________________________________________________________________________Richard S. Kem
So, we talked about that a little bit right there--sort of our own after-action review at about
eleven o'clock at night on the last day of the exercise, and it was just General Kroesen and
me. I said, "I think we didn't come out here prepared, and I need to do a lot of work with the
divisions to get it to where we can be better integrated and realistically do all these things.
We just have to do better next year." Well, remember, six weeks before that we weren't even
going to go to and be in the exercise, and he knew that.
His comment was telling, though. He said, "No," he said, "you know, it's my fault. This is
my second REFORGER. Last year I made every commander--division, Corps artillery,
engineer brigade, Corps support command--come in and tell me what their objectives were
for the exercise and how they intended to meet those training objectives and how they had
laid it out so that we planned our training so we got out of it what we wanted to." Then he
said, "This year, I didn't do that. I figured with all of that last year they'd know how to do it.
So, we came in here and so-and-so really didn't do this and so-and-so didn't do that, and I
never caused you to have to come up and show and tell so you could say you were concerned
about bridging and this and that and everything else."
That was certainly an eye-opener for me because it was obvious that we had to plan and
prepare for REFORGER '77 and have our own training objectives if we wanted it to work
out right. I won't say we started that same month, but as we looked toward REFORGER the
next year, we did a lot of different things to prepare for that exercise. We started with the
troop list. I wanted to put everybody possible on that troop list. I mentioned before we had
been revising the general defense plan, so we had all that thinking about how people would
be employed, so we used that. I wanted to portray our engineer capabilities--strengths and
weaknesses--as a part of Corps combined arms on the doctrinal battlefield during the FTX
of REFORGER '77.
On the doctrinal battlefield, if you have a division, you have a Corps engineer battalion in
direct support of that division and another general support battalion behind that. Too often,
on a training exercise, you know, the engineers are going forward and find a bridge out.
Being track mobile, the tankers and division engineers say, "I'll bypass this. The engineers
behind us will put one in." Then later when the truck convoys come up that would need that
bridge that would have been put in, they just go across the original bridge because
everybody's forgotten it was knocked out (simulated), and they move forward.
I wanted to put in the doctrinal slice and avoid that kind of unreality. I wanted to take out
sufficient troops to really have two battalions for each division and an appropriate slice of the
separate companies--panel bridge, fixed bridge, float bridge, combat support equipment, and
ADM--atomic demolition munition.
In addition, typically on an exercise, engineers put in a bridge. Then they're just going to pull
it out. When you don't have bridges there in an exercise, it is easy to say, "Well, I'd call up
the bridge, and when it gets here I'd wait three hours and then the bridge is in--so then we'll
use the original bridge." Or maneuver guys go up to a minefield and say, "Well, no engineers
here, so we're going to cross."
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