________________________________________________________________________Richard S. Kem
duplicate themselves, but they both dealt with substance, and the Director of the Army Staff
took care of process.
I thought that was a pretty good arrangement and that they were maximizing both number
one and number two to deal with substance. The whole rest of the Army Staff worked the
process under the Director of the Army Staff. That's where the process works, but when you
want to go to win, then you send somebody who'll fight the battle.
It shouldn't be Hatch and me together. He goes and fights some battles; I go fight some other
battles. Or maybe, if he's off somewhere, I go fight that one, or if something I've been
handling and I'm going to be gone, he comes in and he covers that one.
We often strategized together. I'm a contributor to his commander's guidance and how he
formulated an approach to something, but we're both players of substance. We had that
conversation, and he agreed that he wanted me to be in that substantive role.
I had been interested, when I looked at Ken Withers' 671A, that he had done an awful lot of
work on automation and an awful lot of work on research and development. Specifically, I
left those off my 671A when I submitted it because we'd had this conversation--that is,
Hank Hatch and I--about staying broad across the board.
He asked me, when I sent it in to him, "What about automation and research and
development," and I told him why I'd left them off. He said, "Well, I agree. However, those
are places where we have an SES in Research and Development, surely, but we don't have
one in the automation arena. So, I'd like you just to provide a little two-star oversight in both
these arenas, especially since Bob Oswald [Director of Research and Development] has been
off convalescing for a period of time."
So, I put them back in. So, I did carry those roles and, in fact, I was very busy in both roles
this year, for reasons that developed over and above the fact that I was just going to be the
oversight. It turned out that, in both arenas, there was a year of intense activity, and whether I
had written that on my 671A or whether Hank Hatch had told me pay attention to those two
arenas or not, I would have been fully engaged in them.
I was also fully engaged in military programs, and involved in Bill Robertson's strategic
planning, got involved in civil works and some in real estate. So, I really was across the
board in the various arenas. I've left out resource management. I did a lot in that arena too.
Q:
Well, General Hatch spoke of his deputy as an alter ego that he saw there, your spheres
intersecting, and that he was looking for a credible spokesman for him when he was not
there. These are all the things that you've mentioned.
I asked him specifically about the inside and outside because I recalled that, at--I think it
was at General Withers' retirement--there was reference made to that distinction by a
previous Chief of Engineers. General Hatch got up and made a reference to the fact that
that's not the way it was going to be under him.
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