hankyoreh

Drone system development director Kim Jong-sung (far left) explains the features and capabilities of small drones crashed in South Korea

Let’s take a trip back in time two years.

It was Mar. 24, 2014, and the discovery of a crashed drone in Paju sparked an investigation by a team composed of the Defense Security Command (DSC), National Intelligence Service (NIS), and local police. The DSC served as secretary, and NIS agents agreed with its assessment that the drone showed “nothing to raise North Korea-related suspicions.” A few days later on Mar. 28, the investigation resumed under a central joint interrogation team, this one with the NIS - which had collected the drone - as its secretary. On Mar. 31, another drone crashed on Baengnyeong Island in the West (Yellow) Sea, and the team concluded that it had been sent by North Korea to spy on the South.

Nobody at that time could have predicted what would come next: that a tiny, crudely functioning drone measuring just over one meter would trigger a furor jeopardizing the security of the Republic of Korea.

While it wasn’t reported in the media, forward units had routinely collected several North Korean drones since Sept. 2013, the time when the North first began using them intensively. Sometimes the drones were carried by currents on the seas around South Korea after failing to return home; many were found in the hills. Military units that found them typically kept them in storage - or just tossed them away. Technical analysis of the drones by the Republic of Korea Defence Intelligence Command (KDIC) had shown no particularly threatening performance features worthy of attention, and the military simply wasn’t that interested. Then-Minister of National Defense Kim Kwan-jin and the Joint Chiefs of Staff didn’t even receive a report on the NIS investigation until Apr. 2. The NIS held a monopoly on the information.

believed to be from the North

Around the same time, the release findings finding from the prosecutors’ investigation into the NIS’s apparent forging of evidence falsely implicating a Seoul city contractor in espionage. Cases of false espionage charges had surfaced a few times in the past, and each time the Blue House tried to get NIS director Nam Jae-joon to verify whether the evidence had been forged. Each time, Nam swore it had not. Once it emerged that it had indeed been forged, the Blue House began to worry - that Nam didn’t have his organization fully under control, and that the public’s distrust of the Park administration’s security policies could end up growing. The NIS’s anti-communist investigation bureau and second deputy director Seo Cheon-ho found themselves under fire, and it looked like Nam might be implicated as well.

But just as clouds of worry threatened to engulf the NIS, a North Korean drone carrying a video file of images from the skies over Seoul - including the Blue House - emerged as a new political weapon. Some of the central interrogation team’s information was leaked to the media, feeding a growing drone panic. It was at this point that Ministry of National Defense spokesperson Kim Min-seok flatly turned down reporters’ requests on Apr. 2 for images photographed by the drone. To do so, he said, “would be to confirm to North Korea what kind of video performance its drones have.”

“The images cannot be disclosed for national security reasons,” Kim declared.

But the leaking of footage to the Chosun Ilbo, a right-wing newspaper, around the same time would not have been possible without some involvement by the office of the NIS’s second deputy director and/or the Blue House.

The next day on Apr. 3, a large aerial photograph of the Blue House taken by the drone appeared in a front-page story in the Chosun Ilbo. The fact that the same pictures called “unreleasable” the day before were now in print was enough to raise suspicions that the media was colluding with either political or intelligence authorities. The DSC pointed to the NIS second deputy director’s office as the source of the leak, and even hinted at a possible investigation for leaking military secrets.

Even the ruling Saenuri Party’s lawmakers on the National Assembly National Defense Committee exhorted the DSC director to carry out a search and seizure on the newspaper at a session just after the report; the DSC said it “absolutely would” investigate.

Even while on the defensive, the NIS continued playing on drone fears. The person responsible for leaking the photo to the Chosun Ilbo was never identified. The DSC appears to have concluded its investigation after merely confirming that the NIS second deputy director’s office had hurriedly recovered a panorama photograph of the Blue House from the analysis team the day before the leak.

