Memoirs
A lot of housing for U.S. forces, the program to build new facilities for tanks, and thanks to
General Cooper there was an upgrade program to get our soldiers in Europe in better shape.
The rest of it was just spread throughout the country on various posts. Hospitals, we were
building hospitals. Hospitals are always tough. Walter Reed was completed during my time.
We upgraded the hospital in Hawaii, and the congressional group from Colorado was
insistent that we replace the Fort Carson hospital.
What about work for the Air Force?
A
Air Force construction was managed a little differently because the Air Force had AFRCE,
Air Force Regional Civil Engineers. Each of our districts had to deal with an AFRCE. In
some cases, an agent, a representative, was placed in the district office, like in Omaha.
I think we gave the Air Force better projects than we gave the Army, and one of the reasons
was the Air Force probably did a little better job figuring out what they wanted, to start with.
The changes were not quite as late, or as extensive. Second, their method of coordinating the
work was better. The fact we were working for another customer may have had something
to do with it.
Our Air Force construction responsibility, incidentally, was modified somewhat because
earlier, Congressman Mendel Rivers divided the world into two parts. The Navy does the Air
Force in one and the Corps in the other.
commander of the Facilities Engineer Corps in the Navy, wanted to
Admiral Don
adjust the boundary to give him Italy and Sicily. We took over the eastern Mediterranean,
which included Saudi Arabia and also Israel
General
started the annual facilities engineers conference. The first was held in
Chicago and I attended that. They're still going on. That was a very good move, incidentally.
Finally, I became convinced that there was a better way to operate and maintain Army
facilities than the way we were doing them. I never could understand why, in a state where
you have three or four posts in the same general area-like right around Washington, for
example-you have to have separate organizations for each installation when the same type
of work has to be done for all of them.
So we made a study to consider the Chief of Engineers' taking over the entire facilities
engineer program. I brought Colonel [Charles] Blaylock, district engineer, Mobile, to develop
a method of consolidating military facilities maintenance. Well, it turned out that was a good
idea in the minds of Perry Fliakis, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Installations. Perry had
also decided that there was too much money being spent managing contracts on all these
various military facilities. When Blaylock's report surfaced, Mr. Fliakis was agreeable to the
idea.
I wanted to start in the Norfolk area to get away from Washington and to a location where
there were Navy, Army, and some Air Force facilities nearby. He said to do it here in
Washington. That's how this Washington arrangement occurred.
I suppose that's worked fairly well, but I do think that the Army would be well served to
make the Chief of Engineers responsible for executing the Army installation maintenance
program. It would be difficult to organize and structure, but it can be done, and I believe it
would save the taxpayers a lot of money while improving service to post personnel and units.
You still end up with this basic problem of who gets the dollars on the post. I hear that the
Congress now has directed a study of
installations, some Air Force, some Army,
some Navy, to come up with a single plan for reporting operations, backlog of maintenance
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