A soldier pilots a drone at a media day during the U.S. Army Combined Resolve exercise at the U.S. Army's southern Germany training facilities in Hohenfels, Germany, April 30, 2026.REUTERS/YONHAP
Lee Hyun-sang
The author is a columnist at the JoongAng Ilbo.
In a recent simulated battle during a multinational exercise in Germany, an armored brigade from the U.S. Army’s 1st Cavalry Division was effectively “wiped out” by a Ukrainian drone opposing force. Abrams tanks costing more than 10 billion won ($6.8 million) each and Bradley fighting vehicles worth billions of won proved vulnerable to small first-person-view, or FPV, attack drones costing only hundreds or thousands of dollars. Vehicles ruled “killed” reportedly had to be revived and returned to the exercise because losses came so quickly.
This was the 1st Cavalry Division, one of the U.S. Army’s most storied formations. Established in 1921, it entered Tokyo after World War II and spearheaded the recapture of Pyongyang during the Korean War. Its official nickname is “The First Team.” It pioneered helicopter air assault operations during the Vietnam War, and the manic helicopter cavalry depicted in “Apocalypse Now” (1979) was inspired by such units. Yet this formidable force struggled against Ukrainian drone operators hardened by more than four years of war.
The episode was more than an embarrassment for a unit. It showed how quickly battlefield experience can overturn assumptions built around armored platforms and established doctrine. The Ukrainians brought lessons learned under pressure from Russian forces, where drones have become reconnaissance tools, precision weapons and a presence over the front.
That distinction matters for Korea. Reform should begin with threats soldiers are likely to face and skills officers will need, not judgments about institutions shaped by past events.
Modern warfare rejects old paradigms. Drones, AI and autonomous weapons are rewriting its grammar. In an age when the “sensor-to-shooter” cycle can take seconds, battlefield-changing weapons need not be expensive or technologically sophisticated. Hezbollah has used fiber-optic drones that trail cable like kite string to circumvent Israeli electronic jamming. When battlefields reward improvisation and unconventional tactics, militaries chained to old assumptions have little room to survive.
Defense Minister Ahn Gyu-back recently told cadets at the Air Force Academy that “cheobyeon- bulgyeong,” a four-character idiom meaning “remain unshaken amid change,” was a motto shared by Mao Zedong and himself. It was surprising enough for Korea’s defense chief to invoke a figure with such a fraught history with the Korean military. But questions also arose over the attribution itself.
Records identifying the phrase as Mao’s motto are difficult to find. By contrast, it is clearly associated with his archrival Chiang Kai-shek. After Taiwan lost its United Nations seat in 1971, Chiang promoted the slogan “zhuangjing ziqiang, chubian bujing” — roughly, “strengthen oneself with dignity and remain unshaken amid change.”
The point is not to reopen ideological arguments or debate the phrase’s pedigree. The real issue is its fossilized sense of the times. “Remain unshaken amid change” evokes the romantic image of a “Romance of the Three Kingdoms” (c. 1522) general refusing to blink as enemies charge. Modern warfare allows no such romance.
What is needed instead is “susi-eungbyeon” — adapting one’s response as circumstances change. Sensitivity that prompts alarm and forces commanders to devise new ways of fighting is far preferable to complacency disguised as composure.
Mao’s own rise to power, ironically, was closer to constant adaptation than remaining unshaken. Through alliances and civil war, he changed strategy and tactics as circumstances shifted, using guerrilla warfare to avoid stronger enemies and strike weaker ones.
Military history offers other examples. The Prussian tradition of mission command, later inherited by the German military, gave subordinates substantial autonomy in execution while senior commanders set overall objectives. The principle may be steadiness, but action must remain flexible.
How is Korea’s military confronting this enormous wave of change? The Ministry of National Defense is pushing to integrate the Army, Navy and Air Force academies, citing preparation for future warfare, stronger joint operations and more efficient education. Yet behind those arguments lurks a punitive political rationale: Because Korea Military Academy graduates led coups in the past, the academy’s influence must be curtailed.
While militaries worldwide are overturning fundamental tactics through drones and AI, Korea is disrupting its military education system to fight the ghost of another military coup, an increasingly implausible scenario.
One hopes Ahn’s message to cadets was not that they should remain unshaken and silent even as sweeping reforms reshape their military future.
This article was originally written in Korean and translated by a bilingual reporter with the help of generative AI tools. It was then edited by a native English-speaking editor. All AI-assisted translations are reviewed and refined by our newsroom.
