________________________________________________________________________Richard S. Kem
could have an understanding and perspective in those elements of what all was going on.
That allowed me, then, to have greater networking within the organization and out as we
tried to focus on how we reach that vision of the future--that is, an effective engineer force.
That office has been functioning for a year now, a very small, austere organization with
Lieutenant Colonel Farewell, a major, a captain, and a clerk. It's provided a great input and
synergism here.
Q:
It's amazing. Basically, just implementation of School Model '83 and then this one office are
your major organizational changes?
A:
Well, of course, one thing we have to look at is down the line--the move of the school to
Fort Leonard Wood. So, the things we've tried to do organizationally have been fine tuned
here but pointed toward that. Part of the School Model '83 effort was that I reorganized the
school secretary, which has gone away. There's some fine tuning along with that. We have
focused toward Fort Leonard Wood and spent a lot of planning on that. As part of that there
are other organizational things that have been approved which lead toward the move.
One of those is that we're doing away with atomic demolition munition instruction. We've
pushed and worked throughout the Army to get us out of that mission area. Second, we are
passing to the Ordnance School responsibility for training generator and environmental
equipment repair. As part of that I have started an initiative, and it's now been approved, to
pass total proponency for generators smaller than 500 kW--that is, tactical generators--and
environmental control equipment to the Ordnance School. In the past we've had one whole
department here teaching ordnance kind of folks. In addition, we've had combat development
responsibility for those generators.
In my mind, that has been a thing that's diverted us from primary attention on our combat
engineer missions. That's why I asked that with the school move, and the fact that the
department was going to stay here anyway--we conduct advanced individual training for
7,000 students a year for ordnance--that it be transferred to the Ordnance School. It was
never going to go to Fort Leonard Wood anyway. We were going to retain responsibility for
that instruction here with the Engineer School at Fort Leonard Wood. It would be a
diversion. So, we got that responsibility transferred to Ordnance and got them to take the
combat development responsibility too. That's effective the 1st of October 1988. That's been
a major organizational change based on the future.
We've established a noncommissioned officer academy here as a prelude to moving it to Fort
Leonard Wood to combine with their noncommissioned officer academy. We've also sold
the idea of creating, at Fort Leonard Wood, a battalion to run the basic officers course so that
the battalion commander and the company commanders become very involved in the training
as opposed to now where we have a basic officer detachment that does the training under the
Department of Combined Arms and we have a staff and faculty battalion that has them for
command, administration, and discipline. That battalion commander's got a lot of other
things to be involved with and a company commander who is very involved with them.
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