South Korea on Tuesday displayed some of its newly purchased US-made F-35 stealth fighter jets for the first time during its Armed Forces Day ceremony, a development that will likely infuriate rival North Korea. Under its biggest ever weapons purchase, South Korea is to buy 40 F-35 fighter jets from Lockheed Martin by 2021. The first few batches of the aircraft arrived in the South this year. North Korea has criticised the South’s weapons procurements and its joint military drills with the US military as undisguised preparations for war that violate recent inter-Korean agreements aimed at lowering military tensions and force it to develop new short-range missiles. At the event marking the founding of the South Korean military at a ceremony at an airbase in the city of Daegu, Moon watched as four of the eight Lockheed Martin F-35A jets delivered this year were displayed. The South Korean president has thrown his support behind dialogue to end the North’s nuclear and ballistic missile programmes, urging that working-level negotiations between the North and the US be held soon. No new dates or locations have been set. During Moon’s third summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in Pyongyang last September, the two Koreas struck a set of agreements meant to ease military animosities such as halting frontline live-fire exercises and dismantling guard posts along their border. Many conservatives in South Korea have said the deals greatly undermined South Korea’s national security because North Korea’s nuclear threats remain intact. During Tuesday’s event, an F-15K jet patrolled over the islands claimed by both South Korea and Japan and called Dokdo in Korea and Takeshima in Japan. Moon made no direct mention of North Korea or Japan but said today’s security climate was highly unpredictable, requiring strength and innovation. Moon wants DMZ replaced by ‘peace zone’ bordering North Korea “As the recent drone attack in the Middle East region demonstrated to the world, the challenges that we will face will be entirely different from those of the past,” he said in an address to the military. “The war of the future will be a fight of science and intelligence against all elements that threaten our people’s safety and property.” Analysts have said the F-35 stealth jets put North Korea’s anti-aircraft and anti-missile defence systems in a vulnerable position. Negotiations aimed at dismantling North Korea’s nuclear and missile programmes have stalled since a second summit between US President Donald Trump and Kim broke down in February over disagreements on denuclearisation. North Korea blamed the US on Monday for a failure to restart talks, with Pyongyang’s UN ambassador Kim Song saying it was time for Washington to share proposals for talks that showed Washington had adopted a new “calculation method”. South Korea and the US have separately begun talks for a new military burden-sharing agreement to decide how much South Korea will pay for stationing what is now about 28,500 US troops in the country. Moon told Trump during a summit in New York last week what South Korea would contribute, including an increase in purchases of US weapons and future purchase plans, a senior official at South Korea’s presidential office said. Additional reporting by Associated Press