Defense Official Pushes to Merge the Three Service Academies Before Korea Takes Wartime Command

South Korea should combine its three separate service academies into a single integrated military academy, Kim Hong-cheol, the deputy defense minister for policy, said on Wednesday, framing the change as preparation for the moment the country takes back wartime command of its own forces.

He set out the proposal at a policy briefing at the National Assembly.

What is proposed

The plan would merge the Army, Navy and Air Force academies, which currently train officers separately, into one institution at the Jaundae compound in Daejeon, about 140 kilometers south of Seoul. Cadets would follow a four-year program with branch-specific training reserved for the final years, so that officers share a common foundation before specialising. The government expects the academy to be complete around 2036.

Now is the critical time to build an education system that prepares future cadets for future warfare, Kim said.

Why now

The timing is tied to the transfer of wartime operational control, or OPCON, from the United States to South Korea. Under the current arrangement, a US commander would lead combined forces in a war on the peninsula. Seoul wants to complete the handover by 2030, while Washington has stressed that conditions must be met before it happens. The two sides are expected to discuss it at the Security Consultative Meeting in Washington in October.

Kim's argument is that a military about to run its own wartime command needs officers trained to think across services rather than within one, and that the present system does not build that habit early enough. A second pressure sits underneath the reform: a shrinking pool of young people. Pooling cadets into one academy, the ministry argues, makes better use of a talent base that demographic decline is steadily reducing.

The opposition

The plan is not welcomed everywhere. The alumni associations of all three services oppose it, and opposition parties have raised concerns that merging the academies would erode the distinct expertise each branch has built and weaken the competitiveness that separate institutions foster.

That resistance points to the real tension in the idea. The case for merging rests on shared, joint-minded officers; the case against rests on the depth that comes from a service training its own. Both can be true, and the design of the four-year program is where the argument will be settled.

What follows

The ministry plans to release a detailed blueprint in October, the same month as the Washington talks, and to introduce legislation by December. Those two steps will show whether the proposal survives contact with the services it would reshape.