________________________________________________________________________Richard S. Kem
Q:
Ready to shift gears here a little bit? In June of 1981, General Bratton--I'm sure there was a
little background to this--requested you to plan for a full-scale resumption of military
construction in the Ohio River Division, which then was undertaken--not too long a period
before it was actually resumed. So, this, I think, is a reflection of increased funding in the
military area and some other things. How would you start in describing this process of
bringing in military construction?
A:
It was in that time frame that several of us had approached General Bratton and said, "We
think you ought to expand the number of Corps divisions and districts with military
construction."
Q:
Several division engineers?
A:
I certainly was one of them. As I had traveled around initially to various places, I would get
the question, "How come you're right here in Cincinnati, and I'm here in Dayton, Ohio, 50
miles away at WrightPatterson Air Force Base, and my facilities are being built by the
Baltimore District?"
Or, "How come I'm over here in Rock Island, and there's a Rock Island District right here,
but Omaha District does my construction?" Fort Campbell, Kentucky, was the same way.
Fort Benjamin Harrison, Indiana--same way.
So, I, for one, approached General Bratton, and there were others, and said, "I think dollars
are up, the Reagan budget, there's a lot of construction out there. I think we need to get back
in the military construction business."
The Baltimore District had excellent people. They really wanted to do a good job. The
district engineer came out every six months just to see the commanders at WrightPatterson
and make sure that they felt loved. However, he wasn't to feel loved for another five months.
The customers just didn't feel that they were getting enough hand touching. I thought that we
could do that better, and we should be in the military construction business.
So, General Bratton told the Director of Military Construction, Major General Drake Wilson
at the time, to open the question, come back and tell him how we might adjust our military
construction boundaries.
We put together a team to analyze how we'd want to do it in the Ohio River Division. We
came to the conclusion that we couldn't afford to have more than one district in the military
construction business, and every one of our districts wanted to be it. We had to concentrate in
one district.
As a parameter, we knew we couldn't win getting back military construction if we were
profligate in the amount of people the Ohio River Division needed to do the job. We had to
constrain resources, do it the right way but do it austerely, and we had to focus on customer
service. The thing we were hearing from customers was it wasn't being done right.
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