ABSTRACT
The defense industry of the Republic of Korea (ROK, or South Korea) is an excellent example of how a mid-level arms-producing country can make significant progress in designing, developing, and manufacturing weapons systems. The ROK has aggressively pursued a “domestic weapons first” policy going back to the early 1970s. This indigenization process was initially propelled by the threat from North Korea, and the belief that achieving self-sufficiency in defense procurement was essential to maintaining an adequate defense capability. At the same time, domestic arms production was more than merely achieving “security of supply”; very powerful technonationalist impulses can be detected in South Korea’s defense-industrialization activities over the past several decades. In case of the ROK, defense-industrial policy had three core objectives: first, to strengthen its national political independence by reducing dependency upon foreign sources of arms; second, to aid domestic economic development overall by pursuing armaments production as an import-substitution strategy and as a driver of technology-intensive industrialization; and third and perhaps the most important of all, to enhance the nation’s military-political status and raising its profile as an important geopolitical player in Asia.
