Engineer Memoirs _____________________________________________________________________
okay, but they're defining things in their terms. So, what I did was to define the engineers'
role in maneuver-commander terms.
So, my focus throughout my time here has been on engineer warfighting as an integrated part
of the combined arms team on today's AirLand battlefield. When you do that, then engineers
can't support that maneuver commander in the terms of how he intends to fight. So, what
Vuono was describing at the Combined Arms Center as the AirLand Battle and what
RisCassi and Saint were describing as how they were going to fight, engineers were not
going to be able to do the job they expected of us in real time.
So, what I did then was put together in that first year an analysis of the engineer contribution
to the combined arms team and, by visiting many different places, assembled the feelings of
many different maneuver commanders and put that together in a briefing that really said,
"Engineers have been left behind in modernization. We are now the weak link in the
combined arms team." I briefed that around to the four stars and others and received a wide
acceptance of that viewpoint. Only General Glenn Otis of all the four stars I briefed--and I
did not brief Chief of Staff General Wickham; it was all below the Chief of Staff--only
General Otis said that he thought we were tied at the bottom with air defense. Then I pointed
out that air defense was on the way to climbing out of the hole based on the Army's creating
a billion forward area air defense program. So, my strategy really was to lay it out on the
table for what it was. In terms of the maneuver commander, we engineers were broken in the
forward part of the battle area. Putting it in their terms and using experiences gained at the
NTC, I was able to get a very broad understanding of that view. That was my first year.
As we ended the first year, I was looking across the board of the proponency functions trying
to determine what could be done. We spent a lot of time that first year trying to save the M9
ACE, which was going into extinction based on a report by the Operational Test and
Evaluation Agency. That challenge then became a field test and evaluation to be held in 1985
down at Fort Hood. So, I spent a lot of time that first year, 19841985, in working toward
that important test of the M9 ACE.
By visiting the NTC, by assimilating the lessons learned, by interacting with people all over,
by working that first year on the redesign of the echelons above Corps part of the Army,
which was a TRADOC/CAC initiative, there were plenty of things keeping us busy. It was
not always easy to carve out time for independent thought analysis. We put all of our
thoughts together and started fleshing out the game plan of where we wanted to go.
So, at the end of that first year, then, what had been analysis plus articulation of the problem
then turned to addressing what to do about it. Out of that came the concept of EForce [or
engineer force] with the redesign of the engineer part of the Army as a refinement of the
Army of Excellence design. See, the Army had just gone through a whole new organizational
initiative called the Army of Excellence in which all of the organizations had been changed
and redesigned. I maintained that although we had done engineers too, and some parts of the
engineer team were all right, specifically in the communications zone where we'd gotten new
equipment because it was commercially produced and we could use commercial equipment,
that part of the engineer portion was all right. Where we were broken was in the forward
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