Photo By Dottie White | Soldiers attend the Army Space Cadre Basic Course at the U.S. Army Space and Missile...... read more read more
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COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. – As Army senior leaders recognize space as an increasingly critical warfighting domain, the U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense School is preparing the next era of expert space Soldiers to combat evolving threats.
The Army Space Vision, published in January by the secretary of the Army, chief of staff of the Army and sergeant major of the Army, outlines a renewed focus for Army space activities and directs the Army to concentrate on two fundamental mission sets: integrating friendly joint, coalition and commercial space capabilities and interdicting adversary space capabilities to protect ground combat forces.
The Space and Missile Defense Center of Excellence’s SMD School, a component of U.S. Army Space and Missile and Defense Command located in Colorado Springs, educates and trains the military force in space and global missile defense mission areas and develops space and global missile defense doctrine.
Col. Donald Brooks, SMDCoE commandant, said the vision signals increasing Army demand for space education and serves as a “guiding light” for how the school prioritizes and bolsters its courses offered, and better defines the criteria upon which Soldiers are evaluated and certified in the classroom and combat training centers.
The schoolhouse, he said, is ready to channel the Army Space Vision into on-the-ground, practical programs of instruction that equip space Soldiers to provide close space support to the warfighter in complex operational environments against evolving enemy space capabilities.
“In recognizing what our adversaries are doing, it was important for the Army to recognize space as a warfighting domain so we can properly prepare ourselves to deter and compel our adversaries to stop doing things that are counter to the global common,” Brooks said. “Because of the vision, we know exactly where the Army wants us to go, and that helps us now instruct those students in a much more focused manner.”
The school currently offers courses in Army-wide professional education, global ballistic missile defense and space courses, such as the Space Operations Officer Qualification Course, Mobile Integrated Ground Suite Initial Qualification Training or Space Control Fundamentals Course.
Master Sgt. Daniel Huddleston, SMDCoE senior enlisted advisor, said that upon graduation, space Soldiers integrate into their units under USASMDC, other Army service component commands, special forces and more.
“It ensures that folks who actually understand and have witnessed what the space domain can do and why it’s so important are in the proper seats,” Huddleston said.
That force integration, Brooks said, ensures that space capabilities operate closely alongside ground maneuver formations.
“The Army is one of the largest users of space-based capabilities – we integrate it into all of our warfighting functions, like command and control, intelligence, fires, movement, maneuver, and information – and space is a domain that touches all of those warfighting functions,” Brooks said. “If we start to take space away from those warfighting functions, they become fractured or disaggregated. Space capabilities are that connective tissue that makes us the world’s best fighting force.”
| Date Taken: | 02.26.2024 |
| Date Posted: | 02.26.2024 16:23 |
| Story ID: | 464735 |
| Location: | COLORADO SPRINGS, CO, US |
| Web Views: | 113 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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