This study aims to suggest policy alternatives to strengthen the links between defense R&D and government R&D for national security and defense industry development.
South Korea started its defense R&D in earnest with the establishment of the Agenc...
This study aims to suggest policy alternatives to strengthen the links between defense R&D and government R&D for national security and defense industry development.
South Korea started its defense R&D in earnest with the establishment of the Agency for Defense Development in 1970, and it has maintained the government"s R&D and the defense R&D system, which is effectively divided into two parts. As the industry and academia participated in the defense R&D increasingly since the mid-1990s, the civilian-military joint R&D projects were launched to ease the gap between the two systems, as well as the related promotion laws have been revised several times. However, it has been pointed out that such efforts have limitations in strengthening the link between the two different systems.
To overcome these limitations, this study argues that (1) we need to understand the fundamental differences between the two systems from the perspective of the "Innovation System," which stress the interaction between the actors and networks, infrastructure, and governance surrounding them. In this regard, (2) the study identifies the barriers preventing the linkage between the current defense R&D and the government R&D system according to the whole defense R&D process; policy establishment, Planning, Budget and Management, Evaluation, Utilization, and Infrastructure. (3) In order to show these barriers appear in a R&D project, it examines the High-Altitude Long-Endurance UAV(Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) project performed as a civil-military cooperative project from 2013-2017. (4) In addition, it derives several benchmarking elements from the case study of civilian-military R&D programs of the United States, United Kingdom and Israel, where are known for active spin-on/off between defense R&D and government R&D. (5) Based on these results, it presents realistic policy alternatives under several R&D system models for improving the linkage between government and defense R&D systems.
Hopefully, the results of this study contributes to the establishment of a full-cycle cooperative system between the government and the defense R&D to maximize mutual synergy.