SEOUL, Dec. 10 (Korea Bizwire) — South Korea plans to raise the annual salaries of entry-level military officers and non-commissioned officers (NCOs) at border units by up to 30 percent by 2027 from this year, the defense ministry said Sunday, amid a push to improve working conditions of troops. The salary for a new staff [...]
WASHINGTON, Dec. 7 (Korea Bizwire) — House and Senate negotiators released their compromise draft of an annual defense policy bill Thursday, which calls for maintaining 28,500 U.S. troops in South Korea and deepening nuclear deterrence coordination between Seoul and Washington. They unveiled the final draft of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for the 2024 [...]
SEOUL, Dec. 8 (Korea Bizwire) — The Australian subsidiary of Hanwha Aerospace signed a 3.1 trillion won (US$2.4 billion) deal Friday to sell 129 Redback infantry fighting vehicles to Australia, South Korea’s arms procurement agency said. Hanwha Defense Australia struck the contract with Australia’s Capability Acquisition and Sustainment Group in Melbourne, the Defense Acquisition Program [...]
SEOUL, Dec. 7 (Korea Bizwire) — South Korea has attended a United Nations peacekeeping ministerial forum and pledged its support for the global community’s commitment to strengthen peacekeeping operations (PKO), Seoul’s foreign ministry said Thursday. The South Korean delegation led by Kweon Ki-hwan, the deputy foreign minister for multilateral and global affairs, attended the two-day [...]
SEOUL, Dec. 6 (Korea Bizwire) – South Korea’s shrinking pool of conscripts is causing concerns amid the growing threat from North Korea, prompting the military to mull options to effectively maintain combat readiness with limited resources. In South Korea, all able-bodied men must serve mandatory military service for at least 18 months, while women can [...]
WASHINGTON, Dec. 4 (Korea Bizwire) — South Korea’s “indirect” provision of 155-mm artillery shells for Ukraine this year has made it a larger supplier of ammunition for the war-ravaged country than all European countries combined, The Washington Post (WP) reported Monday. In an article on Russia’s protracted war against Ukraine, the U.S. daily explained Washington’s [...]
SEOUL, Dec. 4 (Korea Bizwire) –South Korea’s defense authorities on Monday chose Brazilian company Embraer’s C-390 for the Air Force’s new large transport aircraft over contenders from aerospace heavyweights Lockheed Martin and Airbus. The Defense Project Promotion Committee selected the model for the 710 billion won (US$544.4 million) acquisition project set to run through [...]
SEOUL, Dec. 4 (Korea Bizwire) — Hanwha Aerospace Co., a South Korean defense company, said Monday it has signed a 3.45 trillion-won (US$2.62 billion) contract with the Polish government to provide 152 K9 self-propelled howitzers to the European country by 2027. The deal forged with Warsaw’s Armament Agency is part of a larger framework agreement [...]
SEOUL, Dec. 3 (Korea Bizwire) – North Korea warned Sunday that a “physical clash and war” have become a matter of time on the Korean Peninsula in the wake of the scrapping of an inter-Korean military tension reduction accord, threatening that South Korea will face “total collapse” if it undertakes any hostile act. A North [...]
SEOUL, Dec. 2 (Korea Bizwire) — Space has emerged as an extended battlefield for the rival Koreas as they have successfully launched their own spy satellites into orbit and are gearing up to send more to better monitor each other amid an intensifying arms race, analysts said Saturday. South Korea’s first homegrown spy satellite was [...]