________________________________________________________________________Richard S. Kem
round versus that round to meet projections of when various tubes are going to be available
and storage is going to be available, and how much shipping are you going to have? Whether
you have a facility or don't, which is the chick and which is the egg when you make all those
determinations? It becomes very involved and complex.
I also began to be involved with ammunition, with Walt Kastenmayer from the Office of the
DCSLOG, USAREUR, being the principal person. He would take me back to the
Department of the Army committee meetings to talk the facilities part of ammunition.
I think one of the things we accomplished during this period was to bring discipline to the
process by keeping the books in USAREUR, as the person responsible for the facilities.
When I arrived, DCSLOG would brief the facilities part and the ammunition and everything
else. We wouldn't brief facilities; they would. They had no feeling for how long it would
take. They would say, "We need one here in this town, so we'll just start calling it an
ammunition supply point."
Next thing you know, it'd start getting used in the conversations like there was one there.
There wasn't a program and nobody had done a feasibility check. So, by our taking
responsibility, saying, "Look, we own the books on facilities and we will share information
with you, but the facilities you're going to use are going to be on our inventory, and our
books are it. If you have got something out there, it better be on this set of books." Then we
started presenting the facilities part in all the briefings. I think that helped sort things out over
time and got us all dialoguing better. Then when General Groves, the Chief of Staff, looked
down the table, the logger didn't feel obligated to speak about facilities. He could turn to the
engineer to speak for himself. The engineer would have to speak and say, " I have it" or "I
don't." "It's not in the program" or "It is." "If we do it, it'll take this long." Or whatever the
aspects were.
Q:
The funding for the POMCUS program, was it in MCA or NATO funding? Were there
funding problems with POMCUS, NATO reserves, ammunition, and storage?
A:
All the above. NATO infrastructure was a very complicated thing. One of the other
complicators was the requirement to run our programs through all the other countries. All the
countries had to agree on various things. There's a formula by which various countries
contribute to the NATO infrastructure fund. The United States is the greatest contributor,
something like 27 percent back in that time. Germany was second greatest, 26 percent or so.
Everyone wanted to get all they could for their country. This influenced their vote, whether
something was or wasn't eligible for NATO funding. Remember the obligation to contribute
an additional 3 percent. The United States was going to contribute its 3 percent and do it, in
part, through NATO infrastructure. If a country wasn't eager to push forward on its
contributions, it could delay the whole process and might help its own national budget. One
way to do that was not to proceed too quickly in approving the part that the proponent
country, the United States, was pushing for its 3 percent. So, if we couldn't get ours
implemented then maybe they would not have to match it. So, it became very complicated if
we tried to push through that maze. NATO infrastructure funds funded some aspects of our
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