F-15K fighter's performance improvement confirmed...4.56 trillion input

The Defense Acquisition Program Administration held the 165th Defense Business Promotion Committee today to deliberate and decide on four agendas, including the F-15K performance improvement model decision.

The F-15K performance improvement project, which is 59 units in total, is from this year to 2037, and about 4.56 trillion won has been set for the total project cost, and the performance improvement unit price per unit is about 77 billion won.

This is more than KRW 1 trillion higher than the estimated KRW 3.46 trillion when the 148th cold weather decided on the F-15K performance improvement plan in December 2022.

In this regard, the agency attributed it to the impact of supply chain restructuring due to rising global material and labor costs in aircraft manufacturing, and continued decline in military industry manufacturers.

The agency said the project will increase the speed of information processing by 1,000 times by changing the current mechanical radar to an active phase array (AESA) radar, and automatically change the current semi-automatic electronic warfare equipment to significantly improve its striking capability and viability.

In today's cold weather, a basic system development plan for the short-range engineering air-to-air missile-II project, which will invest KRW 661.5 billion to secure short-range air-to-air missiles for domestic KF-21 fighter jets through research and development organized by the Agency for Defense Development (ADD), was also approved.

In addition, the DAPA said that a basic plan for the system development of the project, which will spend KRW 807.6 billion from next year to 2036 to improve the combat system of Sonwon-II submarines, mine avoidance sonar, floating antenna, and tugboat arrangement sonar, was also approved.