In many ways, South Korea's defense policy is exemplary. Admittedly, the country lives under the permanent threat of its northern cousin having not only a very important military force for lack of being modern, but also nuclear weapons and increasingly powerful vectors. If, like the European countries, but also Japan or Australia, the country can rely on the protection of the United States with in particular more than 28.000 American soldiers permanently deployed on its soil, Seoul has always worked to strengthen its own military capabilities, as well as its industrial and technological strategic autonomy, making it one of the most powerful and modern conventional armies in the entire Pacific theater today.
Like 190 other nations, South Korea is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, even though North Korea withdrew from it in 2003. In fact, it cannot develop its own nuclear deterrence to counterbalance the threat from Pyongyang even if technologically, the country could afford it relatively quickly. However, Seoul does not intend to rely solely on the American nuclear umbrella to ensure its security. This is how the South Korean armies have developed, for several years, a doctrine specially designed to neutralize the strategic threat from the north, the "3 axes" doctrine. This is based on a 3-step response to an imminent North Korean nuclear strike. First, once the certainty of the reality of these strikes to come has been acquired by the South Korean authorities, the armed forces will carry out a series of preventive strikes to eliminate all the identified vectors that can be used for this purpose. The vectors that have escaped this preventive strike must then be intercepted by the necessary means, in this case the anti-ballistic and anti-aircraft capabilities implemented by the armies. Finally, a third stage provides for the elimination, once the nuclear threat has been eliminated, of all critical North Korean sites, such as command bunkers, means of communication, logistics depots, etc., so as to decapitate the set of the opponent's offensive means.
La South Korean 3-axis doctrine is not just a political scarecrow intended to reassure public opinion. Indeed, the successive governments, although belonging to different political sensitivities, have been working for many years to give the armies the means to implement it as effectively as possible. This is why the South Korean air force is equipping itself with stealth aircraft such as the F-35 and the KF-21 as well as a wide range of anti-aircraft and anti-ballistic systems, that the land forces are developing a formidable long-range strike capability, and that the Navy has armed its large surface units, such as the destroyers According to the Great, and his Dosan Anh Changho submarines, significant land strike capabilities, and plans to acquire an aircraft carrier of more than 40.000 tons. It is also within the framework of this doctrine that the awarding of the study contract for a new type of ship, the Arsenal Ship, was announced on April 13, which will carry no less than 80 ballistic missiles ready to make fire.
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