Engineer Memoirs _____________________________________________________________________
Now, I say that because that view carried on some activities over the year and led to many
more after I departed, but that became a factor as we tried to address the Vander Shaaf cuts.
We really went out with his guidance to the Corps commanders. When I say "Corps
commanders," I mean the 21st Support Command along with V and VII Corps, the three
three-star commanders, and also to the Berlin commander and the Southern European Task
Force commander in Italy.
Those five, plus the Commander in Chief, Deputy Commander, Chief of Staff, and the
USAREUR Command Sergeant Major, met rather often together, and so we all had a sense
of direction on where we were going, and we would address various kinds of major items
going on.
We had the Corps and the other two commands submit potential cuts, focusing cuts to try to
get rid of duplications, with quite a number to be in the nonappropriated fund management
arena.
Based on that, we convened commandwide meetings. I chaired the first meeting, and we tried
to identify certain areas for reduction. He established numbers for the Corps headquarters,
and then they got to choose where the cuts came, but then he wanted to see some rationale
for why things were different in similar Corps functional offices.
We held a great, big, all-afternoon meeting with the Corps chiefs of staff, with me presiding,
and we tried to lay the groundwork for what would be presented to General Saint and the
Corps commanders for final decision. Then we had another meeting where General Saint
presided with the Corps commanders present, and the briefings laid out which cuts had been
easy and were agreed upon and those that were still disagreements, and then the Corps
commanders had a chance to say, "No, I don't want to do that. I think we ought to do this
instead," and that sort of thing. Then General Saint would make the final decision.
It was a difficult process. There were two sessions, one presided over by me, one presided
over by General Saint, to make the final decisions. With that we cut out the 420 spaces and
sent them back.
Q:
Did those come pretty heavily at the Corps level?
A:
Yes.
Q:
USAREUR is undergoing yet another round of staff reorganization and cuts, it seems to me.
A:
Yes, and I think the idea was that General Otis had trimmed the USAREUR staff, and he had
started to look at the Corps staffs and turned that task over to General Saint. That's where the
ax fell this particular time.
With General Saint's predilection that Corps commanders may have intervened too often in
his divisional community arena and they had certain other responsibilities they needed to put
their attention to, that's why that happened.
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