AUGUST 11, 2025 – Senior Army leader stressed the importance of interoperability, partnerships, and next generation technology for space superiority during a Space and Missile Defense Symposium August 5, 2025.
“Within Space and Missile Defense Command, we’ve identified how to iterate faster, how to evolve our culture to shape innovation from our overarching strategy,” said Brig. Gen. Don Brooks, deputy, commanding general of operations, U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command, Peterson Space Force Base, Colorado.
After looking at the National Defense Strategy, the Army looked at long-term orbital and terrestrial threats. It’s rewriting the Army space strategy to roadmap manning, training and education.
“We get feedback from warfighters, from the operational force, from experimentation, the exercise elements and the forces out there in the field,” he said. “Feedback from our schoolhouses and Soldiers help us stay on top of our training and education components. These touchpoints, getting feedback as quickly as possible, it’s how we’re now bringing the fight into our systems and our processes to help us iterate faster and evolve our culture.”
His team provides U.S. Space Command vital, terrestrial, interdiction and integration space capabilities, personnel and expertise.
“These are essential to warfighting and the Space Command’s mission of ensuring the U.S.’s freedom of action and movement maneuver within the space domain, while delivering space combat power to the joint force,” said Brooks.
Space capability integration creates significant advantages for ground forces such as Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance, precision targeting, long-haul communications, interdiction capabilities, and the ability to degrade an adversary’s ability to use the space domain at the time and place of their choosing.
Soldiers use space superiority to deny, degrade, and disrupt the enemy’s ability to communicate, to shape, to influence, conduct surveillance, or to use their own precision guided munitions within the battlespace.
The Army has taken an evolutionary step with space interdiction, introducing smaller, lighter, more mobile capabilities. They’ve also updated and published the Army Space Training Strategy to further ingrain space inside of multi-domain operations across operational and institutional aspects of the Army.
Each of the services within Space Command share lessons learned and what works for intergovernmental, interagency, multinational and commercial partners to create asymmetric advantages in the joint command as it solidifies Multinational Force Operation Olympic Defender.
Olympic Defender globally integrates military space power, enables joint and combined forces, deters aggression, and if necessary, defeats adversaries in order to retain military advantage.
Part of that advantage is innovation.
“In our future, innovation is key. We can’t do it alone,” said Brooks. “If we encounter an adversary that’s got magazine depth and not just kinetic capabilities, but other non-lethal producing capabilities as well, we need to find efficiencies across our services. We need to work together, talk to each other, counter communications, surveillance, reconnaissance, navigation warfare, high altitude with balloons or fixed wing aircraft, not just in the terrestrial realm, but also to support the extraterrestrial flight as well.”
The key to Olympic Defender is partnerships.
“The partnerships between our allied nations and the U.S. provider are irreplaceable,” said Brooks. “Commercial industries working alongside their host nation militaries give us a technical advantage in space domain awareness. It’s really important.”
Operationally, the Army has been working with the British Army on target development, weaponeering and electronic warfare. The Army is looking to partner with New Zealand, Australia and Canada at the Space Missile Defense Command school in the future.
Brooks said the U.S. Army shares lessons learned, observations, exercises and experiments with soldiers from the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, Canada, France and Germany.
“Space is the connective tissue of all warfighting functions, command and control, movement maneuver, intelligence, fires, and protecting sustainment information,” said Brooks. “It is that connective tissue that provides us lethality in our combat power, which then increases deterrent effect against our adversaries.
“Space is critical. What we do today, what we do in the future, it’s critically dependent on the partnerships we have with the joint intergovernmental interagency and multinational and commercial partners,” said Brooks. “They will allow us to go faster, lighter, and leaner to produce more effective, more efficient capabilities at the speed of relevancy, evolving our culture, building faster, and delivering faster capabilities.”
By Shannon Collins, Army News Service