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The Army Transformation is highly visible at Fort Lewis, Washington, and no more so than with the engineers. From the first announcement on Transformation by Army Chief of Staff General Eric K. Shinseki, in October 1999, the engineers at Fort Lewis began work in earnest, receiving new personnel and equipment and turning in their legacy equipment. In September of last year, A Company, 168th Engineer Battalion, became the I8th Engineer Companythe first Interim Brigade Combat Team (IBCT) engineer company.
Structure
The structure of the engineer company in the IBCT is unique in the Engineer Regiment. It is a carefully tailored organization with a focused set of missions. It is important to understand the concept and mission of the IBCT and the engineer company's role within the brigade in order to understand its structure.
The brigade is designed as a full-spectrum early-entry combat force, optimized primarily for small-scale contingency operations in complex and urban environments.1 The organizational and operational (O&O) concept emphasizes the need to balance the strategic responsiveness of the brigade against the requirements for battlespace dominance in determining the organizational structure. The organization must balance deployability, sustainability, and the in-theater footprint with lethality, mobility, and survivability. The IBCT's effectiveness is further enhanced by a design based on embedded unit capabilities-military-intelligence, signal, engineer, antitank, artillery, and combat-service-support (CSS) elements-that have been tailored specifically to the unique requirements of the unit's set of missions.
The brigade is an infantry-centric force with three motorized infantry battalions; a reconnaissance, surveillance, and target-- acquisition squadron; an artillery battalion; a brigade support battalion (BSB); an antitank company; a signal company; a military-intelligence (MI) company; and the 18th Engineer Company (see Figure 1).
The organization and role of the engineer company is reflective of the embedded-unit-capability concept. When balancing the myriad missions an engineer unit may face against the deployability and sustainability of the brigade, the designers of the engineer company tailored the company to focus on providing mobility support to the brigade. Limited countermobility, survivability, and general-engineering capabilities are made possible using the same force structure required for the mobility mission. The engineer company supports the movement of combat forces to achieve a position of advantage with respect to enemy forces. Mobility operations maintain freedom of movement for personnel and...