Engineer Memoirs _____________________________________________________________________
The problems were we'd get asked questions, even though decisions hadn't been made, and
then if people know things are being thought, then that can become a self-propagating
proposition. So, he, I think smartly, established a team to think out in matrix form what
might happen--basically look at it from the standpoint of segments. We didn't know the
final level, but it was going to be something more than just the 56th Artillery Brigade,
Pershing. What if we had to start pulling things out by increments? What increments should
those be? Where would we want to take them physically? If you're going to do that, you
really ought to have a base case, an objective that you're going to end up with.
If you don't know where that line is, how can you have a really good objective? You'd better
establish something. So, he picked a level of a single Corps, a couple of divisions, and
associated support elements that might be a reduced-sized USAREUR.
Then we went through the thinking process of what that force might be, and then we went
over to the stationers and the operators to say, "Well, look. That's where it's going to be.
Where should they end up? What are the best places, in terms of location, U.S. facilities,
housing, getting our people off of the economy as much as possible? We ought to move out
enough and save the housing so our people can have it like we should have. We should give
up the worst places and the places where we always had to accommodate a shortfall and
where it wasn't working. Let those go and save the ones where we could be best positioned.
We could tighten the force, but locally loosen up to accommodate all the needs, keep the
quality of life and the ability to train in whatever force it was."
The effort came about to identify some segmented force slices--knowing what the objective
force was assumed to be--and identify the objective facilities.
So, if somebody would come in and say, "This is the number," then we could go to the stack
and say, "Okay. That means these segments go, these units go, these are the places that go,
and these are the kind of moves we have to make to make all that happen." Then we could
cost it out and identify all the other actions required to do it.
So, that thinking started at that particular time, and it was continually honed until such time
as it was needed to be implemented.
Q:
Well, that was, as things turned out, very good advanced planning.
A:
I believe so.
Q:
It may help to explain why some things have seemed to have gone smoothly, I guess, because
they haven't hit the news. Maybe that's a bad definition of going smoothly, but you know,
things started changing with USAREUR pretty quietly. You'd hear about the huge numbers
of people coming back on the transatlantic flights, but you didn't hear about negative stories,
you know.
A:
Well, General Saint took a retired colonel who had spent a lot of time in DCSOPS and really
intimately knew what went on in the command, and brought him back as a civilian, and put
him in charge of the team. We allowed him to lock himself in the room and do the quiet
430
Previous Page
