Engineer Memoirs _____________________________________________________________________
At Headquarters, USAREUR, we did theater planning and theater programming to try to
relate the needs in our 800 installations and for training and all the many other aspects of
living and training in Europe. We had to balance, then, the desires of the community
commanders and the Corps commanders and all those BDU folks that are the real Army into
some kind of terms, package them, and sell the program to the Department of the Army. First
of all, so they would understand it, appreciate it, buy it, and second so they'd be prepared to
use that kind of justification to carry it to Defense and Congress. So, the success of our
efforts would be how well we'd be able to support our folks in the field.
On the other side, once Congress had decided and the budget trickled back down and we got
an amount of money, which was always short of what we wanted, then we had to reallocate
it, once again balancing so everything could get done. In fact, the doors of the installation
open every day, the front gate opens, and people come--you have to have electricity, you
have to have water, you have to have motor pools, you need training to keep the troops going
and combat-ready so you have to have fuel and track pads. You needed to have logistics
flying things over, and you have to take tanks back for maintenance. So, we had to repackage
the budget allocations the best possible way we could to do the job of the command.
Then we had to sell it once again back down, saying, "Division commander, I know you
don't get what you want, but you can still do your job and here's how we figure it. Do this
and do that, and yeah, I know you can't accomplish this, but...." We had a selling job back
down to keep them motivated even when under-resourced to get the job in the command
done. Headquarters, USAREUR, was a very pivotal point. We would wear our BDUs, go
down to the Corps and sit there in the meetings and figure out what they wanted. We would
fly back to the United States in our greens, back to walking the Pentagon halls or going over
and visiting the staffs on the Hill, to try to justify what we wanted for our BDU folks in the
field. Again, a MACOM headquarters is a very pivotal place in the system.
If you serve only at Corps and below, you don't understand. All you understand is that you
never get enough. If you're at the Department of the Army level and have not been down to
the MACOM level, you don't understand things are different. You may think of the Seventh
Imperial Army because it's different. You don't think they understand that we're the boss
back here at the Department of the Army and when we say this is the policy, damn it, that's
the policy--even though it really can't be implemented in Europe because there's a German
law that precludes it. Once you've been at this MACOM level, you really have your sharp
edges rubbed off and you recognize you really have to make peace upward and downward,
and you have to make the translations. I wanted to cap my discussion of Headquarters,
USAREUR, with that.
Q:
Where's that intersection in USACE? Is that the division level? I was thinking about some
things that you hear inside the Corps in terms of the model you were setting up. The field
does what they want; they don't pay any attention to headquarters. Then from the field the
question of the standards there.
A:
Well, districts don't believe there is any necessity for divisions--I know that. [Laughter]
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