________________________________________________________________________Richard S. Kem
A:
I did.
Q:
It seems like it offers the possibility for a lot of surge jobs, a lot of things.
A:
There were. Somebody was surging every week. That meant we also helped each other out.
That was the job of the chief of the special action team, to put together a team effort.
When it came to be legislative time, we all helped in reviewing the papers that the legislative
guy would keep in his big black briefcase. We would all, in our particular areas, review those
papers and work on issue completeness. Our capability was to call straight to an action
officer; I could call the Office of the DCSLOG and say, "What's all this really about? What
do you really think? What did you mean to say here?" So, we could fill in the blanks a lot of
times without having to send some paper back down needing to come back up, or we could
augment the paper. So, we helped facilitate how things ran.
I always thought if I was ever in a senior position any place, I'd really want to have a special
action team. In fact, in a budget crunch, FTE [full time equivalent] crunch times, they're hard
to justify.
One of the things I did that year was write a paper justifying why CAR and the special action
team should be kept. It carried the day and CAR was kept. Since then it's gone away.
Q:
So, is it that nobody is doing that kind of thing, or did they just give it to someone else?
A:
It happens some other way now.
Q:
Some other way they do it. About how many people were involved in that office, roughly?
A:
I remember that the special action team had five. There was probably one fulltime speech
writer, one fulltime legislative person, two people doing the weekly summary--those were
all uniformed. Then there were probably four secretaries plus the chief of the special action
team and the director.
Q:
That's still a pretty small group.
A:
The speech writer was totally dedicated to speeches and never got involved in the rest of the
stuff, other than to participate in discussions about issues, because he had more direct
interaction with the Chief of Staff than many of us. He would hear things as he was writing
the speeches and he would share them.
For me, that position, being my first in the Pentagon, gave me, from the start, a broad
perspective of the Army Staff and the secretariat. So, it was really a perspective broadener on
the inner workings and functions of Army leadership and on the thinking of the day. We were
trying to write things that would become Chief of Staff policy statements. He would say, "I
really think we ought to have a policy on so and so. I'd like to move in this direction."
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