1OCT

Seoul buys jammers with its new tanks

1 min read

15:21UTC

South Korea's Defense Acquisition Program Administration approved a 3.448 trillion won K2 tank upgrade on 11 August that fits drone and roadside-bomb jammers to the fleet.

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Key takeaway

South Korea folded drone jammers into a tank upgrade running to 2046.

South Korea's Defense Acquisition Program Administration (DAPA), the country's arms procurement agency, approved a 3.448 trillion won performance-improvement programme for the K2 main battle tank on 11 August, running from 2028 to 2046 and fitting the fleet with jammers against drones and roadside bombs⁠¹.

A twenty-year upgrade schedule commits an army to a threat assessment it has to make today, and Seoul has decided that small aerial attack is a permanent condition of armoured warfare rather than a feature of one war. Jammers ride inside the base programme, funded and specified alongside the gun and the armour, instead of being bolted on later through an urgent operational requirement.

That choice carries an obvious hazard. Electronic countermeasures date faster than any other subsystem on a tank, and a jammer specified against the drones of 2026 will meet the drones of 2036 halfway through the programme. Counter-drone procurement has been running at record rates across every market this year, and Seoul has chosen to absorb its share of that inside a platform programme rather than buy the kit separately. What the approval buys is the integration work, the power, the mounting and the crew interface, which is the expensive part to retrofit and the cheap part to update once it exists.

Deep Analysis

In plain English

South Korea is spending roughly $2.5 billion to upgrade its K2 tanks over the next two decades, adding equipment that jams drones and roadside bombs. Tanks like the K2 were built before small, cheap attack drones became a serious battlefield threat. This upgrade programme adds defensive electronics to existing tanks rather than designing a new tank from scratch, and will run from 2028 through to 2046.

Deep Analysis

Root Causes

Existing main battle tanks such as the K2 were designed against armour and anti-tank missile threats, not against cheap, mass-produced first-person-view attack drones.

Those drones have proven capable of destroying armour in Ukraine at a fraction of a tank's cost, and retrofitting jammers is the fastest way to extend a fielded platform's survivability without a new design cycle.

What could happen next?

Meaning
A near two-decade retrofit timeline shows South Korea treats drone-jamming as a standard tank upgrade requirement rather than an emergency fix.

Sources:Defense Acquisition Program Administration

Mentions:Seoul →South Korea →K2 →South Korea's Defense Acquisition Program Administration →

First Reported In

Update #17 · Two walls close on the drone supply chain

Defense Acquisition Program Administration· 20 Aug 2026

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Causes and effects

This Event

Seoul buys jammers with its new tanks

Counter-drone equipment is now written into a tank modernisation running to 2046 rather than bought as a separate programme.

Led to

DAPA approves VTOL drone for Korean army

DAPA followed its K2 jammer approval with a VTOL reconnaissance drone programme.

Occurred 15 Sept 2026

Read story →

Different Perspectives

Israel Defense Forces (Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir)

The IDF finalised a new Unmanned Systems and Artificial Intelligence Branch on 10 September, with full inauguration expected by early December. Israel is reorganising its forces around drones while Israeli suppliers pass into foreign hands: US-listed Ondas bought the fuze maker GATE on 14 September.

EHang (chairman and chief executive Huazhi Hu)

EHang withdrew its 600 million yuan revenue guidance on 25 August, blaming a more cautious Chinese regulator after industry air incidents. China's leading pilotless-aircraft maker now seeks first approvals in Sri Lanka and Thailand while US tariffs and FCC rules shut Chinese parts out of allied supply chains.

DroneShield

The Australian firm won one of ten Domestic Shield ceilings, $500m, on 29 September, while its FY2027-and-beyond committed revenue stood at A$46m. Its own filing warns investors that the US award may never turn into orders.

Pete Hegseth, US Secretary of War

In a speech at Quantico on 30 September Hegseth announced AUTOWARCOM, a four-star drone command targeted for 1 October 2027 if Congress agrees, and called Drone Dominance and JIATF-401 a good start. He wants one command with its own budget to buy at the scale those two efforts have not reached.

Defense Acquisition Program Administration (DAPA)

A DAPA-chaired committee approved a 2.16 trillion won domestic programme on 15 September for an army vertical take-off reconnaissance drone, running from 2027 to 2036. Seoul is choosing slow domestic development over urgent imports for its divisional surveillance.

Taiwan's Executive Yuan (Cabinet)

After the Legislative Yuan voted 60 to 50 on 27 August for a baseline of NT$40bn a year, in principle, for domestic drones and rejected its special budget, the Cabinet said on 30 August it would expedite funding and indicated it would co-sign the act. Taipei gets a statutory domestic market but loses a ring-fenced multi-year fund.