The sun will soon set on the U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command senior leader’s career.
LTG Daniel L. Karbler ’87, who commissioned in the Army in 1987, culminated his military service when he took command of USASMDC in December 2019. On Jan. 9 after more than 36 years of service, he will retire.
Karbler attended the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York, and said those four years decisively shaped his future.
“It’s not an overstatement at all to say you make friends for life when you go to West Point,” Karbler said. “You adore those four years of hardships. Everything from ‘Beast Barracks’ all the way up through graduation … that shared level of hardship creates a certain level of camaraderie that I just don’t think you find anywhere else. Those tie-backs to West Point are really important.”
Following graduation, Karbler was commissioned and branched into the Air Defense Artillery. Shortly thereafter he began working with the Patriot surface-to-air missile system. At that time, Patriot was a relatively new weapon system in the Army that had only been fielded five years prior.
“Patriot was the first digital battlefield weapons system,” Karbler said. “I remember as a cadet seeing the Patriot system at Fort Knox, Kentucky, seeing aircraft on the radar scope and seeing what the missiles could do. I thought that this is pretty awesome. When I saw the digitization that was taking place and what Patriot was able to do, it was very cool.
