John
Morris
I went to the deactivation of the board. I was sad. I feel that it was a mistake. Why you have
to lose those things is not clear, but it happened.
The Engineer Studies Group was called the Strategic Planning Group. Many outstanding
engineers led the group-Dave Parker, Don Weinert, Bill Stewart, et al. Don now is the
executive director of the National Society of Professional Engineers. George Orrell was a top
civilian who went to the "new" FEMA. I turned to them to give me a hand with organizational
matters. We put together, after testing it among ourselves, what I considered to be the
optimum organization for the Office of the Chief of Engineers. That was the two directors
with a support division of technical people, similar to the division-level organization.
We tested that in many different ways. We would cut it up, put it back together again, and I
was impressed with how thoroughly and how well they did their job. They also helped develop
the energy conservation plan for the Department of the Army. Don Weinert and his people
came together with a plan of how we should go about that. We looked at drawing down the
size of the Army - the Army, not the Corps. One analysis, which I thought was very valuable,
was to determine the unused capacity of existing posts. How many more people could properly
be put in, say, Fort Benning? It wasn't so much looking at which ones we should get rid of,
but which ones could add capacity efficiently, and that would then free up space that could
be assessed to fill needs or whatever.
Having discussed the trend that our public works program would atrophy and change as we
had known it, the question arose, "What should be the future skill levels in the Corps? What
kind of people should be in the Corps?"
Some of the kinds of people that we had needed in the past wouldn't be needed so much in
the future, and some we didn't have in the past we'd definitely need in the future. The study
group's analysis showed all of that. The thing I remember was that the crucial profession for
the future was projected to be mechanical engineering.
So those are just three or four examples of the Engineer Studies Group, but they came directly
to me. They helped a bit with the dredge privatization analysis, but not as much as Bill
Murden and his people.
The third activity was Huntsville. I think I've already covered somewhat the training program
within the Corps. John Bryson worked for me in Omaha as our personnel guy. He was a stick-
out on the way he saw things. So he came to Washington about the time I came in to be
director of Civil Works.
The Corps' training problem initially was an economy thing. District engineers were running
schools that weren't compatible with what other district engineers were doing, as an example.
So I asked John to analyze the on-going training. Out of that came the famous purple book of
his that everybody came to know.
More fundamentally, it developed the Corps' university," or whatever you want to call it, at
Huntsville. The center started off on a shoestring and now it's housed in a new building
owned by the University of Alabama at Huntsville. The Corps is using some of those facilities.
On a recent visit I was
impressed with how well the program has moved forward. It is
a very good program.,
Training the Corps' people was the first objective, but the school should be able to pay for
itself by training other people, doing work for others. Someday, soon I hope, the facility
should become accredited. It could then sponsor a master's degree course in management.
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