________________________________________________________________________Richard S. Kem
commands, and would put together the ACE's position. I mean, we just couldn't call all these
shots without touching base with others. Some of them required other people to be
coordinated with and to contribute. Al's team was there to work that.
The same call would say, "We need the Chief of Engineers' recommendation on where to
take a million cut out of facilities operations and maintenance--O&M money." We'd
have to get on the phone, call over to the Military Programs shop, and there were no vice
presidents in charge of facilities other than the executive director. We'd be working directly
with individual action officer programmers. We'd have to almost barter for their time,
depending on the other agenda items they might have gotten from their direct bosses. So, in a
sense, it may have been a matrix organization in which we had not defined well our
horizontal matrix line. We spent the year trying to better define that. I mean, General Wray
was very cooperative in dealing with it. It's just that with the rapid-fire turnaround of things
and the intensity on the Army Staff when you're in those budget and program cycles, the
calendar dictates on certain days that you do various things. If somebody has another new
idea, he'd have to wedge it in the same time frame.
One thing I hadn't mentioned before is that typically I would go into a Program Budget
Committee meeting and it'd be chaos. They'd line up a priority of things in a program and
draw the line about the number to be funded, and everybody's pet project or program would
be sitting in the unfunded area. So, they'd all--and me, too--would insist that one had to be
funded. We'd stuff it back in the program and then others would bubble out, as the
expression goes. Then you'd have to stuff those back in. After three hours of this in that hot,
humid room, sitting all cramped in, everybody's tempers get a little tight and you're not
winning. Then the chairs would say, "Well, let's run another printout and let the council of
colonels deal with this one."
Well, I mean, that was really a no deal for the council of colonels. I mean, what that meant
was they'd have to take--now 6:30 at night--another couple, three hours to run the computer
printout and then they'd meet at 9:00 that night and do some more wrestling with the issues,
trying to come up with something. Their tempers were probably frayed, too, because they'd
been sitting in listening to all this other stuff in the afternoon. Then they would try to work
out some sort of agreements that could be presented the next morning at 9:00 to the same
Program Budget Committee. So, they would stay up half the night and they'd run another
computer printout in the morning. They would all meet with their general officer principals
and convince them that the solution was the right kind of solution, that they shouldn't argue
so hard at the Program Budget Committee meeting, or they should, or we're still getting
screwed on this one so we better go in and make the case, or try to make a couple of phone
calls to get some other support before going back to meet again.
Well, when you've got that kind of intensity and all of a sudden you need some fact in the
facilities side and it's after 5:00 and the council of colonels is going to meet in two hours,
and you're dealing with Europe, Korea, in other time zones--nothing meshes. It's not like
putting together, say, a research and development program. That's very complex too, though,
as I found out later at Fort Belvoir. You've got to deal with a lot of people there, but at least
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