After that, the situation became less about investigation and more about spreading drone fears. Speaking at a meeting of Blue House senior secretaries on the morning of Apr. 7, President Park Geun-hye said it “appears that suspected North Korean drones have been spying on this country extensively” and pointed to the Defense Ministry’s failure to establish the facts as “indicating problems in our air defense network and ground reconnaissance system.” The mainstream media subsequently went to work whipping the public into a panic over three small aircraft that had crashed because of their poor flight capabilities, and weren’t even able to transmit images in real time. In the space of a week, the drones became agents of mass destruction carrying biochemical weapons, suicide bombers targeting the Blue House and government complexes, terrifying weapons directed at nuclear power plants. The emotional brain - the part of us that specializes in fears of catastrophe and the end of the world as we know it - was quick to respond to the provocative drone reports. Crude aircraft of the kind made by African countries where many people have no access to clean water turned into fearsome political weapons designed to fan perceptions of catastrophic security failures and excite a mass psychology enslaved by fear. Doing so required those drones to be transformed into terrifying nuclear weapons capable of raining bombs weighing 20 to 30 kg from the skies over the Blue House, as the Chosun Ilbo suggested in its report. They had to be monsters cruising along Gangnam skyscraper windows peering in on us. A search for this period shows 5,410 articles about drones, most of which started with conservative news outlets.

The political opposition also did its part. A day before Park’s pronouncement, Ahn Cheol-soo, then co-chairperson of the New Politics Alliance for Democracy (now the Minjoo Party of Korea), added to the fear-mongering by saying at a supreme council meeting that “unmanned aircraft invaded our territorial skies and crashed three times - that we know of - in the past six months” and that “there could be hundreds or even thousands of drones that have come through here.”

“There’s nothing the administration can really say to accusations that it’s been incompetent when it comes to security,” Ahn declared.

It was a strange scene for politicians on both sides of the aisle. The country’s security had to be a shambles - it was the only way their words would carry any weight. As the tiny drones turned into a major political issue, CNN jokingly referred to the North Korean “toy airplanes” that had penetrated South Korea’s security.

But in South Korean politics, it was taboo to suggest that North Korean drones did not present a serious threat. Anyone who said such a thing would have been labeled an enemy who was weakening the public’s security vigilance at a time when North Korea posed a military threat. Indeed, South Korea’s opposition parties were trapped in a narrative that gave them no choice but to take part in manufacturing fear by bashing the government for its failure to do anything about the supposedly serious threat of the drones.

When Park Geun-hye addressed the issue, the situation got even weirder. High-ranking officers at the Joint Chiefs of Staff - including Defense Minister Kim Kwan-jin - began hurrying to prepare countermeasures, describing the North Korean drones as a “serious threat.”

With pressing demands for the immediate creation of a new surveillance system that could defend against North Korean drones, there was no more time to wait for the development of a low-altitude local anti-air radar system that was supposed to be operated by the army. Since the North Korean drones could not be detected on South Korean equipment, the military would have to purchase low-altitude radar from overseas.

But there is probably no radar in the world that can pick up tiny objects flying at low altitudes, and so ultimately the ROK Army Training and Doctrine Command had to look for a new approach. And thus, the military frittered away the past two years. It finally came to a single conclusion: it was impossible to catch North Korean drones.

at an event to announce the interim results of the investigation

Fast forward two years to Mar. 20. This was the day that Yonhap News reported the outcome of a test carried out by the Agency for Defense Development (ADD) on its re-creation of the drone from two years ago. Researchers concluded that the drone could at the most carry 400 to 900 grams, about the weight of a single grenade - basically meaning that the drone had no value as a weapon.

The camera on the drone, ostensibly for information gathering, turned out to be an old model from the 1980s that could not even transmit information automatically. Just as bizarre was the military‘s claim that it had spent two years analyzing the North Korean drone, which the foreign media had regarded as a worthless contraption from the very beginning.

The uproar over the North Korean drones represented a huge waste for South Korean national security. The moment that we became slaves to a fear of our own making, rational ideals and military expertise collapsed one after the other. As a result, we have already invested an enormous amount of resources in a threat that ought to be low on our list of priorities.

But this kind of irrationality does not only apply to this drone. Every time we learn that the North Koreans have something unusual, it provokes an unhealthy response that entails enormous waste and chaos. After a certain point, such responses have become engrained and habitual - and habits are never easy to fix.

