Ernest Graves
Then I was reassigned to the Logistics Division in the Infrastructure Branch. General
C. Rodney Smith, then a colonel, was the head of that branch. He was later the Deputy
Chief of Engineers for Military Operations. I worked on the airfield program.
Q:
So you are getting back into construction.
A:
That was very much construction, although at a fairly high level. It was programming.
SHAPE put together what airfields we wanted the NATO countries to build or
improve.
Q:
A little bit like what you were doing in Japan?
A:
Yes. But at a much higher level. Every year they prepared an airfield program. I was
involved with the third slice, which was the biggest single airfield program.
The biggest thing I did was the airfield standards--a list of the operational facilities that
would be cost-shared in the airfield. These included the runway, the parallel taxiway,
the dispersal areas, the lighting, et cetera. There was a list of about 20 items. They had
agreed at the Lisbon meeting of the NATO council that these items on the field would
be cost-shared. The countries would contribute to the construction costs in accordance
with shares based on their economic ability to pay. The listed features of the airfield
would be paid for from this common fund.
Everything else would be paid for by the host country, or the using country. Barracks
and other living facilities would not be paid for on a shared basis.
However, the list of facilities agreed at Lisbon was very poorly defined. It took us
almost six months to go through and define what was required for each feature--for
example, how long the runway would be, how wide it would be, what bearing capacity
it would have, what the clearances would be, and so forth.
Then we had a huge conference. It was big for a working meeting. There must have
been at least 200 people around a hollow rectangular table. We asked representatives
from every country to come for the purpose of agreeing to the refined standards. The
bare bones list of the standards had been included in some document that the defense
ministers had agreed on at Lisbon. But then, when it came time to implement the
program, the issue was, "What does this bare bones list mean?"
There had been interminable arguments. SHAPE wanted to establish a standard that
would fulfill its military requirements. I will give you an example of the kind of issue.
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