Engineer Memoirs _____________________________________________________________________
A team headed by the Deputy Inspector General of the Department of Defense, Derek Vander
Shaaf, came over on a worldwide trip with the goal of cutting out spaces in Europe.
General Fiala had chaired those sessions where we all briefed the Vander Shaaf team on our
responsibilities. The results of that effort weren't enacted until later, when I was Chief of
Staff. That became the second factor driving changes in organization in the year '88'89.
Q:
Okay. Well, we'll probably come back to that.
A:
Be sure and ask me about Vander Shaaf's methods later.
Q:
Well, I'd like to go into the various elements you talked about: facilities engineering,
construction, some of those things. What were the budget trends affecting USAREUR,
affecting the engineers while you were DCSENGR?
A:
Well, budgets were still up. We were fairly well funded, but it was beginning to turn. I guess
we were executing a pretty good budget, but the budgets we were programming and planning
for were on the downturn. So, that's always difficult.
Then my second year was even more difficult. There was a lot of talk at this time about the
Germans and the NATO allies carrying more of the load. Congress was filled with people
crying that they weren't carrying their share of the burden. That wasn't new because I heard it
back when I was in the Office of the DCSENGR before, again in the years on the Army Staff,
and it seemed just like a popular refrain--even though multitudes of words and statistics and
graphs were displayed that showed who was carrying what load with respect to what.
Nevertheless, it was just popular to say the United States was paying too much.
Well, it may be popular to say that, but then energetic staffers and other groups would form
to try to make those kinds of things happen. So, there was always that business.
The essence of all that was that things were starting to turn down. I came back for a meeting
about the construction program that Major General Bob Dacey, the ACE, had chaired, with
all commands present, when he tried to grapple with the program. The numbers escape me
for a moment, but it was something like we had all started by putting in 1,800 projects, and
the last bit of guidance we received was that only about 600 projects would make the cut, and
now we were trying to stuff it all down into 200 projects. Every command was there. I mean,
here we were, USAREUR, a third of the United States Army, but also individual
installations: West Point, Alaska. I mean, all sizes and shapes of commands were there. Of
course, Bob Dacey had a difficult problem: how's he going to patch all this together in a
cohesive program?
It was really not a very satisfactory affair, from our standpoint. It just couldn't happen
logically. We also had, then, all of the have-tos: people at the the Department of the Army
headquarters stuffing in their projects: a new headquarters for AMC; finish Fort Drum--it
was well under way, so we had to finish that. All of these kinds of things were top down
"drivers" and, of course, they would push out multiple projects of the rest of us.
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