________________________________________________________________________Richard S. Kem
Engineers. Bill Ray was the DCSENGR. Now, I was networking from the Deputy Chief of
Engineer's office to Dan Schroeder at Leonard Wood, to Bill Ray in Heidelberg, and Russ
Fuhrman, who was now the 130th Brigade commander, having been the lieutenant colonel
action guy at the Engineer School with me, trying to make it all work out.
General John Foss was now commanding general at TRADOC, and General Schroeder
presented to him the Engineer Restructure Initiative, which had certain modifications toward
the Army of the future concept. Certain of those modifications couldn't come about until the
Army switched. For instance, under General Foss's concept, you wouldn't have mechanics in
battalions. They'd be back in the division support command structure. So, the engineer
battalions, likewise, shouldn't have mechanics.
Well, that's fine, to have that as the objective organization, but the tank battalions and
infantry battalions at this time still had mechanics, and support command had not been
restructured to have them, so therefore, the restructured engineer battalion needs to keep
them.
So, when you lined it all up, the refinements and the put backs, the Engineer Restructure
Initiative was very similar to EForce. The bridge company was taken out of the division and
put at Corps, which is something that we had thought of originally in EForce but had kept it
in the organization as a fallback, give up position if necessary to achieve spaces.
So, essentially, by the time you put back in today's needs--because the Army was that way
today--we had what we needed: that is, an engineer battalion in each maneuver brigade and
a brigade commander with a slimmed down headquarters at division.
Then that organization was tested in January during the REFORGER FTX. Colonel Joe Oder
went over to be the chief evaluator out of the ACE's shop. The evaluations were all very
positive. We had a bunch of new maneuver commanders, and it was, again, well received.
Once again, it was shown to the maneuver elements that EForce was the way the engineers
needed to be as part of the heavy combined arms team.
The VII Corps commander at that time was Lieutenant General Fred Franks. Later, when
DESERT SHIELD/DESERT STORM came about, General Franks called back to General Hatch
and said, "I want to go with my engineers in an EForce format. Give me some colonels."
The system then provided the colonels to head the engineer brigades, and the EForce
concept was proven on DESERT STORM's very aggressive and lethal battlefield--and is being
implemented today throughout the Army.
I guess the only other anecdote I would relate was that in the late spring of 1989 there was a
senior leaders training conference at Grafenwhr that General Vuono, General Thurman,
General [Leonard P., III] Wishart, and others came to. It was hosted by General Saint and
presided over by General Vuono. At lunch the last day, we were at the table with General
Vuono on one side and General Thurman on the other. General Vuono looked over to me and
said, "Well, Sam, I haven't heard much about EForce. How's it coming?"
409
Previous Page
