________________________________________________________________________Richard S. Kem
on the change; that is, don't use the baggies, and go back to controlled-humidity warehouses.
The problem was that General Prentiss had been quite wedded to the baggies, and the British
had used some smaller number in their area before and had sold the program to the
Department of the Army. General [William] Wray had been the ACE at the time. He had
testified to Congress extolling the virtues of this great new idea, the baggie. It was one of
those occasions where what had been extolled previously didn't appear to be so virtuous any
more, but a lot of people had put their credibility on the line and felt strongly about it.
General Heiberg and I stopped in to brief General Wray to begin with. General Read was
now the ACE; General Wray had moved up to be Director of Military Programs. General
Wray, was really quite irate that USAREUR was changing its mind, saying, "How come you
new guys don't buy what the old guys did?" We had some time trying to lay out the rationale.
We were trying to do it, not to harpoon anybody--but because Drake Wilson, the EUD
commander, who, of course, worked for General Wray, had brought to us the facts that
feasibility and the dollars said that maybe this wasn't the way to go.
With that, we scheduled a meeting with the Army Staff. As a follow-on to our previous
briefing before Generals Meyer and Johansen, they had set up a rapid reinforcement of
NATO steering committee. Henceforth, when we came back, that was the group we
addressed.
That group was called together and we briefed them, and they concurred. Then we went to
see General Kroesen, who was the Vice Chief of Staff, in an office meeting of, oh, five or six
of us. I remember it included General Heiberg and me; General Read, the Assistant Chief of
Engineers; and General Max Thurman, Director of Program Analysis and Evaluation at the
time; and maybe one or two others. There was another person from the Army Materiel
Command, who were asked to procure the baggies. They had come up with concerns of their
own as to how they were going to put those things together and procure them and get a kit
and have to maintain airtightness during dehumidified periods. We came down on the fact
that the British didn't take their equipment in and out of the individual storage shelters quite
as often in the amounts that we were going to do. During REFORGER exercises we were
going to be moving whole brigades' worth of stuff out of the shelters. Once your soldiers go
in and take the baggie off, they leave the area and are focused on other things. After the FTX
they come back and have to put the tank back in the baggie, seal it up, and reestablish the
dehumidified state. There had just begun to be a real question as to how viable that was for
maintainability over the long run.
So, we made our presentation to General Kroesen. The AMC guy made his presentation from
the procurement situation, and we all recommended change. The Vice Chief of Staff made
the decision that we would not proceed further with the concept of individual humidity-
controlled wraps or baggies, but we would go back to the controlled-humidity warehouse
concept. We were back in business.
Q:
Can you give me a rough date on when this meeting took place?
A:
Late January or February of '79.
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