Good sources for news and developments in certain countries

Maro.Kyo

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Are there any good sources for Korean related defense topics, especially towards new/future developments? I keep seeing this mason guy on my timeline, and he's been really my primary news source to latest Korean defense developments. There likely is, but due to my inability to speak Korean, him being a English poster will generally reach the wider international audience.
I think thats probably why Mason gets cited a lot, he built a niche of using social media to post Korean defense stuff in English. But at the end of the day, he's just an enthusiast like many here.

I sometimes use Bemil, but you'll need some kind of translator. Fortunately AI has gotten a lot better for it.

@Maro.Kyo might have more suggestions
Motivated by these posts from the KF-21 thread and by the fact that we are in a very unfortunate situation where Mason on twitter is the most often cited source for Korean military related developments for overseas enthusiasts...

At first I thought of creating a thread about listing good sources for news and devleopments in broader topics, but I think there's merit in limiting this thread to sources about certain countries and its developments, since there are various other treads for other specific topics...
 
So, as for South Korea :

Obviously best is to dig primary sources like budget plans, audit reports and research publications using a translator but I could understand that doing so is very hard and time consuming as non-Korean speakers (and frankly, even for native speakers, too).

There's also another layer of problem that access to academic sources could be limited unless you are in a university or you have institutional access (or you find them pirated). Even if you do, often times Korean research papers are only published in Korean publication service that doesn't support western Institutions so it becomes even harder.


So instead for trustable secondary sources, I'd like to first recommend Sheldon's Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/cw/jhst3103 ) for the most up-to-date, in-depth and accurate articles. He is a blogger that visits various important conferences and symphosia as well as trade fairs as freelance journalist and do his own research as well. Unfortunatley he only recently started publishing in English through Patreon, and most of his older (yet still very helpful) posts are still yet to be translated in English. I'm not sure if he ever will, but since one could use some AI help these days, hopefully he will. Also, his contents are paywalled so unless you are really deeply interested in matters in Korea, you might as well want to wait for the information to get more accessible.

Another recommendable source is HyunSH's blog (https://blog.naver.com/kevin1406). Similar to Sheldon, but his contents are free. Though you have to remember free contents are free for a reason. It isn't as in-depth, or broad as Sheldon's but I'd say good enough. Also it's a blog, so keep in mind that errors are always possible.


As for news outlets, I'd recommend Defensetoday.kr. Unfortunatle there aren't many defence related media outlets in Korea and this one is one of the better ones out there.


Discussion concerning military is most active on "military" board on Dcinside.com (or as its called in Dcinside, "Gallery"), which is very similar to Reddit in terms of the system and is the biggest 'news aggregate and forum social media' platform in Korea. As you would expect from one such social media platform, that is 'similar to reddit and is popular', content you could find here are either overwhelmingly low-effort rubbish, or vastly misinformed. There are some good contributions by few recurring contributors, but they are rather rare. As a result, not recommended unless you have plenty of time to waste to sort out the bad crops from the good ones.


There are also other defence and aerospace related forums that used to be popular in the past, but all of them have faced significant decline over the years. Forums like Bemil.chosun.com and Milidom.net were almost equally as popular as military board of Dcinside.com, but nowadays you'll find that there is almsot no activity in these forums. Their use are more suited as sources for legacy programmes, so they are in a way similar to Keypublishing, although they aren't completely dead unlike KeyPub.


Another reason I think it is hard to find information regarding stuff going on in South Korea is because the English Wikipedia page is pretty rubbish when it comes to topic concerning Korean aerospace and defence industry and the military and Korean Wikipedia is even worse across the board. Part of the reason is that the primary wiki in South Korea is Namu.wiki. Problem with Namu.wiki though, is that the rules are much more lax about citing sources, and as a result the quality of each articles varies a lot, and by that I mean A LOT. Might be useful if you want to have some overview and find some Korean keywords that you could use for further research.


There might be a few more that I could recommend, but for now these are it.
 
Now Japan :

As for Japan, I usually use three sources.

I first use Wikipedia to learn some keywords that I'll use to search on Google, as well as take a look at sources cited on Wikipedia articles. I also go through ATLA and MoD documents available on their respective websites as well as research papers. But in Japan, cooperation between academia and the MIC is seen as very undesirable or often even as a taboo, so apart from civilian aersoapce matters, it's harder to find military related research papers available to the public unlike other western countries. But that doesn't mean they don't exist, ans there are still some gems hidden in the likes of J-Stage.

As for secondady sources, Japanese military enthusiasts are all in Twitter. Quite the opposite of South Korea, where Twitter is pretty useless. There used to be message boards and blogs on services like Livedoor, but they are all mostly dead. Often times some useful information are lost on the Japanese web as some blog gets deleted but remains on Korean or Chinese web because of those who shared it there, which is often a bit funny, but also pretty unfortunate (that the original source is gone) and relieving (that the information is still alive despite) in the same time.

Some of the recommended accounts is Citrus (@MeYkikka), あ^しゅら(@asura0998822), ガ・チャー・de・畜生(@Gachar1203), 四角号碼(@Sikakugoum) and ベーた(@mod04tk24509a). I'd like to recommend a few more, but it's really easy to dig up information on twitter if you go through quotes posts and know a few keywords to search for on the search menu. So if you want to keep yourself up-to-date with what's going on with JSDF, those accounts would be more than enough most of the times.
 
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Hopefully other members could help fill this thread.

@H_K
@Deltafan
@Regio Ammiraglio
@Kota
@Ares

Some other non-English websites that I have used (and still use) to gather information regarding specific country and their projects :

Italian - https://www.aereimilitari.org/forum/

German - https://forum.raumfahrer.net/

Spanish - https://portierramaryaire.com/
https://infodefensa.com

Russian - https://otvaga2004.mybb.ru/

French - https://forum.air-defense.net/
 

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