________________________________________________________________________Richard S. Kem
For example, the disagreement was that the Inspector General said, "Well, of course, he's
about 5050. He's 50 percent Chief of Engineers staff things and 50 percent Commander,
USACE, things." Well, I took issue with Denny Bulger at the time and said, "No, I don't
think so because the only reason for the Inspector General is to be the Inspector General for a
commander."
That's how it all started, way back with Von Steuben, and that's a very good Inspector
General's role, to be there for the command and the commander, sensing the ability of the
command.
Why would an Army Staffer need that? He said, "No, obviously I do." I'd say, "Well, we've
got a Department of the Army Inspector General. You might be called on to provide him
some help, but he also gets command assistance from the FORSCOM Inspector General and
the USAREUR Inspector General."
Of course, I had just come from USAREUR where I was Chief of Staff. The Inspector
General reported through me to the Commander in Chief.
Anyway, it was through that kind of a dialogue that I tried to heighten people's sensibilities
to roles, really come to grips with self. Are you really doing that because you are the expert
MACOM guy, or is that really a staff function?
Of course, we had the deal with Civil Works, which is a staff function when they're dealing
through the Army Staff secretariat, so you'd count that the same as Army Staff.
So, they put out a tasker to everybody to go back and look at their organizations and come to
grips with themselves and put down the number of people they have working both functions
to just see where we come out.
We came back together 30 days later and had a report out. We had worked the various sheets
in the meantime, and our discussion was, I think, illuminating in a couple of rather key
instances. I think everybody understood themselves a little bit better, and I hope that process
allowed them to influence some of their subordinate people into understanding the two very
important roles.
The answer came out that, basically, about 17 percent of our activities here in Washington
had to do with the Chief of Engineers' role--that is, dealing with policy, programming, and
things in both civil works, military construction, real estate, research and development from
an Army Staff role. For the Chief of Engineers reporting to the Army Staff, the Assistant
Secretary for Installation and Logistics, or the Chief of Engineers reporting to the Assistant
Secretary for Civil Works, that is doing a staff role. About 83 percent of our activities were
as the MACOM headquarters staff, dealing with how we work our divisions and districts--
dealing downwards, in other words.
Now, the second thing--and this came from participants--was a statement that I thought was
really interesting and most illuminating. Somebody said, "So, 83 percent of our time was
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