________________________________________________________________________Richard S. Kem
commander, he sort of backed it up, and Bill Reno developed the study that really fleshed out
the writing to support the concept.
Major General Dan Schroeder replaced him--we had a quick turnover of commandants.
Schroeder came in and General Thurman challenged him to put analytics with the concept.
Meanwhile, the commanders who liked it moved up, like Lieutenant General Saint at III
Corps, who'd seen it at NTC, all of a sudden became Commander in Chief, USAREUR.
Now he wanted to implement EForce, and he started communicating back between the
Army Staff and TRADOC, wanting to get on with it, wanting to test it. General Thurman had
said we should test it at a REFORGER exercise.
Later, General Thurman reneged from that position after a Schroeder brief. Thurman had
stated he wanted a test in the same manner that the Army had done the 7th Infantry Division
at the NTC--put it together, take it to a major exercise, and test.
The only place you can do that is at a REFORGER where you've got the Corps level FTX.
We already knew about the NTC--that the engineer company was better than a platoon at the
maneuver task force level. What we wanted to do was put the rest of it out there.
So, Thurman had pushed for it to go on REFORGER, and then he backed off. General Saint
came up on the net and said, "Chief, I want to test it myself. TRADOC withdrew Army
sponsorship, and I want to test it." The Chief of Staff said, "Go ahead. You test it. I'll send
some TRADOC people over to watch it."
Meanwhile, Schroeder did his analytics and got the TRADOC analysis center involved. Then
USAREUR had a very good test a year ago [JanuaryFebruary 1990] during REFORGER.
They actually put the EForce organization together on the battlefield, set up an ad hoc
division engineer, brought in Colonel John Morris, who was deputy commander of the 7th
Engineer Brigade, to be that colonel, division engineer commander. Gave him a staff, an S3
and a deputy. Then they brought three battalions in to work with each of the three maneuver
brigades, and they worked it during the REFORGER FTX.
It really proved itself. I mean, the lessons learned that came out of that FTX were that E
Force was really the answer on the heavy battlefield.
So, that sort of brings you to where it was when I came in last year as deputy. As I left
USAREUR, we were just getting ready for this REFORGER test. We had wanted to
document the organization so they could organize. We were not permitted to do that, so they
had to ad hoc the organization, as I've just mentioned, for the test.
My activity as Deputy Chief regarding EForce has not been direct. It's been indirect, and
I've gotten a lot of men working over the last year--involved with USAREUR, Forces
Command, the Army Staff, TRADOC, and Major General Schroeder at the Engineer
School--trying to move the decision along. That is, too often things sit and aren't brought to
a head, so I networked and pushed to make things happen.
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