A new partnership between the United States and South Korea to equip the latter nation with its own nuclear-powered submarines is a golden opportunity to bolster joint undersea defense capabilities and forge a new "allied industrial pathway," according to Yea Kyung Han, an executive at South Korean defense conglomerate Hanwha.
“My takeaway from [the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum] is that South Korea’s SSN ambition is not about the prestige, it is about allied undersea resilience, and the Philly Shipyard pathway shows how industry can make that real, quickly and credibly,” Han said today, using the shorthand for a nuclear-powered, conventionally armed submarine.
Hanwha’s recently acquired Philly Shipyard appears poised to take on construction work for a South Korean submarine following a meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump and South Korean President Lee Jae Myung at last week’s APEC forum.
Following the meeting, Trump suggested on social media that the U.S. will share technical information to enable South Korea to develop its own nuclear-powered submarine and said construction will take place within the U.S. at “Philadelphia Shipyards.”
Speaking today at an event hosted by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Han described Hanwha’s role building a South Korean submarine as a “possibility.”
For industry, the new partnership is about more than just a single capability in the form of a submarine, Han said. Instead, it opens an entirely new industrial pathway that would link the U.S. and Korean defense industries in new ways.
“It implies the building of next-generation undersea capabilities inside the allied yard and also to the allied standard within the allied regulatory and security framework,” she said. “That pathway accelerates timelines, embeds interoperability from day one and derisks capacity by tapping an existing ecosystem of suppliers, certifications and also the workforce pipelines.”
This never-before-seen collaboration between the two nations would also raise substantial questions for U.S. regulatory systems and for the domestic industrial base, which is struggling to build the U.S. Navy’s submarines and surface ships and suffering from widespread labor shortages and supply chain problems.
The Trump administration has outlined bolstering the domestic shipbuilding industry for both military and commercial vessels as one of its objectives and indicated it views South Korean industry as a key partner in this endeavor.
The administration’s maritime action plan, which was directed by the April executive order “Restoring America’s Maritime Dominance,” will be delivered to the president this week, an administration official confirmed to Inside Defense.
Meanwhile, Hanwha is also expanding its defense work in Europe. According to Han, South Korean industry excels in industrial scaling, cost efficiency and rapid delivery and aims to aid European defense companies by helping them accelerate production.