________________________________________________________________________Richard S. Kem
moved over in that position, so you had the two general officers in the ACE's shop. Then
Major General Norm Delbridge, when he was ACE, brought Al Carton up to be a second
deputy, so there were two deputy ACEs. Then the Army did the normal kind of expected
thing when they ever find two deputies: they cut one out, and the easy one to cut was the
general officer. So, the Department of the Army took away that second general position,
leaving, then, just the major general ACE and the civilian deputy. So, that's how that
migration happened, and somewhere in there is when the executive officer became an
executive director and a colonel.
Q:
So, now at this point that we're looking at, when you were the Deputy ACE, the
Programming Division and the Installations Planning Division have the dotted line in the
ACE organization because they're actually in Military Programs, right?
A:
That's right because the Corps wanted to represent Military Programs as a stem-to-stern
organization. Read across the divisions of the Military Program Directorate--installations
planning, programming, engineering, construction, operations, and maintenance--you
recognize the life cycle, leaving out real estate acquisition and disposition, in the Real Estate
Directorate. General Read then was listed as a deputy, double starred. Then on the ACE chart
the solid lines are to Military Engineering and the Environmental Office, under the ACE
alone and not part of Military Programs. The ACE had staff supervision over those two.
In reality, we operated as two separate organizations. We did participate in, and I often
attended--but not General Read--the Military Programs staff meeting that General Wray
would hold to keep the continuity of information flowing back and forth between the two.
Q:
That is a sort of complicated link-up there, isn't it? In 1979, I believe, the Corps became a
MACOM, recognized as a major Army command. So, distinguishing the Chief of Engineers'
Army Staff responsibilities, which the ACE carries out, the MACOM responsibilities, which
come under the new MACOM, made a complex mixing of responsibilities there, didn't it?
Was it difficult for the people involved to sort these things out, or is this something that is
more complex from the outside than it is from the inside?
A:
No, it's only complex if you try to believe that it operated like the line diagrams. I mean, the
dotted lines versus the solid lines on here really reflect who ran things. The dotted lines really
ran those shops that are dotted, not the solid. What's even more confusing--you have
Brigadier General Mark Sisinyak then as Deputy Director for Facilities Engineering. That
was not, you see, principally a MACOM function. It was principally an Army Staff function.
Yet, he was the deputy that stayed over in Military Programs and the Army Housing
Management Office stayed over there and worked for the Military Programs, and all the
programmers, so we really hadn't separated out O&M [Operations and Maintenance] from
Construction Engineering.
In reality, General Wray never came over to the ACE's shop--he concentrated on Military
Programs. Don't read that absolutely; what I mean to say is that he'd come over often to sit in
for the Chief of Engineers in the Select Committee and we'd pre-brief him and all the rest,
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