Engineer Memoirs
Then we made projections of how large the workload was going to be. In that way, we
were able to establish a relationship between the size of the workload and the number
of people we had.
We tried to get down to only one district per division handling military construction.
We didn't completely achieve that. But that was the goal. There were some particular
cases where we didn't do that, mostly where the workload was very large.
Many of us agreed at the time that it would have been desirable not to do this because
we wanted to be in a position to move people back and forth between civil works and
military construction. We had this flexibility. But if you took military construction out
of a district, then you no longer had this flexibility without moving people from district
to district.
Talking to people just recently, the military construction program has grown
tremendously, and the civil works program now, in the construction phase, is cut way
back. So those districts that are now purely civil works have an overhead problem. In
other words, they're more costly. I think perhaps some consideration has been given
to reintroducing military construction into these same districts.
But back in 1969, to get the S&A rate down to five percent, the only solution was to
take it out, which we did. And General Clarke was behind this all the way.
We also reduced the size of the Office of the Chief of Engineers in Military
Construction. We took a great many spaces out. I was the one that had to make most
of those decisions. I don't mean that they weren't confirmed by my superiors. But to
decide the question of how many people each section should have, I went through and
examined the information and put this all together.
Q:
Those are not easy choices to make.
A:
They weren't. It was tough. Most of these changes were by attrition. But there was a
certain amount of moving people around.
Q:
I know General Clarke had been concerned about the overhead issue for a long time
because in the work in the Middle East, even in the mid-'60s when that program wasn't
as dramatic as it later became, the S&A rate was always a ground for complaint.
A:
That's correct. A very amusing thing happened in connection with this study. The work
in Saudi Arabia was way down. That was being done by the Mediterranean Division,
which was then in Italy. General Clarke suggested that we discontinue the work in
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