Korea Military Academy alumni push back as revised plan singles out KMA for relocation

The Korea Military Academy alumni association is pushing back against a revised plan to establish a unified armed forces academy — one that would relocate the KMA to a new site while leaving the naval and air force academies in place.

Park Pan-jun, chairman of the KMA General Alumni Association, told The Herald Business by phone Saturday that the association is planning a rally involving marches around the perimeter of the National Assembly and Cheong Wa Dae. "I had been thinking that if we moved past the stage of meeting with the defense minister, the next step would be the National Assembly and Cheong Wa Dae," Park said.

South Korea's Ministry of National Defense recently submitted to the National Assembly a revised basic plan for establishing a unified Korea Armed Forces Academy, replacing an earlier proposal that would have consolidated all three service academies at Jaun Base in Daejeon over four years. Under the revised framework, the plan shifts to a network model: the KMA would relocate to the Chungcheong region, while the naval academy in Jinhae and the air force academy in Cheongju would continue using their existing facilities. Areas near the 32nd Division in the vicinity of Sejong are among the candidate sites for the KMA's new location.

The Defense Ministry has said the revised plan is part of a process to improve policy acceptance and overall quality. A ministry official on Friday rebuffed suggestions that the revision had predetermined the KMA's relocation while excluding input from the individual services. "That is not true," the official said.

The official said the ministry is "seeking the optimal approach to establishing the academy" and plans to gather opinions from a broad range of stakeholders — including the chiefs of each service branch, cadet forums, expert consultations and ruling party-government discussions — before finalizing the basic plan and working through the details with each branch.

By the same token, the Defense Ministry has launched a survey to gather cadets' views as part of efforts to refine the basic plan. The online survey runs from Friday through Tuesday, targeting approximately 2,350 cadets in their first through fourth years at the army, navy and air force academies. About 140 fourth-year naval academy cadets currently on an ocean training cruise are excluded from participation.

The survey poses four open-ended questions: what improvements are needed to strengthen the academies' educational capacity; what elements are essential to preserving each academy's traditions and service-specific expertise; whether cadets would consider enrolling in a graduate program if one were established, and what field of study they would prefer; and what factors should be taken into account in establishing the Korea Armed Forces Academy.

Some critics have questioned why the KMA alone would be moved while the naval and air force academies remain. Reform Party lawmaker Cheon Ha-ram, during budget deliberations at the National Assembly's National Defense Committee this week, told Defense Minister Kang Shin-cheol: "I hope the reason the KMA specifically must be relocated is not a political one."

Cheon added that it would be "deeply problematic" if the discussion amounted to punishing the KMA because, as the president has suggested, KMA graduates carried out a coup — while stopping short of abolishing it entirely and instead settling for a relocation under some formula. "If the logic is that we can't completely get rid of it, so let's at least move it — that kind of reasoning would be very troubling," Cheon said.