________________________________________________________________________Richard S. Kem
Once the Bundeswehr was established, they built new kasernes. So, they were living in fairly
modern kasernes, and our soldiers were living in older, patched-up kasernes. The idea of the
master restationing plan for Europe was to allow us to potentially build new, better facilities.
Garlstedt, a newly constructed community that had just been built up in the north when we
wanted to move a brigade to the northern area, was heralded as a novel approach. General
Groves, as DCSENGR, had gotten German funding and built a facility out and away from a
city. It was modern. Our folks were in it. By restationing, we could get away from the
downtown Stuttgarts, Frankfurts, and so forth.
In DCSENGR, as Chief of the Installations and Construction Division, I was responsible for
USAREUR action on the master restationing plan.
Q:
Now, is this also related to the forward stationing idea that had begun to be talked about? I
think we talked about it earlier, moving U.S. troops closer to the front?
A:
It became that because the DCSENGR is responsible for all infrastructure and facilities. If
the command was to do something new or different requiring restationing or building new--
part of that would be obtaining the real estate, part would be facilities engineering and
housing those other divisions in the DCSENGR--but the kind of focused things, the up-front
things, really came to "installations" first to figure out the where and how and the what, and
then to the "construction" part of the Installations and Construction Division to program the
necessary construction.
President Jimmy Carter had brought to the NATO countries, through his defense staff and the
State Department, an American initiative for rapid reinforcement of NATO. His initiative
was to get every country to increase its defense budget by 3 percent, so everybody was
contributing more to a better NATO defense. His point was that if every country did that, the
United States would commit its 3 percent to adding forces for reinforcement of NATO. That
is, we would build more POMCUS sites. In other words, if you want a more capable force,
we would commit to building sites and storing the equipment forward for three more
reinforcing divisions from the United States to come forward to fight in NATO. That would
reduce the time to move three divisions to be able to fight because they would just have to fly
troops over; the weapons and equipment would be there. That was the initiative.
Like most initiatives, the decision makers wanted it done in a very short time. As I arrived in
DCSENGR to be the Chief of the Installations and Construction Division, execution of that
initiative was on my desk. Sites had been picked for the first division set of POMCUS in
northern Germany at MoenchenGladbach, Herongen, and Twistaden--three different sites.
It had been determined that we were not going to use the usual controlled humidity
warehouses but adopt something else--individual covers for tanks with separate
dehumidifier elements, which had come to be called, in the vernacular, "baggies."
That was the point where we were when I arrived. EUD was now the design agent, through
the Germans, to try to construct the first division set of facilities. That wasn't going very
quickly, certainly not quickly enough for those at the Pentagon who were involved. We still
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