Some interesting footage here… All I could think was…that would be a heck of a moment for NK to launch an artillery barrage with sensor-fuzed weapons!
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All hail the baby Abrams!
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Yeah - I saw mention in the article that most were “indigenous” armor vehicles… Is there any more data on their vehicles? I’d be curious what they came up with…
They also use the K1 and K1A1
The ROK has got a fascinating army. A strange mix of Cold War US and European imports, late period indigenous products. Most interestingly they’ve also got a fair amount of Soviet vehicles they received as debt restitution in the 90s.I can’t think of another army that had M48 Pattons and T-80Us serving at the same time.
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I spent an interesting year in South Korea in 1973-74. I was a HAWK HIPIR radar technician* assigned to a missile battery on the DMZ near Camp Casey. Our HQ was 40? miles south at Camp Red Cloud. The highways all have tank traps built in that can be toppled in case of a NK invasion.
On this page of images, the large blocks above and to the sides of the roadways are ready to be detonated to barricade the passes. Also interesting, the South Koreans in the mountainous north bury their dead in ~6’ high mounds on the sides of the mountains – the higher the mound up on the side of the hill the more stature the person had. Scattered among the real mounds are others that are observation posts with a rear entrance and downhill viewing slits.
Hee hee that’s me in the middle, ~40 years ago.
WC
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Seems like a nightmare for identifying friend or foe in the heat of battle…
If I recall the ROK basically received a motor-rifle regiment’s worth of T-80s and BMP-3s from Russia. I remember reading they basically use it as their version of the 11th ACR at Fort Irwin: A training regiment that fights using DPRK tactics and vehicles (in this case actually better vehicles than the DPRK). It doesn’t make sense to use them as line units precisely because IFF would be a nightmare, as would finding and supplying ammo for that particular unit when the rest of the army is standardized around NATO ammunition.
@WreckingCrew that’s awesome. My boss spent time in Korea as an artilleryman and then again as an intel weenie. I’ve heard some interesting stories about the land of the morning calm.