Despite President Yoon Suk-yeol’s claims that only unarmed soldiers were deployed to the National Assembly on Dec. 3 after he declared martial law, investigations have revealed that the martial law forces had more than 50,000 rounds of live ammunition on hand that day.
Investigations also revealed that, after experiencing difficulties in blockading the National Assembly, then-Minister of Defense Kim Yong-hyun ordered helicopters returning special forces to their base to instead set course for the National Assembly.
According to the indictment against Kim, received by Democratic Party lawmaker Jang Kyung-tae from the Justice Ministry on Sunday, the Special Warfare Command (SWC), Capital Defense Command (CDC) and Defense Intelligence Command (DIC) prepared at least 57,000 rounds of live ammunition on Dec. 3, 2024, the day martial law was so abruptly invoked.
Yes, I know the point is that the president said the troops were unarmed. However, I just want to deflate the shock factor of 57,000 rounds.
57,000 rounds could be a lot of it could be a little. If the 1st Special Forces Brigade has about 1000 members with probably only 800 or so preparing for a bad scenario, that is about 65-100 rounds per soldier. That is just… standard.
It’s also expected that military forces are going to use multiple weapon types and each one of those needs a usable amount of ammunition. It just inflates the numbers much more.
I just wanted to put scale around what is probably just a minimum amount of ammunition. What is interesting is how much more stuff is needed to support troops like that. You need food, water, gear, medical supplies, etc… and my point is that military logistics is crazy, even with small deployments.
It’s actually less than standard. My military loadout was 240 rounds. That’s 8x30 round magazines. When i was stationed in korea the ROK soldiers had the same loadout as us.