South Korea plans to finalize the deal on buying four Global Hawks from Northrop Grumman in the first half of this year for better surveillance capability on North Korea, a senior acquisition official said Thursday. Last year, Seoul received sales approval from the U.S. for the high-altitude, long-endurance unmanned aerial vehicles, which are sold only through the Foreign Military Sales program....

A recent report from Britain’s defense consulting firm IHS Jane’s estimated that China’s defense spending for 2014 would amount to around $148 billion, an increase of 6.3 percent from a year ago. In the report on the world’s defense budgets, China ranked second after the U.S. whose defense budget for this year is estimated at $574.9 billion, a decrease of 1.3 percent from last year. China’s def...