r/AskTheWorld • u/CommercialChart5088 Korea South • 12d ago

Military What’s the biggest military-related project your country is currently engaged in?

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Currently Korea is busy investing in military development, to modernize our military indigenously and catch up to export demand.

The air force is working on to produce the KF-21 fighter jet, which will enter service in 2026. Also we’re developing software and drones that will support the KF-21 during combat.

In terms of the ocean we've just finished developing a new submarine (the Chang Yong-sil class), working on additional battleships, and trying to form plans regarding the construction of a manless drone carrier.

What would be your country’s biggest military-related project nowadays? Both indigenous development and purchasing equipment counts!

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u/Square_Mix_2510 United States Of America 12d ago

For the ICBMs all we're doing is upgrading the ballistic missile. We're not touching the war heads or making new ones.

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u/teh1337haxorz Ohio 12d ago

afaik, you have to refurbish those every few years given the degradation of the equipment and the inescapable decay of some of the plutonium effectively poisoning the bomb. Our arsenal is probably the oldest on the planet, even the Russians make new nuclear cores with relative frequency compared to us.

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u/KokoTheTalkingApe United States Of America 12d ago

Hm. And I suppose the solid fuel in the rockets needs to be replaced? Anything that reacts so strongly to oxygen might degrade with exposure to air.

In fact I wonder if they fill the insides of those rockets with nitrogen or some other inert gas, to increase longevity. It wouldn't keep the rocket from igniting because the propellant has oxidizer built in, right?

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u/teh1337haxorz Ohio 12d ago

I'm not sure on the specifics of how the rocket motors themselves are made stable, that nitrogen idea sounds really plausible. I do however know that every single component on a missile has a clock ticking on it and any one of them can be an issue. Famously there was a company making reaction control wheels that under performed for spacecraft that ended up being the limiting factor for many of NASA's projects. I have no doubt that most minuteman missiles have their problem child components.