Engineer Memoirs _____________________________________________________________________
Q:
It's a relationship you have to handle that none of your other commandants have to worry
about, isn't it? Presents you a little more of a challenge in that respect?
A:
Well, yes, it's a relationship we have to handle. Whether it's a challenge or not depends. It
almost implies that if you've got to work hard at it, then it's a challenge, and I haven't had to
work hard at it. I mean, it's been natural as far as my feeling goes. I worked as the Deputy
ACE before, and I worked directly for him in two positions, and so I think I understood the
different relationships. Every now and then I find somebody who doesn't, so they want us to
do certain things. Usually, after a little discussion, we can figure out that that's in the other
arena and they ought to take care of it or it's down here. Or they get something in that we
should work on and they'll feed it to us. We get something in that is really above our level,
we'll pass it back up.
There's maybe a little more discussion than other people have, but it's not been a challenge
because it hasn't been difficult. We have things like the Engineer Center team meeting, and
we typically invite General Bob Dacey's people out here for our meetings like we do our
operations, force integration, and our people from Research, Development, and Acquisition.
Q:
Now, what would you say was the greatest challenge you faced in this position?
A:
Well, if I define that engineers were broken, then my greatest challenge was to try to get an
Army understanding of that and develop a game plan to fix it and put that game plan on the
path to getting fixed and hopefully accomplish that fix. Going with that, then, becomes the
ability to marshal the forces and focus and keep doing the other things that are daily
important that you can't drop to accomplish the major thrust.
Q:
Did you make any major changes in the organizational structure, and why?
A:
Yes, we made some changes. First of all, though, TRADOC had decided that there would be
an organizational change to accommodate the fact that we have doctrinal responsibilities as
well as teaching responsibilities. A thing they call School Model '83 had been approved
when I came in. What I found out was that we had not implemented School Model '83 here,
so during my early months I made the decision to implement it. That moved people out of the
Training and Doctrine Development Directorate into the teaching departments so that we
would be teaching and writing with the subject matter expert at the point of teaching instead
of writing in the Directorate of Training and Doctrine Development and teaching in the
Department of Combined Arms or the Department of Engineering. The decision had been
made that that was the conceptual framework. We made an evaluation while I was here,
decided we weren't in that mode, and made that mode change. So, that happened.
The other things have not been as dramatic; that is, we've done some fine tuning. I
established an organization called the Engineer Force Modernization Office, and brought in
Lieutenant Colonel Tom Farewell to head that to provide some ability to pull across all
functional areas. I think I mentioned earlier the fact that different organizations could be
pulling in one direction and not knowing what others were doing. I asked Tom Farewell to
come in and provide that perspective and vision across all of our functional elements so we
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