Ernest Graves
We studied the military workload and decided to remove military construction from
about half the districts. It was a massive effort, as you can imagine, to determine what
the space reductions were going to be.
Fortunately, to get the job done, there weren't as many procedural requirements back
in the fall of '69 as there are today. I don't mean that we didn't have a program of
keeping people informed.
But if you look at that situation today, you have to go through a tremendous drill if
you're going to make major reductions or realignments of functions. You're even
forced to do environmental impact statements in some cases, which is a ridiculous
extension of the law. But the National Environmental Policy Act [NEPA] hadn't been
passed at that time. It came along about then, but it hadn't taken effect in all the ways
that grew out of litigation.
Q:
It was the next year.
A:
It was the following year. For that reason, we were able to go ahead and do this work.
Q:
How did you approach the work? Was it through a committee?
A:
Yes. You had participation of a group of people, such as the personnel office and the
controller. The budget people from Military Construction and people from Civil Works
also were represented.
There was a small nucleus within Military Construction which worked under my
supervision. Everybody was into this--General Clarke, the Chief, the Deputy Chief,
Raymond. The guy that was in direct charge of making sure that these charts were done
right was myself.
We made a layout of the numbers. We had data on the number of people. We went
through and said, if we eliminate the staff that deals with military construction in the
Detroit District, then we can eliminate 20 spaces, for example.
We also studied the level of military construction in all the districts over the past and
the number of people that it had taken to manage it. We studied the S&A rates to
develop a curve that said how many people it ought to take, depending upon the
construction workload. If the workload was 10 million a year, it would take so many
people; 20, 40, and so on up.
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