Ernest Graves
Q:
He says he doesn't regret it.
A:
No. When he left Chicago, he went from engineering to the policy job, and he worked
that for a while. Then they decided to swap him and Alex, which I think was a good
thing.
Q:
When you were in civil works, were there reorganizations of the directorate?
A:
No, I don't think so. Jack had been reorganizing it every six months for the preceding
three-and-a-half years. And I decided it didn't really need any more. There might have
been some open issues that had to be solved. We had to change people. Irv Reisler
retired during that time. We had to fill some jobs. But I don't remember changing the
organization during my time. I felt there had been enough of that.
Q:
There has been talk about reorganization in the past few months, and it's something that
comes up frequently, the merging of the civil mission with the Bureau of Reclamation's
work. Every time this happens, the Corps defends the civil works' organization as a
crucial reserve for military mobilization. How valid is that contention?
A:
We probably aren't likely to face exactly the same thing we faced in World War II
again. Our whole posture is totally different. You have to remember that the Army
before World War II was around 200,000 people, and it grew to 8 million during the
war. Now the Army is about 730,000. So we're not likely to see the same kind of
extraordinary growth, and we have a much larger set of facilities now, much more
adequate peacetime facilities than we had then.
But the basic concept that we need a reservoir that will allow us to expand military
construction is a valid one, and the Corps has been blessed with having the civil works
and the military construction to balance each other. When the one was high, the other
was low. So that aspect, I think, is very valid. And I think it's right for the Corps to
keep working on the mobilization capability of the construction industry.
The Reagan administration came in, and this was one of their pet concerns, the fact that
our ability to mobilize was much diminished.
Q:
That's right.
A:
They did work on this. However, they found out that the cost of redressing this was
pretty substantial. So the Reagan administration hasn't pursued this with as much vigor
as they talked about in the beginning.
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