________________________________________________________________________Richard S. Kem
July 1st, I would guess a lot of people out in the Army didn't know a lot about OPMS, even
though there had been Army Times articles and so forth.
Within the Corps of Engineers there had not been a lot of discussion about it. I know up at
the Naval War College, there were only 26 of us in the Army there, and it had some very
minor kind of exposure. It really hadn't crossed my mind when they said, "Hey, you know,
OPMS started last week." I said, "Oh, what's it all about?"
As I mentioned earlier, I had this phone call from Major General Andy Rollins who said,
"Sam, come brief the Chief of Engineers on this thing called OPMS and tell him what the
impact is on his Corps of Engineers and his engineer officers, on his colonels."
So, I did a lot of research; I had to learn about OPMS. Out of that, I put together a briefing
and I went up to brief General Fred Clarke. Andy Rollins was present and probably Ed Peel.
The essence of that briefing was that much of the rudiments of OPMS was in general terms,
but the focus was on centralized command selection. That first year only troop commanders
were being selected centrally by boards.
My recollection is that we had about twelve troop commands that engineer officers
commanded, and about seven of them would rotate that year. So, the board was to meet and
pick seven commanders to go to troop command the following July.
He asked what impacts were involved. One of the things I told him was that, first of all, I
thought there was going to be a big change in engineer commanders. We had some good
people commanding engineer troops in the Army, and we had an awful lot of district
engineers who were all very good. You need to know that district engineers at this time were
"slated." Maybe I better back up a moment and say that the process for selecting district
engineers at that time was that the engineer assignment officer in Colonels Division would
develop a slate of officers, recommending them to be district engineers, meeting the criteria
of the Chief, year groups, and that sort of thing. We would take the twelve or thirteen
districts becoming available and open that next summer, and then I would go over to sit
down with the Chief of Engineers and typically his staff general officers present that day, and
go through a "slating" session. At that slating session the Chief would then approve those
who would be district engineers for the coming year.
The assignment officer would go back to the Colonels Division, write up the assignment
sheet, send it in, and the Chief of Colonels Division, Lou Tixier, would approve the
assignment.
In other words, we had a work group, face-to-face nominating process working. The
assignment officer would take over that list, plus some alternates or potential substitutes. At
that time we in the Officer Personnel Directorate worked with something called an order of
merit list, a ranking by branch of how people stood.
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