Air Force Academy alumni chief says service 'sidelined' in unified military academy debate

Hwang Seong-jin, a retired Air Force lieutenant general and former superintendent of the Korea Air Force Academy, serves as chairman of the academy's alumni association. [Provided by Hwang Seong-jin]

"It sounds like they want to tear up 40 years of infrastructure built with taxpayer money and spend more public funds rebuilding it on a cramped site that cannot possibly match what we have now."

Hwang Seong-jin, a retired Air Force lieutenant general, former superintendent of the Korea Air Force Academy and current chairman of its alumni association, said Wednesday that "the Air Force has been sidelined in the debate over a unified military academy."

The Air Force Academy relocated from Daebang-dong in Seoul to Seongmu Base in Cheongju in 1985. The move was necessary because training aerospace officers requires a flight line and glider facilities that could not be built in an urban setting.

After surveying sites across the country, the Air Force chose its current location and over the following four decades built up a runway, glider facilities, an aerospace medical center, a pilot aptitude training center and a survival training ground. Seongmu Airfield, a dedicated airfield completed in 1987, sits directly adjacent to the campus.

"The US Air Force Academy has four runways at Davis Field in Colorado Springs, allowing cadets to earn their pilot licenses at any point during their studies," Hwang said. "We are not even close to that standard — and now there is talk of moving the academy into an urban area where even the basic infrastructure would be hard to use."

He said the Defense Ministry had claimed the travel time between Jaundae in Daejeon and Cheongju Airfield was 40 minutes, but in practice the journey takes more than an hour and a half. He added that Jaundae has no space for either a runway or glider facilities, as the surrounding area is densely packed with mountains, research facilities and residential neighborhoods.

Hwang said facilities are the very foundation on which cadets build their identity as pilots. Simply hearing aircraft engines and watching planes overhead, he argued, instills a sense of purpose that cannot be replicated elsewhere.

"When I was young in Cheongju, I grew up watching pilots walk around in their flight suits and dreamed of becoming one myself," he said. "That environment cannot be physically replaced. Academic coursework alone in an urban setting will never give cadets a pilot's identity."

As an alternative to a physical merger, Hwang proposed a virtual campus. "Just as universities at home and abroad already do, each academy could attend the same lectures at the same time through virtual reality and a shared network," he said. "That system could be built for 30 billion won ($21.7 million), whereas a physical merger would cost more than 3 trillion won."

He also questioned whether the consolidation plan reflected genuine military thinking. "The trend in modern warfare is to disperse assets, not concentrate them — I wonder whether the idea of cramming all the academies into one tight space actually came from a military perspective," he said.

Hwang pushed back point by point against the Defense Ministry's other arguments. The ministry has argued that 70 to 84 percent of the three academies' curricula overlap, making it inefficient to maintain separate faculties and duplicate facilities at each institution. Hwang dismissed that claim, saying the Air Force's base support group already provides integrated support covering an information education battalion, the aerospace medical center and a flight wing. "I have no idea what basis they have for saying most of it is duplicated," he said.

On the question of attracting talent, he said cadets apply to the Air Force Academy specifically because they want to become pilots. "Even high-achieving students get rejected because of vision and physical requirements — what does any of that have to do with consolidation?" he said.

Responding to the ministry's argument that the academies must prepare for a demographic cliff, Hwang said the proportion of officers actually rises even as the overall troop count falls. "Elite personnel should not be reduced in number — they should be developed to a higher level of specialization," he said.

Hwang said the alumni association's position is the complete and unconditional scrapping of the unified military academy plan, drawing a clear line between that demand and the ministry's stated concerns, which he said could be addressed through improved compensation and curriculum reform. He warned that if the demand is not met, the association will work alongside civic groups through a joint coalition formed by the alumni associations of all three service academies to block the merger and any academy closures.

Born in Uiseong, North Gyeongsang Province in 1962, Hwang graduated from the Air Force Academy's 33rd class and was commissioned in 1985. He went on to serve as commander of the 3rd Training Flying Wing, inspector general of Air Force Headquarters, Air Combat Command commander and deputy commander of Air Force Operations Command before becoming the 49th superintendent of the Air Force Academy in 2016. He later served as Air Force vice chief of staff and as the 37th Air Force Operations Command commander before retiring at the rank of lieutenant general. He took office as the 33rd chairman of the Korea Air Force Academy Alumni Association in January.

Meanwhile, the Defense Ministry held a public hearing Wednesday afternoon at the Defense Convention Center in Yongsan, Seoul, to present the basic plan it announced last month for establishing a unified military academy. The session featured a debate between three experts on each side of the issue, followed by a question-and-answer session. Defense Minister Ahn Gyu-back did not attend.

rimsclub@heraldcorp.com