AN ENGINEERING MEMOIR

by

Martin Goldsmith, Ph.D.

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An Introductory Note

This narrative is concerned primarily with my professional development and working life. Mention is made of a few important happenings in my personal life, but these serve largely as points of reference in time. This is not to denigrate the importance of one’s ‘real’ life, but the story of the family and non-work activities is an altogether different yarn, to be addressed in a different way. Somehow work was always separate from personal life, perhaps from necessity, but probably partially by choice. That is what has prompted me to write this tome; I don’t think my sons or other members of the family ever had much of a notion of what I was doing at work, or why. If they can plow through this manuscript, perhaps they will have a better notion of what makes the old man tick.

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Period 1 --- High School

Even as early as my grammar school years, it was apparent to my parents and teachers (and me) that I was destined to be a technical person, engineer or scientist. I was always fooling with chemistry sets, erector sets, microscopes, model airplanes, and so forth. This continued into junior high school, where I added photography to my interests, an interest which continues until this day. My father bought me some simple developing equipment for my thirteenth birthday, and so the die was cast. As compared to what is offered today by first class high schools, Piedmont High was a pretty primitive place, although it had a good library. And remember, this was an elite academic prep school in an upper class community. I took four years of math, five years of French, four years of science, three years of English, and the usual history, civics, etc., the amount of which I cannot recall. There was no such thing as advanced placement classes. It is interesting to me to recall how variable the teachers were in their capability. For example, the general science and biology teacher, Mr. Siegrist, was pretty good at keeping our interest, although I don’t remember exactly what was taught. Doc Niemann, the chemistry teacher was really good, and was very popular among the students – he had a good rapport with young people. Mr. Meldrum, the physics teacher, was a dunce. No harm, it is easy to learn high school physics from a book. In math, my tenth grade geometry teacher was absolutely great, and I think her name was Mrs. Williams. I came out of her class with a good intuitive grasp of geometry, which remains with me to this day. Trigonometry followed right along, and that too was well taught. Algebra was a different story. Both the beginning and the senior year were taught by the same fellow, Mr. Weingarden, and he was useless. I struggled away, but never really became comfortable with it. It wasn’t until college (more about that later) that I learned algebra. That guy Weingarden I resent – I was always playing catch-up and math was a never-ending struggle for me, all through college. Later I decided that algebra is really not so hard to teach, but he didn’t work at it. With one notable exception, the social study and English teachers were OK, but uninspired and without insight. I cannot remember what they might have taught me. I think one of them taught me to diagram a sentence. The library had to serve as my tutor. Both of my French teachers were rather prickly, hard task-masters, but very good. By the end of high school, I could maintain a simple conversation, and could read about anything, including magazines and newspapers. In the last two years, M. Knox spent a great deal of time with us on the classic French literature. We read the great ones, Voltaire, Rousseau, Cornielle, Hugo, etc. As everyone knows, one learns grammar (English grammar) by studying a foreign language. Senior English was also a remarkable experience, with a truly fine teacher (whose name I forget). The Subject A exam given by UC covers basic English, and you must pass on pain of taking ‘bonehead English’ which is a requirement for university graduation. The usual pass ratio was about 50% as I recall. Piedmont students had a pass ratio over 90%. Her goal was to teach us English, and she focussed on the Subject A. We took a Subject A exam every week. Her method succeeded. I cannot say much for the administration of Piedmont High School. Counseling was an unknown word to us. The deans were well aware that I was pointing toward engineering, and was likely to go to UC Berkeley. At no time did they suggest that I take drafting, which was offered. But when as a senior I got the catalogue from UC, it showed that a year of drafting was required for admittance. Now what to do! Oakland Technical High offered drafting in a summer course, but only one semester per summer. Another fellow from Albany High was in the same situation, and in speaking to the teacher , he took pity on the two of us and allowed us to take both semesters simultaneously. He said he did so only because we had both graduated from high school with top grades. Let me tell you how many hours we spent that summer in the drafting room at Tech High. Anyway, I graduated. I applied to only two engineering schools, Berkeley and Caltech. I took the Caltech exams, and was subsequently interviewed. However, I was turned down, which was probably the first of many fortunate things that happened to me along the way in engineering. Let me expand on this personal point.

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In high school I was a genuine nerd, and felt very insecure socially. At Caltech there would have been nothing to change that pattern. However, going to Berkeley was entering a world I had never seen before. While Techies have the well deserved reputation of being the ultimate nerds, at Berkeley there were a lot of fun-loving people, many of them very smart. But everyone respected intellect and hard work. Moreover, this was a time (1947) when the universities were full of veterans studying under the GI Bill. [Let me state without equivocation that in my opinion the GI Bill was responsible for the technical domination enjoyed by the USA in the second half of this century. Another debt we owe to Mr. Truman.] These men were mature, smart, focused, and stood for no horseshit. The engineering students were a particularly tough bunch. So there I was, a nerdy youngster tossed into the mill. It was sink or swim for me, and my family background didn’t make much provision for sinking! As the record will show, I didn’t sink. Thus I was forced to grow up in a big hurry, and this was one of the best things (possibly the best) that ever happened to me. I will always be grateful the WWII generation, who not only kept our people from harm, but were instrumental in my education. I cannot emphasize this point too strongly.

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Period 2 --- UC Berkeley

I entered UCB in September 1947. The university had grown from about twelve thousand students before the war to nearly twenty thousand. Registration was chaotic, and could require several days. Classes ran at all sorts of times and in all sorts of buildings. My first semester of drafting was given in the evening at a local high school. This situation was eased a little bit for the engineers by the construction of temporary buildings (barracks, actually) in Engineers Glade, an open area. With all of that, I think that we were all able to get the classes we needed, even if not at preferred hours. There were several exams we had to take before we registered. First among them was the Subject A. No problem! Then there was the American History and Institutions requirement. Several courses were need, but one could satisfy the requirement by examination. Took it and passed. Two down. Then there was an examination for engineering aptitude. It was not necessary to pass – it was being given as an experiment to see if it would correlate to later academic performance. It was an interesting exam, including such things as spatial visualization, which is the ability to visualize shapes from two dimensional drawings. My score was in the 98th percentile, which confirmed the wisdom of my decision to take engineering. Then there was the language requirement, which my high school record satisfied. Last there was the placement exam for freshman calculus. It was largely algebra, and true to my training, I flunked. The result was that I had to take college algebra the first semester. But physics, to be taken in the second semester, required first semester calculus. So the sequence for me went like this. First semester, algebra. Second semester, a double course in freshman calculus, covering both semesters. The instructors were math grad students. It should be written on tablets of stone that mathematicians should never be permitted to teach engineering or other science students! The guy I had was a particularly inarticulate nerd, and I escaped by the skin of my teeth. Moreover, it continued my pattern of not being well-founded in math. This sequence required that I take first semester physics in summer session. Then I was back on track in terms of the standard sequence of courses. You see, there was time for only four non-engineering courses in four years (one of which had to be English or speech), to be completed in the first two years. Then there was provision for two engineering elective courses to be taken as an upper-classman. Other than that, you took what the program laid out. I took speech that first semester from a wonderful prof named Bill Shepard. It was really a course in logic and organized thought. He later lost his sight, but continued on to become a beloved senior professor. In the second semester I took psychology. I thought the whole presentation was simple-minded, and after a while I quit going to class, relying on commercial notes and the textbook. Came the one mid-term exam and I got a B without studying. That confirmed my decision to kiss off the class. I reviewed the material the night before the final, and got an A. I decided that first year humanities courses were a waste of time, and resolved not to take any more. It turned out that Astronomy 1AB counted as a humanities elective, so I took that instead. As in high school, I turned to the library to round out my education. As I have said, I struggled with math, but fared better in physics, which I enjoyed very much. Mechanics and optics were my strong points, while electricity and magnetism confounded me a bit. Again it was the math that made it tough. Chemistry was a mixed bag. Joel Hildebrand, a celebrated senior prof, always taught freshman chem. He loved it, it showed, and the students loved him. The lectures were huge, several hundred students, but the results bore out the precepts of R.G. Sproul, the UC President (and another great man) who said it was better to sit one hundred feet from a great man than twenty feet from a mediocrity. Organic chem was another story – here we sat one hundred feet from a mediocrity. Tuesday, Thursday and Friday at 0800, for the most boring lectures I have ever experienced. I never came closer to flunking a class. At this point I should talk about the general approach to engineering education taken at UCB at that time. A somewhat generalized approach was taken, so that mechanical engineers took the usual basic science and mathematics, and started on a program of mechanical drawing leading on to static and dynamic analysis, as prerequisites to design. At the same time, however, ME’s studied plane surveying, strength of materials and testing, and structural design, which are in the province of civil engineering. Further along, while

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ME’s took manufacturing processes, they also took a year course in electrical machinery and circuits. The point is, students were expected to become familiar with the basics of all branches of engineering. Surveying, machine shop, materials testing and other practical skills were expected of all. I will be forever grateful for having this opportunity to learn the practicalities of technical life. It was also true at that time that the engineering school had rather tight limits on how many students could be accommodated in the senior engineering labs, which had, after all, only so much equipment. Clearly all the lower classmen could not be accommodated, so we students were convinced that certain course were made so demanding that students would simply drop out of engineering. When you had to put in twenty hours a week for a two unit course, any but the most dedicated might think about walking. And all the students knew, looking ahead, that senior ME lab required up to forty hours a week (for four units). A lot of engineers took up business administration! In the light of later events in my life I should mention that all non-veteran male students were required to take two years of ROTC. Most students resented the requirement, and shirked the classes and drills. I found them non-onerous, and recognized that they were a gift of grade points to anyone who paid the least attention. So I got straight A’s and was seen by the RO staff to be a promising candidate for commissioning. They even made me a battalion commander for the final parade (I was convinced they did so because they thought I could be heard in the back of the battalion.).They were incredulous when I turned down their offer (which involved cash payments as well as tuition) to take the last two years and become a lieutenant. I was very polite in turning them down, pointing out that the rigor of the engineering curriculum would prevent my doing so. As it turned out the Korean war broke out before I graduated, and had I finished RO I would no doubt have been shipped to Korea, where the casualty rate of rookie platoon leaders was extremely high. I did receive a certificate which presumably made me eligible for officer candidate school should I ever join the Army. At the end of two years of engineering, I was working hard to maintain a B average, and it was still in my mind that I would finish UCB and work as a sales engineer, or some such. At this time all we engineers had to take an exam covering everything we were supposed to have learned by that time. I was astonished when I received the results, for I had scored in the 99th percentile! This caused me to seriously consider what I ought to be doing with my life. I surely had learned a lot more than I had thought, and it was this sort of internal review that convinced me to plan on graduate education. This decision tended to make me even more focussed. Sometime around then I became interested in rocket engines, and in time my goals firmed up to include grad school at Caltech, in the Guggenheim Jet Propulsion Center. The summer before my junior year I took a class in more advanced math, knowing I’d be needing it in the future. The prof was good, and I caught on a little bit better, but a mathematician I wasn’t. The junior year was really a good one, with all the odd courses out of the way, and one could concentrate on really interesting stuff. I started pulling straight A’s , and became part of a group of deadly serious students who were determined to blast their way through the rest of engineering. Because we tended to work out difficult problems together, and paired up for lab work and so on, we became the scourge of those students outside the loop. We did nothing negative toward them , but they became reluctant to enroll in some class sections when they walked in and saw the ‘killer’ front row. To illustrate the no-nonsense attitude that prevailed, in one senior class some student in the back kept asking inane questions and arguing with the prof. Harry Moore, a front row student, turned around, glared at the offender, and said “I am paying to listen to him, not to you.” We heard no more, and the prof could hardly hide his smile. I should divert to mention my social life at UCB. It pretty well revolved about two organizations, the Masonic Club, and the Photography Club. I lived at home, but was there only to sleep, eat and study. Like most students, I was a fan of the football team. Also watched some hoop (played by men of normal size), rugby, and hockey. The men’s rooting section at football games had a national reputation for vulgar behavior – we reveled in the rep. After the junior year I got a summer job working as an engineering aide in the Navy Waves Project in Civil Engineering. It was interesting work. I learned to do complex calculations using a mechanical calculator and huge volumes of math functions. The machine cost about $1400, and the books cost

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hundreds more (in 1950 dollars). Today, a twenty five dollar calculator does the same thing, but about a hundred times faster (or more). Remember, at the time most engineering calculations were done on slide rules. I carried mine every day, and I still have it in my desk. The Navy work involved such things as doing wave refraction mapping for harbor planning purposes. I got to know the contours of Apra Harbor in Guam very well. We also tried a method for the determination of beach slopes using aerial photos, interpretation of sea levels in the surf zone, and knowledge of the tides. Also did some grunt and groan work preparing test facilities over at Ft. Cronkhite in Marin Co. Sometime about this point I visited Caltech, as I was quite sure that I would prefer to attend graduate school there, at the Guggenheim Jet Propulsion Center. I consulted with Dr. H.S. Tsien, the director, concerning the elective courses I should take in my senior year. He steered me away from a superficial course in rocketry in favor of fundamental stuff such as hydrodynamics and heat transfer. It was good advice. We will hear more of him later. The senior year was a real killer, as we all had expected. The culprit was senior mechanical engineering lab. Now labs were a very serious business in engineering. We were handling pretty heavy equipment, which posed real dangers. If you disregarded safety directions, the faculty would ban you from the labs, and without the labs you could not graduate. For example, in junior electrical lab some students failed to have their wonderful AC power circuit checked by an instructor, as was required. What they did was to put heavy DC power across a transformer, causing a dead short, the destruction of the transformer, and the melting of a circuit breaker on the distribution panel. We never saw them again. In senior lab a group adjusted a friction dynamometer themselves, without the instructor. The dyno locked up, ripping an engine off its mounts and flinging it in an arc overhead. Adios. The senior lab required about forty hours of work each week, on average, but was only listed for four units (twelve hours being the expected time requirement). With fifteen units total, the study, lab, and class time required each week turned out to be over seventy hours instead of the expected forty five. We dealt with reciprocating and turbine steam engines, steam boilers (powerplants), Diesel and gasoline engines, ship towing tanks, wave tanks, wind tunnels, air conditioning, illumination, measurements (temperature, pressure, etc.) vibration measurements, and so on. The engineers earned their degrees! Again, I was pulling A’s, except for hydrodynamics. This was really a course in applied mathematics, taught by a very sharp guy. I was really floundering, and my mathematical deficiencies were certainly made painfully apparent.

My second semester was interrupted by a bout with the mumps, which put me in Cowell Hospital for about a week or so. I was going nuts, figuring I would never be able to make up for the lost time and would be unable to graduate. However, the faculty were just wonderful about it, cutting me all kinds of slack. As it was I finished the year OK, graduating with 135 units and a GPA of 2.5 (out of 3.0). Today, with grade inflation, that doesn’t sound so hot, but then it put me 14th out of 888 engineering graduates! My UC transcript is included in the archive book accompanying this manuscript. In that last semester I worked a little as a research assistant, under a grad student friend and his professor. We were doing heat transfer research using a Mach-Zender interferometer, an optical instrument of great precision which enabled the measurement of temperature profiles in complex two-dimensional flow situations. The picture shows me with that apparatus. During the senior year I applied to graduate school, looking at only three. My first choice was Caltech, and I also applied to UC Berkeley , where I was a known quantity, and to Purdue, which had a good jet propulsion program under a beloved prof

named Zucrow. The applications were straightforward, and I was hoping for a teaching or research

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assistantship for support. I had one odd glitch in the process, which I do not understand to this day. The head of ME at Berkeley was a Caltech grad, and while I hardly knew him, I asked him if he would write one of the letters of recommendation. He agreed to do so. A little while later I encountered him on the campus, and he proceeded to berate me, but not for any specific infraction. I went away very concerned, having obviously earned his animosity. As the replies came back, I was informed that Purdue would be glad to have me as a teaching assistant. Caltech would accept me, but without financial aid. The goofy thing was that UCB not only offered admission, but offered an assistantship! Go figure. I clearly preferred to go to Caltech, and my Dad was very generous in agreeing to underwrite not only my tuition but my living expenses. My undergrad education had been essentially free (tuition at UC was $50/semester), money was not that tight in the post-war years, and Dad was a fanatic on education. (I agreed to try to work part-time while at Tech, but after trying it I found that there just wasn’t time to do so.) Anyway, the die was cast and I accepted the Caltech offer of admittance. It turned out to be a damn good decision. The issue at the time was what to do that summer between colleges. I was offered a pretty well-paying job doing structural detailing over in San Francisco, but I really had no taste for that. The US Navy, down at the Naval Air Missile Test Center at Pt. Mugu, was recruiting on the campus, and they had some work in rocket engines. They were looking for permanent people, and I told them I was only interested in summer employment. They said they wanted me anyway, and offered me a job in the rocket section. I accepted, although the pay was substantially less than the SF job, and of course I would have to pay independent living expenses. My parents were going to make their first trip to Europe that summer, and wanted me to go with them. However, I was determined to move out on a career and had no interest in visiting nasty little foreign countries. So I packed all my worldlies into my 1950 Plymouth (a 21st birthday gift from my parents, who wanted me to have transport when I went to grad school) and off I went to Ventura. My cousin Helen and her husband Sol lived in Ventura, and through them I located a guest room in back of a private home to live in for the summer. On reporting to NAMTC I was assigned to the air-breathing propulsion section. I told them at once that wasn’t what was promised, and insisted on a transfer to the rocket section. They said they would work on it, but meanwhile would I please take on an air-breathing assignment. What they had were a large number of small reciprocating aircraft engines used in target drones. These engines were failing after very little service, and they showed me several disassembled engines with badly scored jugs and broken rings. I told them I didn’t know beans about those kind of engines, but they asked me to do what I could to get to the bottom of the problem. Having no idea of what else to do, I asked one of the mechanics to take apart a new engine, out of the crate. At least I wanted to know what an intact engine looked like. When this was done, we saw at once that the ‘new’ cylinders were badly scored, with the rings showing much distress. The damage obviously occurred when the engines were run in at the factory, and they never should have been accepted by the Navy. I went back to my boss with the flip recommendation that the engine contract be cancelled for non-performance. You can be sure that was an unacceptable thought among the civil servants of the Navy, and the next day I was transferred to the rocket section. In the rocket group I was assigned to a very pleasant fellow named Bernie Ellis. The group was working on modifying existing LARK (a sea-to-air AA missile)engines to yield greater thrust, and perhaps better missile performance. The engines burned aniline and red fuming nitric acid, using a turbine-driven pump that was spun by having its blades immersed in the rocket exhaust. The details are unimportant – it was a mickey-mouse arrangement using two of the most unpleasant propellants one could find. We constructed test engines out of spare parts, and fired them in standard rocket testing cells. Later in the summer we launched a couple of the missiles driven by our engines. Bernie thought the tests were a great success, for the more powerful engines ripped the wings off the birds. For me it was my first exposure to the real thing, and I had a lot of fun working there. Being a young, green engineer, the old timer mechanics crew tended to razz me a bit, but I probably deserved most of it. Aside from the practicalities of rocket engines, I learned a little about the art of working with an engineering group. There were four or five of us young bachelor engineers working out there, and we car-pooled to the base, and often ate our meals together. On weekends most of us headed for LA. I had a girlfriend living in

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Brentwood, so I’d see her and stay at my grandmother’s flat. Ventura had to be the most boring town around, and I think I was there only one weekend all summer.

