Engineer Memoirs _____________________________________________________________________
would work the program five or six years out, putting together the MCA [Military
Construction, Army] program for USAREUR, and we would ship that to the Department of
the Army.
We also had the NATO infrastructure program. We'd work all those details, which was taken
care of within NATO locally with Headquarters, EUCOM, a big player but involving the
whole NATO organization. There was a separate branch in Installations and Construction
Division for NATO infrastructure because it was complex. They had all their own
interworkings and a whole different set of rules.
That basically was the construction part of the division, focused on putting construction
programs together. We interacted with EUD, EUCOM, Department of the Army, with our
own Real Estate Division, and with the entire USAREUR staff, and we went down to the
Corps and the Corps' Director of Engineering and Housing, now, to get the Corps program
built together. That meant we brought programs together; we had a lot of prioritizing sessions
in-house; and we'd come back and participate here in the Pentagon with Department of the
Army and the Office of the Assistant Chief of Engineers. There were a lot of faxes going
back and forth, trading messages as we tried to work the priorities as the Army went through
its annual building the program, building the POM, and building the budgets process.
On the installations side, we really were the keeper of the books on those 800 different
installations that I talked about earlier in 39 communities. We were the keeper of policies
having to do with installations--whether you can have this, don't have that, how many of
them, what the standards would be, and that sort of thing.
We were also the stationer. You know, with stationing there's a big operations component
and there's a big engineer facilities component. Over time it has gone back and forth as to
who is the stationer, DCSOPS or DCSENGR? Well, obviously it's operations who has the
call. I mean, DCSOPS takes it to the commander for approval of which unit should be where,
but we were the ones who kept the books and would say, "If you want that unit there, you're
going to take up all the facilities and you still will have a shortfall." So, we knew how much
and we kept all those kinds of facts. So, if you ever wanted to move a unit or change a force
structure, DCSOPS and the Installations Branch of the Installations and Construction
Division would have to get together and work all those details.
That was a very big comprehensive kind of thing, not so routine a process as every year
putting together a construction program.
Also involved with stationing was something that had come up as a special initiative at that
time--the master restationing plan for Europe. General Groves, I think, had been the initiator
of the program initiative to try to determine the way of refitting where we were located so
that we better fit the mission and installations in Germany--maybe to be able to move out of
some of the U.S. installations, which were right in the middle of downtown German
communities; move them out to the periphery to avoid some of the interaction problems and
to get us out of some of the older, hard-to-keep-up facilities. After all, the kasernes we were
living in, for the most part, were those captured during the war.
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