Engineer Memoirs _____________________________________________________________________
The project was to take current issues and link them back to issues his predecessors had
faced. I guess it was like, "I'm now going through this drill much like you had to go through
a similar drill," or "I'm doing these things, which are different from what you did." The
issues addressed the size of the Army, where research and development funds were focused,
the roles and missions between the Air Force and the Army, and a whole bunch of different
things.
About two weeks before the session, the Chief of Staff said, "I'd really like to know about
the issues they faced during their days." So, that was sort of a typical task, and it came down
the way to CAR, and I was the available special action team member unassigned with a
mission at the moment. So, I was given the task of, "How about analyzing these eight Chiefs
of Staff that are going to be here and their periods?" The periods went all the way back to the
end of World War II. "List out what were their issues and what they thought."
The problem was that I only had about four days to do it. So, an advance call went over to the
Center of Military History that said, "We've got to do all this, and this Lieutenant Colonel
Kem will come over and lead the effort."
So, I went over there and sat around and jawboned it for a while, and basically picked
different periods and different chiefs, and several historians pulled in the stuff. The Chief of
Military History assigned who was to do what, and they wrote it up and sent it in to me. I was
the collator, bringer together in a format, editor, and that kind of thing.
Once we had it, then I boiled it down into a two- or three-page executive summary of all of
those things, and then developed a matrix with the names of the Chiefs of Staff across the top
and the issues down the side--an issue like Army versus Air Force roles; you know, we had
to decide who gets the Caribou, who gets the helicopter and so forth. Another was the size of
the Army, how many divisions did each have and that sort of thing.
Then we filled in the matrix with words; it was a word picture, not just numbers, to say "here
it is," and it was a triple foldout. So, a week after that, each was given a copy of this matrix
representing the analysis of the Army and its important issues in each period.
It was a tremendous surge of effort--evenings and weekend. It was a pretty fair product, but
not so rigorous. That was a typical requirement. When the Chief of Staff or Vice Chief of
Staff of the Army had a need to do something--we would provide that need.
It could also be assisting speech writers, as speech writing requirements were heavy at the
time, or analyzing a book and what was said, or analyzing various items like the one I
mentioned. We also worked up trip books for the Chief of Staff and the Vice Chief of Staff
when they went out to visit places--pulling issue papers together.
So, it was a year of doing that, really being an extension of the thinking and actions for the
Office of the Chief of Staff.
Q:
Did you enjoy that?
170
Previous Page