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Period 3 --- Caltech

Toward the end of the summer I made a few trips to Pasadena to start making arrangements to move there. The graduate office had some listings for living quarters. At that time there was no graduate dormitory at CIT. There were a few rooms in the ‘Old Dorm’ over the coffee shop. They were pretty poor. I was directed to one private home where there was a guest room for rent. It turned out to be about two short blocks from campus, a lovely spacious Spanish-style home owned by Dr. Ruth Tolman. She was a clinical psychologist who had trained with the famous Prof. Tolman of Stanford, and married his brother, the world-renowned physicist Richard Tolman. He had died several years before, and Dr. Tolman was renting out the guest room behind the house. It was a separate structure, with a one-car garage. The room had only a bathroom, no other facilities, but opened out onto the garden. It was perfect and I jumped at the chance to live there. It was to be my home for the next four years. A notable feature of living there turned out to be the constant stream of visitors. She knew most of the world’s famous physicists, and when they visited Pasadena, they stayed at the house. We’re talking about people of the stature of Oppenheimer, Rabi, and others. I’d get a chance to meet them once in a while, and it is a pretty heady experience just to lay eyes on such people. I have to admit to being star-struck in the presence of Oppie, for example. I’ll never forget our most memorable last meeting. He greeted me and asked “Where can you get some laundry done around here?” Mrs. Tolman’s best friends included Mrs. Bacher, the wife of the chairman of the physics department at Tech. So I’d see Prof Bacher in the backyard now and again helping with chores. Seeing the physics chair with his suspenders down, driving a fencepost is a not to be forgotten sight. Of course he got to know me, and it always puzzled my physics student friends when we were walking on the campus and Bacher would greet them with “Hello, boys” and me with “Hi, Marty”. I had enrolled with the expectation of doing one year of work for a masters degree. As it turned out, I was so delighted with the place, the ambience, the quality of the profs and the students, that by the end of the year I resolved to try for a Ph.D. More math was required (a lot more) and I was fortunate to have as a prof for applied math a recent graduate named Forrest Gilmore. He was just a whiz at teaching a mathematically-challenged fellow like me what differential equations were all about. Whatever skills I ever came to possess, I owe to the foundation he gave me. While courses in such basics as math usually used textbooks, many of the courses did not. The reason was that Caltech tended to be on the leading edge, and the course material often led to texts in later years. So it was with Jet Propulsion, taught by Frank Marble, a JPL pioneer and a very fine prof and person. His lectures consisted of detailed analyses of the thermodynamics of propulsion systems. After every lecture I would very carefully copy the notes, and they were so clear that I could probably understand what was done even today. Another course was Chemical Problems in Jet Propulsion, taught by Sol Penner, who eventually became my thesis advisor. His notes I do not have, but that material was included in a text he wrote a few years later, a copy of which is with my other papers and books (my thesis work is included in that book). That is often how it went at Caltech – last year’s research is this year’s lecture material. Compared to the jet propulsion and math courses, the mechanical engineering courses I took seemed pretty dull. I did take a great course in philosophy taught by Hunter Mead. He was a fine fellow, and an accomplished organist. In fact his whole house was essentially a pipe organ! Grades per se didn’t mean much at Tech. What seemed to be important was what the faculty thought about your potential. At the end of the year I got my MS and applied to continue in grad school. You can imagine my delight when I was accepted and was granted a Guggenheim Jet Propulsion Fellowship! (Newspaper clips and other papers are in the archive.) First off, that was a real ego-booster, and after a year of CIT one could use a little of that. But it also included tuition (then $600/year) and a tax-free stipend of $2000 for the year. That more than covered my expenses, and I actually started to save a little money while I was going to school. That summer I got a job at JPL, doing some research on heat transfer in boiling fluids. This was arranged for by Prof. Rolf Sabersky, whom I had approached about doing thesis work under him. The topic had

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been around a while, and good experimental methods had been devised, which I was going to implement. The pay was $400/month, which I thought was fantastic when one was working essentially on one’s thesis. Looking back now I realize that making a thesis out of what was already established might have been a difficult thing to do. Anyway, I enjoyed JPL. The staff there were very good, and made me feel at home. I carpooled there with a student named Ed Zukoski, who was also in jet propulsion and doing a thesis for Prof. Marble. Ed was a very bright and hard-working guy, and he later became a prof at Caltech. He died a few years ago, but our friendship lasted all these years. As the summer ended and I went back to the campus, I was approached by Prof. Penner, who proposed to me that I do a thesis under him, working on the problem of the combustion of single drops of fuel, doing experiments and developing theory. It would involve the construction of a rather massive test chamber, capable of operating at elevated temperatures and high pressure. He had a contract with the Army Office of Ordnance Research to do the work, so financial support was not in doubt. It sounded like a winner to me, so I cleared my change of heart with Rolf Sabersky, and committed to Sol Penner. Now Rolf was a very fine person, and we remained friends until my last contact with the campus about fifteen years ago. However, linking up with Sol Penner was a opportunity whose value I did not realize at the time. Unlike many of the profs, who seldom met with their thesis students, I saw Sol at least several times a week. I was only his second graduate student, the first having already finished, so I had a lot of his time and attention. As the years passed, he left Caltech for a period of government service, and then ended up at UC San Diego, where he remains. He became a very senior leader there, much beloved by a long list of graduate students and fellow faculty. Brita and I were privileged to attend his 70th birthday party a few years ago, and the outflowing of love and admiration for the man was impressive. I contributed my share. One of the benefits of being an assistant or a fellow was the assignment of office space. Rather than having to return to my off-campus room to study, I now shared an office with telephone, etc. This made much more efficient use of time. Moreover, a prof could find you instantly if he wanted to see you. Sol wanted to see me a lot. This year I shared the office with Gordon Macloed, an older fellow, and a very proper citizen. We got along quite well, but he left at the end of the year. The last two years my office mate was Sedat Serdengecti, a Turkish man about my age. He was a very bright guy, and a fine gentleman. I learned to love and respect him. After graduation he voluntarily returned to Turkey to do his military service, and then came back to the USA where he became a prof at Harvey Mudd, where he remained until retirement. (An interesting side note – when Brita and I met Rick and Susie McWilliams down in the Sea of Cortez, our friendship got off to a good start when Rick revealed that Sedat was his mentor at Mudd, and I told him of our prior relationship.) There were many very interesting and impressive people on the faculty and among the students. One who has always stood out in my mind was Paul MacCready, who was then a post-doc in aero. He is the fellow who developed the Gossamer Condor and many other incredible flying machines. Another one who impressed us all greatly at the time was Moshe Ahrens, who was reputed to have been a gun-runner for the Irgun during the wars of Israeli independence. Later he became head of Israel Aircraft Industries, and Minister of Defense in the Likud government. There was Clarence Allen, who has become one of the best known seismologists in the world, and whom we often were with at dinner. The list of those who became well-known academics is endless. Our working habits were pretty routine. In the office, or class, or lab, by 8AM. Half-hour or so for lunch at the ‘greasy spoon’ (cafeteria), an hour for dinner at the Athenaeum, and back to the office until 10PM. Pretty much twelve hour working days, but less on weekends, maybe fifteen hours total. Dinner at the Ath was very enjoyable. Unlike today, the dining room catered to the grad students at night. Dinner was simple and cheap. We mostly ate a large round tables, seating eight. We generally were a mixed bag of disciplines, so all of us became familiar with the technical and people problems of the different departments. Sometimes a faculty member would stop by, and we often had visitors, who were staying upstairs in the guest quarters. These were often people of great distinction, even including Nobel Prize winners. These distinguished people would sit down and often started asking the students about their work. It is for reasons like this that I think Caltech offered an education like no other place. I do not think that the same conditions prevail today, but the education remains excellent, without doubt.

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Courses continued, in mathematics, physics, and engineering. Julian Cole was a memorable instructor in applied mathematics. He tended to lecture on what interested him at the time, so things had a little researchy flavor. In his last final, the problems were extremely difficult. In fact, I couldn’t finish even one of the four or five. I left my office to return the test paper, very dejected, and found my fellow students with long faces. None of us felt we had done anything with the exam. At the next meeting, we challenged Julian to show us the secrets. He started off, and lo and behold, he couldn’t do them either! I elected a minor in physics, and took one course from Robert Leighton, who had to be one of the finest instructors I have ever had. Later I took a course in mathematical physics from Robert Christy. I was certainly not the brightest bulb in the chandelier in that one! I have later found out that Christy had stood up for principle in an encounter with Edward Teller, and I will forever respect him for his intellect and character. He later became the Provost, I believe. At the end of the second year, I was granted a second year of the Guggenheim, so again, my financial status was good. Additionally, Sol Penner volunteered to pay me the same summer wage I had been given by JPL the prior summer. Remember, this work was almost entirely devoted to my thesis. The same sort of situation prevailed in my final year, when there was no Guggenheim (they were for two years, max). A grad student could only be listed as working half-time while registered, so my pay was half-pay during school. That was plenty to live on. Penner took very good care of his grad students. Among the other requirements for the Ph.D. at that time was foreign language. German was required, and another major language was the choice of the student. After I was admitted to the Ph.D. program, I passed French by examination. I walked into the proof’s office, he handed me a French text, and said “read”. I started off translating away, relying on my high school training. After a few minutes he said “OK” and signed my paper. German was another story. I didn’t know a word of the language, and had no time to take a course in it. So I elected to translate a rather lengthy paper written by a well-known German engineer on the topic of combustion. I worked on that bloody thing every night over a whole summer, relying on a dictionary, sweat, and Rolf Sabersky, whose mother tongue was German. When I would get absolutely stuck on some phrase, I would consult Rolf. He would often mumble about the author’s tortured syntax, and once in a while he would be stuck too! Anyway, that task ended, and actually I published the translation as a RAND document after I went to work there two years later. In the third year I took several courses because they seemed interesting, but were not central to my field of study. They were interesting, but my taking them had some interesting consequences in my final year. They included such topics as solid mechanics, taught by the famous earthquake engineer George Housner , and control theory, taught by Tsien. A great deal of my time went into constructing my lab apparatus. The detail design and major construction was accomplished by the Caltech engineering shops. The smaller parts I made myself in the ME machine shop. I had established my bona fides with the faculty member in charge, Pete Kyropoulis, in my first year, and it was important to do so. If he approved, you had the run of the shop, but woe to him that screwed up! Another facility that I used was the photo lab, presided over by Don Clark. Same caveats. Sol had started me off on my research problem by giving me copies of several British reports on the burning of single drops of fuel. The model was very plausible, but the author, Godsave, had to assume values for several variables, including the flame diameter and temperature. Sol wanted me to see if I could calculate those values, rather than just use estimated values. I got to work on the problem, and it seemed to me that all the information necessary to make the calculations was available, at least for the very simple geometry of the model. As is pretty common with problems of that nature, you fool around for a while, then see a way of writing the equations, and then you bang on them with different methods, and finally a solution appears. When it is all written down, it looks very simple, and everyone, including the analyst, says, “well, that wasn’t too hard, was it”. All solutions look easy once you see them. What you don’t see is all the incorrect approaches that went in the trash. Anyway, what I had calculated was a complete analysis of the simple droplet model, from first principles. So, by the time I was in my third year, I had completed the theoretical part of my thesis research. Sol had

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me write it up for publication, and it was published in the Journal of the American Rocket Society in the summer of 1954. Copies of this and other papers I will mention are in my archive folder. It is typical of Penner’s generosity of spirit that he insisted that I be the lead author of the paper. It was not common for professors to do that, especially if they were young and still making a name for themselves. The big job then was to get the furnace working and make experimental measurements to corroborate the theory. The shop finally finished their work, and it was a monster. I don’t remember how much it weighed, but it was solid stainless steel, and had to be many hundred pounds. There were quartz windows through which you could photograph the burning droplets. I had purchased a used Eyemo 35mm motion picture camera to record the data. It was not a usual scientific instrument, but rather a professional movie camera. I used the “Eyemo” movie camera, and a high speed scientific camera which moved the film at a very high speed continuously, with shuttering provided by a high speed repeating strobe. There are photos of all this with my thesis. I would photograph the drops as they burned, and by measuring the diameter of the image as it became smaller, I could calculate the burning rate. The first experiments, conducted at room temperature and pressure, gave results which were embarrassingly close to those predicted by my theory. Both Sol and I thought we would be accused of fraud! We found it difficult to make the crude injector I had constructed operate at elevated pressures and temperatures, so that part of the theory was never adequately tested. We did explore the influence of atmospheric oxygen content, and again, the agreement with theory was good. This work occupied the summer of 1954. A paper on the experimental results was published in the JARS in early 1956 (copy in folder), and of course all the details are in my thesis, a copy of which is in my archive of documents. Penner insisted that I be listed as the sole author of the paper, a most uncommon and generous act. The paper also shows a photograph of the experimental contraption. Sol was happy with the work, and had me start to write it up. However, as there were months left before the end of the school year, Dr. Tsein (more about him later) wanted me to do a different kind of analysis of the problem. Some sidekick of his, a Dr. Kuo, made the almost preposterous proposition that the correct model was not a diffusion flame at all, but a thermal flame model. My readers will not grasp this point, but the whole concept is rather mad. Tsien insisted that I analyze it. Penner said he would have nothing to do with it, as he considered it absurd on the face of it. But I was stuck, and I went to work. I couldn’t make any sense of it – couldn’t even formulate a decent model (equations). Tsien kept sending me back to try again. Finally, I reverted to arguments based on first principles, and was able to show that the problem as formulated was impossible. With much grumbling, even Tsien was forced to agree, but then he insisted that I include this mess in my thesis. Sol blew his top, and swore he wouldn’t sign the thesis! Oh, the life of a grad student. In the end, the analysis was in , and Sol signed off. It became ever more clear to me that Tsien and Penner did not get along very well, and the student is of course caught in the middle. I was scheduled to take my oral examinations early in the Fall term of 1954, so I devoted a lot of time in the summer to studying topics which I expected would be covered. This first oral was to cover the course work, but not the thesis. Some of the profs discussed with me the sorts of things they would want to discuss; others said nothing. I paid a lot of attention to my core subjects, thermodynamics, heat transfer, combustion, jet propulsion, and of course, physics and applied mathematics. The committee included seven faculty, Tsien, Penner, Marble, (for jet propulsion) Rannie (for thermodynamics), Cole(for applied mathematics), Leighton (physics), and Kyropoulos (for my major, mechanical engineering). I was the first JP victim scheduled for the year. Unbeknownst to me, the last student to be examined at the end of Spring had not done very well, but they let him go as he had to report for active military duty that summer. That really galled Tsien, and he went in with the position that the next students were going to have to do well to pass. My exam was going along with the usual ups and downs. (They were usually three hours long.) Kyro was easy, Marble was straightforward, Rannie asked me an almost philosophical question which baffled me, Penner was gentle, as might be expected, Cole was difficult, but not impossibly so, and Leighton asked most interesting questions, which I was fortunately able to ace. (One was, “If you look at beer, it appears brown, but the foam is white. Why is that?”) Then came Tsien. He started off on his course in control theory, which I had taken because it was a new and very researchy topic, but which was far outside my main interest. The mathematics were not those which were customarily used in my line, and it wasn’t long before I was floundering around. Time ran out, and I was dismissed. After some time, the committee filed out, and Sol told me to come with him to his office. He was very kind, and the

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message was that I hadn’t failed, but I hadn’t passed. Tsien had said that I could do better, so I would do better, and I was told that the process would be repeated in six weeks. Penner assured me that I would be getting my degree on schedule, and not to worry – just do better! Within a short time I had conversations with most of the committee. Kyro was boiling mad. He described Tsien in language unfit for a family newspaper, and proceeded to tell me exactly what he was going to ask next time. Others were studiously non-committal. Overall, I was worried, but not devastated. Some other students, due for examination later, were extremely concerned, and probably lost more sleep over it than I. I devoted the next six weeks to studying control theory. Came the new examination, and it proved to be most interesting. Kyro asked exactly what he said he would; Marble asked very little, as I recall. Cole pointedly said that he was satisfied the last time, and Leighton said he had no further questions. Clearly battle lines were being drawn. There were several questions and discussion, and then it was Tsien’s turn. He started at EXACTLY the same point we had left off. But this time I had it wired. Rattled off the analysis of that particular point, dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s, and Tsien was satisfied, showing his enigmatic smile. I suppose he had made his point. As Spring came around, life became a matter of tidying up details, like writing up the thesis and having it prepared as an archival publication. To a generation raised with word processors, the task of producing an error-free typed manuscript in those days would seem like Catch-22. One also defended one’s thesis in an oral exam, but that was not really a problem. The student ought to know more about his subject than any other person alive, and if you had a problem defending it, that would really be shame on you and shame on your thesis advisor. The attention of the upcoming graduates was turning to where we would go next. In the sciences, most were focussed on academia. Some of the engineers were also inclined that way, but most were interested in industry. We were all of us anxious to be gone. In those days, four years was the normal time for post-graduate studies. Those that got out in three were considered geniuses; those that took five were considered unlucky. This was the time when the space and missile program was just getting underway, and all of government and industry were seeking technical graduates. All the major players came to Caltech to interview. We were advised to speak to as many of them as we could, with the reasoning that this would be the only time in your life when you could easily do so. I knew I wanted to be in the rocket racket, but I also spoke to other sorts of places, such as oil companies. Actually the places that tried to make it most attractive to me were Esso (Exxon) and GE. Esso wanted me to try to find a way to burn bunker oil efficiently. This low value by-product of the refining process could end up making them a lot of money if it could be used in high-performance applications. They promised that my financial future would be assured if I carried it off. But nice as they were, that isn’t what I wanted to do. My prime interests were in the local rocket companies, Aerojet and North American Aviation. I was interviewed by the new company, Ramo-Wooldridge. They wouldn’t say what their work was all about (it was to manage the Air Force missile program), but we all knew anyway. They described the job they wanted me for, and I was actually appalled, as I didn’t consider myself to have the experience needed and told them so. That pissed them off, and they even called Tsien to complain about it. In the middle of my interviews in Pasadena and around the country, Julian Cole asked me if I knew anything about RAND Corp. I didn’t, but he was a consultant there, and told me a little of what they did. He said that they were looking for one or two new graduates, and would arrange an interview if I was interested. I talked to them, and the job seemed absolutely fascinating. They basically were doing planning work for things that were well beyond the present state-of-art. Anyway, I expressed interest, and they made me an offer. I still had other offers coning in, and feeling it was only proper to do so, I told RAND I felt obligated to wait for the others, although I told them I was quite sure I wanted to work for them. They said they had not hired a new graduate for a long time, and were unfamiliar with the market. Wanted to know how their offer stacked up. I told them it was somewhat lower than others, but that would not be a deterrent. They promptly upped the ante. Anyway, in a short time I formally accepted their offer, and spent some time before graduation looking for a place to live in West LA. Settled on Westwood, and the Monday after the Friday graduation, I reported for work.

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At this point I ought to say something about Dr. Tsien. He had been a graduate student under von Karman at Caltech, and with others was in the pioneering group that started CIT on its way in rocketry, first at the campus and later at the new Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He was a Chinese national, with an undergraduate education in China. After the war he went to MIT for a while, and then returned to Caltech, and was now the Guggenheim Professor of Jet Propulsion. He was extremely good at applied mathematics and had a good physical sense of what went on in natural processes and engineering devices. He was also an abrupt person, often rude, and was considered arrogant by many. We students had enormous respect for him, but very few liked him. Many faculty disliked him. In about 1950, he attempted to return to China for a visit, to his family and former colleagues. He was stopped at the dock, as it were, by the FBI, and his baggage was seized. He had many technical papers with him, and he was accused of trying to take secret material to China. My understanding was that there were no classified papers among his stuff , but owing to his association he was suspected of being a communist and perhaps a spy. He was ordered held in the USA, but the INS at the same time had an order to deport him. So he was in limbo, but it didn’t affect his ability to be a professor. He could not consult with industry or government, of course, as many of his colleagues were able to do. Shortly after I left Tech, the restraining order was lifted, and he returned to China. There he is reported to have been the leader of their missile and space effort, and some say he was influential in their nuclear program as well. In a biography of him written by a Chinese author, his life in China was outlined, and I would say in mostly unflattering terms. I cannot attest to the validity of any of this. I did return to see him before he left, just out of respect, and he said he had no quarrel with the American people, who had treated him kindly, but he held our government in contempt. I think most Americans have the same reaction to the Chinese people and their government. Looking back, I think his hard ways were not harmful to the students, but may not have done much good, either. It certainly kept the students from having that devotion to him that other men, like Penner or Marble, could enjoy. I would not care to see him again.

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Period 4 – RAND Corp. Because I had accepted the job earlier in the Spring, RAND had been able to go forward with a security clearance application before I reported for work. When I arrived, a clearance was in place, and I was spared the weeks or months of waiting in the unclassified area, looking for something to do. At that time RAND worked entirely for the Air Force, and almost the entire building was a secure facility. No ticket, no real work. After going through the admin procedures, I was assigned an office (with a fellow named Bob Bjork) and met my future colleagues. My first assignment was to an ICBM interceptor system design concept (the One-Eyed Goalie), which was startlingly like the system currently being developed and tested by the US. Please remember at that time that the US had yet to fly its first ICBM. That was why I went to RAND, to work on far-out stuff. I was to work out problems associated with the solid propellant interceptor rocket engine. One of the things being asked for was a constant acceleration flight profile, which is extremely difficult to attain in a solid rocket. In pursuing this, I became familiar with the state-of-the-art in solid rocket technology, and the industrial actors, which would serve me well in later projects. After a while I found out that the constant acceleration requirement was written solely so that the lead engineer could write the equations of motion in closed (simple)form. I sort of blew my cork at that, because a guidance system would be employed which really didn’t care. I thought this was a perfect example of the need for sound systems engineering, to keep one set of sub-system designers from screwing up a system design for silly reasons. Another task soon arrived on my desk. The Vanguard program was at that time the US entry into space flight. This was a Navy project, cobbled up out of existing components. It was in deep yogurt, with reliability problems, and shortfalls in performance. The decision had been made to keep this satellite effort separate from our ballistic missile programs, so as not to delay them, and Vanguard was something less than state-of-the-art. I was asked if there was any way to boost the performance of the upper stage of the booster. For the most part, the design was cast in bronze. I decided to investigate if the rocket nozzle area ratio was optimum for the application. If the nozzle is made bigger, the propellant performance goes up, but the weight of the larger nozzle tends to offset the gain. So I did an analysis (which indicated that there wasn’t much help available from that gambit) but the analysis had general applicability. So I wrote it up and it was published in the Journal of the American Rocket Society. A copy of the paper is in my archive folder. To see if experimental data on the problem could be obtained, I went to to visit the Lewis Propulsion Laboratory of the NACA, the predecessor to NASA. Those folks had the high-altitude tunnels to do the job, but refused to do so because they were all tied up with ram jet research. In spite of hundreds of millions spent, the US never built an operational ram jet. So much for the far-seeing wisdom of NACA. A good portion of my time was spent in keeping up with current developments in rocketry, so that our RAND projects could exploit new technology. This involved a great deal of contact with industry, and I made many friends out in the big world. They were able to keep me up to date on technical matters, and I helped to keep them up to date on emerging requirements. Most of the documents I wrote were classified, and I do not have copies, although most have probably been declassified by this time. We had started to work on the concept of nuclear rockets [that is, rocket engines discharging a propellant (hydrogen) that had been heated by a nuclear reactor rather than by combustion]. I won’t go into the rationale, but at one point I needed to know if a nuclear stage would be better used as a booster, or as an upper stage. The optimization of two-stage rockets was a problem treated in a classic paper by two American rocket pioneers. Inspired by what they had done for stages of similar design and performance, I did an analysis for a two stage rocket employing very different stages. I got the answer I need, and stuck the work in my files. Some months later friend from industry was visiting, and we got to talking about the problem. I told him I had a solution, and he jumped up straight and asked why I hadn’t published it, and insisted that I prepare to do so at once. OK by me, so I wrote it up and it was soon published in the JARS. A copy is in my folder. The interesting thing is that I had used the rather simple-minded mathematics that I understood, but the paper inspired a regular mini-industry for analysts who used much more general and elegant

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formulations to treat the problem in a more fundamental way. I think at least six or eight papers were published in the following year or so. I was asked to review them, but actually I didn’t understand the math well enough to do it. About this time our Russian friends launched Sputnik, which caused great consternation in the ranks. Some of the RAND analysts were really excited by all the furor, and resolved to try to measure the orbital parameters of Sputnik themselves. Knowing that I had camera equipment and could process the film, they enlisted me in their scheme. We knew when and approximately where Sputnik would show in the night sky, so we assembled in a backyard up in Beverly Glen (at a home I later rented before Greg was born). We had timing devices, telescopes, etc. and the leaders had a scheme of analysis. I was really a cook and bottlewasher. Anyway, we saw Sputnik, photographed it, analyzed the data, and by George they determined its orbital parameters by photographing several passes with a backdrop of stars to provide the angular information. It was exciting. I was quite active in the American Rocket Society, and became a member of the Liquid Rocket Technical Committee, one of the several groups that arranged the content of the general and special meetings of the Society. It turned out that the chairman of our committee was a fine fellow, but didn’t seem to care much about hands-on work. So pretty soon I found myself as vice-chair and doing most of the actual arranging. That was OK with me, and the general expectation was that the following year I would rotate into the chairmanship. When that time came I got a bunch of humma-humma-humma from the society president-elect, who thought we really ought to have a more senior member of industry for the chair, but that they would be happy to have me continue to do the work. Basically I told them to stuff it. So I became the chairman, and I think I served for about two years in that post. Some of our technical meetings were pretty typical of those things, but we had one or two really great ones. One national meeting was devoted the history of the American space effort, and for that my industrial colleagues put together a terrific collection of film showing significant developments. The chairmen of the committees were also supposed to provide articles summarizing developments in their field each year. In my archive of documents I have several issues of such publications which include my contribution to the effort. One of our technical meetings was arranged so as to produce a collection of papers to be published as a book. Other papers were added, and the collection was edited by two colleagues and myself. A copy of the book is on my shelves. To get ahead of my story just a little, in about 1960 the American Rocket Society decided to merge with the Institute for Aeronautical Sciences. At first, I thought this would be a great idea, but as the implementation unfolded, others and myself could see the tight-knit ARS, which was closely guided by its technical members, not the paid staff, would disappear into a bureaucracy. Our opposition came too late, and the deed was done. As we suspected, the staff started to make all the decisions, and the combined American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) became more remote from its members. Later, when I had left RAND, my job focus changed and I dropped out of active participation in the AIAA. Still later, it became engaged in semi-political matters. I took particular offense at some positions they took on industrial employment policy, and then it endorsed a very faulty analysis of the supersonic transport program. Officers of the Institute were senior members of management of the companies that would have profited by the government’s financial contributions, and their ‘technical’ analysis was quite faulty in its economic projections. The AIAA had become just a mouthpiece for the industry, in my estimation. At that point I resigned my membership and told them why. I have never joined another technical society. To return to the narrative of RAND work, in the aftermath of Sputnik the Congress asked RAND to prepare a summary of the technology of space flight, as a congressional committee report. Bob Buchheim got a RAND gang together, and in about six weeks prepared a well finished product. It was printed as a committee report, and was later published as a book. I wrote the sections on rocket engines and propellants. A copy of the book (the Space Handbook) is on my shelves. As we finished up our initial work on nuclear rockets, I wrote one short paper on performance augmentation and published it as a note in the JARS, in 1959. We briefed our results here and there, and we mostly concluded that the technical problems were too difficult to be able to consider nuclear rockets in a serious way. As my boss, Ben Pinkel, put it – ‘Imagine trying to fly a huge pile of hot crockery in a space booster!” Nonetheless, the AEC and the USAF continued to fund some pretty substantial development

