Two Space Force Guardians have graduated from the Army's Drill Instructor Academy at Fort Jackson in South Carolina, marking a first for the nation's newest service branch.
Space Force Tech. Sgt. David Gudgeon and Sgt. Yuji Moore graduated from the Army's program Wednesday, according to a news release from Fort Jackson.
"This is historic, and I don't think it's lost on anybody how we bring the joint force together in order to get after it," Command Sgt. Maj. Raymond Harris, Army Training and Doctrine Command senior enlisted leader, said in the news release. "The Army will never fight by itself; the Space Force will never fight by itself. In the entire Department of Defense, we fight in a joint force."
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The two Guardians went through the school as part of a program that allows other service branches to send instructors to the academy at Fort Jackson, granting them a chance to see how the Army trains its own recruits and instructors.
The Space Force is continuing to grow its number of service-specific military training instructors and working to establish its own culture and traditions for Guardians going through boot camp.
Air Force and Space Force military training instructors go through their school at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland -- the same location for basic training for new airmen and Guardians.
In October 2020, Guardians started going to basic military training with airmen at San Antonio-Lackland. By the following December, the first seven Space Force Guardians had been trained by Air Force drill instructors and graduated alongside airmen.
By 2021, the service created the 1st Delta Operations Squadron Detachment 1 to formulate its own training, curriculum and standards.
In 2022, Military.com embedded with Guardians for the first-ever separate and specialized Space Force boot camp and examined the culture and changes in a three-part series.
The service now has 10 Space Force-specific military training instructors who are currently certified, and it aims to graduate around 500 new Guardians from basic military training each year, according to a Space Training and Readiness Command spokesman.
"So, about 25% of all Guardians on active duty were trained by Guardian military training instructors and now Guardian drill sergeants," Maj. Clinton Emry, commander of 1st Delta Operations Squadron/Detachment 1, said in Fort Jackson's press release.
In addition to the routine physical training, Space Force Guardians also go through an additional 35 hours of classroom instruction compared to airmen during basic military training, Military.com reported, where they learn about the service's origins, the wide variety of global threats in space and the arsenal of satellites under the branch's control.
Both Gudgeon and Moore enlisted in the Air Force and later transferred into the Space Force, Fort Jackson said. Both instructors said they're ready to bring what they learned back to Guardians.
"I think we're definitely gonna be bringing in a different flavor to that training environment that they haven't seen yet," Gudgeon said in the press release.
Related: How Do You Create a Guardian? A Look Inside Space Force's First Specialized Basic Training
