Memoirs
Programs. So finally the civil works and military programs organizations were conceptually
the same.
The last step then was to establish the Directorate of Engineering and Construction and, to
some extent, operations to support the two program managers. That was yet to be done when
I retired. There was in place a director of Military Programs, and a director of Civil Works
with two major generals as program managers. I had expected Lloyd Duscha would head the
never
third directorate. I don't know what happened after I retired. General [Joseph]
created the third directorate, but he changed the director of Military Programs to the director
of Engineering and Construction with a major general in charge. Without saying it was good
or bad, this arrangement was a diversion from the plan I had envisioned and the direction we
were heading.
One of the by-products of the changes was that the ACE's shop became very big instead of
being very small. I felt the ACE's shop should be kept very lean. I think in the long run the
expansion led to the ACE's shop being dismantled as has now happened, but I don't know
enough about it to be constructive.
So the organizational plan that I had in mind which worked very well under Bill Wray during
the Israeli airfield job got off track. I do not want to make this record sound critical because
I have no criticism of it. It's just that it was different from what I had thought we should have
done.
To change the organization of the Corps of Engineers is a continuing major issue. Now, 16
years later, General Williams is still having agonies over this. Of course in the meantime, a
couple of the Chiefs decided to get rid of some districts with the same bloody experience that
I had. The current plan has not deleted any districts. They've changed the shape of them, but
they haven't changed the number of them. To reorganize is a major, major undertaking,
which creates a lot of turbulence and has adverse morale effects.
I really hope that all these other studies have led to improvements in each iteration to where
we now have a plan that's suited to the times. I don't know if it is or not, but I hope that's
what happens.
Now, inherent in the organization plan that I've discussed so far was this idea of getting OCE
out of the operations business, and I've already mentioned what that did to the Humphreys
Engineer Center. It also caused us to consolidate the Facilities Engineering Directorate into
the Military Programs Directorate. So we actually saved a general's space, which we needed
elsewhere.
We also began to realize that in some areas of the country the Corps was not going to be
building any more major projects, so keeping the same structure at all the districts was
becoming inappropriate. The question was, "How were we going to handle this change
without closing down districts?"
We came to the obvious conclusion that we would tailor the districts to meet the
requirements. The idea was that if a district didn't have any construction programs, it didn't
need a construction division and possibly didn't need an engineering division. It needed a
good operations division to run what they'd built and a planning division to take care of the
studies they were doing and probably a little engineering and construction to help with these
operational problems. Basically, we tailored the district to the need. That allowed us to put
some lieutenant colonels in as district engineers. That gave us some command positions
below the colonel level and it gave us a better training base to move up into district and
division spots later.
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