic boost-glide vehicle test reflects a broader arms race that has been expanding in scale and scope for years now. South Korea is also developing an air-breathing hypersonic cruise missile, seen in the composite image below, as well as new air- and sea-launched ballistic missiles, the latter of which will be loaded on new surface warships and submarines.

Though there are always questions about the actual maturity and viability of the designs, North Korea continues to churn out its own new missile developments. This includes two separate test launches of purported new hypersonic designs just in recent weeks. Tit-for-tat missile launches are not entirely uncommon on the peninsula, but there are limits to how quickly a test like the one South Korea conducted yesterday involving an emerging technology can reasonably be staged.

Friction between the North and South has been at a particular high point, in general, following an incident on September 21, in which three South Korean troops were injured along the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), as well as the United Nations Command (UNC) on the Peninsula, have said a North Korean landmine placed in violation of the Armistice Agreement was to blame. South Korean authorities have demanded an apology and raised the prospect of some form of action in response, though President Lee has more recently sought to downplay the situation. The government in North Korea has denied the accusations and threatened an “immediate and powerful counteraction” should South Korea seek to retaliate.

An operational hypersonic boost-glide vehicle capability would also expand South Korea’s capacity to challenge opponents regionally beyond North Korea. Though the regime in Pyongyang represents the most proximate national security threat to the country, China and Russia have also been growing points of concern for South Korean authorities in recent years.

“We must secure our national security through our own strength,” President Lee said after yesterday’s hypersonic test, per the Blue House’s release. “The government must not rest on today’s success but must further advance the technology so that the hypersonic glide vehicle can establish itself as a robust strategic asset safeguarding our future security.”

South Korea’s very public test of its new hypersonic boost-glide vehicle underscores the country’s still-expanding efforts to broaden its options for striking even the best-defended targets in North Korea, as well as projecting power elsewhere regionally. At the same time, it remains to be seen when the South Koreans may field a real operational capability in this regard.

Contact the author: joe@twz.com

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Seven tankers made 14 trips from South Korea to Russia's Far East in July and August, carrying more than 176,000 metric tons of fuel, most of it diesel, the Guardian found in a 6 October analysis of port records and ship-tracking data. The UK and EU have sanctioned three of the ships, and one loaded its fuel from another tanker at sea off South Korea instead of at a terminal.

Ukrainian strikes have cut Russia's fuel output as Moscow scrambles for supplies, while fuel loaded at South Korean ports has flowed to Russia. Loadings began to surge in July, the same month South Korean President Lee Jae-myung pledged $100 million for Ukraine's reconstruction, the Guardian reported. That creates a tension in Seoul's policy toward the war: South Korea has provided Ukraine with humanitarian and non-lethal aid but ruled out sending weapons directly, while the fuel trade appears legal under South Korean law even though three of the tankers are under UK and EU sanctions.

Russia imported 368,000 metric tons of oil products by sea in August, 112,000 of them from South Korea, according to Kpler data analyzed by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) and cited by the Guardian. CREA's own August report gives 172,000 metric tons in total, including 18,000 from South Korea. Neither explains the gap.

Where the tankers said they were going

The Layla, a tanker under UK and EU sanctions, made two voyages from Ulsan to Vladivostok, carrying a total of 57,000 metric tons of diesel. It left South Korea on 19 July and 10 August. On the first trip, it told South Korean authorities it was bound for Vladivostok; on the second, it declared Niigata, Japan, but sailed to Vladivostok again.

The Astoria, a Russian-flagged tanker under UK, EU, and Australian sanctions, loaded nearly 11,000 metric tons of fuel at Ulsan on 1 August. It declared Japan as its destination but sailed to Vladivostok.

The Chongchon did not berth at a South Korean port. Instead, it took about 26,000 metric tons of fuel from the unsanctioned Celeste I at an anchorage off Yeosu in early August. It declared Singapore as its destination but headed to Vladivostok. The owners and managers of the four tankers did not respond to the Guardian's requests for comment.

Why Russia needs the fuel

Ukrainian drone strikes have severely disrupted Russia's refining capacity, the Guardian reported. In July, Ukraine's General Staff said the strikes had knocked out 42% of Russia's refining capacity, costing the industry billions of dollars.

Russian refinery throughput fell in June to its lowest level in more than 20 years, and diesel output is down nearly 30% from a year earlier, the International Energy Agency said, according to the Guardian.

Russia has also restricted fuel exports to protect domestic supplies, extending its diesel export ban until the end of October; on 2 October, Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak said Moscow could consider partially lifting the ban if there was overproduction, according to the Moscow Times.

Responses to the shipments

Seoul's non-lethal aid has included helmets, body armor, and demining vehicles, and in 2023 it pledged $2.3 billion in support, mostly in loans.

Isaac Levi, an analyst at CREA, told the Guardian:

"It is shocking that EU-sanctioned tankers loaded fuel at South Korean ports and carried it to Russia. This undermines the sanctions regime and South Korea's support for Ukraine."

South Korea's Foreign Ministry did not address the shipments or the sanctioned tankers. In a statement, it said the government supports international efforts to help end the war in Ukraine and bring about a peaceful recovery. The ministry said it was strictly enforcing its export controls and had expanded them to cover 1,402 non-strategic items with high potential for diversion to military use. The UK Foreign Office did not answer the Guardian's questions about UK-sanctioned tankers using South Korean ports, saying only that it remains committed to monitoring its sanctions.

Ties between Kyiv and Seoul are also strained over Ukraine's disclosure of its transfer of two North Korean prisoners of war to South Korea, which Seoul said should have remained private.

Originally published by Pacific Forum, this article is republished with permission. While operational planners in the United States, the Republic of Korea and Japan have made historic strides institutionalizing trilateral security cooperation, the credibility of deterrence ultimately hinges on a more punishing variable: wartime sustainment. Washington, Seoul, and Tokyo have expanded joint exercises, real-time missile […]

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