Generally speaking, this habitual response consists of three stages. First, there is a hubbub about some new North Korean threat. This threat must be something unfamiliar that appears unexpectedly. It could be a strategic weapon such as a nuclear missile, long-range artillery, hovercraft or submersible, but it might also be cyber tactics, an EMP pulse or a chemical or biological weapon.

Even a weapon that the North Koreans already had can create fear if it is being used in a new way. One example of this was in 2014, when North Korea launched one of its mid-range Rodong missiles at a high trajectory, reducing the missile’s range. After the launch, the commander of US forces in Korea abruptly claimed that this represented a new signal of North Korea’s intention to attack.

Another example was when North Korea’ moved its long-range artillery from tunnels in front of the hills to the area behind the hills, which supposedly transformed them into a new and invincible threat. In this manner, existing weapons can create fear if they are put to a new use.

Second, the media portrays a threat as being nothing less than the destruction of the country - and nothing can be done to stop it. This portrayal must be lurid, showing society disintegrating into chaos in an instant, alongside scenes of a giant mushroom cloud rising over Seoul.

The claim that nothing can be done must be given particular emphasis in articles such as these. At this point, The South Korean military has to be downgraded into an unprepared and disorganized organization in order to provide political groups with the rationale to involved themselves in the national defense for their own purposes. Political groups that must manufacture fear in order to more easily control the masses always want to meddle in military matters.

In reality, the drone incident was a peripheral issue that could have been dealt with by a single department at the Joint Chiefs of Staff or the ROK Army Training and Doctrine Command. But the incident escalated abnormally to the point where the president, government ministers and the director of the NIS were all stepping forward to give instructions.

For politicians to be able to reinforce their prestige by alerting the public of problems that the military cannot solve on its own and by going on to solve those problems themselves, the military must remain a rather incompetent organization. It must never have any solutions.

Third, at this point the military must insist (as if on cue) that it needs to buy a weapons system from overseas and create a program to acquire some specific weapon. Weapons purchased for large amounts of money in the past, to be sure, are always useless against North Korea‘s latest threat.

Since the weapons that are being developed by domestic research organizations or the defense industry are low-quality, they cannot serve as a solution. Even if the required weapon is already under development in South Korea, the only answer is to shut down the domestic program and to purchase the weapon from another country. And not just any weapon - it has to be the most expensive high-tech weapon possible, a shiny prototype equipped with the latest technology.

This three-stage response culminates in the creation of a cycle of greed involving a ballooning military budget, in which weapon systems must always be upgraded to the newest available version. We need to pay attention to the fact that the majority of corruption scandals in the defense industry occur when a decision is suddenly made to purchase some weapon system without taking the time to carry out project feasibility studies or to manage the product with sufficient care.

Weapons that are acquired simply for secondary reasons without being thoroughly reviewed are magnets for corruption. This is leading to a bizarre tendency in South Korean society for the national defense system to function only when there is anxiety about national security.

There is an endless demand for security - it is a hunger that can never be satisfied. As the double helix of fear and greed continues to spiral down, the security state acts according to its inherent desire for its own growth and development.

Recently, President Park instructed the entire army to increase its alertness, just as she did two years ago. In a meeting that was convened to address a series of threats Pyongyang has made to Seoul, commanders from across the spectrum of South Korea’s armed forces redoubled their resolve to respond to an imminent attack from the North.

The political groups that dramatically revealed South Korea‘s vulnerabilities by pointing out that it does not have anti-terror legislation or measures to defend against cyberattacks have developed new national security solutions and are waiting for the next threat from North Korea.

Along the way, the state scolds and browbeats the public for its failure to appreciate the security crisis. With its monopoly on information, the National Intelligence Service leaks new North Korean threats like hits of some kind of drug.

The result of this fatal addiction is the incipient collapse of our sense of reason and our national security system, which ought to be rationally organized. The most serious problem is that this prevents us from preparing for the security threats that we really should be preparing for.

This is why we need to take another look at the drone incident two years ago, which should be seen as a national security scam.

By Kim Jong-dae, staff reporter

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]