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effort. I wasn’t too impressed with what was going on, and at one time wrote a review of the so-called ‘Rover’ nuclear rocket development program which I titled “Rover is the Name of a Dog”. I had an interesting lesson in perceptions when we briefed some of our work to von Braun down at Huntsville. They were busy touting the nuclear rocket program, and what we had to say was probably not very welcome there. Ben thought von Braun was favorably impressed by our work. I thought he politely threw us out of his office. One of my big regrets in life resulted from a luncheon conversation we had there. One of that collection of Nazis made some self-serving denials of German culpability in WWII, and I should have attempted to strangle him on the spot. But polite young RANDers didn’t do such things, and I have regretted my failure ever since. Sometime around then a face from my past called me at home and wanted to visit. It was Moshe Arhens, from IAI. He asked me if I would like to move to Israel and join that organization. I was thunderstruck ,as I had never been a Zionist nor had I any interest in such a move. To make matters clear to Arhens, without being offensive, I simply said that if he could obtain a letter from the Dept. of State or from the DoD stating that it was in the best interests of the USA that I consider such a change, I would consider it. And so ended that conversation. But Moshe was a very smart guy, and a very tough customer. Not a man you would want to meet in a dark alley, unless he was your protector! As I related before, he later became defense minister in the Likud government and was a very influential politician in Israel. A great deal of our RAND work dealt with the rapidly developing ICBM program. The initial Atlas and Titan programs employed cryogenic propellant (liquid oxygen, called LOX) and kerosene. Handling huge quantities of LOX in a real-time military environment would have always been a nightmare, so everyone was searching for an alternative. The navy settled on solid propellants for its submarine-based missile, the Polaris, and was rapidly developing the state-of–the–art in high performance solid rockets. The USAF started to think about a solid propellant ICBM, larger than Polaris, of course, but much smaller than Atlas or Titan. At the same time, I became aware of experiments being done at Aerojet and Rocketdyne on running storable (at room temperature) liquid propellants in Atlas and Titan engines. We started running performance calculations on the conversion of Titan to storables, and finally RAND recommended to the USAF that this be done. I spent a lot of time on this line of work. The issue of launching the missile directly from the underground silo was considered, as well as guidance and payload considerations. We were quite convinced that this configuration would offer major operational cost savings. Meanwhile the Air force had decided to go forward with the solid propellant ICBM, called Minuteman. We named our large storable propellant rocket the Mightyman. This work was part of a RAND-wide study called the Strategic Offensive Forces Study (SOFS) In the end, the Air Force decided to proceed with Titan II, the storable propellant version. While we had proposed a minimum change conversion, they elected to go forward with an all-new configuration, offering greater payload capacity. In later years there was reason to be very pleased with that decision. This narrative brings us up to about the middle of 1960, at which time my work environment started to change at RAND. My boss seemed to have less interest in participating in some of the major RAND studies, but wanted to concentrate on more narrowly focussed propulsion research. As 1961 dawned, the attention of the nation started to turn toward larger scale space exploration, and the issue of large capacity rocket boosters came into prominence. All the industry big dogs were pedaling their favorite programs, with conflicting claims and generous doses of optimism. Impervium and unobtainium were the favorite materials of construction. I proposed a RAND study of large boosters to bring an unbiased analysis to bear on the problem. My leadership refused to consider the matter, as not being researchy enough, and I was very unhappy with that decision. If I couldn’t work on the important stuff, then I had to question my reasons for staying at RAND, comfortable though it was as a place to work. In the archive folder I have included a list of all the RAND documents I wrote or contributed to from 1955 to 1961. About this time a major military communication satellite program, Project Advent, seemed to be in deep yogurt. The Army was responsible for the payload and ground stations, but the Air Force was responsible for launching. They were to use the Atlas-Centaur booster. Centaur was a liquid hydrogen-liquid oxygen stage being developed for NASA, but an Air Force office was actually the hands-on stage manager. It was a management nightmare. My former division chief at RAND, Ed Barlow, had gone over to the new Aerospace Corp. (more about that later) to be VP in charge of the engineering division. The Air Force

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tapped him to form a study team to review the Advent program. He appointed an Aerospace chairman, and one or two members, and got some other folks from universities and labs to participate. I got a call one day asking me to be the propulsion weenie on the team. They wanted me on the job at once. I spoke to my managers, who said OK, but they were obviously somewhat leery. I went to a meeting of the group at Aerospace, and met the Air Force officer in charge of the investigation, a Col. Joe Bleymeier. I got to know him pretty well in subsequent years. Within a few days, I was preparing to leave with the team on a trip East when I got a call from the RAND VP. He was obviously concerned about my participation, so I left in a worried state of mind. The details of the investigation are not important, but we found endless problems. For example I found that among the several agencies and contractors in the project, there was no agreement on what the actual performance of the booster would be. The one obvious thing was the there was no way they could put their payload into orbit! Anyway, we wrote a report, the program got cancelled, and that was that. A congressional report on Advent, and on Centaur, is included in my archive folder, although I had no part in their preparation. Shortly afterward, I had another contact with Barlow and Aerospace. The Air Force was proposing a new high-performance space booster called Chariot. The supposed performance advantage was due to the use of a high energy propellant combination using liquid fluorine in the upper stage. This is a truly difficult combination to deal with, as the combustion products include hydrofluoric acid, in addition to the corrosion problems induced by fluorine. Anyway, I analyzed the performance of the booster, as it offered truly remarkable improvements, as compared to the Atlas-Centaur. What I found was that the guidance and control weights were very low, and the structural efficiency was sheer magic. I pointed out in my RAND internal study that if these same factors were applied to Centaur, the performance presumably gained by the propellant was considerably less. A person less charitable than myself might have called it a sort of fraud. So I went over to see Barlow to convey my reservations, and he had me discuss them with his program office for the project. They were not delighted with my work. Nonetheless, and for whatever reasons, the project was cancelled shortly thereafter. When Ed Barlow had left RAND, he urged me to join the new Aerospace Corp. in his division. The Air Force had caused the formation of Aerospace to replace Ramo-Wooldridge in the management of Air force space programs, because the industry saw R-W as a potentially formidable competitor, and they didn’t want R-W knowing all their proprietary information. We spoke of these matters again during the Advent activity and afterward. My old friend, Don Dooley, who had gone to R-W and then transferred to Aerospace, was urging me to ‘get in the fight’ Then in the summer of 1961, I had a rather acrimonious performance review with Ben Pinkel. Essentially he said if I didn’t care for the way things were going at RAND, I ought to seek employment elsewhere. That was on a Friday. On the weekend I spoke with Ed Barlow, and on Monday submitted my resignation to Ben, effective in two weeks, telling him I was going to Aerospace. He was taken by surprise by the immediacy of my response to our conversation, but I think my departure was overdue.

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Period 5 – Aerospace Corporation El Segundo

I accepted the job offered to me a year before by Ed Barlow, to be the head of an analysis section in the propulsion department. The department had a temporary leader named Mort Goldman, whom I had known for many years, socially at least. Within a few weeks, a permanent leader was chosen, a man named Gene Perchonic, who was a ramjet specialist. Aerospace was growing as quickly as it could, to meet the obligations it had taken on for the Air force. Its mission was to be the architect/engineer, or technical director, for Air Force space programs, and at a later date, to take over the ballistic missile programs from Ramo-Wooldridge. Of this, more later. I had about a half-dozen engineers working for me, assigned to one or another of the many programs at Aerospace. Another division, the Advanced Planning Division, looked after plans for proposed programs, while our division worked on actual development programs. There was some interest in one of the programs at this time in the use of compressed gas for attitude control systems for spacecraft. I did a sort of basic thermodynamic analysis of the problem, and published a small report. A copy is in the archive box. I believe it is the last generalized engineering analysis I ever did in my life. After this time, as will be seen, I turned entirely to project work, and never again had the luxury of ‘researchy’ sort of engineering. A major planning study was going on in the planning division for a new heavy lift rocket booster to be devoted to the Air Force space program. It was based on the Titan II ICBM and was going to require a new upper stage, which was to be able to maneuver payloads into orbit, and possibly to continue to maneuver them. It was to be sort of like a tugboat in space. The leader of the effort was Don Dooley, who was a colleague and friend from Caltech. He was a Guggenheim Fellow also, and we had gotten to know one another very well. He asked that I be assigned to his study, and in particular to look at the problems of the upper stage. I found that the Air force director of the program would be Col. Joe Bleymeier, whom I had come to respect in my earlier Advent committee work. Our division complied with the request, as it appeared that the program had every chance of being approved , and would then be moved into our division. Indeed, that proved to be the case, and when the program office was established, Don was made the director and he asked me to join up as his staff engineer. I jumped at the chance. The program was not approved for development, but only for program definition. That is, the design and contracting arrangements were to be fully worked out so that reliable estimates of cost, schedule, and performance could be the basis of a development decision. The new McNamara regime in the DoD was not going to approve any more programs that over-ran budgets and schedules and failed to perform! Because the design of the first and second liquid propellant stages was based on Titan II, Martin was the vehicle contractor, with Aerojet supplying the engines. For the heavy lift version, two solid propellant boosters were to be attached to the sides (called ‘strap-ons’) and were to be dropped in flight. Because of their huge weight, the solid boosters were to be built in segments, and joined at the launch area. My original participation was in the selection of the requirements for the new upper stage. Lockheed, and part of the Air Force, wanted it to be based on the Agena upper stage, but that approach had deficiencies. We ended up deciding on a full diameter (ten foot) upper stage, to be called the Transtage. Both Cape Canaveral and Florida launch sites were to be used. The program office was organized into the liquid rocket core unit, the solid propellant unit, and the ground support unit. I worked on the crisis of the moment, reporting to Don. We had a few older engineers, perhaps in their forties, but I, Don, and most of the prime movers were in their early thirties. We were a very hard-working and cocky bunch. We had a few program ground rules. First, we were going to avoid making special configurations for this or that payload; this was to be a delivery truck for whatever came along. There would be basically two configurations, with and without the solid boosters, depending on the size of the payload. Therefore the booster had to be so designed that various known or likely payloads could be accommodated. The payload spectrum ranged from the Dyna-Soar, an Air Force manned winged vehicle expected to maneuver in the atmosphere when returning from orbit, to the other extreme of payloads to be placed in synchronous-equatorial (24 hour) orbit.

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After the passage of nearly forty years my memory no longer encompasses all the major problems we had to overcome, nor their sequence. However, several stick in my mind. One of the early ones was the Transtage configuration. Our studies had shown what the approximate weight and thrust of the stage had to be, using the standard Titan propellants. We had found that Rocketdyne had been working on a pressure fed rocket engine that just might fit the bill. It had been designed to go in the Chariot upper stage (a USAF-proposed project) and was to burn fluorine and hydrazine. Chariot had been cancelled, for good reasons, (see the title of my last document written at RAND). The propellants were two of the nastiest chemicals you could imagine. However, Rocketdyne had found that the engine ran just fine on the Titan storable propellants, at a lower performance level, of course. So we said, why not just use that? We made several stage designs based on the motor, including one with very short full-diameter tanks (the aspect ratio of a dime, one engineer said) and another with toroidal tanks with the engine in the middle. We started to contract with Rocketdyne for the engine, and put out a Request for Proposal (RFP) to industry for the stage. I was sort of the integrator for the stage in the program office, and was still working on details when the RFP went out. Among the things we hadn’t settled was the method to be used for attitude control when coasting and for roll control when firing. (Pitch and yaw are taken care of by the main motor, but roll has to be handled another way in a single engine configuration) We had a pretty good handle on some of the requirements, but we lacked information on the characteristics of the DynaSoar, which would generate significant aerodynamic forces even in the later stages of boost. So off we went to Boeing, the DynaSoar contractor and to Wright Field, their Air Force sponsor. We were horrified to find that these agencies didn’t have a clue as to what those forces might be! Here they had been in development for several years, had many thousands of wind tunnel hours, and couldn’t answer basic questions concerning aerodynamic moments. They said, ‘don’t worry-we will use the aerodynamic surfaces of the DynaSoar to control the booster’. We said ‘like hell’: a basic ground rule of ours was the there would be no special configurations. The T-III guidance and control system would fly the booster. Being good Air Force airplane types, that went over like a lead balloon with them. I was later told that the messengers (me and colleagues) were now persona non grata at Wright Field, and I never went there again. I returned to El Segundo in a state of shock. There was no way I could try to define an attitude control system guaranteed to support the ill-defined DynaSoar. I immediately huddled with Don and other engineers and we spent that day and a good part of the night trying to decide what to do. We elected the solution of going to a two engine stage, where the engines could be differentially gimbaled to provide all the roll control any payload would need. Don and I marched into Joe Bleymeier’s office the next morning and dropped the mess on his desk. We recommended that the Rocketdyne engine be cancelled, that the stage RFP be withdrawn, that new RFPs for a stage and for a new engine be prepared and issued. Joe really showed his management skill at that point. He questioned us briefly about all the circumstances, accepted our recommended actions, and called his people to implement them. That is showing a lot of faith in your advisors! What was finally decided was to have Martin design and build the stage, so as to minimize design and interface problems. Our design gang preferred a short full diameter tank arrangement, while Martin preferred an arrangement of two smaller diameter, longer tanks, arranged side-by-side. The Martin folks had their way, because our ground rule was that if you couldn’t prove that the contractor was wrong in an analysis, you let him make the call. After all, they bore the responsibility. There were endless debates over many issues. We wanted a new guidance system, based on one built by North American, but finally we were over-ruled by a headquarters decision to use an adaptation of the Titan II guidance. NASA kept trying to shoot down the program, as they wanted to control the whole US booster program. Because they would always postulate pie in the sky, particularly when it came to cost estimates, we were always trying to put out fires. The fallacies of the NASA methods were later exemplified by the experience with the space shuttle, when the whole heavy lift program of the US was on hold owing to problems with the Space Shuttle. The T-III production had been terminated because of all the promises NASA made, and had to be re-constituted as a Titan IV program to be sure our vital defense payloads could be launched on schedule. At this point I ought to say something about the work habits of our gang. I think the standard work week was about 60 hours, but I know there were one or two times when it stretched to 100. I couldn’t count the times we worked most of the weekend to finish a briefing or something, and take the charts and Don down

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the catch the red-eye to Washington on Sunday night. The charts then were drawn by artists on large sheets of paper, which were then rolled up and put in a locked carrying tube (called an elephant gun). The charts were classified, of course. While Don would go to the gate to board the aircraft, I would take the elephant gun out to the ramp and personally observe it being placed in the baggage. For one major briefing where well over a hundred charts were used, we had the artists lined up in our office hallways working on their tables, while we engineers fed them information. We had guards stationed at each end of the hallways to maintain security. This went on well on into the night hours, when we just started to droop from fatigue. There is no question that we were a dedicated bunch. We believed in ourselves, and we believed in the absolute importance of what we were doing. In one heated conversation with some ‘senior’ members of the propulsion section at Aerospace, we were accused of being inexperienced youngsters, ignoring the advice of more experienced staff. My reply was that the great experience they were talking about consisted of making the same mistakes over and over. Actually we studied the problems of other programs and attempted to avoid them. For example, recall the problem we had found with the Advent program, where there was no consistency, or even good sense, in the performance estimates. We were determined to avoid those program-killing pitfalls. We first had the Aerospace and Martin performance sections agree on a calculation method, to include values for standard atmosphere, etc. Then all the contractors and Aerospace would arrive at agreement on values for performance and weights. The structural factors were based on agreed-on loads, which depended on agreed-on wind profiles, and a set of enveloped payload characteristics. All values were predicted on conservative models. We wanted no pie-in-the-sky. These weights and engine performance values were part of the incentive contracts between the Air Force and the industry. When it was all done, we only permitted Martin and Aerospace to conduct performance calculations. If our results did not agree, a stop was called until the source of the discrepancy was found and corrected. We maintained a book of all these values. No one was permitted to alter any of them unless the change had been approved by Aerospace, Air Force, Martin, and other contractor management. One of my duties for a while was to be the custodian of that document. It turned out that each of the sub-system managers, solid rocket, liquid rocket, structure, etc. had built in a certain amount of conservatism in his own numbers. Then sometimes a technical problem, or a wish for some other type of mission, would surface, and we would have to see if an altered requirement could be met. Then sometime we would have to hold someone’s feet to the fire to make him disgorge a few performance points he had been holding in reserve. The performance was really there, but he didn’t want to admit it. Now, Aerospace people were only responsible for technical matters in the program. The Air Force had all contractual responsibility. We were part of the source selection teams, but only advised on technical worth; we had no direct input to contractual decisions. Sometimes we were taken by surprise by the contracts that were let. I served on the transtage engine team, for example, but had no direct vote on who would be granted the contract. If our advice was that a contractor’s proposal was technically satisfactory, then that was that. However, we had a very good relationship with the uniformed and civilian AF personnel, and were often invited to sit in on contractual meetings. We were pretty careful about offering non-technical opinions, however. I was in one such meeting with Martin, which was going over the provisions for incentive payments for good performance. The contractors were always good technically, and had good legal and contractual advisors. In this meeting, Martin was trying to sell a scheme of counting successes to determine incentive. There was a lot of thrust-and-parry, and I sat back and listened. Then they proposed the outrageous notion that if their first stage failed, they should automatically be allowed the incentive payment for the second stage because they never had the chance to earn it by success! I failed to restrain myself and blew my cork right through the overhead. Air Force faces turned toward me, and I realized that I had committed a severe breach of protocol. As I was sitting at my desk morosely contemplating my anticipated dressing down by my management, the lead AF contracting officer stuck his head in my door, looked at me, smiled and just said; “Thanks.” That was the end of that. Some of our program office ways infuriated and sometimes almost frightened other Aerospace staff. We certainly had a take no prisoners approach to technical disputes, and people weren’t anxious to tangle with

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us. An example of a major dispute, over a very important problem, surfaced sometime in 1963. A version of Titan II was being developed by the Air Force for use as the booster for NASA’s Gemini (two-man) spacecraft. As flight testing proceeded, a problem of what was called ‘pogo’ instability developed. It turns out pogo had always been present in the ICBM version to some degree, but those longitudinal vibrations were simply integrated by the guidance system and didn’t affect the payload or other mechanical components. However, male human bodies were another matter, and pogo proved to have serious consequences for testicles. The problem had to be fixed, and there was only one or two remaining unmanned test flights. One of the Aerospace analysts, Sheldon Rubin, a Caltech Ph.D., did an absolutely fantastic job of tracking down the problem, and prepared a first class mathematical model. The vibrations depended on a feedback with the first stage liquid rocket engines, and Aerojet was able to take high-speed motion pictures of transparent pump volutes that showed a clear cavitation problem in the eye of the pump which would account for a feedback mechanism. The cure for the problem, absent a new pump design which was out of the question in a schedule sense, was to increase the propellant tank pressure. This was not without a performance penalty, but the overall performance remained within the envelope. So the fix was to go into the next flight. About this time, an senior experienced bozo who ran the Aerospace flight test operation facility down at Canaveral came up with some crazy theory for the problem which was supported by nothing. He insisted that Rubin’s solution would make the problem worse, and the Gemini program would crash and burn. Because this fellow was an old acquaintance of the company president, the Engineering Division took his warning seriously and a major in-house review meeting was called to decide whether the scheduled flight test should go. Because we had a very similar configuration, and might expect to have the same problem, I was delegated to be the TIII rep at the meeting. I went over the data carefully, and reviewed the Aerojet information, which was, after all, my own technical bailiwick. Then I read the other fellow’s paper. My conclusion that Rubin was right on, and this other guy was just nuts. So the meeting went along, with Barlow and all the major actors present. When it was my turn, I came down very emphatically for going forward with the test flight, and stated all reasons. I was not very kind to the Florida thesis. The decision was made to go forward, but on the way out Barlow asked me “Do you really think it is that black-and-white?” He was somewhat taken aback when I sort of snarled, “Hell, yes!” Ed was the finest kind of gentleman, and very even-handed, and I think he had some trouble with strongly stated opinions. In this case, the opinions were justified. The flight test went off and the pogo problem was fixed. Sometime after that, at some meeting or another, Ed Barlow asked what it was that so motivated our program office to work so hard and be so protective of Titan III. I acknowledged that we were a bit off the wall at times, but that we believed that without TIII there would be no military space program, and that without the space program there might be no country. Today that sounds pretty extreme, but this was the early 60s, and the Russians were building military capability of the most dangerous kind. Barlow just raised his eyebrows, but I believe he respected our dedication. About the summer of 1963, the program had been approved for development, and the contractors were starting to cut metal. I was still the staff engineer, and most of our original gang were still on board. A fellow named Don Rogers had been added to manage the liquid stages. He had been a school mate of Don Dooley, and had been recruited for this job. Rogers was a good guy, but he felt a lot of pressure in the job. After all he was looking after a part of the program that was spending a million dollars a day (in 1963 dollars), and there were daily problems. One decision to be made was the amount of liquid propellant to be carried for the attitude control system on the Transtage. There was no single sure way to calculate this, as payloads and their flight profiles could only be guessed at. Yet tankage had to be built, and as the day for decision neared, Rogers just couldn’t make a decision. The uncertainty just paralyzed him. Dooley had to step in to call a meeting to make this decision, and it was clear that Rogers was approaching mental instability. Our group made the decision, and the next day Dooley announced to a staff meeting that Rogers would become staff engineer, and that I was appointed acting director in Roger’s place. Rogers was devastated and I was not pleased. But we were all good soldiers and marched on. Not too long later, we had another disconcerting announcement. Aerospace was setting up a new unit out in San Bernardino to support the USAF Ballistic Missile Division, which had moved to Norton AFB. This was done because of the difficulty of finding work space and housing for the Air Force folk in El Segundo. Well and good – an outsider was brought in to lead the Berdoo operation, Ernie Krause, and it was

