The rise of South Korea’s weapons business

JJumpCrisscross about 9 hours ago 14 commentsRead Article on politico.com

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tristanj•38 minutes ago

This article uses so many words to focus on the political reasons, but completely ignores the primary driver: Cost.

Korean weapons systems are 40-60% cheaper than their American counterparts.

The Korean K9 Thunder 155mm self-propelled howitzer costs $3.5 to $4 million per unit. For comparison, the American M109A7 Paladin costs around $8 million. The German PzH 2000 runs approximately $7 to $8 million.

The K239 Chunmoo Rocket Artillery (MLRS) system runs $2.0M/unit; M142 HIMARS runs $4.5M/unit. 155mm artillery shells are $2k/shell from Korea vs $3.5k/shell from the United States. Korean Cheongung II SAM interceptors cost ~$1.1M/unit, US Patriot missiles cost $4.0M/unit.

Buying South Korean weapons systems means you can procure twice as much at the same cost. It's a no brainer why Korea is winning military contracts.

[0] https://militarymachine.com/k9-thunder-howitzer-most-exporte...

kwillets•about 1 hour ago

This trend has been obvious since at least the Poland deal. Korea gets much more return on its defense dollar manufacturing exportable weapons systems than relying on imports or domestic-only programs.

bell-cot•about 8 hours ago

Maybe HN should ban words matching "surpris" from Titles?

Even if you are clueless about the international arms trade - South Korea has maintained a huge military for the past 70-ish years, as part of their endless cold war with North Korea. And South Korea has been really big on manufacturing and exporting all sorts of stuff for the past half-ish-century. Why the hell wouldn't they be selling the military things that they are building anyway, at scale, to any and every non-enemy with money to spend?

tartoran•about 2 hours ago

I don’t know what your point really is. Yes Korea has been already selling arms, but as of recently, they stepped up drastically. This is what this article is about. Is the title wrong? That’s an issue with most titles these days

dredmorbius•16 minutes ago

The original title, before dang corrected it (See: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48611464>), was "The Surprising New Arms Dealer to the World". Which teases unnecessarily and uses more words to not reveal the actual country involved.

HN mods chose to employ my suggested title, which follows from HN guidelines and practices: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32949870> and <https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>, most of the first six 'graphs following "In Submissions" pertaining to titles.

nine_k•about 1 hour ago

There are, sadly, many places of conflicts smoldering for years; not all of them, if any, ended up in production of exportable weapons. E.g. Taiwan is preparing for a PRC invasion for decades; did it produce exportable weapons systems?

So there is an element of surprise. Maybe not as large as North Korea exporting ballistic missiles to Russia [1], but still.

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/apr/25/how-north-kore...

dredmorbius•about 5 hours ago

Email suggestions (specific submission title edits, general edit-rewriting rules) to the mods: hn@ycombinator.com.

HN guidelines typically prefer sourcing a title from the text of the document itself. Given Politico seem to be rotating through clickbait variants (the presently displayed title is "Trump Is Tired of Arming Allies. This Country Is Stepping Up.", the submitted title appears elsewhere in the page source), I'd suggest:

"The rise of South Korea’s weapons business"

Which is non-clickbaity, succinct, clear, and accurate. It appears at the start of the 4th body 'graph.

I'd argue it's superior to the subtitle "The U.S. retreat from the global stage is an opportunity for South Korea.", as that option fails to indicate the nature of that opportunity. South Korea and arms trade are the key elements discussed.

dang•about 2 hours ago

Ok, we've put that in the title above. Thanks!

Animats•about 1 hour ago

Other countries with rising weapons businesses are Ukraine and Iran.

The best endorsement for a weapons manufacturer is winning a war against a tough opponent.

jonnybgood•about 1 hour ago

It’s just Russia using Iranian drones, but that was already happening.

This war with Iran is not really an endorsement of Iranian weapons. The US didn’t stop its offensive because of Iranian weapons. We already knew the effectiveness of one way attack drones just from looking at their employment in Ukraine.

The US counter-UAV industry might start seeing some exponential growth. There’s a lot of lessons learned for the US and we’ll probably start seeing a lot more money thrown around by the US military.

Animats•27 minutes ago

The Ukrainian counter-UAV industry is already seeing huge growth. The Gulf oil states attacked by Iran are buying.[1]

Strong counter-UAV defense requires an entire integrated low-altitude air defense systems. The US systems the Gulf states have purchased are high-altitude oriented, useful against incoming aircraft and some missiles. They have long range radars, but not enough of them in the right places for finding low-flying drones. They have expensive missiles like the Patriot, which works against drones if there are not many of them. There are many incoming drones. Ukraine alone is up to 7 million drones a year.

Aerial warfare is changing in a big way. It's starting to look as big as the transition from battleships. Big airfields are big, fat targets.

[1] https://www.thedefensenews.com/UAE-Qatar-and-Kuwait-Seek-Tho...

graeme•15 minutes ago

>The US didn’t stop its offensive because of Iranian weapons.

I would say they did. Gulf countries ran out of missile and drone defenses and a lot of infrastructure was getting hit. Long run loss of capacity here would be worse than temporary strait closure and there were a lot of assets left to hit.

themafia•7 minutes ago

That's one of the problems with the lack of diplomacy in the US's position for the past 40 years. We have pushed the envelope beyond our own control:

"The U.S. military reverse-engineered Iran’s Shahed-136 loitering munition to create a low-cost, one-way attack drone squadron in the Middle East called LUCAS (Low-Cost Unmanned Combat Attack System)."

Necessity is the mother of invention. We spent billions in exchange for making our "enemies" stronger. We really are a ridiculous nation.