________________________________________________________________________Richard S. Kem
Colonel Kem inspected the bridging exercises on the Rhine River conducted by the
labor service companies and the 565th Engineer Battalion in the spring of 1977.
A most difficult combined arms operation is one where you have to bring the maneuver
elements from a spread formation down to constraining points, process them through
constraint, and then let them maneuver out and be ready to go again, whether that is a
minefield, complex obstacle, or river line. So, we would use this mechanism to convince
them that "your commanders would be aptly tested in their ability to communicate,
coordinate, write plans, and your noncommissioned officers, company grade officers, and
everybody will get a good exercise trying to cross this river--because it's tough. You will
really understand yourself better. Not only that, you get a two- or three-day realistic field
training exercise. You can attack; you pick the objectives. Here's the way we see it." Let
them actually develop the exercise to their needs.
Just as later we got into mission essential task lists, commanders could pick out their training
objectives, which ways they wanted to train, write the scenario to get the maximum amount
of training the way they wanted it, and we had already done a lot of the early staff work for
them. All they really had to do was provide their own training money for fuel and that sort of
thing.
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