Engineer Memoirs _____________________________________________________________________
rapid reinforcement of NATO program, and some new categories were established to take
care of that.
Some other things, though, had to be built with MCA kind of funds because NATO wouldn't
cover those items. We had difficulties making our pitch to Congress on things over and
above NATO funding. "We are contributing to NATO infrastructure," was the congressional
view; "why don't they cover it all?" There was almost a continuous dialogue about whether it
should be this way or that way. We would have an opinion on how it should be. Both places
where we were addressing them--NATO countries and Congress--would disagree and want
to pare down their part. This meant another reason for a lot of the networking of whether we
in USAREUR were on top of things. USAREUR was always getting blamed by EUCOM, the
Department of the Army, and the Office of the Secretary of Defense that we weren't
proceeding fast enough.
I used to say that, "Look, USAREUR is at the bottom end of this noodle. You push a noodle,
it collapses. We need a pull from the top and then the noodle will come straight." In effect,
we were at the bottom of the NATO infrastructure system. We had to send things to
EUCOM, then to AFCENT [Allied Forces, Central], with a German commander, before it
went to SHAPE. Then we, if we wanted to do things through MCA, had to go to the
Department of the Army. We just had a lot of players, and we really tried to succeed through
networking.
So, I would call people--Colonel Bill Keach, Corps of Engineers, worked in the Office of
the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Policy. General Groves had left USAREUR and gone
back to that office. I would call Bill Keach and say, "It'd be awfully helpful if the Secretary
of Defense would put out a message saying this and this and this." He would work it from
there to make it happen. I would call Colonel Vern Ebert, a friend of mine who was one of
General Haig's SPACOS--U.S. action type. Vern worked on U.S. problems at SHAPE
headquarters, and I'd say, "We're really having trouble getting into The Hague. Can you have
somebody call down and tell them to get with it?" He'd have someone call down, and they
would be more responsive to us.
We just tried to anticipate obstacles and somehow push the obstacles or go around and had
somebody pull it through that obstacle. I might even call Vern Ebert and have him say, "We
need General Haig to ask the AFCENT commander to get that stuff on up here. He's
interested" because, from the German national perspective, it might well have been advisable
to hold the thing down. After all, the Germans wouldn't have to start delivering on the more
rapid schedule in MoenchenGladbach if we didn't have approvals. We were beating on
them to execute, but we didn't yet have all of our approvals through--delay in the approval
process took the pressure off of them.
So, within the scope of things, our plans just might get hung up at AFCENT for a few weeks,
so I would call up to ask Lieutenant Colonel Ebert to have SHAPE pull them up, pull that
"noodle" through AFCENT. I did an awful lot of networking, just trying to make it happen.
We in USAREUR were at the bottom of all of the approval totem poles, but we were the
ones who were being looked at to produce.
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