> Israel is not in the top 20 active duty
Well yeah, it's a tiny country. In terms of active duty personnel per capita, it's fourth in the world (2.1% of population, as opposed to 1.2% for South Korea and 0.4% for the USA).
> from what he told me after basic training he basically served his time doing nothing near the dmz.
The security strategy of Israel and South Korea is:
* Be able to call an army of ~10% of the population into being within 48-72 hours
* Have an active-duty military with the latest and most up-to-date equipment and training to hold the line until that enormous reserve is ready
* Have intelligence services capable of giving advance warning so the active-duty military doesn't need to hold out as long
So yes of course someone drafted into the ROK army will be trained for combat, and then spend several years on equipment maintenance and training waiting for The Big One to roll around.
Israel is a bit different in that, in addition to its preparations for high-intensity conventional war, its active-duty army is also involved in low-intensity conflict continuously. This is a major concern for the army, as it needs to make a tradeoff between levels of force to apply to the daily grind in the West Bank and the Gaza border areas, and the level of readiness for high-intensity conflict - Israel's poor performance in the 2006 Lebanon War was widely attributed within the Israeli military establishment to the reduced training for conventional warfare while the army was caught up in the counterinsurgency work of the Second Intifadah.