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S. Korea to Develop Larger Combat Drones
By wchung | 05 Jun, 2026

South Korea announced Monday that it will invest about 500 billion won ($443 million) to develop drones that can serve both combat and reconnaissance missions despite severe restrictions imposed on their payload capacity by the nation’s treaty with the US.

The planned Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) will be propelled by 150-horsepower engines. That’s three times the power of the low-altitude 50-horsepower RQ-101 Songgolmae (Peregrine) UAV currently deployed by the S. Korean military. It is the only one of the three types of low-altitude surveillance drones in use by the Korean military to have been developed domestically by Korea Aerospace Industries. It went into service in 2004.

The payload limitation for the contemplated larger S. Korean UAV is imposed by the guidelines for missiles and other unmanned aerial devices under the mutual defense treaty with the US. The US severely limits S. Korea’s missile capabilities to discourage a preemptive strike against the North which might draw the US into a full-scale land war on the Korean peninsula, one that might involve Chinese troops as was the case in the Korean War (1950-53).

The missile guidelines — formulated in 1979 and partially revised in 2001 — limit the payload of drones and missile warheads to under 500 kg (1,102 pounds). The US MQ-1 has a payload capacity of 340 kg (750 lb) and the newer Reaper-class UAVs, 1,700 kg (3,748 lbs).

The new S. Korean drone will be slightly more powerful than the 115-HP medium-altitude MQ-1 UAV developed by the US in 1995 though its overall performance is expected to be similar to that of the MQ-1.

The MQ-1 Predator has a top speed of 217 kph (135 mph), a range of 1,200 km (746 miles), a maximum altitude of 7.6 km (4.7 miles) and maximum flight time of 24 hours without refueling. Like the US Predator, the S. Korean UAV will be armed with laser-guided air-to-surface Hellfire missiles with a range of 10 km (6.2 miles) to launch precision strikes against armored vehicles. It can also be configured for long-range reconnaissance missions.

Korea hopes to complete development of the combat drones by 2017 and deploy them warfare-ready by 2021.

Korea has the technological capability to develop UAVs with a 900-HP engine like the US Reaper-class UAVs that went into service in the early 2000s. Currently the US and Israel are the only nations to have developed and deployed comparable drones.