Ernest Graves
how you do these things--was to have the contractor use our people to run the test.
Rather than going out and hiring civilians, we would turn these people over to him.
They would work for him. We would pay their salary because they were in the services.
The second point was that we would make it tri-service. We did that because the Army
was building these package power reactors for use by all three services--Army, Navy,
and Air Force. So we thought we ought to get them into the training program right
from the beginning.
There was another reason: the Army didn't have anybody that knew anything about
steam machinery and the Navy had all kinds of people that knew about steam
machinery. One of our ideas was if we wanted to get people experienced in steam
machinery, we got the Navy on board and they would send us people.
We got mostly warrant officers and master sergeants into this first group.
Q:
You got people who were adequate to this task?
A:
Oh, yes. We had no trouble. That was one of the most amazing things. I don't know
whether this happens very often. But I decided to have a worldwide recruiting
campaign for these people, to have all their applications and records sent in to Fort
Belvoir, and we would screen them, and then we would bring them in for interviews,
personal interviews.
The Army usually doesn't do anything like that at that level. It just assigns them by
number. I went over to one of the temporary buildings where the Adjutant General was
doing his personnel work and described to them what I wanted to do. They started
going through the length of time it normally takes to prepare a circular like this. And
I started talking about the timing of all these things. We spent the whole day going over
this, and they came up with a much shorter schedule. They got this circular out in less
than a week, and it contained all the deadlines necessary to meet the power plant
schedule.
But here is the interesting thing. Nobody had told me to do this or told the Adjutant
General's office to do this. I would go and see Lampert occasionally and tell him what
I was up to, and he always said fine. To do all this, I didn't have to be told by him, and
I didn't have to have his authority. I went all over the Pentagon and all these places and
went in and told these people what I was doing. And they said, "Fine." I didn't have to
go to the Chief of Staff or the Secretary of the Army, or the G4 or anything. There
was none of this business which seems to be prevalent now, that you can't even mail
a letter without permission. That's true.
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