Clear the way: by Colonel Robert A. Tipton Commandant, United States Army Engineer School.

What an unbelievable honor to serve as the Engineer School Commandant and to lead our Regiment's efforts in so many areas. In late August, we were given the great news that BG Martin had been selected for promotion and would take over as the Commanding General of the Maneuver Support Center (MANSCEN). While it is tough for the Regiment to lose this "Great Engineer" as our Commandant, it is good news for MANSCEN because the passion and energy that he brought to our Regiment will certainly take MANSCEN to the next level. These will be tough boots to fill!

However, the new CG is not the only change that has occurred here in the past year. There have been a lot of changes at the school house and MANSCEN that have had a huge impact on our Regiment. Last year, MANSCEN converted to the TRADOC Center of Excellence model that transformed the way we develop capabilities for the Regiment. During the early stages of this transformation, the Engineer School and MANSCEN had to overcome a lot of obstacles to establish the systems to support this new way of doing business. I am happy to report to you that new systems and processes are beginning to take hold that will help shape the Regiment to better support our Army.

The Center of Excellence model calls for MANSCEN to be the lead for capabilities development (doctrine, organizations, and materiel) and for the Engineer School to focus on training and leader development. The missing piece for the school was that while MANSCEN is responsible for capabilities development, the Engineer School still has a tremendous role to play in shaping capabilities development as the subject matter expert for the Engineer Regiment and to be the link between MANSCEN and the engineers in the operational Army--a role we were not staffed to do after the transition of our combat developers to MANSCEN. As a result of this shortcoming, we developed a new position in the school to address this gap and hired Mr. Jim Rowan, who many of you know, as our new civilian Deputy Assistant Commandant. Jim is no stranger to the Regiment or the Engineer School, and he made an instant impact and is the field's direct link to engineer-related capabilities development within MANSCEN. In addition to bringing on Mr. Rowan, we have formalized the collaboration between the school house, the Office of the Chief of Engineers in the Pentagon, and our engineer integrators in the G-3 and G-8, along with other key engineer positions at the Army level. This increased collaboration will ensure that we articulate our engineer equities to better support our Regiment, the maneuver support community, and the Army.

We have also improved our collaboration tools to allow you to better connect with the school house. See Mr. Doug Fowler's article on the Engineer School Knowledge Network (ESKN) <https://www.us.army.mil/suite/page/126> on page 21. Please understand that the public website is intended for our external stakeholders and will be much less dynamic than ESKN and will not contain products for downloading. We will, however, use the public website to post all information on ENFORCE (more on that later).

In September, I was indeed fortunate to lead a great team of engineers into Iraq as part of the Center for Army Lessons Learned (CALL) to conduct an Engineer and Base Camp Collection and Analysis Team (CAAT). As a result of this trip, we collected a tremendous amount of great feedback that was recently published online by CALL. We specifically looked at the challenges we are facing as a Regiment in the areas of engineer command and control, engineer leader technical competencies, the engineer role in building capacity in support of stability operations, route clearance, and an in-depth look at base camps in the Iraqi theater. We are using the results of this document to support ongoing and new solutions being worked by MANSCEN and others to address the identified gaps. The team outbriefed the CAC leadership in October and also provided an outbrief at the 20th Engineer Brigade Lessons Learned Conference in December. Many thanks to the 20th Engineer Brigade, 926th Engineer Brigade, 18th Engineer Brigade, the MNC-I C7 Staff and all the phenomenal engineers working in-theater for supporting this very important effort.

The past few months have also seen some significant changes to the regiment as well. In October, the 4th Maneuver Enhancement Brigade (MEB) uncased it colors and assumed training and readiness oversight (TRO) responsibilities for the 94th and 5th Engineer Battalions at Fort Leonard Wood. This is the second active duty MEB to stand up and, like the 1st MEB at Fort Polk, it has become part of the maneuver support family and by extension the engineer family. Additionally, the mighty 130th Engineer Brigade once again uncased its colors --this time in Hawaii, under its new commander, COL Fabian Mendoza. CSM Wells represented the school house and reported back that the uncasing ceremony was a sight to behold--it is great to have the 130th back on active duty!

On the engineer strategic front, the Building Great Engineers flywheel continues to turn as we focused on officer accessions this past summer and fall and are in the midst of rewriting DA PAM 600-3, which is a big part of our employment line of operation. It was a great honor for me to attend branch night at West Point on 2 November where we pinned the castle branch insignia on 136 senior cadets. Initial analysis shows that we had another good year with the statistics very similar to those in 2007, with about 58 percent having hard engineer degrees. We still have to compile the results from our ROTC accessions. In November, we held a Building Great Engineers Council of Colonels where our regimental leadership developed recommendations for developmental and key developmental branch positions in support of the DA PAM 600-3 update. Additionally, the colonels set the agenda for the work group sessions at ENFORCE this year.

Speaking of ENFORCE, I ask all of you to place 20-24 April 2009 on your calendar as these are the dates of ENFORCE 2009. We are working hard here at Fort Leonard Wood and with our regimental Army Engineer Association to put on the best ENFORCE ever! We will continue the theme of Building Great Engineers to keep the strategic campaign plan moving forward. This year's ENFORCE is going to be an awesome event as we continue to focus on the Regiment's most important resource: the Soldiers of our Regiment. In this light, the entire conference will be held at your home--Fort Leonard Wood. As previously mentioned, registration information and agendas are published on our public website. We want to see more engineers from the operational Army attend this year's event, and we have gone out of our way to structure both the content and the cost to support your coming to this great event.

It is an indeed an exciting time for the Engineer Regiment!

By Colonel Robert A. Tipton

Commandant, United States Army Engineer School