The Merchant Marine serves Kansas and Missouri. Its academy needs expertise | Opinion
Our nation once had a huge fleet of merchant ships. Think of those merchant ships in the American Merchant Marine industry as analogous to the trucks hauling cargo on our highways or the airplanes moving packages via our airports. The Merchant Marine started to decline at the end of World War II, and that decline increased at the end of our nation’s participation in Vietnam. Now we are once again trying to grow that civilian fleet to compete with other nations and to ascertain that you and I have ready access to products that we both need and desire.
Although both Kansas and Missouri are far from the oceans, we are directly impacted by the ability to send our beef, grain and automobiles to other nations. To drive trucks, airplanes and ships, we must have competent people to man those vehicles. If we are to have new ships to deliver the cargo that we import and export, we will need new officers to direct those vessels. One of the major sources of officers for merchant ships comes from the least known of the five United States Federal Academies.
These degree-granting four-year federal schools are the United States Military Academy at West Point, the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis, the United States Coast Guard Academy at New London, the United States Air Force Academy (the newest of the five) at Colorado Springs and the United States Merchant Marine Academy at Kings Point. Of the five, four typically have one of their own graduates serving as Academy Superintendent. Only one sends its cadets into war zones, as it has done since World War II.
Kings Point, the United States Merchant Marine Academy Nassau County, New York, will provide many of those officers to man the new merchant ships. But Kings Point is at a turning point. The academy has often been led by people with less understanding of merchant shipping, our traditions and our history. The Merchant Marine Academy trains its midshipmen on the former Walter Chrysler estate in Kings Point, New York, where they complete courses for a bachelor of science degree during three years of residence. And during split half-year periods during their four-year enrollment, they are sent to sea around the world on American merchant ships for further on-the-job training as cadet officers. Historically, during times of military conflict, those cadet midshipmen also go into battle zones, as needed, on ships laden with beans, bullets and bunker oil for our military.
Despite this, most often Kings Pointers have someone other than one of its own graduates as the academy’s superintendent. One hundred forty-two of our cadets were lost at sea during World War II. Kings Point is the only one of the academies authorized to have a battle standard replete with pennants from the battles in which we participated. It is the only academy whose graduates are licensed to serve as officers and who graduate with reserve officer commissions in either the Navy, Marine Corps, Army, Air Force or Coast Guard reserves. It was the first of the five U.S. federal academies to admit and to graduate women, thereby paving the way for the future.
Unfortunately, Kings Point is also the one academy whose superintendent is most often not chosen from its own graduates. This is unfair to the brave men and women who will serve as cadets or as officers aboard our ships in the next war’s battle zone, as did many of my class and academy mates from conflicts during World War II, Korea, Vietnam and military fights since then.
It is time to replace the recently resigned superintendent with one of the many Kings Point graduates who has sailed on their license as ship’s master or chief engineer as our next U.S. Merchant Marine Academy superintendent. Our cadet midshipmen deserve a meritorious leader who has sailed on his or her license, and who knows our traditions and the future needs of our nation.