________________________________________________________________________Richard S. Kem
All that, also, was a good prompter for people to train well. I mean, the general defense plan
in Germany becomes a great vehicle for training, a great motivator, and for keeping sharp the
senses of the leaders, noncommissioned officers and officers, oriented toward that mission.
That mission keeps reminding everybody of why we are there. So, that's always been a great
thing about service in Germany over all these years--you're always working on a general
defense plan that always keeps you sharp and keeps you trained.
Q:
That also requires an appreciation by the maneuver commanders of the role and capability of
engineers, and also the ability of the engineer to sell those commanders on what he can and
can't do. This is a broad generalization, but how well was that going over there? Did the
maneuver commanders have a good sense of what engineers could and could not do? Were
they wanting too much? Were they impatient?
A:
Well, that's a question that's always germane, and the first part of your question really
established the essence of it. There has to be a real interaction between maneuver
commanders and their engineer. The engineer cannot wait for the commander to call for him.
The commander needs to have an appreciation for what this element of the combined arms
team can do for him. A lot of them don't have that; they don't get that training. I mean, at the
TRADOC schools, as I learned when I was there later at Fort Belvoir, when you're told to cut
back your curriculum here and there and you start paring things out, you find out that in the
other service schools your part seems to get pared a little bit more. I found in the Armor
School, for instance, that we'd put engineer instructors there--I've really now jumped ahead
to my Fort Belvoir time, but it's pertinent to your question--that our instructors were
basically just teaching wiring diagrams. "This is an engineer company; this is an engineer
battalion. When you're here you can expect this." After that hour and a half of that, then--
"we've had Engineer."
We found graduates--captains, advanced course graduates at the Armor School--that
thought the combined arms team was when you had infantrymen with tankers, as opposed to
having engineers, military police, artillerymen, et cetera, as the combined arms team. They
thought the hasty breach was the one tankers did by themselves and the deliberate breach was
the one where you called the engineers--as opposed to the entire combined arms team
moving forward so when it hits an obstacle everybody ought to be operating to get across it
and the commander uses his engineers as his main breach element. This later became the
reason at the Engineer School that we rewrote the manual for breaching and we set up
different definitions. We called the tanker-only concept the "bull through" operation. This
was not defined as a doctrinal breach operation but an act by a desperate commander who
found himself in the middle of a minefield, taking fire, and who had to decide whether to go
forward or backward. If he decides to go forward, it becomes a "bull through," and he must
expect to take great losses. He would never decide to do that if he didn't have to in a
desperate situation.
We also changed the name of the hasty breach to the "in-stride breach," which identified the
connotation that a combined arms fighting unit on the move, once it comes across an obstacle
identified by scouts, would like to cross that obstacle "in stride" without losing momentum.
The unit doesn't want to get bogged down and allow enemy gunners to bring fire in on it,
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