한국군 부사관 획득제도 변천과정 분석으로 본 미래 발전방안 연구

Abstract

The ROK Army extensively upgraded the status of its NCOs, by recognizing the importance of the NCO and redefining the role of NCOs to be more battle-oriented. The number of NCOs as part of the Defense Reform 2020, will be expanded to approximately 100,000 and the recent plan from new government presents that it will make the numbers even higher while curtailing the service period of enlisted soldiers to 18 months. In this critical moment of changes in military personnel management, stable NCO recruiting with understanding of the improved NCO capability and the changes in weapons system and younger generations consciousness has now become the most important factor, as it stands at the center of the spearhead of the combat power. Diagnosing the aspects of the future war accurately and making use of lessons learned from the past would be the wise way to prepare for the war. Therefore, it becomes important to set recruiting system appropriate for future war by analyzing and assessing NCO recruiting systems by now and to ensure high-level combat strength at all times by guaranteeing the stable supply of high-quality personnel. Researches on NCO recruiting until now, however, stay at the level of merely summarizing representative cases of each decade and deal only with the data till 2006, as the field has attracted relatively less attention as a research topic. Moreover, there has been almost no previous research on improving the wartime recruiting system. Taking into account all the factors stated above, this research looks into the courses of the changes in ROK Army's NCO recruiting from the time Armed Forces were activated to 2013 as it aims to draw a blueprint for recruiting NCOs in the future, and systematically analyze the history of NCO recruiting and keep it as historical data for future researches.