South Korea's army will form dedicated GOP border guard units as it shifts to AI surveillance

South Korea's army plans to set up units whose only job is guarding the front line with North Korea, as it moves border surveillance toward artificial intelligence while the number of troops shrinks, the Korea Herald reported on Oct. 19. The army presented the plan at the National Assembly defence committee's annual audit, held at the Gyeryongdae military headquarters, according to BBS News and Voice of America's Korean service.

The reorganisation will come in two stages. The army will first create division-level general outpost, or GOP, security groups, and will later expand them into corps-level GOP security brigades. The first two groups are due to be established under the 5th and 22nd Infantry Divisions on Oct. 1, 2027, and the army intends to judge how they perform before it moves on to the brigades.

Under the current arrangement, brigades belonging to the front-line divisions take turns manning the GOP, the line of guard posts along the southern edge of the Demilitarized Zone. Under the new structure, dedicated units would take over that mission for each corps. The combat units based in the forward edge of the battle area behind the GOP would then no longer rotate into guard duty and could concentrate on training and combat readiness, the army said. VOA reported that each of those forward brigades will also gain one new infantry battalion so that it stays at full strength.

The new units are part of a wider plan to replace the army's manpower-heavy GOP and coastal guard operations with AI-based surveillance. The army aims to finish upgrading its existing electronic border surveillance system by 2028 and to build an AI-based border operations control system by 2033. According to VOA, it wants coastal surveillance converted to an AI-based system by 2031.

By 2040, the target year of South Korea's next defence reform, the army wants a combined crewed and uncrewed surveillance network built around AI. To watch the border, the guard units would get legged walking robots and reconnaissance drones. To strike, they would add loitering munitions, an integrated counter-drone system and fixed remotely controlled weapon stations, VOA and BBS reported.

The Ministry of National Defense is pursuing a phased cut in the number of troops assigned to front-line border security, from about 22,000 now to around 6,000 by 2040, on the basis of the new AI-based system, according to all three outlets.

The plan comes as attention has returned to security inside the Demilitarized Zone and to how South Korean forces coordinate there with the US-led United Nations Command, which under the 1953 Armistice Agreement controls access to the southern half of the zone, the Korea Herald noted. The audit also revisited the Sept. 21 mine blasts that injured three South Korean soldiers, two of them seriously, while they cleared a route for a joint inspection with the UN Command near the Military Demarcation Line. A joint investigation later concluded that North Korean resin antipersonnel mines had been deliberately planted south of the line, in violation of the armistice, the paper reported.