Engineer Memoirs
A:
The only thing left was the Chicago District work on the Newport ammunition plant,
which was one of the new explosive production lines. That was a big mess. It was a big
mess because there had been multiple contracts. I guess it had started out as a cost-
plus-fixed-fee contract. It had to be converted to fixed-price. Of course, you're not
supposed to have the same contractor with both a fixed-price and a cost-plus-fixed-fee
contract at the same time on the same job.
The job got way behind. There was tremendous anguish. [Major General Richard M.]
Dick Wells took over as the district engineer when this was going on. He finally got it
straightened out.
Q:
In Chicago?
A:
Chicago District. It had really been messed up. But Dick came in and saw--and I told
him--that we had to get this straightened out. We couldn't get any welders. There was
a lot of welding because it was a chemical plant, but they could not get enough qualified
welders. The truth of the matter is, they had neither a schedule nor a cost estimate for
this job.
Q:
It's not like an ammunition plant is a mystery, is it?
A:
This was at the early stage of a program that is still going on to modernize all of the
ammunition production in the United States, because much of what they had dated as
far back as World War I.
At the time they started this plant, not all aspects of the design were firm. They just
started to get going. They did firm up the design, but then, of course, they were well
into the contracts. So there was a mountain of change orders, many of which had been
issued but never agreed upon. It was one of those cases where the scope of work was
uncertain. The schedule was uncertain and the cost was uncertain. When you have such
a job, progress is usually unsatisfactory.
Q:
The same kind of issue came up with Israel, as you know. People were saying if you'd
stopped and thought about the project a little longer, and taken the time at the front end
to get an understanding of the work, it wouldn't have taken so much money and so
much time later to actually execute the work. Does that sound familiar to you? Is that
a legitimate complaint?
A:
It is a legitimate complaint, but it comes about because people won't make decisions.
It does take some time, but frequently you have this situation. You have the
requirements person, the user. He wants certain things, but he's not completely clear
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