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expected that a number of Aerospace people would transfer out there. Then we learned in a staff meeting that Dooley had been promoted to VP and would move out to Berdoo. We were stunned, so much so we almost forgot to congratulate Don on his promotion, which was well deserved. But losing the captain of a close knit team ain’t easy. A fellow named Jim Marsh would take Don’s place. He had been leader of the Gemini booster program, so technically he was in a good position to take over. However, his management style was the antithesis of ours. While Jim had assured everyone that everything would go forward exactly as it had, we all knew that every new leader said that, but within a short time, surely less than a year, he would have an altogether new management team in place. Additionally, other opportunities were opening up. I was still at management level two, the same as when I joined the company, although my salary had gone up. Because of my peculiar position in the program office, I had a lot of clout, because it was understood I spoke for the program director. Without that backing, however, I had no particular wheelbase. About this time a new program was taking shape in the Air Force and Aerospace. The DynaSoar was dying a much overdue death and NASA was focussed on sending a man to the moon. The Air Force badly wanted a manned space program, and they created a requirement for the Manned Orbiting Laboratory (MOL). A program office was being formed. Meanwhile, the Air Force was conducting a massive study of future technical possibilities, for aircraft, for missiles, for space. It was called Project Forecast, and was being run by the famous four star general, Bernard Shriever. It was thought of as an overdue follow-up to the study conducted by Prof. Theodore von Karman at the end of WWII called Toward New Horizons. The space portion of the study was in the hands of a Col. Ken Shultz, and was in deep yogurt. He had simply made no progress at all. Dooley was named to assist him with an Aerospace team, and Dooley figured I need a graceful way out of TIII, and besides, he needed some help. So off I went to Project Forecast. Most of it was a pain in the butt, but there were a few bright moments. The Air force had made the usual cross-agency request to NASA for help in the study, and of course NASA had to answer with “whatever you need”. We knew as much or more about vehicles and all that as they did, but what we wanted access to were the early results of the Mercury manned flights. So we requested that one of the astronauts visit with us for an extended working meeting. Gordon Cooper showed up on our doorstep one day, and we had a great meeting with him. I was in charge of assembling and organizing the questions, and it was a most informative day. We asked him such things as “ How do your own motions within the spacecraft affect its motions?” Or, “It is reported that you saw vehicles travelling across the desert. Analysts say this is impossible for the human eye. What’s the story?” We got very good answers and learned a lot. At the end he paid us the great compliment of saying that he had never before been asked most of those questions, and that he could see that they were very important. And you know he had been thoroughly debriefed! In my archive folder will be found my American Rocket Society membership card for 1963 with the autographs of John Glenn, Gordon Cooper, and Harrison Schmidt. After we saved Col. Schultz’s bacon with a pretty good summary report on the future of space technology, he disappeared without a word of thanks. About then, I was approached by one of the senior managers at El Segundo about becoming a member of the Aerospace MOL office. In fact they offered me a choice between two of the shops, and I agreed to become director of the laboratory module itself. It meant a promotion to level three, and the chance to start on the ground floor of what promised to be a very exciting program. It would fly on the TIII, of course. I liked the program director very much – he was probably the most respected program director at Aerospace at the time. However, things were strictly in an organizational mode at the time, and the real work had not yet begun. No sooner had I agreed to this new job, and left TIII, Dooley was on the line with another proposal. He was offering me a job as a Group Director (level four) at San Berdoo, in the new planning division! I would be responsible for about half of the planning work directed toward new ballistic missiles. Now I was in a real quandary. MOL seemed technically the more exciting, but the program was as yet only a notion. Of course the Air Force wanted pilots in space, but the requirement was by no means clear. One suspected it might simply be studied to death. On the other hand, the potential of a level four position in salary and influence was not to be sneezed at. But the family had moved into a lovely new home on the bluff over Malibu the previous year, and it would be very hard to give up beach living for a move to the

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desert. I went out to San Berdoo to look it over, and the second in command there, Walt Brewer, who was from El Segundo, put the hard sell on trying to persuade me to join them. I was getting advice from some who knew Ernie Krause, the top man out at San Berdoo, and they regarded him as a hard taskmaster. Ralph Morgan said “Marty, Ernie will chew you up and spit you out!” This from one of the toughest engineers you would want to meet. Anyway, I was being hauled this way and that, and finally I went to see Ivan Getting, the president of Aerospace. I asked him what he wanted me to do. He replied by saying that he was ordering no one to move out East, and that it was up to me. The company had already made it clear in writing that those who answered the call to move would receive ‘special attention’ from the company, but no one had to go. So I asked again, saying that I understood there was no coercion involved, but if he simply had his ‘druthers’, where would he prefer I went. He said San Berdoo, I said thank you, and left to set the wheels in motion for the move.

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Period 6 – Aerospace Corp. San Bernardino

Aerospace wanted me to start work at San Berdoo immediately, as they were trying to make do with the very limited staff out there, supported by some personnel at El Segundo. I was to have half of the planning activity, with a fellow named Bill Dorrance having the other half. He was a very capable aerodynamicist and a hard nosed manager. We sort of looked each other over carefully, but in a short while we came to respect each other and worked very well together. We were both known to be a little crabby, but together alone in an office we would tell yarns and laugh uproariously. Our secretaries wondered what was going on in there. I had a couple of fellows who worked sub-systems development and an engineer still at El Segundo who was to move out shortly. He had been leading the support work there. That and a secretary were my total shop. Clearly recruitment was going to be a major problem, particularly as the El Segundo support was to be a very temporary situation. Our offices were located in a brand new set of buildings across the street from Norton Air Force Base, and were very nice to work in. In later years, we consolidated office space with the Air force, and for a few years some of us worked in offices on the base. They were old warehouses, and in very poor condition. We were still living in Malibu, and in fact did not move to Riverside (our eventual choice for housing) until about March of 1964. I was commuting out to San Berdoo, sometimes by car, and sometimes by commercial helicopter. Those were the noisiest, most uncomfortable aircraft I ever used. They make a DC-3 seem like luxury. In the Christmas season, the passengers had to share the seating space with freight packages. The constant driving back and forth from LA never ended, as long as I was out there, either to go to El Segundo or to LAX. Within a short time, the AF Ballistic System Division, the agency we were to support, looked over the results of Project Forecast (which I discussed in the last section) and decided that ballistic missiles had not been properly addressed. They wanted to have us support them in a similar but more narrowly focussed study. As I recall it was to be called Project 75. In any case, we moved out with dispatch. To do it properly, all of us would need access to special information. Ordinarily, this access could take up to a year to arrange. In this case the commander made it happen in only a few weeks. Strategic warfare was of course the central issue for Air Force ballistic missiles, but the AF wanted to include a look at potential roles of these weapons in limited warfare. No one held out any great hope for such applications, but I was assigned the job of leading that part of the study effort. A very capable AF officer was assigned to be my opposite number, and we carried out the work together. He was a veteran of WWII, and entertained me with some wild yarns. He was a great fellow to travel with and to try to make some sense out of our assignment. To restrict the scope of our work, we adopted the ground rule of no nukes. Everyone agreed that the use of nuclear weapons removed a conflict from the category of limited war. So we looked at advanced sorts of explosive warheads, and chemical and biological weapons. Of course, neither of us knew anything about such matters, so we traveled the country getting smart. The knowledge has stood me in good stead since then, enabling me to keep these frightening weapons in perspective. Anyway, there were no startling results from our study of limited war. The main effort had more important results, however, and led to the adoption of multiple independent re-entry vehicles (MIRV) for AF ICBMs, as in Minuteman III. By the time this study was over, we had added to our staff at Berdoo, and relied less on El Segundo for support. Among the people I recruited for my shop were Earl Hinz, who later left engineering to go cruising, and turned into a well respected author of nautical articles and books. Another was Nick Kfoury, who turned out to be an ingenious system designer. We are close friends even today. Mason Watson worked on problems of hardened missile installation, and was careful and insightful analyst. For a while I had a fellow named Bob O’Brien as an associate director. He was a great manager, and later left to run his own company, making vacuum cleaners and a whole lot of money. We still keep in touch.

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Dick Adams was a careful manager and a first-class pilot (veteran of B-24s in WWII). We made several trips to Baja in his Bonanza, and I have a number of yarns about that.. After a year or so out at San Berdoo, Don Dooley announced that he was leaving the company to go to industry, as he had been offered a VP slot at (as I remember) Pratt & Whitney. He had brought a number of his old Titan III gang out to San Berdoo, and again, people felt a bit betrayed by his decision. However, as he moved into the corporate world, several of the gang followed him. After a short industrial tour, he came back to El Segundo as a VP, but moved at least one more time, and finally ended up as a VP at Perkin-Elmer, if I remember correctly. After a short time there, he was called into the corporate office one day and was fired, apparently without explanation. His followers were dismissed at the same time. So Don ended up at Aerospace El Segundo in some kind of a staff job. I saw him some years later; he did not seem happy, and I could not figure out what his job really was. I never understood the reasons for his frequent job changes. Ernie Krause had the belief that he should re-organize regularly as the focus of the work changed. Consequently I had a changing menu of assignments, and of the people assigned to me. My memory no longer supports a close narrative of all the different things I did out there, and there is no written record of reports, etc. Almost everything we did was reported in briefings. However, one aspect I covered continuously from the beginning was sub-system development. There was always a low level of propulsion work, and initially a low level of work on basing technology. Initially guidance, which was a major effort, was not included in my scope (of this, more later), and re-entry technology was a major program with its own directorate. The BSD had a scientific advisory committee . It was chaired by Edward Teller, and included people like Al Latter and Hal Brode from RAND, Stark Draper from MIT, Nate Newmark of the U. of Illinois, and others. These were pretty high-powered people. Stark Draper was the head of the guidance lab at MIT, and can properly be thought of as the father of inertial guidance in the USA. He was truly a visionary. Nate Newmark was one of the best known earthquake engineers in the world. His name is on plaques on major buildings in several countries. Teller’s name is well known to everyone, and he was the chairman. As will be seen, I had frequent contact with these folks. In fact, they played a central role in our activities, as the Air Force and Aerospace management deferred to their judgement in almost all things. The situation for ICBMs in the USA was about like this. Our major reliance was on the Minuteman system, a three-stage solid propellant missile, based in strong concrete silos scattered among several AF bases around the country. They relied on dispersion and hardness for survival. The official US strategic doctrine was mutual assured destruction (MAD). That is, no matter what an opponent might do to us in a first strike with nuclear weapons, our retaliatory capacity would survive and be used. We had great confidence in our missiles, their guidance, and their warhead systems. The great worry in some quarters was to insure the survival of the force after a first strike by a major enemy. That is why the ‘triad’ was maintained, the triad being the Minuteman force, the manned bomber force, and the Polaris/Triton submarine-based missile force. Our studies concentrated on missile and basing designs intended to enhance survivability. Without going into details, we created system designs for truck-mobile missiles, train-mobile systems, air-mobile systems, and some of a very peculiar nature, as well as fixed base systems of greatly increased hardness. Actually the original Minuteman was intended for both fixed basing and rail mobile basing. The rail mobile option was eliminated early in development. Other studies looked at fixed base systems protected by active missile defense systems. My shop worried about mobile systems and hardening technology. The committee was obsessed with survivability, and always took the conservative position of assuming the worst. This is usually a prudent course, but there were times when conservatism turned to a form of defeatism. Sometimes some of the members exhibited an astonishing lack of practicality. I will mention only a few examples. We essentially gave up on mobile systems because it was feared that real-time satellite and other observations could be used to constantly track the location of the missile carriers. In light of this, it is interesting to observe that during the Gulf War, twenty five years later, the USA was frustrated in its attempts to track and kill the Iraqi mobile Scud systems, in spite of our technical

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capabilities and free access to their air space . Not that I was an advocate for mobile systems; this is just an illustration of mis-directed conservatism. In doing our studies of road mobile and off-road mobile missile carriers, we visited the Caterpillar testing grounds in Arizona. There we paid special attention to their large ore haulers, designed for use in open-pit mines. These were truly impressive machines, with huge payload capacity. Nonetheless, the Caterpillar people assured us that they were maneuverable ands easy to drive. To prove it, they popped each of us into a driver’s seat, and told us to steer with the wheel, go with the accelerator pedal, and stop with the brake pedal, exactly as in an automobile. This from a seat about fifteen feet above the ground! In fact, it was as they said – the machine drove like an auto. The only occupational hazard in the sound-proofed, air conditioned cab was sea sickness owing to the very gentle but large amplitude vertical motions. One of the most bizarre studies we did was in response to one of the committee’s great notions. It came from a physicist – no engineer would ever propose such an absurdity. Because the USA has lots of ‘flat’ land in the Midwest, and enough water there, it was proposed to construct a system of interconnected canals, concrete lined, with deep holes at various points. Submersible missile carriers (shallow water submarines), each carrying one large missile, would cruise up and down the canal system. They could assume a vertical position at any one of the deep hole spots, and launch their missile from there. While it was agreed that the carriers could probably be tracked, the assumption (and it was little more than that) was that the carrier floating in water was more resistive to nuclear weapons effects than a silo-based system. My shop was given the task of doing a preliminary design and cost estimate of this kluge. When we reported in with some early results, we were told that we probably ought to get some expert help on the design of the carrier, which was in effect a submarine. Ivan Getting said, ‘no problem, I’ll just call up my friend, the president of General Dynamics, and ask for help’. A few days later Bob O’Brien and I were on our way to Electric Boat, the GD submarine builders out in Connecticut. We arrived early one Monday morning, and were ushered in to the office of the plant manager, who met us and introduced his leading associates. They had no idea why we were there, but their boss had told them to receive us. So we started off describing this crazy scheme, and concluded by asking for their help in designing and costing the carrier. They sat in silence, not believing what they had heard. When we completed our presentation, the boss said he would like to summarize what we had said, to insure that they understood. His words were something like – you are proposing to build a missile submarine, to be deployed in an ocean you will build in Kansas, to compete with the missile submarines we build for our only client, the US Navy. You are asking us to help you design this device, using funds supplied by our customer. Bob and I sheepishly hung our heads, and allowed that he had it right. They asked for a few minutes to caucus, then returned and said they would help us, but that their report would not bear the GAD imprimatur. They did produce some helpful information for us, and we completed our study. The idea was dropped, of course, as it was crazy. At one point Ernie re-organized, and the new chart laid on my desk showed me in charge of guidance development . Too bad I didn’t know the first thing about guidance. So I marched up to see Ernie, to remonstrate. I knew our own guidance people would be insulted by this move, and the AF guidance directorate would not take it very well. Ernie waved me off, and told of his rationale. It seems the guidance folks were not paying enough attention to systems considerations, and he wanted a more systems-oriented approach. I told Ernie that I was unfamiliar with guidance technology, and he told me I could damn well learn about it. He made the useful suggestion that I go back to MIT and get Stark Draper to arrange an orientation for me. I went there with great trepidation, but Stark, God bless him, understood my awkward position and did have his people show me the equipment, the test set-ups, and explain the underlying technical features of inertial guidance. I came away mightily impressed with their competence and accomplishments. Fortunately, that assignment didn’t last too long, less than a year, as I remember. After flailing about with all manner of mobile systems, we finally focussed our efforts on fixed base systems, and concentrated on the hardness issue. Ernie then re-organized to have me work solely on that technology. That came about when the committee requested a design for a silo design offering a ten-fold improvement in hardness to blast effects. They also wanted to know what it would cost. The man who was given the assignment hemmed and hawed, grunted and groaned, and finally insisted that he couldn’t deliver such a design in the six weeks allocated for the job. Ernie blew his stack, and said in a meeting of all the principals that if he didn’t have a design in six weeks, “heads would roll”. I went to see Ernie afterward

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and told him that of course my shop could produce a design in the time allocated, but that we would have to use very conservative design techniques, which would probably result in estimated high costs. Given more time, we could probably produce better designs. That is exactly what he wanted to hear, as we both agreed that some kind of design of almost anything could be produced in just a few days – but the longer one had, the better the result. We did produce the design, and shortly thereafter I was put in charge of fixed base design and technology. This began a period of very interesting work and substantial progress. This sort of bludgeon approach to management was typical of Ernie. He would assign a job, and ask the principal to give him a plan to carry it out. The target would shuffle around, and allow as how he didn’t know when he would be able to deliver. So Ernie would say – OK , but when will you give me a plan? That was not to be sloughed off; he wanted an answer. When he got the plan he would say, ‘I have allowed you to set the time and so forth, but now I will hold your feet to the fire to make good.’ Some of the managers got ulcers over this, but I thought it was a pretty decent way to run things. A job quite out of our main stream came to me about this time. It seems a few fellows down in El Segundo had taken on a job with the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA) which was considering arms control measures concerning ICBM and nuclear weapons. Apparently corporate management decided that this sort of thing belonged out at San Berdoo, and it was decided that I should have this under my wing. One more bag of grief! I trucked on down to El Segundo to meet the workers, and to familiarize myself with their contract. Needless to say, the group was not pleased to have their work snatched away, and I could hardly blame them. The next thing I found out was that the statement of work was classified. The ACDA, unfortunately, used the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) clearance system, and it was going to take about six months for me to get cleared. So now I was in charge of a project whose content I could not see. However, in the fullness of time, I got my ticket, got some people out at San Berdoo to take over the work, and got acquainted with the project sponsor back at ACDA. It was interesting that after a while, my old friend from Titan III days, Don Rogers, was at loose ends and was chosen to take over the project, in my shop. After several years, Don had gotten quite into the work , both technically and emotionally. Unfortunately, he also seemed to be having severe psychological problems, and got on the wrong side of almost everyone. Eventually his extreme unhappiness manifested itself by his offering his resignation, which to his surprise, I think, was happily accepted. As a consequence of my association with this arms control work, I became a member of the Southern California Arms Control Seminar, which had very interesting meetings and speakers, and led to involvement with that community lasting well into the 1980s. One such involvement led to an invitation to participate in one of the summer studies often conducted by the Dept. of Defense (DoD) to look at problems concerning national security. This particular one was held at an old Rockefeller estate near Williamstown, Mass. Four subjects were being considered, one of which was strategic missiles and arms control. Ed Barlow was also in that study group, as well as others I knew, and some strangers. It was a week-long sort of thing, a brainstorming session. As with most such activities, it led to nothing, because we had the usual grouping of those who intended to follow national policy, namely MAD, and some others who were bound and determined to follow the Air Force line. Actually the most interesting part of the week to me were some of the nightly social sessions, when the formal groups did not meet, but we all mingled together after dinner. One of the topics being studied was our policies in Viet Nam, which by this time, in 1968, was consuming the US. I fell in with that group of analysts, which included some people I knew from RAND and other places. By this time, some speakers at our Arms Control Seminars had about convinced me that our national leadership had their heads in a very dark place. I posed a very simple-minded question to the group, essentially what would happen if we simply left that country to its own devices. They were able to develop scenarios that they felt encompassed the range of outcomes. None of those outcomes seemed to threaten the security of the USA, and as a consequence, I personally became firmly opposed to our continuing that tragic war. Subsequent events have shown that those analysts were quite right in their projections, and today, of course, some of our then national leadership have allowed that they were terribly mistaken in their policies. The initial work on fixed base hardness improvements also led to a change in my work position. I have mentioned the importance of the BSD advisory committee. Briefing those folks about every six weeks was a major emotional experience for the staff. One division manager (my boss) got himself canned because of his briefing style and attitude before the committee and other Air Force audiences. In any case, one of the

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meetings was held up at Livermore, and I was to present some results of a fairly substantial missile system study. I had about fifty overhead slides to support the briefing. I personally hated to use all these slides, because I regarded them as aids for the briefer, rather than aids for the audience. Nonetheless, I was ordered to use them, because corporate reviewers could then be sure of what the briefer was going to say. What horseshit! Came the meeting, and I was scheduled to have about one hour for the presentation, just before lunch. Other briefers, mostly Air Force, started the session with secondary issues, and things dragged terribly. First, they exceeded their allotted time, they used a lot of very poor charts, and they bored the committee to tears. In particular they bored Teller. With fifteen minutes left before the scheduled lunch, my turn with the day’s piece de resistance came up, and Teller’s eyes seemed glazed. (Even at that time he was not a young man.) He looked at my pile of charts and asked, plaintively, “ Marty, could you just tell me what you have to tell me, without all those charts?” My boss and the commanding general turned white; I glanced at them and nodded; they nodded back, and I said to Teller that I would do so, of course. I planted myself in front of him, not at a podium, and spoke to him directly for the fifteen minutes. He pronounced himself satisfied, in fact convinced, expressed his gratitude, and adjourned the meeting for lunch. The upshot of this event was that I became the designated briefer for Teller as far as San Berdoo was concerned, and that we no longer used charts for his committee, unless they were necessary to show diagrams, tables, etc. No more word charts! I got to know Teller far better than I ever wanted. While he may have been well-meaning, I believe he was at best counter-productive, and perhaps even dangerous. Our technical work on base hardening became more and more interesting. We did work in-house, and we had contractual support. We found new ways of configuring concrete and steel which were calculated to be much more efficient at resisting the shock waves from nuclear explosions. The issue of ground motions resulting from the nuclear explosion was critical to what we were doing, but we found that very little hard data were available even though the USA had conducted many surface explosions in years past. By this time the surface test ban treaty was in force, and no more data of that type could be obtained. Therefore accurate calculations were critical. It turned out that my old RAND office mate, Bob Bjork, had formed a small company to exploit a method of numerical calculation he had developed for shock waves in solids. I got hold of Bob and asked if his group could help with our problem. He answered in the affirmative, and within days we were able to have him working on our problem. His initial work was quite successful ,and this led to a small cottage industry for these calculation methods. The AEC was conducting regular underground nuclear tests in Nevada, and we arranged for some of our designs to be installed as test sections in a few of the shots. These sections were installed as part of what was essentially a complex of mine shafts dug in the local rock. The magnitude of the effort was very impressive. A substantial fraction of the national capability for hard rock mining was employed in the area. Additionally, we worked on ways to simulate nuclear effects through use of massive chemical explosions, some of the largest ever created. That test series was carried out in Utah, at one of the proving grounds. We were able to visit our test installations before the nuclear explosions in Nevada, and after a considerable period of time had elapsed, we could go down in the dug-out remains and examine the results. What we saw was technically quite amazing. The results showed that we could expect remarkable increases in missile base hardness if our design and siting criteria were followed. Some of the effects we were trying to estimate had direct analogies in earthquake investigations, and with our consultant Nate Newmark, we got into the literature of that field. On their hand, the earthquake community found some interesting effects showing up in our tests. For example, the phenomenon of earth liquefaction was assuming great importance in earthquake effects, and we were able to produce liquefaction in our surface chemical explosive tests, which astonished the earthquake engineers. On our part, earthquake studies showed that motions were much smaller in hard rock, as compared to alluvial soils. Our own calculations and studies showed a similar pattern, and we concluded that hard rock was the preferred medium for missile basing. In fact our missile basing proposal came to be known as the Hard Rock Silo. The Air Force was by now focussing on a new ballistic missile system, to be deployed in hard fixed silos. The launchers were to employ our new protective construction principles. They chose to propose a missile very much larger than Minuteman, employing a large number of very accurate MIRV. The missile system was going to be very complex in terms of its targeting and command and control. Unfortunately, to be able to survive a first strike by an enemy, we would have to deploy a great many of them, or defend them with an extensive missile defense system. In either case, the cost would probably be greater than the

