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.
