From the Newport paper:
Newport welcomes return of Navy’s Officer Candidate School
01:00 AM EDT on Sunday, March 23, 2008
Now that it has returned to its birthplace at Naval Station Newport, Officer Candidate School is running full throttle, and will soon be turning out nearly double the number of commissioned officers it has in recent years.
Right now, a new class of about 50 students arrives every other week to begin the 12-week program that produces officers, the Navy’s leaders and managers, as opposed to enlisted personnel who are essentially trained in technical skills. But by the summertime, when OCS receives a flood of recent college graduates, students will be flocking to the naval base for new classes forming every week.
It won’t only be a seasonal bump in enrollment. Before OCS moved back here last summer from Naval Air Station Pensacola (the setting of the movie An Officer and a Gentlemen), the program was producing about 800 officers a year in Florida. In Newport, OCS is already on a pace to commission about 1,000 officers a year.
And in just a few short years, the total is expected to leap to 1,400 a year, according to Capt. Joseph A. McBrearty, commanding officer of Officer Training Command Newport, which oversees OCS and other training programs.
“We are seeing an increase in class size because of the Navy’s need for more officers,†says McBrearty, who attributed the demand partly to the effects of cyclical upswings in officer retirements and promotions.
“It is an intense leadership course and what we bring to the Navy is confident, competent junior officers. We give you pretty much the biggest bang for the buck when you talk about a commissioned officer source, cost-wise. It’s not a four-year process like the Naval Academy and ROTC.â€
In 2005, the federal Base Realignment and Closure initiative shifted several Navy educational programs to Newport, including OCS, which began here in 1951 but left for Pensacola 15 years ago. The other programs moved here recently are Chief Warrant Officer/Limited Duty Officer School and Direct Commissioning Officer School. They joined other schools already here, quadrupling the number of graduates from about 900 in 2006 to a projected 3,600 by 2010, McBrearty says.
The staff at Officer Training Command has grown from 92 to 103, but it has the potential to grow up to another 40 positions, according to Lisa Rama, spokeswoman for the base.
The activities at the various schools are largely invisible to the surrounding community since the students live and train on the base. But McBrearty says the growth of training in Newport benefits the local economy.
He notes that large amounts of money are being paid to contractors to upgrade facilities, including $5 million for a new pool complex. About $9.2 million has been spent renovating a training building, Callahan Hall, with another $1 million going toward refurbishing old barracks buildings. The long-range plans are to replace these, he said.
Meanwhile, students on liberty head off base to area restaurants, pubs and theaters. Staff members and their families live in off-base Navy housing in local communities. And graduation festivities, which include an OCS reception at a local ballroom, regularly bring families to local hotels, restaurants and attractions.
None of this is lost on the Newport County Chamber of Commerce. Just recently, the chamber invited Navy representatives to a conference for local companies that want to do business with the naval base. The chamber also organized a marketing program in which local businesses offer 10 percent discounts to armed service members.
All of this, says executive director Keith W. Stokes, “is a great stimulus to our economy.â€
Longtime residents may miss the days when the Atlantic fleet was based in Rhode Island, says Stokes. But, he says, “Instead of having a large Navy ship presence, we instead have nearly anyone who is an officer … getting rotated several times through Newport.†And because these officers “are highly compensated,†he says, they have more money to spend.
— Richard Salit