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country would be willing to spend. On the other hand, a limited deployment would be a clear signal that the system was intended as a first strike weapon, and that was not national policy. We at Aerospace came up with quite a different concept. We felt that a very small single warhead missile limited to city-busting accuracy could be designed to be launched from very hard fixed sites, and could be deployed in a dormant mode, thus minimizing maintenance and support. Because it was conceptually very cheap (as compared to conventional technology), it could be deployed in great numbers if necessary. We argued that if a potential enemy persisted in deploying a large ICBM fleet, we could afford to simply out-build them. If they chose to deploy a very capable (thus expensive) defense system, again we could out-build them. It was the kind of missile system that lent itself to a stable form of deterrent and arms control. This is not what the Air Force wanted, but it was what the government said it wanted. Anyway, my shop produced the preliminary design (Nick Kfoury was instrumental in this). We briefed it around, and it was well received In fact, sometime around in here we finally got to brief some of our work at higher levels. Usually, we talked to the local Air Force, and they would go to higher headquarters with their version of it. I do remember that on one occasion at least we got to brief Harold Brown, then Secretary of the Air Force (in the Johnson administration). As it turned out, I later ran into Brown in another role, when he became president of Caltech. However, we knew that the Air Force would do everything in its power to kill the concept. They simply had their own agenda. Eventually they did win approval for a development program for the large missile, but it always struggled to stay alive. Among other things they introduced so much complexity into the basing that costs got quite out of hand, even in these early estimates. However, the Air Force did eventually prevail, and this system is what became the MX, or ‘Peacekeeper’. Sometime in this period I had an interesting encounter with a man named Bud Wheelon. He had been one of the top level managers at the Central Intelligence Agency, and had just left there to return to Hughes Aircraft. Later he became the president of Hughes. He was a very sharp guy, one of the best I ever met. He must have been in one of the briefings we were constantly giving, and I ran into him again at some meetings. He approached me about going to the CIA. Apparently he felt that they had fallen behind in their knowledge of missile technology, and he thought I could give that area a boost. He arranged for me to visit their headquarters and speak to several people. They were quite interested, but my response to them was that I could do that kind of work under contract at Aerospace, and have good support to boot. But they wanted me to move to Washington, and I wasn’t interested. In 1969 I had another interesting outside assignment. The first really serious strategic arms limitation talks were about to begin, and the US was preparing its delegation. (The talks produced what are known as the SALT agreements between ourselves and the Russians.) Representatives from the DoD were included, of course, and they wanted to have their ducks in order. So study teams were being put together in Washington. Aerospace received a request for me to be assigned to that work for a period of three weeks. As it turned out, the three weeks turned into six, and then dribbled along. When I reported into the Pentagon, I was assigned a desk in a basement room set aside for the team. A young man named Richard Perle had the desk next to mine. I found him to be highly opinionated, but lacking in knowledge of missile technology. As it turned out he thought like that paranoid nuclear mafia I had been coping with for years. In later Republican administrations, he became one of their gurus and spokesmen, and very well known. I don’t think he ever learned anything. Anyway, he made for lively discussion. My work week went like this. Early on Monday afternoons, I left LAX for Washington. I worked in the basement for the rest of the week, answering questions, doing analysis, and writing. On Friday I took the evening flight back home. I consulted with colleagues over the weekend, and met with Aerospace staff Monday morning, when I filled them in on the latest, picked up the work they had done in support the previous week, and left off more work to be done. Of course this was an interesting assignment, and it brought about my continued involvement with arms control activities. Meanwhile the San Bernardino organization was not prospering, as the years went on. The downhill slide actually began very early, say by 1965. After our first big study out there, as I outlined, the Air Force adopted the concept of MIRV and proposed a new missile system, based on improved Minuteman technology. In fact, they chose to name it Minuteman III, so as to present it as an upgrade of the existing Minuteman II. They also chose to keep the Minuteman contractors, thus avoiding the lengthy process of

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competitive bidding. The Space Systems Division used Aerospace Corp. for the technical direction function, and we thought that would be their intent at the Ballistic Systems Division also. In fact, when first formed, Aerospace San Berdoo had the responsibility for the Mobile Mid-Range Ballistic Missile, then in development. MMRBM was cancelled, however, and with the AF decision to stick with TRW for technical direction of the Minuteman program, Aerospace was left without responsibility for an operational system. We did provide direction for the re-entry vehicle program, which involved a lot of flight testing. But the Minuteman III decision stung. At the same time, Aerospace was receiving a lot of congressional scrutiny. Often industry was not too happy with having a capable, unbiased gang of engineers looking over their shoulder, and they could always bend the ears of their favorite local congressmen. So we were finding that Aerospace was always being squeezed at budget time. After our original pressures to hire staff and get up to speed, those pressures diminished. Then the Manned Orbiting Laboratory program was cancelled, down in El Segundo. Programs had always come and gone, but there were always new ones to take up the slack. In this case, however, there needed to be a reduction-in-force, and it was decided that San Berdoo would take its share of the lay-offs. It was a painful process, and was made worse because promised transfers to our staff didn’t happen. Our level of effort was steadily decreasing, and in fact some of our staff moved to El Segundo. Something else was happening in the defense world, which turned out to affect my life very deeply. The national administration decided that all that technical expertise which had been working on defense and space matters should be tapped to help with civilian problems. The services and their contractors were asked to find ways to make that happen. Aerospace was no exception, and our management started to look around for something to do. By this time Ernie Krause had returned to a staff job in El Segundo (taking part of the San Bernardino work with him), and his former assistant, Walt Brewer, was now in charge. Walt had been reading about the troubles plaguing the Salton Sea, water level and increasing salinity, and asked me to spend some time looking into the problem. Now that was a switch! So I started getting hold of the literature, and made appointments in the Imperial Valley to get up to speed on the history of the place, starting with the great canal failure in the early 1900s. The base of the economy there is irrigated agriculture, so that too had to be looked at in its relation to the sea’s problems. Other issues also became apparent. There was some potential for geothermal energy there in the Imperial Valley, and some academics at UC Riverside were touting that for electric production, water desalting, and control of the Salton Sea. Without going into the gory details, we did find that there were possible solutions for the

salinity problem, but that they were very expensive, and we could find no rational way to pay for them. The Bureau of Reclamation had done some work, and proposed that diked evaporation ponds be constructed in the middle of the Sea. Our own proposal was for a pipeline to built to the Sea Of Cortez, pumping excess water out of the Salton Sea. We wrote a report comparing these ideas, and examining sources of funding, which is included in my file of documents. To support this kind of civilian effort, Walt Brewer had hired a PR person to tout our capability. I had never thought too much of that sort of activity, but I have to tell you that Milan Chiba was a real live wire. He listened to what we were doing, and went out and found people who were interested. He knew lots of folk in the newspaper, magazine, and TV business, and all at once I found

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that he was making me into a celebrity. He knew just how to get people’s attention. For example, he saw clearly that geography was the key feature of our Salton Sea problem. So he had built a large relief map of the whole Imperial Valley. Well, it was the ideal thing to use as a briefing tool. Instead of people staring at projections in a darkened room, they could gather around this large table while the briefer pointed out this and that. Then, the TV news people could film a briefing without it simply being talking heads. Same for still photographers. So we got some good TV coverage. Then, the local people in the Valley got to see it, and they asked to borrow it for their county fair, as an exhibit. Of course, the name of Aerospace Corporation got well exposed by all this coverage. I have a couple of pictures of me using the map to brief Sen. George Murphy, one of which is shown here. He was an actor who became a Republican senator from California. My impression of him was that he was as dumb as a box of rocks. Our work was reported in local newspapers and the LA Times, often as part of the outdoor section. I have chosen not to burden my poor readers with copies of all that repetitive newsprint. Essentially the same information was presented in clippings from at least twenty newspapers, even some on the east coast. One of the TV news shows made a short feature of our Salton Sea work, and I had a film copy of the show. I cannot find it at this time. It came about because the California Dept. of Fish and Game was interested in the Salton Sea fishery, but couldn’t mount a soapbox of their own to urge a solution to the problems there. So they recruited me to speak for them, as it were. We went on a ‘fishing trip’ to the Sea, arranged by the DFG. We caught fish, and I explained the problems of the Sea and potential solutions. After all the briefings I had done, it was not hard to speak in front of a camera without a script. We just agreed on what points needed to be made in the presentation. Milan also found a journalist named John Chapman to interview me. He turned out to be a very interesting person, and wrote a very nice article which was published in the West Magazine section of the LA Times. A copy of that issue is in my file box. All this sort of activity comes after the conduct of a study. When dealing with the armed forces, you have but one client, and the last thing in the world you want to do is start putting out information about their business. But in civil matters, it is all different. There are many clients, all wrestling over the same bone. A major part of any study is getting it before the eyes of potential actors. As an illustration, I included a collection of ‘Salton Sea’ letters in the archive binder. By 1971, my professional focus was clearly shifting from the missile business to environmental matters. First, I was sick of missile studies; we had studied all possible variations at least three times, and I was meeting myself in the revolving door. Our effort at San Bernardino was becoming smaller all the time, and the missile center of the Air Force and Aerospace was clearly shifting to either industry or El Segundo. In fact, by mid-1971 it was known that BSD and SSD were going to consolidate, and that the San Berdoo offices would be closed. I was not a very happy camper. Like a bolt from the blue one day, I had a call from Al Donovan, the senior VP of Aerospace. He told me that Lester Lees, a very well known professor of aeronautics at Caltech, was starting a new center there to be called the Environmental Quality Laboratory, and that he was interested in borrowing people from industry to help staff it. Al asked if I might be interested, and told me to call Lester if I was. As you might imagine, I wasted no time. The deal was quickly put together, and I made preparations to change my base of operations.

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Period 7

Environmental Quality Laboratory

The arrangement was this: Aerospace would loan me to the EQL for one year, and pay my salary as usual. I would work on the campus, but would maintain contact with Aerospace El Segundo. Caltech agreed to provide me with an apartment near the campus so that I would not have to commute from Riverside. I usually returned home one night during the week, and of course on weekends. I was made a faculty associate, as I did want to participate in the life of the Institute. They even had me help with a little low-grade teaching, but I found out that guiding graduate student research was one thing they would not delegate to outsiders. Rather than explain what the mission of the EQL was intended to be, I have included a copy of the Caltech publication, Engineering and Science, for January 1971 which explains it all (see pg. 11). As I recall, I arrived on the campus about the beginning of summer. There were a number of people already at work at the EQL, and they had produced their first report on air pollution in Southern California. I was anxious to begin some substantive piece of work – I knew that a year would pass quickly and I wanted to leave a product behind me. As it turned out, the Speaker of the State Assembly, Bob Moretti, had asked their scientific panel to prepare an appraisal of geothermal energy in California. Lester Lees arranged for the EQL to be given a contract for that task, and I was to carry it out. Starting from my background work in the Imperial Valley, I cast a wider net. Union Oil Company and Pacific Gas and Electric were players in the field, and they were very gracious in showing me their operations and discussing the state-of-the-art. By the end of the year I had published an EQL report, and it was converted into an Assembly report the following year. The reaction to the work was interesting. There were a number of promoters out in industry who were touting the vast potential of geothermal energy, and were supported in their efforts by some academics out at UC Riverside. As soon as the piece was published I started to get the howls of complaint from some of them. My findings were that there was indeed some potential, but the costs would be higher and the environmental impact greater than the public had been led to believe. To the hostile phone calls, I simply replied that if they could find any factual errors in my work, I would be happy to correct them. On the other hand, people from Union Oil, who really knew the most about it all, were very supportive. In fact they ordered a bulk quantity of the report to give to people who made inquiries about the subject. Now, after the passage of about thirty years, I think that I could be considered optimistic in my appraisals. We even caught a blast from some folks at Bechtel Corp. Now Steve Bechtel was an influence on the Caltech board, so a gang of Techers, including me, went up to San Francisco to hear their complaints in person. After a long morning of hemming and hawing, what the basis for the problem turned out to be was a couple of their hack engineers who objected to the nomenclature I had used for mechanical draft cooling towers. It seems I had used the term ‘forced draft’ instead. The chairman of our engineering division, Francis Clauser, was really pissed at having to go up there to hear that! In the March issue of Engineering and Science there is an article on this geothermal work, and in 1973 , at the request of the editor, I wrote an article on the Salton Sea for the Southern California Audubon Society. Copies are in the archive box. The journal Energy also published a couple of papers they asked me to write, and I also contributed a little discussion to one of the civil engineering journals on the subject. Copies are in the notebook. So I got quite a bit of mileage out of the geothermal work and that original Salton Sea work. At the end of my year at EQL, Lester Lees expressed a strong wish to have me remain at Caltech for another year. I was having a good time, so it was OK with me, and I told him to check it out with Al Donovan at Aerospace. The Corporation wasn’t too happy with this, but finally agreed. However, they said they would only pick up half the bill, so EQL had to remit funds to Aerospace. Also, the apartment deal could not go on forever, so I resolved to move the family back into LA County from Riverside. The area around the West Side, near Aerospace, had gotten out of hand price-wise, so we had to look elsewhere. We need a place that would be OK for either Aerospace or EQL, and after rejecting other places, settled on

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a home right across the street from Caltech. So we moved, and it turned out that I would remain in Pasadena for fifteen years. The next topic I turned to at EQL was electric power production. I prepared a briefing on the topic, and published it as an EQL document titled ‘Dimensions of a Dilemma’. It simply tried to scope out the supply/demand problem in Southern California. But the major thrust of my work turned out to be the problem of siting nuclear power plants in California. This was no easy problem and it took about a year to complete the study. I had the opportunity to visit existing nuclear plants, as well as some under construction. Also visited sites that utilities had chosen for further investigation. Aside from the field trips, I spent a lot of time visiting various parts of the industry. People were very cordial, but of course there were sharp differences of opinion on many topics. The EQL report was very even-handed, I think, but aroused its share of controversy. I do think it had the effect of focussing attention on the problems of coastal siting, and my arguments supporting inland siting, with the use of fresh water cooling towers, were among the first to be put in play here in California. Whereas the utilities had claimed that it was prohibitive in cost to go inland, my figures showed that position to be nonsense. I do know that essentially after the report was published, there was never another coastal site proposed by a California utility. When doing work of this nature, one should always be sure to understand and account for the position of all parties. The object is not to be confrontational, but to find common ground so that solutions may be found and accepted. The point is well illustrated by the letters to and from reviewers of this report which are enclosed in an insert in the archive binder. While this work was going on, in the middle of 1973, Lester approached me with an interesting offer. Besides my own work, I had participated in the overall activities of EQL, and had in fact advised Lester from time to time on some managerial aspects of the operation. Lester was not much of a hands-on manager, and the administrator he had hired was letting some of the junior staff run a little wild. In fact, Lester finally fired him. The offer he made was for me to stay on at EQL as a Caltech employee, with the post of Deputy Director. Because of the duration of the grants the EQL was operating under, the term of the offer was for three years. My contacts with Aerospace El Segundo had not been very satisfactory; the crew doing civil work there didn’t have any clear notion of what they would want me to do. So I took Lester’s offer, and resigned from Aerospace. Living across the street from work didn’t make that decision very difficult. It was not long, however, before the happy little EQL family started to unravel. Lester began to suffer from some physical ailments which affected his ability to work. I was told that it was some form of Parkinson’s, and he became quite feeble in appearance, and rarely showed up at the office. Also, some of the EQL work had turned out to be very controversial (in fact, some of it was not so good) and this increased the pressure on Lester from the Caltech administration. While I tried to help out with these relations, the faculty really wanted another regular faculty person to be in charge, and within the year Lester resigned from the EQL. Professor Norman Brooks was chosen to replace him. Norm was a younger and very active member of the civil engineering group, and as good a choice as could be made at the time. However, Norm had quite a different vision of what the EQL should be. Lester wanted it to be something of a think tank, working on policy issues, and using academic as well as industrial talents. Norm wanted it to be a variation of the normal academic unit, with emphasis on cross-disciplinary work. But he wanted it to be academic. Rather than bring in people of varying backgrounds, Norm wanted to use faculty and students only. Now, he tried to make me feel a part of it all, but I knew that I really didn’t fit in with his vision. The topic of underground nuclear power plant siting had first been raised by Edward Teller, but he did nothing with it. We had some interest in the topic at my old shop in San Bernardino, arising from our work on underground protective construction. So at EQL we started a little project to study the topic and contracted with Aerospace to conduct the actual technical work. Mason Watson and Fred Finlayson did most of the work. With our limited resources, the study was less than definitive. Somehow, doing half a job can be worse than doing no job. Being incomplete, the report had to use ‘may be, might be’, etc. Now those who love the notion or hate the notion ignore all the tentative wording. Thus we received kudos as well as withering criticism. Neither were justified. As spokesman I had to participate in a number of interviews, and chose my words carefully. What can be mis-interpreted, will be. Later Fred came up to EQL for about a year to work on the topic. As time went on the State Energy Commission took some

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interest in it all, and finally decided to conduct a study. It took a long time for them to decide just what they wanted to do, and it was 1976 before they were ready to go forward. My geothermal involvement was not yet over, however. The County of Imperial was seeing more and more activity by geothermal explorers and developers, and if one believed the hype being generated over this, one could expect there to be major impacts on the largely agricultural base of the area. So the County Supervisors wisely decided to get ahead of game by creating a geothermal element for their general plan. I had numerous conversations with them, and in the end they gave a grant to EQL to study aspects of the problem. I wrote two reports for them, one on the engineering aspects of geothermal development, and the other the impact of geothermal exploitation on the Salton Sea. Both were published as EQL memos, and are in my document archive. By this time I was well acquainted in the geothermal community in California. Aside from the study effort at EQL, I devoted time to several other related activities. Caltech was constantly being asked to supply speakers of one kind or another, and the environmental activities were often targeted. Most faculty loathed such assignments, as it took them away from their beloved research. However, if you are working on problems of concern to the citizenry, it behooves you to get out and press the flesh. So I gave a number of lectures here and there, at other universities, civic groups, and technical meetings. I even gave one well-received lecture at Caltechs’s Alumni Day, where Caltech staff tell the alums about recent interesting research. A couple of these presentations are in the archive box. The campus also became involved with one of the JPL studies of civil matters. They were examining the future of automobile engines, in particular some of the concepts such as gas turbine, Stirling engines, and so forth. The EQL was asked to convene an advisory committee, and I was a member of that body. While we had a few members of JPL on loan to EQL, this gave me an opportunity to get to know many more of the people up there. Their team did a good job on the study, balancing cost, environmental impacts, fuel economy, so on. A key assumption we all worked out was to have all the studied engines meet the same performance requirements. No comparisons of an anemic little Diesel to a big gasoline V-8! Also, the technologies had to be compared for similar time periods. No comparisons of a magic engine built of impervium and burning unobtanium to a present version of a gasoline engine. The importance of these ground rules are quite apparent today. The gasoline engine today is a lot more clean and efficient that those of twenty five years ago, and most of its competitors have dropped by the wayside. Another side activity led to a more lasting connection with the outside world. The City of Pasadena decided to form an environmental advisory committee, and I was asked to become a member. Fortunately, at that time, the city picked people for their backgrounds, and not their political connections. With all the talent in Pasadena, they got some pretty good people, several from Caltech and JPL. The first task we had was to review the environmental report for the proposed downtown re-development. It was mostly hand-waving, and the committee was pretty critical. The city probably started to rethink their notion of an environmental committee. It was about this time that I moved from EQL to JPL, about which more later. However, another problem soon came up in Pasadena. Some citizens started to agitate for the city to sell off its electric utility. Like LA, Burbank, and Glendale, Pasadena not only retailed electricity in the city, but maintained its own power plants. So the city fiddled with the membership, but basically turned the environmental committee into a Blue Ribbon Committee to advise the city council on the pros and cons of divesting itself of the electric utility. This really got interesting, as all the issues of electric supply and demand, environmental impacts, municipal finance, and the economics of electrical generation and distribution came into play. We wrote a pretty good report, and the city adopted our recommendations. We were astonished! A key recommendation was that the city rationalize the amount of the profit it extracted from the utility. They had been in the habit of taking about whatever they thought they needed, which resulted in needlessly high rates, and had led to the citizen discontent in the first place. Another recommendation that we made was to form a utility commission to de-politicize the decisions being made about the utility. The city council went along, but called it the Utility Advisory Commission, as they would not turn over the funding decisions to an unelected group. The Blue Ribbon Committee was morphed into the UAC. At the first meeting, I was elected Chairman, and so it was to be for several years to come. My fellow members included three Caltech profs (two engineers and an economist), a JPL

