- South Korea will arm its new 'decapitation unit' with suicide drones and other weapons to assassinate Kim Jong Un.
- The unit was allocated $310,000 by the South Korean government on Wednesday.
- South Korea is reportedly discussing it openly in the hopes of scaring Kim Jong Un to the negotiating table.
South Korea is planning to arm its newly-formed special forces unit known as the "decapitation unit" with suicide drones and other lethal weapons to take out North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, according to the Korea Herald.
The South Korean defense ministry announced on Wednesday that the decapitation unit was allocated $310,000 for the weapons and equipment, and an anonymous defense ministry official told the Herald that the unit will receive $24 million altogether.
The "equipment includes suicide drones, surveillance drones, and grenade machine guns,” the defense ministry official told the Herald.
The decapitation unit is an army brigade consisting of 1,000 special operators. It was established on Dec. 1 with the aim of assassinating Kim and his top leaders.
It's expected to be modeled off SEAL Team 6, but it's not yet operational as it requires more equipment, such as low-flying aircraft to take the operators into North Korea, the Herald reported.
South Korean officials have been openly discussing the formation of the unit since Summer 2015. It's considered strange for a government to freely talk about assassinating world leaders.
But the New York Times reported in September that the South is doing so in the hopes of scaring Kim Jong Un back to the negotiating table.
“The best deterrence we can have, next to having our own nukes, is to make Kim Jong-un fear for his life,” Shin Won-sik, a retired South Korean three-star general, told the Times.
The South's allocation of $310,000 to the unit is part of the its nearly $40 billion defense budget for 2018, which has increased 7% since 2016 and is the highest since 2009, according to Newsweek.
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