A more globally connected world and emerging technology that is changing the face of warfare have caused the U.S. military to make shifts in its strategy, and that has filtered down to the Army and Navy service academies — a pipeline for the American armed forces’ officer corps.
“Individuals coming in are a lot more worldly,” Naval Academy Superintendent Vice Adm. Yvette M. Davids said. “They’re more connected and they understand this is a big world, but how do they fit into this world? It’s intriguing to them.”
The United States Naval Academy in Annapolis Maryland has a little more than 1,000 officers who graduate and go on to serve at least five years in the Navy or Marine Corps. Around 73% of the Naval Academy’s 2024 graduating class joined the Navy and the rest became Marines. The Naval School was established by Navy Secretary George Bancroft in 1845 on an Army post named Fort Severn in Annapolis, Maryland without Congressional funding. It became the U.S. Naval Academy in 1850 and since then 91,000 midshipmen have graduated from the school.
Each year, nearly 900 cadets graduate from the United States Military Academy West Point in New York, which was established in 1802. Graduates serve a minimum of five years and represent 20% of the Army’s lieutenants, according to the school.
As the needs of the services and interests of incoming students have shifted, so have the academies, superintendents of the Naval Academy and West Point told Task & Purpose at a media event in Arlington, Virginia on Friday ahead of the 2024 Army-Navy football game.
At the Naval Academy, students are showing more interest in the United States’ relationships with other countries.
“They’re a lot more aware of what’s going on in the world, certainly, than I was from way back when,” Davids said. “That’s essential.”
At West Point, cadets are showing a bigger appetite for their physical health, said West Point Superintendent Army Lt. Gen. Steven Gilland.
“Culturally, from a physical perspective, their desire to increase their physical fitness is so much higher than what it ever was,” Gilland said. “We expect more and we tell them we expect more.”
Courses and majors offered by the academies are constantly evolving and are “dependent completely on the needs of the service,” Davids said. In recent years, the Naval Academy added majors for robotics and foreign area studies and this year they’ll have their first graduates in data science, “think AI,” she added.
At West Point, academy officials have created an interdisciplinary program for strategic studies, war-fighting history, and are offering different courses or electives focused on computer science and data, Gilland said. Officials are also developing a major in AI and redesigning the school’s chemistry and life science programs for dual-focused majors in bio-medical or bio-engineering.
“Everyone gets a Bachelor of Science degree because of the number of engineering classes that you get, but the propensity of young people today, about two-thirds of our corps cadets chooses an engineering major,” Gilland said. “You can choose law or history or American politics and still get a Bachelor of Science degree. Two-thirds of them are choosing engineering.”
Beyond academics and extracurriculars, there’s an expectation that current and future students have the qualities the military expects of its officers.
“We want those that are interested in serving the nation and in the Navy or the Marine Corps, and that have this purpose to serve, but also this idea that they want to live a life of adventure and they want to live a life for something bigger than themselves,” said Davids. “That’s the individual we’re looking for, and they’re out there, and they may not know it.”
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