The Ministry of National Defense said it will pursue the "unified military academy" as a landmark project and build a cutting-edge smart campus. The plan aims to address a shrinking school-age population and military restructuring while establishing a symbolic center for future military education.
Kim Hong-geol, head of the ministry's policy bureau, said Wednesday at the National Assembly's Heonjeong-hoe that the unified military academy "will be pursued as a landmark project" and that he expects budget support to be fully provided.
The Defense Ministry plans to establish a unified military academy in the Jaundae area of Daejeon, consolidating the functions of the Army, Navy and Air Force academies, and to build a state-of-the-art smart campus grounded in AI, robotics and hyper-connectivity. The goal is to create not merely an educational facility but a central hub for military education and research.
A key element of the plan is resolving aging infrastructure and duplicated spending across the existing service academies through consolidation — improving budget efficiency and concentrating investment in advanced infrastructure. The current academies operate with facilities more than 45 years old and maintain separate personnel and budget structures for each branch, a setup that critics have long flagged as deeply inefficient.
The Defense Ministry also intends to bring the integrated academy's educational environment up to civilian university standards. The plan calls for improving faculty compensation to match that of general universities and attracting top research talent to create a structure combining teaching and research. The ministry says stable fiscal support is a prerequisite for that goal.
Daejeon's Jaundae area was chosen as the site, given its concentration of KAIST, more than 90 research institutions and roughly 19,000 doctoral-level researchers. The ministry envisions building an academic-research-military cooperation cluster centered on the area to maximize the impact of budget investment.
"The unified military academy is not a simple relocation or consolidation — it is a future investment at the national level," Kim said. "We will make it a symbolic space that concentrates advanced education and research capabilities."
The Defense Ministry plans to push for related legislation within the year while holding public hearings and gathering opinions to flesh out the project.
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