________________________________________________________________________Richard S. Kem
We certainly handpick the captain who's going to be a team leader in our officers advanced
course. He has to have a breadth of experience, he has to have proven leadership capabilities,
he has to have the recommendation of a couple of former battalion commanders and a branch
chief. They're all selected on their abilities as a leader, coach, potential mentor, and so forth.
We try to put the right person in each different job. We have jobs here that get done and
don't necessarily require brilliance. The better people you have, naturally, the better it's all
going to be.
I would like to have more good junior officers with perspective to put in the Combat
Developments Directorate because I think that's a weak area here as we've stretched out the
numbers. In the combat development arena we bring this same person back to Fort Belvoir
and we pick one to go to the advanced course and one to combat developments. When you're
limited by number of majors and above and you get mostly captains, you're bringing here a
person who's had one or two tours and the advanced course as his level of experience. He's
been in troop units--that's what he knows, and probably did that very well--but now we're
asking him to do work in a whole new field that he hasn't been trained for, combat
developments--to write papers that will defend, win or lose, an engineer system, and they
might be writing those papers for an Under Secretary of the Army or a congressional staffer.
Now, I never did that until I was a lieutenant colonel assigned to the Pentagon. I wrote papers
at lower levels but not to the degree of editing them down to be the hard-hitting, very high
level things that you read in the Pentagon.
Then that becomes a burden to that officer's bosses because they now have to work harder to
develop that person and let him know what's going on, and in what's a very supercharged,
stressful arena anyway, combat developments, that extra burden for the bosses takes its toll.
Once again we're talking about level of experience.
Now, the implication of your question might be that we're not getting good folks here. I want
to dispel that. I know that in times past, people didn't want to come to the Engineer School. It
was always said that infantrymen want to go serve at the Infantry School because that was
felt to be career enhancement. I was always told that you don't want to go to the Engineer
School because that's not career enhancing, vis--vis other things. I would like to think
we've turned that around. I'm told by some that we have turned that around. I imagine there
are others out there who still say the opposite, who aren't talking to me. Nevertheless, we are
hand picking lieutenant colonels out of the War College, majors out of Fort Leavenworth,
and people see the caliber of people we have here. People have seen that we've had three
Engineer Branch chiefs--Paul Chinen, [Peter G.] O'Neill, [John Paul] Basilotto--all
assigned here after leaving branch, and people have seen that we've had people selected for
brigadier general out of here, for colonel below the zone out of here, for lieutenant colonel
below the zone out of here. Hopefully the word is getting around that our selections for Fort
Leavenworth and the War College are higher than the engineer average. People see that of
last year's sixteen engineer colonel command selects, three were assigned here and one had
just left; that's 25 percent. When those kinds of things get around and about, I think people
see that if they come to the Engineer School, that it's not career damaging; it is probably, if
they perform, career enhancing.
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