________________________________________________________________________Richard S. Kem
We knew that the relationships of the Corps engineer company and the divisional engineer
company both supporting a maneuver brigade were troublesome and difficult. With a direct
support battalion and a divisional battalion, how do you integrate them with maneuver to
fight the battle? It's difficult. Today it is solved by EForce, you see. We wanted to point out
those kinds of difficulties on the training and doctrinal battlefield that the REFORGER
exercise provided--a great forum.
We felt that engineers could greatly help in the combined arms fight if we could prepare
terrain and use obstacles to improve the fires--tank, infantry, artillery.
Another point, we knew it was difficult to move a tactical bridge to be available when you
need it. If you have your bridging on the roads, exposed, enemy air is going to attack it. If
you have it so far back where it's not exposed, then it's not going to be there when you need
it. Remember the example in A Bridge Too Far. We knew that it was difficult and so we
wanted to work on that. How do you do it? Did we need to rewrite our doctrine or what to
solve that question?
We had the new medium girder bridge on that training battlefield for the first time ever. We
didn't have it in the brigade yet, but V Corps had it and we brought it down for this exercise.
We also had the ribbon bridge available, which we had received since the last
REFORGER--also a first time on a REFORGER exercise. So, we were taking out some new
stuff, and we knew we wanted to say, "Hey, that's an improvement, but we need more of it.
Field it faster." We also knew that the dozer on its tractor-trailer was not the right thing for
forward brigade engineer elements and we badly needed the M9 ACE. We knew that because
we had been to the field with maneuver elements so many times. We knew that whenever we
went to the field, engineer company commanders always left the tractor-trailer and dozer
back to the rear. They'd never take it up into the forward brigade area because you couldn't
turn it around fast enough on German roads to beat it out of there. It just wasn't sufficiently
maneuverable, so it was kept back.
We had this nice list of things we knew were shortcomings. So, we taught our people, as they
were going through day-by-day actions, to keep an after-action log--jotting down instances
and anecdotes, real-life things that happened to prove the points. As we did our map exercise,
we would say, "Hey, we think that's going to happen there. We think this is going to happen
here. This would be a good point to emphasize." So, we really framed and scoped out the
major elements of our after-action report--what we thought we'd be commenting on and
were looking to have identified in the exercise.
Ground recons--people were really familiar with what was going on. We really prepped to
try to make sure it was realistic and we did it right. We took out more engineers than have
been on a large Corps exercise for I don't know how long. There were 6,340 combat
engineers, over 11 percent of the total force of 56,000 in the field.
We had a great exercise. I think we put in something like thirty-one bridges over a 10-day
period as compared to the two the year before. People didn't stop action to take out the
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