Engineer Memoirs _____________________________________________________________________
The assignment officer would present, "Here's the Portland District, my recommendation
is..." and give a resume of the person, show them a picture, and be able to answer any
questions concerning the recommendation.
The Chief of Engineers would ask his assembled generals, "What do you think?" If it was an
all civil works district, he'd ask the Director of Civil Works, "What do you think?" If it was a
military construction and civil works district, he would get both of their comments.
It was really the Chief's "board of directors" giving him advice, and then typically he would
say, "Well, I'd like so and so to go to the Portland District." That was the process.
When I went to my OPMS briefing for General Fred Clarke, I told him that I felt that one of
the things that was going to change was that, whereas all of the previous secondary zone
selections to colonels had gone to districts and none to troop command, they were now all
going to go to troop command and would be unavailable to him as district engineers until
later. The Army was saying our troops deserve the best; their new system was going to get
the better commands because they were going to send the first cut of folks to troops and not
districts.
My comment to the Chief of Engineers was that we had the potential for setting up two
classes of citizens based on this situation.
Whereas the Army had some suspicion, especially coming out of the Vietnam War, as to the
relative worthiness of district engineers, in the greater scheme of things, as opposed to
warfighters and troops, we had a real potential of having that differentiation work to the
detriment of the Corps of Engineers.
So, having said that to the Chief of Engineers, my recommendation to him was that he should
consider very strongly the idea of putting his engineer districts into the centralized command
selection system.
He asked that I brief the three new engineer brigadier general selectees. The selection board
had just met, and I briefed two of them, Bill Read and Jim Kelly. I briefed them to get their
viewpoints, and I think they generally went along, had some views, and conveyed their
thoughts back to General Clarke.
Anyway, I was told by General Clarke that he'd like to proceed in that light--do what I
needed to do to make it happen. So, I started really working on it then to try to flesh out the
concept and come up with the ideas of how we wanted to do it. I floated a paper that made
the recommendation to do it. The paper I'm just giving you now, the 30 March 1973 paper, is
the culmination of that. [See Appendix A.] Colonel Paul Suplizio had a study group that was
working on changes to OPMS; they were pretty well tied to what they already had going. By
this time they were not really looking to make changes other than the ones they thought about
themselves. Colonel Tixier was very supportive because we were emphasizing the Army's
concept that we want key positions and we want to get the right people into them.
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