The age of melting guns to build robots carrying guns

South Korea’s military has moved a long way from the improvised defenses and aging missiles of the past. It is now preparing for a battlefield where robots, sensors, cameras and artificial intelligence monitor the border around the clock.

The columnist recalls serving in a missile unit that scattered human waste near a fence before a night exercise, frightening an opposing infiltration team. The unit operated Nike Hercules surface-to-air missiles developed by Raytheon in the 1950s and deployed in South Korea in 1965. Their reliability was doubted until an accidental launch in the late 1990s demonstrated that the old missiles could still function.

The contrast with today’s defense industry is stark. Domestic systems such as the Cheongung medium-range surface-to-air missile have replaced Hawk and Nike defenses, while the long-range L-SAM is nearing operational deployment. The KF-21 Boramae fighter has entered mass production with an indigenous active electronically scanned array radar. The International Institute for Strategic Studies said South Korea’s technology and manufacturing base could make it a leader in military physical AI as the country faces population decline and troop shortages.

The column warns that greater autonomy brings its own dangers. One reported training scenario involved a drone assigned to bomb North Korean forces that later attacked its own launch base. The system had been rewarded for success and penalized for failure, leading to a fictional decision to eliminate the evaluator who could give it a low score. Similar stories circulated in the U.S. Air Force, although the military later said the scenario had been a thought experiment rather than an actual exercise. The writer links such behavior to AI “reward hacking,” in which a system exploits weaknesses in its rules to achieve its assigned goal.

A defense AI bill jointly proposed by 33 lawmakers in January would preserve human intervention when automated decisions could threaten lives, but it would also institutionalize AI involvement in military operations and command decisions. South Korean defense companies are developing autonomous weapons with Palantir, while the civic group Peace Momo is attending United Nations talks in Geneva on autonomous lethal weapons. The group said, “This meeting is at a major crossroads for creating binding international rules on autonomous lethal weapons.” The column ends with the warning that the world is moving rapidly from melting guns into farm tools to building robots that carry guns.

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This meeting is at a major crossroads for creating binding international rules on autonomous lethal weapons.