Engineer Memoirs _____________________________________________________________________
the one mentioned. There really was not much involvement for me in testifying before the
committees as the Deputy ACE.
Now, having made that statement, I think I went over only once or twice to appear before a
committee and testify. The reason for that is that the ACE job is a rather high-intensity job
because you're always in the middle of the PPBES [planning, programming, budgeting, and
execution system] process. The ACE is always preparing, contributing to defense guidance,
working the POM, or working the budget. There are just an intense number of meetings to go
to as you're wrestling with new budgets or the cuts. A new cut comes down, new bogies need
to be met, and the ACE, as part of the Army Staff, meets with others as they sort all those
out. There are regular procedures for all of this that I should get to.
In the meantime, the ACE has four committees that he's the principal Army officer for
testifying before--the Appropriations and the Military Construction Subcommittees of both
the House and Senate. The ACE has more testifying days than any other officer on the Army
Staff. Bill Read described my job responsibilities--he would basically take the testimony to
the Congress side of the ACE house, and he would leave me to work the programming and
budgeting issues on the Army Staff.
I don't know if that's a "Mr. Inside/Mr. Outside" because you're not traveling far when you
just go over the river to the Hill. He described the problem he faced in his first year as ACE,
that he found himself coming and going daily. He would be returning from the Hill, having
testified, and someone would push papers at him so that he could attend a Program Budget
Committee meeting for which he'd have to be voting on Army Staff issues. That meeting
would be over at 6:30 or 7:00 p.m., and then he would have to go back to a prep session then
and again early the next morning before going back to the Hill at 10:00 a.m. or so to testify to
another committee. He said, "You can't prepare and go to Hill meetings and prepare and go
to Army Staff meetings while they're all going on concurrently." So, he was going to take the
former, I was going to take the latter, and that's how he divided things up, basically.
He would attend Select Committee meetings, often with General Morris, the Chief of
Engineers, when our issues got to that level, and he'd carry the ball. I carried the prep in
those sessions and was the principal ACE member at the Program Budget Committee. Now,
the way it works on the Department of the Army Staff is that the Program Budget Committee
is a committee co-chaired by the Director of Programming Analysis and Evaluation and the
Director of the Army Budget. I say co-chaired because they'd each take the lead depending
on whether it was a programming session or a budgeting session. If you were addressing the
program, then the Director of Programming would take the lead, and that was Major General
Max Thurman and then Major General Pat Roddy that year. If it was a budgeting session then
it was chaired by the Director of the Budget, and that was an engineer general, later
Comptroller of the Army, Major General Peixotto.
The voting members were the Army Staff proponents' budget persons. I certainly get to meet
a lot of good people up there when we're wrestling with all those issues. Everybody brings
their agencies' agenda to the table. I'd sit next to Larry Skibbie, who then was a brigadier
working in the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff, Research and Development. He later
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