Army space operators are like NFL kickers

Army space operations officers can be compared to kickers on a football team: While not the most glamorous or even most well-known players, they can make or break a game.

"The kicker is normally the small, scrawny guy, he’s only got the one bar around his face mask, small pads, he wears funny shoes, doesn’t get paid quite as much as the stars of the team, but I’ll tell you that kicker is an important member of the team… A good kicker can win you or lose you the game," said Col. Joseph Guzman, division chief, strategic plans and policy for space within HQDA G-3/5/7. "We should always be on the look out for a reliable, ice-in-the-veins kicker for our team. Kickers are a lot like space operations officers in the Army…you can be the hero of an operation or an exercise. You can also be a zero, show up with nothing, but I truly believe that in the future Army…anybody might be called to take that winning field goal or tack on the extra point – anyone can be that hero and anyone can be the zero."

Guzman spoke Aug. 16 at the Space and Missile Defense Symposium in Huntsville, Alabama.

Guzman described that given the rich adversarial investments in anti-access/area-denial capabilities, the Army must own a piece of the solution to the problem of denied capabilities in space. The Army no longer narrowly consumes space products but shares responsibility to shape the future of an evolving combat environment, he said, which includes satellite communications, surveillance and reconnaissance, missile warning, precision navigation and timing and environmental monitoring.

Ensuring the vitality and reliability of these capabilities is critical to the way the Army plans and fights, Guzman said.

Guzman noted how the Army must do a better job of training soldiers against an improved threat, including through more realistic simulations. Additionally, the Army must continue to develop, acquire and improve space applications.

"The future Army will need modernized systems and weapons that capitalize on the attributes of satellites," he said. "There’s nothing else that can regularly overfly the sovereign territory of other nations. Satellites operate at altitudes beyond the reach of conventional air defense weapons, altitudes which facilitate information transport over extreme distances into and out of austere environments."

Stronger relationships with partners around the globe will also result in enhanced situational awareness. Guzman described an anecdote in which a 2014 report identified an object in space thought to be debris belonging to Russia, but upon further investigation, it was discovered to be maneuvering, causing concern that Russia was operating covert anti-satellite technology.

"Perhaps a more robust sensor network augmented by a future Army force on the ground somewhere in the world might aid such a discovery in a future conflict," Guzman said.

While Guzman said he does not envision an Army team of kickers running onto the field to win the game, his vision of the future Army is one in which "any one member of the team is able to kick a [point after touchdown] and when the space officer, when the kicker is called in to do his job, he simply doesn’t miss."