South Korea's carrier ambitions and competing defence needs

A carrier programme would compete with South Korea's need to modernise its army, including older tanks and artillery and a shortage of mobile air defence. The navy also needs more air-defence and ballistic-missile-defence platforms. Its difficulty is characterised as having too few capable ships, even though individual ships can be very capable. The Sejong the Great class has a missile capacity comparable to a cruiser, but the headline cell total needs care. Different vertical-launch systems cannot each handle every missile in the inventory, so the total does not describe one interchangeable pool of weapons.