South Korea has sought leverage through an alliance with the world’s dominant military power, the United States. North Korea, unable to fully rely even on like-minded partners such as China and Russia, has instead pursued deterrence through nuclear armament.
Pyongyang’s deepening military cooperation with Moscow during the Ukraine war has heightened concerns. North Korea has supplied artillery shells, missiles and even personnel in exchange for billions of dollars in economic benefits, access to Russian military technology and participation in joint operations. This cooperation is widely believed to be giving North Korean forces valuable real-world exposure to drones, electronic warfare and modern battlefield integration — experience that could gradually sharpen its asymmetric capabilities despite a persistent conventional gap.
Thanks to its economic scale and manufacturing base, South Korea holds an unrivaled advantage over the North in purely conventional terms. The 2026 Military Strength Ranking released by U.S.-based Global Firepower (GFP) placed South Korea fifth out of 145 countries, while North Korea ranked 31st.
Yet modern warfare is no longer defined by conventional force alone. Cyber operations, drones, artificial intelligence and information warfare — as seen in recent conflicts from Ukraine to the Middle East and Latin America — complicate any linear comparison of military power.
On land, the balance is often framed as South Korea’s K2 tanks, K9 self-propelled howitzers and K239 rocket artillery versus North Korea’s larger but aging inventory of tanks, guns and long-range artillery. South Korea fields roughly 2,500 tanks, including substantial numbers of modern K1A2 and K2 main battle tanks equipped with advanced optics, digital fire control systems and composite armor.
Across the Demilitarized Zone, North Korea is estimated to possess more than 4,000 tanks on paper, including indigenous Pokpung-ho variants derived from Soviet-era T-62 technology, alongside legacy platforms such as the T-34/85, T-54/55 and the Chonma family.
“Most of North Korea’s tanks are obsolete,” said Choi Seung-woo, director at the Seoul Defense Forum Center for Nuclear Strategy. “When you put together accounts from senior and military defectors, many say they rarely trained with real tracked armored vehicles. That doesn’t mean we should underestimate them — but fuel shortages are severe enough that even fighter pilots reportedly fly only infrequently.”
Artillery remains one domain where Pyongyang has long pursued both psychological and military leverage. Long-range systems such as 170-millimeter Koksan guns and 240-millimeter multiple rocket launchers — some of which have appeared on the Ukraine battlefield — are positioned within range of the Seoul metropolitan area.
Many of these systems are dug into hardened positions and could unleash intense opening salvos. Studies suggest North Korea could fire tens of thousands of rounds toward Seoul in the initial phase of a conflict. Sustaining that tempo, however, would quickly run into logistical limits and survivability problems, as many systems are towed or mounted on aging vehicles vulnerable to counter-battery fire.
In the air, the disparity is even starker. South Korea operates a layered mix of fifth- and fourth-generation aircraft, led by F-35A stealth fighters, supported by F-15K Slam Eagles for deep strike missions and large numbers of KF-16s as multirole workhorses. The domestically developed KF-21 is scheduled to enter service from March, further widening the gap.
North Korea, by contrast, relies largely on legacy Soviet- and Chinese-designed aircraft, including small numbers of MiG-29s and larger fleets of MiG-23s, MiG-21s and Su-25 attack jets. While these platforms can still pose localized threats — particularly under the cover of dense surface-to-air missile networks — they lack the sensor fusion, survivability and stealth characteristics of South Korea’s modern fleet.
“North Korea has large quantities of conventional weapons and manpower, but most of its equipment is outdated, and only a small fraction qualifies as genuinely high-tech,” said Jung Kyeong-woon, a research fellow at the Korea Association of Military Studies. He noted that South Korea fields a smaller but far more capable force, reinforced by U.S. intelligence, surveillance and high-end strike support.
At sea, the Republic of Korea Navy has invested heavily in blue-water capabilities. Its KDX-III Sejong the Great-class Aegis destroyers function as floating command centers and area air-defense hubs, while successive batches of FFX frigates provide flexible anti-submarine, anti-air and anti-ship capabilities.
Below the surface, Type-214 submarines with air-independent propulsion and the newer 3,000-ton KSS-III class give Seoul the ability to deploy cruise missiles and submarine-launched ballistic missiles — capabilities demonstrated through successful tests since 2021.
North Korea’s navy, by comparison, remains focused on coastal defense, relying on small surface combatants, patrol craft and a large fleet of aging diesel-electric submarines. Still, leader Kim Jong-un has pushed “naval nuclearization” as a strategic priority, emphasizing SLBM-capable submarines, nuclear-powered vessels and missile-armed surface ships.
As part of this effort, Pyongyang unveiled the 5,000-ton destroyer Choe Hyon-ho, reportedly equipped with phased-array radar and vertical launch cells. While North Korea has promoted it as an indigenous “Aegis-class” destroyer, its actual combat effectiveness remains unproven.
Viewed purely through a conventional lens, South Korea has pulled decisively ahead across land, air and sea, even if North Korea still fields greater numbers of tanks and artillery on paper. The true balance on the peninsula, however, turns on a fundamentally different category of force: nuclear weapons and other asymmetric tools whose effects are global and psychological rather than regional and tactical.
North Korea underscored this reality with the successful test of the Hwasong-19 in October 2024. With an estimated range exceeding 15,000 kilometers, the missile can theoretically strike anywhere in the continental U.S. — a capability that transforms the strategic calculus in ways no conventional comparison can capture.
“Nuclear missiles carry international political weight,” Jung said. “Their impact extends geographically to a global range and psychologically far beyond anything conventional weapons can achieve. Conventional forces remain largely confined to regional military effects.”
North Korea is expected to seek integration of nuclear and conventional forces in wartime, but the consequences of nuclear use depend entirely on timing, scale and intent — variables that defy precise modeling. For this reason, analysts generally avoid collapsing nuclear and conventional power into a single numerical score.
In the Korean context, war cannot be understood through conventional metrics alone. The peninsula’s balance of power is shaped less by tanks or aircraft counts than by deterrence, escalation dynamics and the shadow cast by weapons that make any conflict inherently global.
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