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engineer, a stockbroker (specialty being municipal finance), a community activist, and a retired utility engineer. There was a lot of talent in that group. Among the things that came out of our work was a rational way to determine the proper return to the city from their investment; a working agreement with the neighboring municipal utilities to share spinning reserve, and to use common load dispatch; a consortium of the utilities to build out-of-state coal fired power plants (the Intermountain Power Project), which included a major DC transmission line to Southern California; the purchase of shares in the Palo Verde nuclear complex in Arizona; and several other lesser projects. At the time, natural gas was under price regulation, and was therefore in short supply. In that situation, these coal and nuclear projects were our only guarantee of adequate supplies of electricity. After gas was de-regulated, and became abundant, these supply decisions came to work against the cost of electricity to the city. Of course, all these studies and deliberations gave me a considerable insight into the workings of municipal utilities, to include both water and power. About 1980 (well after I had moved to JPL), the manager of the Pasadena utility called me and asked if I would like to replace him as the Pasadena Director on the Board of the Metropolitan Water District. He had served for several years, but was now overwhelmed with his duties in the department as well as being a leader in the power consortium. We discussed the duties, and I agreed that it would be an interesting appointment. The JPL of course supported the notion of its members having such experience. So it was that I was sworn in as a member of the MWD board. I was appointed by the Mayor, acting for the City Council, so this was definitely a political appointment. As a newbie among veterans, I sat and listened for a year or so at the monthly meetings and committee activities, but in time I got into the swing of it. You have to understand that the MWD is big business, supplying as it does about half of all water to municipal Southern California. Even in 1984 the properties were worth about a billion and a half, and revenues were a quarter billion per year. Copies of a few annual reports are on my shelves. The numbers are much larger now – the price of water has about tripled, and the new east-side reservoir alone cost well over a billion. I suppose I was as much a part of things as the other directors – there were dozens of issues taken up each month. I think I may have made a special contribution in one or two areas. One I remember in particular, was when a new feeder pipeline was being considered. Both the route and the schedule had controversial aspects. When the Engineering Committee got the staff report, I set about reading it carefully. I found that it had been prepared by the engineering staff, who also did the financial analysis. It was hopelessly incorrect; that group simply didn’t understand the first thing about simple economics. I rather noisily pointed out the deficiency, and using simple arguments showed that a late start was preferable to their early start, etc. This caused some commotion, and the report was withdrawn and reworked. I made the point to the board, and to the General Manager, who was a really good lawyer and administrator, that the MWD badly needed to have some capability in economics. To me it was unbelievable that they had never had such people on the staff. In 1985 there was a change in the city council in Pasadena, and electoral politics started to intrude on the work of the utility commission. The membership started to change, and previous profit-taking recommendations were now over-ruled by the council. Then, my five year term with the MWD being up, the mayor decided not to reappoint me, but chose one of his political supporters from the UAC. So while I was off the MWD Board, I still found my self staying in touch with the staff down there. One day the GM called and said the board had accepted my recommendation to hire an economist, and he wanted to know if I could recommend someone, or find someone to help with a search. By this time I was back working at RAND (more on that later) and I knew a fellow there who had been doing some pretty good analysis of the water business, and who knew many economists nationally who were concerned with water supply. I called him and asked for his help, which he was willing to offer. So I got the GM and Tim Quinn together for lunch at the MWD, and then left affairs to sort out as they would. As I hoped would happen, Tim was offered the job and accepted. He rose rapidly in the level of his assignments, and after a few years became an assistant general manager. I think I did both parties a favor. Anyway, I enjoyed my time with the MWD. It was a very real world experience. After I had become a regular Caltech employee at the EQL, I began to take advantage of the opportunity to spend up to one-fifth of my time working as a consultant, the standard policy for faculty. I don’t think I ever put in that much time, but some of the jobs I took on were very interesting. Others were not. For

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example, my old friend from Aerospace, Craig Hartsell, had gone to the DoD, and he called and asked me to chair a little technical review committee. But I knew nothing about the technology involved, although I understood its ramifications. Consequently I didn’t feel at ease with the assignment, and left it as soon as I could. I was also asked to work by an aerospace company which was trying to get into civil business, but after seeing how they operated I opted out. There were others which I do not even remember. Two projects, however, occupied quite a bit of time. One was for the United Nations Development Program, and took place in 1975. Another was for the County of Kern, started in 1975 but did not end until 1978. In December of 1974, a high-ranking UNDP executive contacted Caltech to request help with a potential environmental problem arising from effluent disposal at a geothermal electrical generating station in El Salvador. I think their call came about owing to my EQL geothermal work. In any case, the call was referred to me, and as I recall my management strongly suggested that I help them. In January, they sent me letters with an outline of the problem, and asked that I go to El Salvador immediately. I was not anxious to travel there, and wanted them to send me the necessary reports and information so I could analyze the situation. They were adamant about my going there, however, saying all the reports and all the experts were there. I also got the idea from them that ‘presence lends conviction’; that is, be seen on the ground if you want to be believed. So in March I got on an airplane for El Salvador. My hosts for the visit were staff of the national electric utility. I met with staff and some members of the board of the utility, which included some of the oligarchs of that miserable country. They explained the problem. The geothermal waters that flowed through the power plant had to be disposed of. They had rejected, unwisely I came the think, the use of reinjection wells (based on the opinions of their Italian consultants), and were thinking of either dumping it in a nearby river, or if necessary building a very expensive canal to the sea. Their question to me was – what to do? I read all the reports they had in their files on the topic, and they shared such information as the drilling and production history of their wells. In my opinion their whole project was in peril owing to poor production. But as I was to see, the power plant was nearly complete, even though the production well program was floundering. They then gave me a tour around about half of the country. First we went to the site of the geothermal plant, and I looked over the whole complex. It was pretty impressive, with brand new equipment and buildings. Then, as a side tour, they showed me a new massive hydro-electric dam under construction. That was really impressive. Then we went down to the sea, where the river from the plant, and the canal, if it were to be built, end. This was at a small decrepit fishing village, near a lagoon-like area. They had little data about the area, but I was able to get information I needed from satellite images. I had a lot of notes and information, but as yet had not done any real analysis. My intention was to go home and do my work, and submit a report to them. However, before I was to leave, they asked that I meet with the board of the utility company (which was a state-owned business) and tell them of my findings. I was realizing that this whole thing was a big damn deal down there. For example, the river that they were thinking of using as a waste dump formed part of their border with Guatemala. Even the terminal lagoon supported fisheries of both countries, and a whole load of boron and arsenic are not nice things to send your neighbor. So this was an international problem! So I met with the board the morning before I left. I told them that I could only make tentative statements, subject to revision, but I would be candid with them. There were several business types there, some of whom I had met (and I have to say had been very gracious to me, in a very Latin style), one was a general who walked in with a pistol stuck in his waistband, and one fellow was the Foreign Minister. He was MIT –educated, and spoke perfect English. It became obvious that he was really the audience for my brief. He understood everything, and showed a very clear concern for the environmental problems. I really liked him. As a side note, I saw a news clip about a year later that he had been assassinated, one of the first of the many killings that marked their long and brutal civil war. Countries like that can ill afford to lose people like him. I left that afternoon, but had a difficult trip. Their national airline went on strike, so I used alternate routing, and ended up stuck in Mexico City without a reservation on Easter weekend! When I got home I did write up a report and advised that the river was essentially out of the question, the canal could not terminate in the lagoon, and that re-injection ought to be re-thought. Their Italian consultants had strongly advised against re-injection the geothermal waters, but they had never had any experience with the process!

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All the US reservoir engineers I spoke to were greatly surprised, as they showed that without re-injection the field was going to peter out in a very short time. So I offered some side advice on getting sound US reservoir consultants to replace those worthless Italians. My contacts continued for a while, and we were visited by one or two people from the UN and El Salvador, but I never went back there. I hope I never go there again; it was a country without charm. I lost touch with what was happening there after the civil war heated up, but I heard that the geothermal fields faltered rather quickly, and the project was not successful. I have two folders in my archive. One shows all the letter writing that goes on in such a project, and the other contains the reports that I wrote. I had totally forgotten that I knew all that stuff! Another major consulting job started in 1975, and dragged on for several years. I was approached by the planning department managers of Kern County for help with the review of an environmental impact report for a nuclear power plant. The City of Los Angeles DWP proposed to build a multi-unit power plant in Kern County and the county folk felt that they lacked the knowledge to perform a competent review. While I am sure they would have liked the EQL as an institution to take on the job, that sort of thing could not be done at Caltech. What we finally arranged is that I would recruit a team of consultants, who would individually contract with the county. However, I would not only review appropriate sections myself, but I would integrate the disparate output of the individual reviewers. As you might imagine, an EIR for a nuclear power plant is a major document, massive in its content. The consultants did their work, and the first review report is in a folder in my archive. The DWP was then directed by the county to respond to the comments made, and a revised EIR was submitted. The county then asked us to consider the adequacy of their reply. This report is also in the archive folder. A year or so later, the county wanted some of us to help them with specific questions then under discussion between them and DWP. I also include a collection of those considerations. In the end, the San Joaquin plant was never built. In fact, after the middle 70’s, when San Onofre and Diablo Canyon were under construction, no more nuclear plants were built anywhere in California. In my estimation the US created a very viable nuclear technology, but totally botched the job politically. When I signed on with Lester Lees in 1973, the contract was for a three year term. But now with the changed mission of EQL, from broadly-based research to support of the academic program, I knew that a renewal of the contract was out of the question. Norm Brooks and I spoke of this, and he encouraged me to finish the things I was working on, even though the three years were up. So I stayed on for a time, and started looking for something else to do. I had stayed in touch with Aerospace Corp. but they were not doing very much of interest in civil things, and I didn’t want to return to space/missile engineering. Also spoke to RAND Corp. as they were working in the energy arena, but they were having trouble getting their contracts to gel, and wouldn’t consider hiring anyone until they had money in hand. I was starting to get uneasy, because things in the engineering business were tough at the time. However, opportunity came from an unexpected place. The folks at JPL asked if I would like to come up there and continue the sorts of things I had been doing. It was an easy transition to make, as I would simply continue as a Caltech employee (all of JPL works for Caltech), just in a different organization. It was a no-brainer.

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Period 8 – JPL

As I have written, the California Energy Commission was laboring to initiate a major study of underground nuclear power-plant siting. We had been going back and forth for about a year with them, down at EQL, and they were now on the brink of letting contracts. They had agreed that the work I had been trying to bring into EQL could be done at JPL instead. In fact, as it turned out, the work we finally agreed on could not have been done at EQL without outside support. So the JPL folks were happy to have me come aboard with funding promised, not only for myself, but for several additional staff. I was assigned to the Systems Analysis Section of the lab, where the non-technical work such as economic and environmental analysis was done. I was made staff to the section manager, which meant I could do whatever the boss felt was expedient. Before long, we had our Energy Commission contract (all contracts were actually with NASA – that is how the government worked) to do specific parts of the undergrounding study. The heavy engineering was contracted to a major architect/engineering firm experienced in nuclear matters. We were to create a decision analysis methodology, do a regulatory analysis, and a develop a novel system of probabilistic cost estimating which I had proposed to the State people. We produced reports on each of these topics, published in 1978. A copy of the cost analysis is included in the archive. Most of the detail work was done by Terasawa, a very accomplished mathematical economist, but I am included because the original concept was mine. Poor Katchen nearly went nuts arguing with me over the conduct of the analysis. The idea was to show that if one accepts that uncertainty prevails throughout a powerplant development (or any other), that the decision on cost advantage must account for the uncertainty. Two competing concepts may have widely different levels of uncertainty, but even if the one with the least uncertainty has a higher point estimate of cost, it still may be the preferred option. The really interesting part of the work was done by the A&E firm. They found that our original Aerospace concept of using a mined chamber in hard rock to house the plant was an exercise in futility. In the event of a catastrophic meltdown, even the rock walls would not guarantee the isolation of the radioactivity from the environment. On the other hand, burying the plant in what we called an earth berm offered even less containment protection. But the firm went on to develop a concept of permitting the volatile contents of a melt-down accident to escape in a controlled fashion through a massive, but simple, filter system. Thus they preferred the berm concept. My view, standing back from the whole project was that if these filters would work as advertised, why not simply apply them to ordinary surface siting and remove an unlikely, but worrisome, source of danger. After the publication of all the reports by the Energy Commission, nothing more was ever heard of the whole notion. As my work on nuclear power wound down, I found myself in the role of fireman in the SA Section. By that I mean that I was often asked to jump into some project or another that was in trouble, and try to lend a hand to fix it. Many of our staff were less experienced than myself, and perhaps less willing to mix it up in a strange arena. So I did a lot of this and that. One example of this was a contract we had with the Energy Commission to lead a study of the use of coal in California, and its potential. It involved having workshop sessions with many people from industry and government covering a broad range of topics. We were to organize, lead, and report on these workshops. The penultimate meeting was held at Pajaro Dunes, near Santa Cruz. I was an attendee, chairing one of the panels. Well, it was a pretty stimulating three or four day affair, with a lot of serious arguments. The JPL leader of the whole project got himself quite crossways with some from industry, and took quite a battering. After the workshop we went home, and the JPL leader was to put together the final report, using inputs from the panel chairmen who were to make sense out of all the presentations made in their sessions. Well, the whole process was running out of time and money, and was not closing on a product. Panic. Ring the fire bell! I slid down the pole and took over the report. By sparing no feelings, including my own, I ground out a report. I suppose it was an adequate summary, but hardly full of revolutionary notions. But management was happy – my Division Manager slipped me a hand-written note, thanking me, and stating “you have wrought a miracle”. About the nicest thing he could have said.

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Another project in deep yogurt was a study of coal mining, intended to uncover new, cheaper, safer, more environmentally friendly ways to extract coal. Now how could JPL have ever gotten itself into such a pickle! We had one mining engineer in JPL, fresh out of school. No one else had ever even seen a coal mine! I thought it was crazy. I even found one dreamy analyst from a technical section who was trying to apply the Second Law of Thermodynamics to coal mining! The one useful thing I did was make sure that he never got to touch one of our projects again. I tried my best, but all I could do was to get the staff off of Buck Rogers notions and focussed on writing meaningless systems-oriented drivel that could satisfy our sponsor. At least we weren’t sued for non-performance. But we sure didn’t contribute anything to coal mining. About this time I got one of the worst assignments I ever had, anywhere. I had been told that being assigned to a Source Selection Board was to be avoided at all costs. I found out why. JPL was a very risk-adverse place – they didn’t handle criticism very well, so when they let a contract on behalf of a sponsor, they really left no stone unturned. In this case the contract was to engineer and build four prototype hybrid automobiles. (This was twenty years ago. Today they are supposed to be coming on the market.) I was told to serve on the board, and no one would take no for an answer – it wasn’t an optional matter. The first thing we had to do was review the statement of work, to insure that it was crystal clear in its requirements. That means a lot of negotiation with the project engineers. Then we had to prepare evaluation criteria and methods, so that the proposers would know how their submittal would be judged. Again, endless legalistic agonies. This took a month or more. Then we stood down while the RFP went out and the contractors did their work. When the proposals were submitted, we took about a month to digest all four of them, and arrange for site visits. We visited each of the four proposers to see their facilities and have them respond to our questions. All of this was thoroughly documented, of course. We probably did a pretty good job, first because we had a really first class chairman, and secondly we had a superlative secretary. After these long, long days of discussion, she was able to get the thrust of it down accurately and succinctly. She was an editor from the JPL publications department. About the best I ever met. After the visits, we went home to score the proposals according to the evaluation scheme we had concocted. Again, every point had to be documented. Finally we were done, but the whole thing lasted over six months, as I recall. I hated it. I started getting into salary trouble about this time. The section had been very happy with my work, and had put me in for large raises each year. The problem came up because my pay was now so high as to require review by a high-level salary committee. Those folks knew who the managers were, but the spaced-based organization was less familiar with the civil program workers. So they said, who is this guy, and why so much? I was advised to find a management slot so that I would be better known in the lab at large. There were some section manager jobs opening, but I was not too enthusiastic about having a job where my most pressing duties would be finding work for my staff. I think my reluctance showed, and those jobs went elsewhere. But then one of the civil program managers, who headed the fossil energy programs, resigned. That job was sort of a natural, as I had been supporting several of his projects, and I was offered the position. I took it on the condition I could rid myself of one of his subordinates, who I had discovered to be a less than straightforward person. Those terms agreed to, I became the fossil energy program manager. Everyone congratulated me on my major promotion. It turned out to be the worst job I ever had. There were several reasons. First, when I started reviewing the program, I kept finding body parts sticking out of the ground. When I carefully removed the surrounding dirt, I would discover a buried body. In other words, there were a bunch of bum projects buried in the program, many the legacy of the gent I had caused to be fired. Getting rid of those won me few friends in many quarters. Another problem was trying to make a match between the techno-wonks in the JPL divisions and the real needs of our clients, who were agencies such as the EPA and the Dept. of Energy. I had to convince JPL-ers that just because something was technically cute did not make it an effective solution for real world problems. I was fortunate in two-thirds of my program. I got Chris Stevens, one of the best from the Systems Analysis Section, to assume the role of the departed manager of the environmental projects, and from then on I really didn’t have any worries in that area. He had Ph.D from USC in marine environment, and was a really good man. The man handling my systems projects was a hard-working honest guy who I came to like very much. We had a bunch of arguments, some of which I won and some of which I lost, but in the end the program went along fairly well. The third part, technology development, was an endless headache. Here my man was from the

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tech division which had the most interest in fossil energy matters. Unfortunately, he thought his role was to direct as much money as possible to his old division, and he thought all their ideas were great. Unfortunately, the best of the talent in that division worked on space matters, apparently, and the less able hoped to survive on the fossil energy program. He was very restive under my continual probing, and eventually he decided to go back to the division. I was relieved. But even some of the better divisions could drive me crazy. Chris came in with a proposal from one group to use a planetary instrument for a leak detector for the gas company. It was a great idea, and the gas company fell over themselves to buy in. We had made a total of three instruments, one of which we needed to retain for the planetary program. A second one would be modified for field use by the gas company. The third one was on Mars. So it was all go and fully funded. But as the weeks went by, I found that the money was not being spent, and nothing was being done. No amount of prodding yielded results, and finally I decided we would have to give the money back. The troops just had things that interested them more. You can imagine how proud the gas company was of JPL! The sort of problems we had were actually endemic throughout JPL. They had a fundamentally flawed system of management, in my estimation. At Aerospace Corp. the program offices had a wealth of technical talent, and ran the sub-programs hands-on with support from the technical divisions, such as aerodynamics, propulsion, guidance, etc. But at JPL the program people doled money out to the divisions, who took responsibility for sub-systems. Unfortunately they had problems keeping everyone on the same sheet of music. The divisions were dukedoms whose leaders squabbled with each other (in mostly polite ways, of course). The lab director at the time reigned, but did not rule. The consequences of this diffuse system of responsibility is still evident in the problems JPL is having with their Mars program. This continued to be a lousy job, fighting fires and counting beans, and it didn’t solve the salary problem anyway – everyone in the program office was simply given the lab average raise, so I might as well have stayed in the Systems Analysis Section. If we didn’t have internal problems, then our clients could provide more. Working with Rich O’Toole from systems analysis, we got a contract from the State Energy Commission to work on the use of methanol in California. The staff of the Commission had decided that methanol was the wave of the future for California, and they wanted someone to prove it for them. This staff was a sad collection of non-talent. When the organization was formed, some years before, Caltrans was laying off a bunch of engineers. With the rules of civil service, they were able to obtain positions with the Commission. Then, for younger people, they hired a number of graduates of the local state universities, most of whom had taken hybrid curricula such as environmental studies and other topics of the moment. They were sadly lacking in the basics, such as science and economics. In general they knew all the answers, but needed help in proving that their answers were correct. Unfortunately for the people of the state, most of what they knew was wrong. A typical example was their insistence that the State Water Project (a big electric consumer) construct geothermal power plants in the Geysers area. The plants were built, the geothermal resource proved insufficient, and the taxpayer was stuck with losses of hundreds of millions. The same mishaps occurred with some coal plants. As it finally turned out, Rich and company conducted a first rate study, and concluded that methanol was a loser. The Commission staff insisted that they rewrite the report to support their preferred conclusion, and naturally JPL refused to do so. So they refused to pay the bill! NASA was infuriated, as the Commission had recently played the same game with the NASA Ames Laboratory. The result was that NASA issued an edict that none of their labs were to accept any further business with the Energy Commission. That was unprecedented in inter-governmental dealings. Now came along another career diverting opportunity. We had a couple of live-wire program office people who were trying to develop technical projects for the US Army. They had brought in several computer modeling jobs, and then landed a major technical development called ASAS. It was a computer system for integrating a wide variety of intelligence inputs under combat conditions. You must remember that the Army was the original lead agency for JPL, back in WWII, and until NASA was formed after Sputnik. The JPL/Redstone Arsenal response to Sputnik, Explorer I, was the first US success in space. I suppose the Army still harbored warm feelings for the lab. On one of their trips to Washington, the program office guys had a conversation with Army Headquarters staff concerning the Army’s wish to institute a new

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analysis organization (or ‘think tank’) to help them with their work. While different people had different visions, the one that seemed to have the most appeal was modeled on Rand Corp. and its work for the Air Force. Anyway, they indicated that they wanted to be able to move forward on the concept without getting into a big source selection process, and they asked if JPL/Caltech would take on the job. JPL’s usual response to any problem outside the normal course of work was to form a small committee to consider the issues. They intended to do so in this case, and I was informed about what had been asked of us. Because I was the only person at JPL who had worked in such an organization as far as I knew, I offered to join the committee, and my offer was accepted. This sort of work was way outside of any existing capability we had at JPL, and we knew a special approach would be needed. So we came up with a plan of starting into it slowly, giving us time to hire additional staff and to become familiar with the Army’s problems. We developed a manning and financial plan, an organizational plan, and a set of ground rules that would give JPL the independence necessary to carry out work of quality and integrity. If it was to be associated with Caltech and JPL, the issue of academic independence, freedom to publish (within the bounds of security classification) and so forth had to be faced and accepted by the Army. We said we would do the initial staffing out of existing JPL people, and would promptly try to hire appropriate skills from outside. We also said that after a year or two of development, we would search for and hire a person of national reputation to be the permanent Director, and we would find suitable quarters for the project. Anyway, we produced a short report, and took it to JPL management and then to the campus for approval. Professor Murray, who had been the JPL Director for a number of years had returned to the campus, and retired Air Force General Terry Terhune was acting Director. He was a very sound fellow, and offered useful guidance in matters dealing with the military and with internal JPL organization. The report was then taken to the President of Caltech, Murph Goldberger, who also gave it his blessing without talking to other campus officials. (This happened during the Summer, when the faculty tend to be absent.) So the program people took it back to the Army for their consideration. After a remarkably short period of time, the Army Staff said OK, and the ball was back in our court. At this point, JPL offered me the job of interim director, to get things going until a permanent director could be recruited. They didn’t have to ask me twice.

