Ernest Graves
A:
That's gone on continually. Perhaps it's more embedded now than it was. It's depended
on the personality of the top man in Air Force civil engineering.
The man at the time that I was in Military Construction was very aggressive about this.
He was a tough one to deal with. Among other things, he was up in the committees in
Congress trying to get them to put into the military construction bill language that
would force more work in the direction of the Air Force. He used the S&A rate
argument to persuade some of the staff members up there that this should be in. But the
Corps did get its S&A rate down, and we basically won that contest.
Q:
You said you wore three hats, and I've counted two.
A:
The other one had to do with the post engineer program, or facilities engineering
program.
In those days, facilities engineering was part of Military Construction. There was an
operation over in the Pentagon where all this was being coordinated. I was a member
of all of this. The part of Military Construction that dealt with facilities engineering was
pretty much my responsibility.
Q:
Now you stayed there quite a bit less than a year.
A:
That's right. That's because of the Air Defense Evaluation Board, which was a study
to decide whether or not to put the SAMD [surface-to-air missile development]
system into engineering development. SAMD later became Patriot.
The hierarchy of these weapons systems is that first there was Hawk. Then there was
improved Hawk.
Hawk is a continuous wave homing missile. You illuminate the target with a certain
That's a pretty good system. But it is a system against which you can use certain types
of electronic warfare countermeasures.
They were seeking a different technique. They also wanted to use a phased array radar
for tracking, which could handle many more targets.
This had been under advanced development for some time. The issue was whether this
program should go into engineering development, which would have been getting it
ready for actual production. There was also the issue of whether it should have a
nuclear capability or not.
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