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Period 9 – Arroyo Center @ JPL

Program initiation occurred in the early summer of 1982. I first hurried back to the Pentagon to get acquainted with my opposite numbers on the Army staff. They were having their political battles getting this new notion going. There were plenty of bureaucrats who were threatened by a new outside independent organization. But that was their battle to fight, and I would have my own problems back in Pasadena. What we did agree on a was a small budget for the balance of the fiscal year, and a million dollar class budget for the following year. By July we had the money in hand, which astonished all of us. My job in the first year was to get things going and to produce a detailed development plan which would include all the operating rules and conditions. My closest associate in the Pentagon was LTC Jim Cravens. He was just a wonderful soldier; we got along at once, and became close friends. He ended up as a two-star general, which surprised no one. I won’t even try to recount the day-to-day battles over just about everything. Cravens had a hell of a time fighting off the bureaucrats. Our battle caused me to write an observation which I kept posted on my wall until I retired. It said: SKILLED BUREAUCRATS GENERALLY DO NOT KILL PROGRAMS OR CONCEPTS WITH A BOLD RAPIER THRUST, OR EVEN BY A THOUSAND SURREPTITIOUS CUTS; THE FURROWS DUG BY DRAGGING FEET ARE OFTEN THE ONLY EVIDENCE OF MURDER. M. GOLDSMITH 5/17/83 One such endless squabble that took about a year to settle concerned the name to be given the new child. We tried ‘Center for this or that’, and were told that wouldn’t do, because other places also did this or that. We tried Institute for this or that, and were told by Caltech that there was only one Institute, Caltech. We must have tried twenty names, but all were rejected. Finally I told Cravens that we would have to pick something that meant absolutely nothing, as RAND had done when choosing a project name. I said, let’s call it the Arroyo Center. That had the connotation of JPL (in the Arroyo Seco) and was a center, a place, not a program. I don’t think anyone cared what we called it, as long as it offended no one. So Arroyo Center was accepted and that remains its name till this day. Among the first things I knew that I had to do was get some campus involvement in this thing. The Army wanted it , and at JPL we knew that it would be necessary, for intellectual and political reasons. I think I met with about ten percent (perhaps twenty five members) of the faculty. These were people ranging from David Elliot, a historian who had studied things such as NATO, to Robert Bacher who had been active in matters of national defense from WWII on, through his tenure on the Atomic Energy Commission and beyond. Fortunately I was well acquainted with him since my student days. From some I got polite interest, from others a promise of participation, and from a few some hostility to the notion. They observed that neither JPL or Caltech had any background in such activity, and the work would lie quite outside the Institute’s interests. Others felt differently. There were also rumblings around JPL. It had been called out in our proposal that we would manage things differently from typical JPL programs, with the staffing to be concentrated in a cohesive body of researchers assigned to the Arroyo Center. This meant that the various dukedoms would not be calling the shots. Some accepted the premise, but those who fancied themselves to have a lot to offer to the Army were quite miffed. It is hard to describe how little most of them had to offer. The Army’s problems turned out to have relatively little technical content. I was working out of my office in the Civil Systems area, and it wasn’t until 1983 we got some space in another leased building down in Pasadena, and set up some very pleasant offices. It would have been better to have it on the main campus of JPL, but there simply wasn’t room. JPL couldn’t go to NASA and say they were kicking spacecraft people off the JPL campus to make room for an Army program. So we were

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down with the rest of the civil program offices. At first there was only me and my secretary; after a while some others joined us. Getting an enterprise such as this going required a multitude of activities. Among others, I undertook to visit the heads of the other DoD contract research organizations. These included the Center for Defense Analysis, Aerospace, Rand, and the Center for Naval Analysis. . They were very generous with their time and offered advice, from their perspective, concerning the operating rules and relationships between the sponsor and the Center. I also started to make contacts around the Army, explaining what we were doing and asking for advice on appropriate topics for work. On the inside, I was trying to line up personnel who might take on different tasks. And of course management wanted some kind of oversight of the project, and proposed a committee. They asked Dr. Pickering, the retired Director of JPL who had really gotten it into the space age, to lead it and he agreed. He turned out to be very supportive, but always did things his way. He had excellent access to high level people all over the Army and government, and made several important visits in Washington. That was fine, but he got into a lot of difficulty with the campus members of his committee. They hemmed and hawed, but Pickering wanted to march straight ahead. He wrote a chairman’s report, which infuriated some of the faculty, and eventually Pickering faded away. Sometime that Fall, the new JPL Director came on board. He was General Lew Allen, just retired as Chief of Staff of the Air Force. He had a Ph.D. in physics, and had been deep into intelligence matters. In fact he served a tour as head of the National Security Agency. He had also been appointed as a Vice-President of Caltech by President Goldberger. Within a few days I had met with him. He knew nothing about Caltech or JPL, and some of the early meetings were difficult. For example, when he heard that faulty was miffed with Pickering, he just said that we ought to ignore them. JPL jaws dropped; he simply didn’t understand that the faculty ran Caltech. All this is just to giver a flavor of the sort of things I worked on. They were all administrative and political in nature, and I did no substantive work at all during the period from mid-82 to mid-84. The two things that I saw as vital, aside from developing our client base, were to maintain some kind of relationship with the rest of JPL, and to try to keep the faculty interested and supportive (or non-combative). I had regular meetings with officers all over the Army, and traveled a good deal. We were trying to create connections and to find out what sorts of problems we should work on. At places like the Army War College I found out what real Army hospitality was all about. The Army treats its ‘distinguished visitors’ very nicely indeed. Using personnel we had on board at JPL we got a few studies going, some of which worked out and others that did not. One that did was a study of innovation in the Army. The Army Staff figured that an innovative place like JPL ought to be able to help on that. We did too, and it also turned out that work had profound effects on my own future. We struggled for about a year trying to get a project with part of the Army’s intelligence system. They wanted us to work, but simply couldn’t articulate their desires. Finally a wiser head prevailed and told us to quit fooling with them. We started some work on fitting meteorological information into the intelligence system in a more meaningful way. A project got started (barely) on the use of the GPS system by the Army. We got some visiting academics to work on some Soviet studies. Anyway, the work started slowly and sometimes had its ups and downs. Campus difficulties continued to simmer, but in the Spring of ’83 Lew Allen wanted to press on with recruiting a Director for the Arroyo Center. I don’t think he liked me very well, and was anxious to get someone with whom he was more comfortable. There had been a small faculty advisory committee appointed, but Allen decided not to involve them in the search. I was active in seeking out candidates, and participated in interviewing, and in the end we were turned down by two of the three finalists on our short list. Allen and President Goldberger finally offered the job to Dick Montgomery, a Caltech Ph.D who had worked at Boeing for many years, and then held a high level job in Defense Research and Engineering. At this time he was near retirement age, and working at a small technical firm closely associated with the nuclear mafia. He was also Chairman of the Army Science Board, a large and unwieldy bunch of civilian advisors. Dick was reluctant to take the job, and only did so after being promised great independence by both Murph and Allen. He also got assurances from the Army that the very decent ground rules we had negotiated would be honored.

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Dick came on board in the Fall, and it took almost no time before things started to deteriorate. First he announced that we were going to have nothing to do with the administrative structure of JPL, nor were we going to use any of their people unless they wanted to transfer to his separate organization. Except for his reporting to Allen, and having the contract money come through NASA, we would be a free-standing organization. He got rid of the very experienced JPL administrator I had recruited, and got a fellow who would do his bidding without question. He made his disdain for the whole JPL organization very clear. I had some interesting calls from senior JPL managers about all this, and they were infuriated. The less than plush quarters available to us would not do, and we spent a lot of time touring new office space being built on Lake Street. It was clear to me that we were courting disaster, but Dick became quite irritated with my objections, and I was soon relegated to be one of three Deputy Directors and I knew my title meant nothing. Now, JPL/Caltech is a closely knit sort of thing. Our senior managers and Caltech faculty often lived close to one another and had social contact. The concerns our managers had were being shared with faculty, and just before Christmas there was a faculty meeting in which President Goldberg was rather roughly treated. It turned out that the faculty had been becoming more and more disenchanted with him over campus matters, and this gave them an opportunity to express their feelings. Clearly Murph had made his original decision to accept the Arroyo Center without consulting faculty, and he had done the same thing about making Allen a VP of the Institute, and he was roasted on both matters. The faculty appointed their own committee to look into all this. In January 1984, they met again, and reported their findings and recommendations to the faculty. Basically they said that this sort of work was well outside JPL’s expertise, thus could not be counted on to supervise it; that the faculty had no experience in policy analysis; and that the whole thing did not belong at Caltech. They said that Caltech/JPL should discharge its promised obligation, to get this thing going, and then it should go elsewhere. Now isn’t that a fine kettle of fish! There was no doubt that Murph would have to follow the recommendation. I have no idea how Murph or Allen reacted personally to the decision by the faculty, but Montgomery was of course insulted and dismayed. Murph communicated the Caltech position to the Army Secretariat, and the Army was more understanding than I thought they might be. They made no recriminations, and took the position that they would transfer Arroyo to some other organization as soon as it could be arranged, not sometime off in the future. Obviously that put all our recruiting activity and a lot of the study activity in limbo. Montgomery started a frantic activity of trying to find a home for the Center. First I think he floated the idea of having it an independent organization, but the Army was having none of that. Such a thing is far too difficult politically, and it would be very expensive. He called the likely outfits, but was getting no takers. This whole process left me in quite a pickle. There was no way I was going to move to some outfit, somewhere, and work for Dick. Meanwhile, all this Arroyo hassle had left a very bad taste at JPL, and as the former chief protagonist I doubted if I could ever mend fences and resume other activities there. This was the first time I ever seriously prepared a resume, and because it summarizes my experience I include it in the loose-leaf archive papers. Meanwhile, the Army was doing its own thinking about the problem. Actually I had asked them once when we were talking things over, why they had not simply gone to a place like Rand in the first place. Their reply at the time was that Rand was too Blue, meaning it was too closely associated with the Air Force. But now the Chiefs of Staff of the Army and Air Force had gotten together and promised the DoD that they were going to do a lot of joint planning, etc. Now the notion of having Arroyo at Rand was a perfectly acceptable thing, and they decided to make it happen. And they didn’t ask Montgomery about it or even tell him for a while after they made the decision. He was really angry when he found out. We had a nasty confrontation after I heard rumors that this was going to happen, and called an old friend, a VP, at Rand to make inquiries about the situation. Montgomery took this as some sort of plotting behind his back. It had been clear, of course, that Montgomery was not going to be welcome at Rand, because he wanted to be an independent operator, and that wasn’t acceptable at Rand. In fact, as the process of effecting the transfer moved forward, Dick got into a nasty name-calling encounter in a phone call with the Rand president, Don Rice. It was a call made on Dick’s speaker phone with several of us in the room. I guarantee he was persona non grata there. What Rand proposed to do was take over the contract from JPL via an exchange of funds, and then be in charge from the beginning of the fiscal year. They would make an offer to any JPL personnel presently

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working in the Center, and the actual transfer to Rand employment could take place as late as the first of the calendar year for those accepting. This possibility offered me a way to go that was very appealing. Because I was having less and less to do with Arroyo management, I had taken up work on a particular project and was enjoying that more then the hassling over politics and administration. I interviewed with the new Rand director of the Arroyo Center, Steve Drezner, and found him to be a very pleasant and capable person. I had talked to him about a year before, when he had been the director of the Air Force work at Rand. My concern with going back to Rand was that we were living in Pasadena, and Brita had a wonderful job east of town. To move out west, to Santa Monica, was out of the question for us, and I wasn’t looking forward to that miserable commute. So we negotiated. Drezner at once offered to let me work a four day week. I still wasn’t happy with the drive, and he knew that other JPL people were going to have the same problem. He offered another sweetener. Rand had been buying other property in the neighborhood with an eye to building a new complex. One property they owned was a run-down apartment building that they used to house long-term visitors to Rand. He offered me the use of an apartment rent-free so that I could stay there during the week as I wished. That did the deal. I agreed to come down as of January 1, 1985. According to the rules, I carried with me my old Rand seniority (as far as benefits were concerned) from my previous tour there. My intention was to work the four day week, and stay over two nights each week, cutting my commute to twice a week. Additionally, I knew I’d be travelling quite a bit, further reducing the commuting time. Steve seemed pleased to have me join up, and I think that Rand treated me very well in this transfer.

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Period 10 – Arroyo Center –Rand

Now I have to step back a bit to set the background for what became the thrust of my work at Rand. In 1983, we had undertaken a study of innovation in the Army at the request of one of the Deputy Chiefs of Staff, LTG Merryman. Roger Bourke, my old section chief, ran the study. One of the workers was Dick Davies, a most interesting character. He was a veteran of over fifty missions over Germany in WWII (as a navigator), and was a physicist at JPL who was a bit at loose ends. He knew some of the staff who worked out at Goldstone tracking station, which was on the west side of Ft. Irwin, north of Barstow. They had observed that Ft. Irwin had been re-activated, and that the Army was conducting major maneuvers out there. In fact, they would go up on the hills and watch what was going on. Because Goldstone was on the post, they had access to the cantonment, and they snooped around, finding that this was a very innovative new place for training, using lasers, computers, and seemed to be a very interesting operation. It was called the National Training Center. With this new charter to investigate innovation in the Army, Dick insinuated himself into the system and started going out into the field with the NTC staff. After he had been out a few times, he insisted that I come out to visit the post. I did so and was very impressed with it all. I certainly encouraged Dick and a few of his colleagues to continue to learn about the operation, as it gave us a real chance to learn what the fighting part of the Army was all about. When the final briefing of the innovation study was given to Gen. Merryman, he observed that while the NTC was very innovative, and the units learned a great deal, the lessons learned out there were not being captured by the Army. We had encountered that theme before in other places. We were quite interested in doing more at NTC, and he encouraged us to do so. In fact, he said he would get us set up with appropriate offices to have both sponsorship and access. So a new project was born, to determine how the Army could better learn the lessons taught by exercises at NTC. By this time I recognized that the administrative and management functions of the Arroyo Center were going to be done mostly by others, so I took this project under my wing. While Dick devoted himself to observations, I started out on a round of visits to different Army agencies that had an interest in the NTC. In order to operate out there, we had to have a very well defined sponsor relationship, from an office with enough clout to see that we got the information we needed. I will not bore the reader with all the difficulties this entailed. A major problem was that even within the Army many changes were occurring with organizations concerned with the NTC. It happened several times that I would meet with people who were in charge of aspects of the NTC, come to an agreement, and within weeks find that they had been reorganized out of the loop. All this was happening while we were still located at JPL. What we finally were able to establish as the goal of the project was to investigate what mechanisms presently existed in the Army to capture the ‘lessons learned’ at NTC, and to recommend how they might be made more effective, and if additional mechanisms were needed. To do that it was agreed that we first would have to thoroughly understand how the training worked at Ft. Irwin. We had permission to follow two Army units through the whole process, starting with their pre-rotation briefings and train-up, and ending with the processes they used to arrive at a remedial training program after their NTC experience. These substantive activities began in the Summer and Fall of 1984, but we had been visiting the NTC on an occasional basis throughout the year. Before going on with the progress of our project, I have to explain what the NTC is and how it works. The motive for establishing this very expensive operation was based on the observation that in most wars, the initial engagements by inexperienced units resulted in high casualty rates. These rates dropped markedly as units or individuals became experienced. For example, new pilots experience heavy casualties in their first air battles. Subsequently the attrition rates drop sharply. This fact was the motivation for the creation of the Navy’s fighter pilot school ‘Top Gun’, where the object is to create realistic air battle situations under the eyes of experienced instructors aided by accurate instrumentation. The Air Force also created such a program, called ‘Red Flag’, operated from Nellis Air Force Base. A very smart general, Paul Gorman, saw the same requirement for the Army.

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The Army had several problems in training units (not individual training, at which they were quite good). Training at the platoon level was no problem, as a tank platoon, for example, consists of four tanks, and training the crews to work together is simply an extension of individual training. Companies (three platoons) are more problematic, but the real problem occurs with battalions, with four companies. First, this is the lowest level at which so-called combined arms come into play. In the heavy forces, tanks must operate with infantry, artillery, intelligence systems, combat engineers, plus all the logistic, medical, and maintenance elements. Second, none of the existing Army posts have sufficient space to support the fast moving maneuvers called for by modern war. So when the battalions trained, they were constricted to unrealistic areas, had to practice against sister units which were no better then themselves, were instructed by personnel no more experienced than themselves, and had no objective means of judging outcomes. It was bang-bang, you’re dead kinds of games refereed by amateurs. Larger units such as brigades were even worse off. Gorman conceived of developing a training center of sufficient size, and to make it a permanent institution, with instrumentation, trained instructors, and a professional opposing force. The planning started in the late ‘70s, and the NTC opened for business in 1982. Here is the way it works. Units are designated for training by brigades, and each brigade deploys to the NTC with two (or sometimes three) maneuver battalions, a battalion of artillery, a helicopter squadron, a military intelligence company, a chemical company, a forward support battalion, military police, and all the other elements of a combined arms unit. Between 3500 and 5000 soldiers are involved. The soldiers arrive by commercial airlift, and most of their wheeled vehicles arrive by rail. Most of the tracked vehicles are drawn from the motor pools at the NTC, just as it would be if a unit fell in on pre-positioned equipment overseas. They have about three days at NTC to get their equipment together and be briefed on their mission. They are presented with a scenario where an ally of the USA, the country of Mojave, has been threatened or invaded by their neighbor Krasnovia. (Other scenarios are also played.) The Krasnovians utilize Russian equipment and have been trained according to Russian doctrine. The training unit, called the BLUFOR, prepares to move into the field for fourteen days of maneuver training. During this time they are in strictly tactical configuration. Their opponents are called the OPFOR. It is made up of two US Army battalions who use American equipment visually modified to resemble typical Russian export equipment. Most of the tracks are obsolete Sheridan reconnaissance tanks made to look like T-80 tanks and BMP-2 infantry fighting vehicles. HMMWVs are disguised as BRDM vehicles used as recon cars, missile launchers, chemical trucks, and so forth. The OPFOR has UH-1 helicopters modified to resemble Hind attack aircraft. The OPFOR has signals intelligence, direction finding equipment, radars, and all the other elements necessary to replicate a Motorized Rifle Regiment. The soldiers have the NTC as their regular assignment, serving for two to four years at Ft. Irwin. They are in the field about 150 days each year, so they become very good at their job. Without doubt they are the most experienced combat soldiers in the world at this time. The instructors are called observer/controllers, or O/Cs. There is an O/C for every unit, down to the platoon level. They are non-coms and officers who have all led the class of unit they are working with. They live in the field near their units for the whole rotation. The O/Cs are organized into teams, according to company and battalion, and operate as a team at all times. They were given names such as Scorpions, Cobras, etc. These are the people. The instrumentation is no less remarkable. Battle casualties are assessed by a system called MILES. Every weapon, from tank guns down to rifles, BLUFOR or OPFOR, is equipped with a laser designator which puts out a coded IR laser beam whenever the weapon is fired. Each soldier wears a harness on his body and helmet carrying laser receivers. If hit, your alarm goes off and you must quiet it by removing a key from your weapon (which inactivates it) and turning off the alarm. Likewise, vehicles when hit put out a warning tone in the intercom system, the firing system is turned off, and a strobe light on the top is activated. Things are coded so that a rifle cannot kill a tank, for example, and there are probabilities of kill built into the system. Sometimes you are hit but do not die. Soldiers when hit look at their casualty card, issued to them. Sometimes they are killed, but other times they are wounded, and the card calls out the nature of their wounds. The rifles and machine guns fire blanks, and the heavy guns and missile launchers fire pyrotechnic simulators to provide a firing signature. Artillery strikes are replicated with various forms of pyrotechnic simulators, fired or thrown by O/Cs and special fire markers. Mines are

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replicated by inert forms, and gas is often replicated by tear gas. Protective gear must be worn and employed properly, or the O/Cs assess casualties as appropriate. All of the vehicles are instrumented with a position-location system which operates by radio tri-lateration. Some dismounted units also carry manpacks with the same sorts of transponder. This information is transmitted to a central facility, popularly known as the Star Wars building. There is a work room devoted to each of the battalions there, and equipped with work stations which can display a variety of map presentations, and can show the location of all the instrumented units. The firing and hit information from the instrumented vehicles is also reported. Analysts are assigned to each company and other parts of each unit, and can follow the progress of the battle on the monitors. The analysts are in constant communication (via radio) with their opposite number O/C in the field. Between them they have a very accurate picture of what is taking place. This instrument information is recorded for subsequent use in the post-battle analysis. Up to forty of the radio command nets of the BLUFOR units can also be listened to and recorded. The two week scenario is played out as a series of engagements and exercises that have doctrinal designations. These include movement-to-contact, hasty attack, hasty defense, deliberate attack, defend in sector, road march, etc. The daily scenarios are based on the overall mission, and are arranged so that one naturally follows from the last. The NTC Operations Group acts as the parent division, handing down orders and intel to the training brigade. The brigade in its turn must prepare orders for its subordinate units. Each day there is either a battle, or preparation for battle (preparing mine fields, digging emplacements, performing reconnaissance, doing maintenance). The units must perform all their real world maintenance and logistics, bringing up water, food, fuel, supplies. If they have not provided enough fuel, their vehicles cannot move. Additionally they must provide ammunition, although this is notional. But if sufficient ammo trucks do not arrive with sufficient crew to unload ammo, the troops cannot shoot. I have seen this happen many times. All the casualties from the previous battle had to be treated appropriately by medics in the field, or the soldiers are deemed to have ‘died of wounds’. All ‘fatalities’ must be ‘replaced’ by going through the appropriate requisition paper drill. Only then are the ‘dead’ resurrected for further training. What I am saying is that all elements of war have to be included in as realistic manner as possible. And while this bustle of activity is going on, the leaders have to be doing their planning and orders preparation. As a battle draws to its conclusion, orders start coming down for the next mission. Battles are concluded with such orders as ‘consolidate on the objective’, or ‘prepare defensive positions. Almost immediately the After-Action Review process begins. First the company team and platoon O/Cs meet with their counterpart leaders and go through events from their perspective. This is done in the field without instrumentation support. A few hours after the battle, the battalion AARs take place in mobile, expandable vans brought out to the field. These vans have video projection equipment, and seating for 25 or 30 people. The participants, which include all the major players in the battalion, are there with the senior O/C for the battalion. The AAR reviews the orders and the plan. The critical events of the battle are reviewed, usually by the Socratic method, where the O/C asks questions to elucidate understanding by the participants. Critical points are illustrated by projecting images from the instrumentation screens, and significant excerpts from the recordings of the command nets can be played. Thus the sometimes faulty understanding, or faulty memory of the commanders can be exposed. It is an unusually frank confrontation of the facts, almost unprecedented among the armies of the world. The AARs are remarkable learning experiences. They are limited to two hours in length, and the troops then return to their duties. Something additional is done after the end of the rotation. The Operations group gathers up the statistics for each battle, and the staff prepares summaries of each battle from the notes of the O/Cs. This yields a telephone book sized compendium which is sent to the training unit for their use. These are called ‘take-home packages’. After speaking to many units as time went on, we found that they made no use of these packages for training purposes. At some point in the rotation, the units move from the force-on-force area to a live fire area. Here the MILES is replaced by live ammo, and the OPFOR is replaced with huge arrays of remotely actuated targets, which rise from the ground and appear as advancing enemy combat units. Again, the scenarios are carefully crafted, and everything takes place under the eye of the O/Cs. Certain constraints are put on the maneuvers for safety reasons, but all weapons are used, including tank guns, infantry weapons, artillery, and aircraft. There is usually a day defense, a night defense, and a movement-to-contact. These are very

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large scale live fire exercises, and are most interesting to watch. The night engagements are particularly spectacular. As in all the exercises, the Air Force participates by providing close support sorties to both the BLUFOR and OPFOR. Aircraft early warning systems are in place, and anti-aircraft weapons are simulated. The aircraft must use evasive tactics, IR flares to confuse guided weapons, and other tactics to make the simulation as real as possible. Unfortunately the kill assessments on aircraft are subjective. All this is to give you some idea of what the NTC is all about, because it became the sole focus of my work from 1984 until I retired. To return to that narrative, Dick Davies and I started to accompany the O/Cs on a regular basis. We would go into the field for period of two or three, or sometimes up to five or six days. We would live out there with them, eating whatever they did and sleeping on the ground. They used jeeps at that time, and the jeep was our home. I often rode with an O/C named Tony Cerri, whose job was to observe the activity of the operations officer (S-3) in the infantry battalions. This gave me a good overview of the planning and conduct of the battles. The teams were very accommodating in letting me watch the AARs. We also often watched a battle from the Star Wars building, to get that perspective. At other times, we accompanied the OPFOR, sometimes watching from a vantage point with staff officers, and other times riding in a tank or BMP. It was hard work, but very exciting. The NTC was not without its dangers. On an early rotation I was out with Tony Cerri looking at a battalion of the National Guard. Well before dawn, before the first battle, a call came over the net that a scout track had turned over, with major injuries. I was near the commanding officer, LTC Davis, when the call came in. He appeared absolutely stricken. Tony quickly found out why. The Colonel had a son who was a Cadet, and he had brought him out on the rotation as a member of the battalion. He was assigned to the scouts, and as it turned out, it was Cadet Davis who had been killed. Tony drew the job of taking LTC Davis back to the post (with me in the back of the jeep), where he looked after his son. The father had to take him back home, of course. What a horror! But the measure of the man was that by the end of the rotation he was back to lead his troops. Another terrible event out there has never left my memory. Major Frank King was leader of the Dragons, the O/Cs that ran live fire. He wanted me to see the live fire exercise and offered to take me along with him during a rotation. It was sort of unheard of for an O/C team leader to have a straphanger, but there I was. It was Winter, and the live fire area is at a higher elevation than most of the post. I have never been colder in my life. The days were frigid, driving in a jeep with no windshield, but the nights were worse. Anyway, the first exercise was a day defense. I was sitting in the jeep with Frank just as the first targets started coming up down-range. Just then my ears were assaulted by the damndest ripping sound, and I lifted out of my seat. I looked up to see an A-10 Warthog which had just fired its GAU-8 automatic cannon. Then he went down-range and released a bomb. The arty then started firing, well behind us, and you could hear the shells give a warbling whoosh as they went overhead. Soon all the weapons were firing at the approaching targets, and it was pretty exciting to watch. That night, the same defensive battle was fought again, and this time you could see the tracers going down range. The machine guns laid out streams of bullets sort of lazily floating down-range, while the tank main gun bullets went past them as if they were standing still. Again, very exciting. During these defenses, safety could be insured in a pretty controlled way, as the units were limited in their maneuver. But the third battle, a movement-to-contact, was different. Here the outfit moved over about twenty kilometers, while targets appeared here and there under the control of the O/Cs. We were alongside the lead elements during most of this. There was a lot of gas discharged, and a lot of it (which is really a very fine powder) settled into the dust. Then when we would drive over it, it would get stirred up and the stuff really had a bite. Of course when we were actually in clouds of it, and this happened quite often at NTC, we would all have to mask up. Anyway, it seemed to be a pretty hazardous undertaking, in spite of all the care exercised by the O/Cs. I was pretty impressed by it all, although I have never felt that the live fire has the training value of the force-on-force. However, experienced Army leaders disagree. But in any case, and to the point of this

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yarn, about two months later Frank King was killed, hit by a 50 caliber machine gun bullet that nearly cut him in half. A plaque on the billeting office building on the post was placed in his memory. This was not the last encounter with tragedy I would have while at the NTC. Colonel ‘Grizzly’ Hamby was the commander of the OPFOR, and an officer beloved by his troops. I often rode with one of his staff officers to watch battles from the OPFOR viewpoint, and met him frequently out in the field. He offered to have me ride with him anytime I wished, but I usually was able to ride with other junior officers, as I felt it a bit of imposition to ride with senior leaders. Anyway, one chilly, windy day I was out there and found that my ride for the next day had disappeared. I had looked around for another way out, but found nothing, so I resolved on asking Col. Hamby for a ride. I was waiting around his headquarters about 1800 hours when he arrived, looking dirty, tired, and pre-occupied. I just said hello and moved on – he didn’t need a visitor in his life just then. The next morning, well before dawn, his driver was moving slowly up one of the major unpaved routes into the Granite Mountains when the jeep moved toward the side of the trail and overturned onto its right side. The jeeps had no doors or roll bars, and Hamby was crushed by the radio rack on the right rear of the jeep, and died of suffocation. The thought has always haunted me – what if I had gone along? Perhaps I would have been seriously injured also, but I doubt it, sitting between the radios in the back. But perhaps with the two of us, me and the driver, we might have been able to lift the jeep. Another example of the fickle finger of fate. Dick and I also started visiting other installations, such as the branch schools (i.e. Artillery, Armor, etc.) Here we could watch the methods used for individual training, and unit training among the resident forces. It also gave us a chance to meet with the instructors and doctrine writers. The Army was contemplating setting up a training center similar to the NTC in Germany, at a place called Hohenfels. In early 1985 Dick and I went to Germany to visit the live fire training grounds at Graefenwohr and the maneuver area at Hohenfels. It was there that I first met (then) BG Fred Franks, who later became the commander of VII Corps in the Gulf War. That was the unit that carried the main thrust of our attack. That was my first trip to Europe. I went to Germany twice more while working on the NTC project. While we were learning about the Army at a great pace during the Summer of 1985, Dick became restive with things at Rand. He had expected that as he learned and came to conclusions about the Army’s problems, he would just be able to write a letter to the Army with the Rand imprimatur giving his recommendations. Well, that isn’t the way Rand works. They have a rather academic approach to things, and don’t toss off casual recommendations. Anyway, he decided that he would go back to JPL and put his new-found knowledge to work on the battle simulations that were being developed there for the Army. At this point I wanted to get a product written up and delivered to the Army, so I started writing, while continuing my field observations. At this time I was still following our original mission plan of determining how the Army might best institutionalize the lessons that the units learned out at NTC. While I thought that what we had to offer was useful, it ran into problems both in the Army and at Rand. No matter what I suggested in the text, when the Army people looked at it they would say – ‘Oh, we are planning a new organization to do just that’. Or, we don’t have to do that because we are going to have people from the schools go out to perform that function. Or some other waffle. Now as it turned out none of their solutions for the problem ever worked, but they didn’t want Rand coming in a mucking up their plans. At Rand there was also dissatisfaction. My boss, Bernie Rostker, felt that the Army didn’t even know how to really identify the problems they were having, and we should set up a methodology for them to do so. The institutionalization problem he felt was secondary. I was taken aback by that, as he was suggesting that we, Rand, should go out and analyze combat problems and in so doing create a methodology for others to follow. In spite of my misgivings, I took up that new line of attack. As it turned out, Bernie was quite right. I finished up the paper on capturing lessons, and published it as a working draft. I wanted to make it more widely available as a regular report, but first I wanted to run it by the NTC to be sure it didn’t offend their sensibilities. The officer I decided to consult was the new chief of the operations group (COG), a young Colonel I had met earlier in the Pentagon named Wes Clark. He is later became the four star commander of NATO. He is a very bright and thoughtful officer (first in his class at West Point and a Rhodes scholar).

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His view was that the paper would do no good and should not be distributed. I deferred to his judgement. A copy of the paper is in my file of NTC documents. Toward the end of 1985, a new NTC-oriented problem was identified. Another party at Rand had taken on a job from the Army of looking at fratricide (friendly fire). They had first identified the problem of air defense forces shooting at and killing both helicopters and fast movers (Air Force aircraft). They took on that aspect of fratricide because they felt that methods they had developed for examining Air Force problems would be applicable. But Bernie asked me if fratricide occurred at the NTC. Because of the lack of instrumentation of the aircraft, there was only subjective information on that part of the problem. We were sure it occurred, but there was no source of data. But I told him that ground-to-ground fratricide was a common occurrence. He asked if I could obtain actual data on the level and nature of the problem. So I went out to the NTC and started asking questions about some of the data logs. First I found that the recorded instances of fratricidal vehicle kills could be identified from the computer logs, kept for each battle. I also found that the times and locations of the kills were called out, so I could replay the instrumented record of the battle and actual see where the players were when the kill occurred, and what the general circumstances might be. In spite of the shortcomings of the instrumentation, I was quite sure that valid conclusions could be drawn. I looked at a large number of battles, toted up the scores, and categorized the circumstances of the kills. From this I was able to draw some interesting conclusions. It turns out that among some high-ranking and influential officers, there was a desire to equip our fighting vehicles with identification friend-or-foe (IFF) devices as are used on our combat airplanes. This would be an expensive program, of course. But the data showed that in only a small fraction of fratricides was an IFF really necessary to avoid the problem In most cases, the units were showing a lack of knowledge of where they were, and where their sister units were located. What one really needed to avoid fratricide was a position/location system which would have the additional and very substantial benefit of improving maneuver efficiency. Having found very useful results from the direct fire study, I turned to the artillery (indirect fire), for I knew that there were a significant number of fratricidal events from that also. You see, the artillery batteries do not see their targets; they are simply given geographic grid locations to fire on. I found that the fire support people in the Star Wars building kept paper logs of firing events, and the fire events could also be observed on the instrumentation recordings. So I was able to determine the frequency of fratricide in the indirect fire case also. Of equal importance, my data also showed a much less than expected effectiveness of the BLUFOR artillery fires at NTC. I wrote up these fratricide results and also prepared a briefing. Of course I drove the whole thing by the staff at NTC to be sure I had not misunderstood what the data had suggested. I was pretty nervous about taking these results to the appropriate headquarters offices; the idea of a civilian telling the Army how it was doing out on the battlefield was unsettling. However, Rand had formed an advisory group of retired officers and other knowledgeable people, and it was decided that they ought to hear about this work. The group included General Paul Gorman, the man who had come up with and pushed the NTC concept. No better person could be found to make a judgement on our effort. We had the meeting back in Washington, and Gorman thought it was just fine. He agreed with the findings and the conclusions, and also felt that this was the way the experience of the NTC should be used by the Army. We published the paper without further ado. A copy is in my report file. I believe that this is the first time anyone had studied numerical data from the NTC. Bernie and I still had differences of opinion about how work at NTC should be done. He thought that ‘bouncing around in jeeps’ was not the way, but that we should rely on the instrumented data. My view was that the instrumentation simply didn’t capture the most important parts of the battle, such as the planning process, the use of intel, the methods of fire control, etc,etc. I felt that the research would require a continuing field presence. Bernie continued to be skeptical, and said we ought to develop a methodology to follow. He was convinced that Rand had to uncover the lessons out at NTC, and had to support any findings with data. But he first wanted to be able to show a methodology.

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We now set to work at Rand to develop a methodology for analyzing NTC battle results in a systematic way. Bernie was very impressed with the instrumented data, and wanted to build a replay capability at Rand. I thought the recorded data was of limited utility, but we all thought that the replay of battle could be melded into simulation programs to explore alternate outcomes. It was a long shot, but we got the NTC software developers at SAI to write us software meant to run on our Sun workstations. It worked, but not very well and never was really useful. Bernie got a few Rand old hands to help with the methodology development. Indeed the effort proved useful as it codified the information available so others at Rand could easily understand what sorts of data were available out there. We published that paper as an analytical plan in the middle of 1986, and a copy is in the file. I found that the old hands agreed with me that field work was very necessary, and that issue faded away with the passage of time. I found it quite amazing that the Army had no organized approach to drawing out the long term lessons from the NTC. Fairly early in the game they archived the instrument recordings up at the Army Research Institute at Monterey. Other paper records, such as the take home packages were also kept there, with some other miscellaneous items. For a short while, owing to the insistence of General Max Thurman, the branch schools were required to send officers there for a course in how to access the archives. I also took that course. However, the schools never could figure out what to do with the information. This mindless exercise went on as long as General Thurman was in charge – but no longer. That simply confirmed my belief in the limitations of the electronic data. There had been an officer from Ft. Leavenworth (the Command and General Staff College) assigned temporarily to Ft. Irwin to consider lessons learned. His name was LTC Jim Crowley, and we became fast friends. Our friendship continues to this day, and we and our wives visit together when we can (they live near Atlanta). He is presently a full time consultant for Rand. But Jim was always under the gun to deliver comments on this or that, and never was able to mount a body of coherent research. It is also true that Army officers are trained to lead troops and run an Army. Research is not one of their chosen topics of study. It is not too surprising that the Army really didn’t know how to go about the problem, in spite of the fact that they set up a Center for Army Lessons Learned (CALL) at Ft. Leavenworth. They conducted a lot of ‘activity’, but really never did much to learn lessons. That body became the sponsor for our work at NTC, and eventually we came up with a way to do business with them that was marginally satisfactory. They helped me very little, and hindered me very often. Their problem was the one common to bureaucracy. Avoid all criticism. Thus any finding that finds fault can lead to criticism and controversy. That’s a no-no. A source of criticism is also not having full control over all actions. So a loose cannon like a crazy Rand researcher is a potential problem. Keep control. And as long as you can show that your people are bustling about, working hard, no one notices that you produce nothing. After the fratricide exercise and the outlining of the analytical plan, I resolved to try one of the more sweeping problems that had become evident at NTC. Dick Davies had first focussed attention on the importance to the OPFOR of their reconnaissance efforts. In comparison we noted that the BLUFOR seemed to pay less attention to intelligence, and we came to believe that the lack of success of BLUFOR often had its root in the absence of good intel. I decided to study the work of the battalion scouts, which were a prime source of intel at that level, and the only source under the control of the battalion. All other intel assets were the domain of the brigade, division, or higher. This study proved to be the real watershed in our NTC work, as it was here that our actual working methodology was developed, as well as the process for communicating (selling, if you like) the results to the parts of the Army that could do something about the problems uncovered. Also by this time I had come to the conclusion that the problems in the Army that were manifest at the NTC were people problems. Technology played a part, of course, but the officer corps was key to what happened. After all, they were trained by other officers, using doctrine written by other officers, according to a system that was created by officers. Therefore if I was to understand what was going on, I had to be able to get inside their heads, to know what they knew, and to know what motivated them. So I decided on a personal program of total immersion. I would not work on other Army studies, only my own, and I would study what the officers studied, and learn as much as I could about their lives. I studied military history, read more doctrine than most officers, followed the Army professional journals (of which there are quite a few), and spent as much time visiting Army installations as I could manage. Soldiers were always willing to share their thoughts with me, and I could try notions out on them. I think my total immersion

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yielded good results, and enabled me to understand why the otherwise inexplicable might happen. I also made a lot of friends. For the scouting study, the first analysis I did was of the battle results reported in the take-home packages. We had about a years worth available, representing over twenty battalions and over one hundred battles. For most of them I could deduce whether the BLUFOR had won or lost, and whether they had good intel or not. I then was able to easily show that there was a strong correlation between successful reconnaissance and a successful attack. The logical mind might hypothesize that well trained units did good recon, and could also fight well, thus there might be no correlation. So I reasoned further that one unit that always fought well was the OPFOR. They also did recon well. So I looked at their attacks, and found that in the few cases where their recon failed, their attack also failed. Now this was getting to be hard fact! I immediately tried out these results on the OPFOR, and their leaders agreed, ruefully, that it was true. So now I had a sound basis for pursuing recon as an essential element of success. The next step was finding out why the BLUFOR recon often didn’t work. I started by riding along with the O/Cs who accompanied the battalion scouts. The instrumentation archives were worthless for studying these events, as recording was not carried out at night owing to limitations of disc space. Thus I had to watch in real time, and you learned more in the field than you could watching a screen. I spent a lot of nights chasing the scouts with the O/Cs, with whom I became quite close. Many things became clear. The scouts were given inadequate guidance by their leaders; they used their time badly; they failed to use stealth, and were caught by OPFOR patrols; they had inadequate night vision equipment; they were often lost; they didn’t know what to look for anyway. The litany of grief goes on and on – they were hopeless. To look at the other side of the coin, I interspersed my BLUFOR rides with rides with the OPFOR. Here I actually rode in the OPFOR vehicles, of course, and was just one of the crew. On occasion I even did some sneaky-peekie as a member of the team. Was it fun? Usually, but not always. If your vehicle got caught and killed early in the evening, you had a long boring night out in the desert. But sometimes we would get way in the rear of the BLUFOR, report on everything, call artillery during the battle, and toward the end the command would release us to raise hell among the supply trains. They died in droves! With this activity I came to understand what was happening with the scouts and some of the other intel assets, such as the ground radars. But understanding would not cut it. I needed numerical results to prove conclusively what was happening. The instruments would yield none of this. I needed information that only the O/Cs could generate. Now they kept notes, for purposes of their own AARs. I noticed that they were either kept in small notebooks, or on index cards. I decided that the only way I could expect them to take data for me was if I asked questions that could be answered with a check-mark, or a number, or a word, and that the questions and the answers had to fit on an index card that would fit in a BDU (battle dress uniform) pocket. In order for the questions and the answers to be universally understood, they had to be cast in doctrinal terms. That is, I had to ask things that showed how the troops were following the doctrinal manuals that dealt with recon. You must understand that everything that people do in the Army is covered by doctrine, in the form of hundreds of manuals. So I came up with twenty or thirty key questions covering the scout elements, and I took these questions to the scout O/Cs for review. I wanted them to be accurately stated, and complete, and something they could reasonably answer. They were endlessly cooperative in helping me with this task. I knew we had gotten to the correct questions when the O/Cs said that these were the questions they should be answering after every battle for their own AAR purposes. It was in activities like these that I came to understand how deeply these officers cared about their Army and how selfless they were in sharing their time and knowledge. So began our program of ‘Rand Data Cards’. The O/Cs dutifully filled them out over many months, and they would drop off the completed cards at a new office that had been established in the Operations Group. This became the Lynx Team (all O/C teams had the name of an animal, such as Scorpion, or Eagle, or Raven, or Cobra, or some such). The Lynx team held a few officers assigned from the CALL at Ft. Leavenworth, and this office became my home away from home at the NTC. They provided me with a lot of services, and we did a few things for them. In the early days computers were in short supply at NTC, so

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I brought a Rand computer out, ostensibly for my use, but actually to be used by the team. Anyway, the cards were collected and they would either mail them to me or I would pick them up when I went out. After we collected about eight or ten months worth of data, a Rand statistician named Jim Hodges put them in a data base that allowed us to do a lot of cross-correlations. We made many interesting discoveries, and I will not try to relate them all here. We found that the scouts generally failed to carry out their doctrinal tasks. The battalion staff generally did not work out a recon plan. The scout’s orders were generally issued much too late. The scout failed to dismount from their vehicles and walk to preserve stealth. And on the list went. It was really pretty sad, but we had hard numbers to prove that all these deficiencies were found in most units. It was not that a few groups of men had not trained properly; it was that these failings were almost universal and represented a failure of the system. Now I set to work to find out what the failings might be. With the insights we had gained from data and observations, I read and re-read the doctrinal manuals. The first great error jumped out at once. The scout platoon manual had been written to apply to all scout platoons, whether they be battalion scouts or cavalry scouts. Now cavalry scout platoons are fighting units, and the manual was geared toward them. Why? It was written by the cavalry branch of the armor school. I made the armor school at Ft. Knox one of my first stops. There I met a young Major, John Rosenberger. He was charged with rewriting that manual, as well as contributing to others. We talked a lot, and he seemed to take note of what we found. In any case, the next version of that manual specifically called out the differences between cavalry and battalion scouts. I am happy to say that Rosey became the commander of the OPFOR out at NTC, and we remain good friends. The next thing I did down at Ft. Knox was find out what training the scout platoon leaders received in their basic armor course. I went through the program of instruction (POI) line by line, and counted up the hours. The answer was that they received almost no instruction in scouting. With this, I went back to Rand, and based on the data we had on scouting failure, I wrote a suggested POI for a scout leader’s course, to be given when an officer or non-com had been designated as a battalion scout leader. By the time I went back to Knox to brief the assistant commandant of the school on the scout study, I knew that they were thinking of such a course. At that point in my briefing, General Funk turned to his staff and said, “That’s the course I want!” Needless to say I was gratified by his support, and indeed the course was created in short order. Paul Funk went on to be the commander of the 3rd Armor Division during the Gulf War, and Rosey rode in his command track as his operations officer. Then it was the turn of the battalion staff. It was clear from the data that they really did not appreciate the importance of scouting and intel in general. Moreover, their staff intelligence officer (S-2) was supposed to be a Captain, but owing to personnel shortages was usually a First Lieutenant. So I went to Ft. Huachuca, the intel school , to see what training they received. The emphasis was on staff work and hot-shot intel systems, but little attention was paid to tactics and what commanders needed to know. This emphasis came directly from the command climate there, and I am not sure it has ever substantially changed. Fortunately at the time there was an officer in charge of that level of instruction who was a fellow believer. We became good friends, and he had me come down and help with some modifications to the curriculum. He also gave me the opportunity to lecture to the officers in training at that time, and participate in some of the field exercises. The problem of the training of the battalion commanders and staff turned out to be intractable, and remains so to this day. There is a standard educational pattern for officers, after they are commissioned. First they go the their branch Basic Course, which teaches them how to be Lieutenants and platoon leaders. After a few years they go to branch Advanced Course, which teaches them how to be Captains and company commanders. Their next service school is called CAS3, taken as Captains, and teaches mostly the administrative parts of staff work. About the time they become Majors, they go to Command and General Staff School. This deals with division and higher echelons, but does not really deal with battalion and brigade tactics. The fact is that nowhere are officers taught how to fight a battalion. Small wonder that commanders stumbled around so at the NTC.

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A general deficiency of all the fighting manuals is that they give no guidance as to how to run training exercises, or how to really do some of the things they are admonished to do. For example all manuals say that one must rehearse a plan, repeatedly if necessary. But no one calls out what a satisfactory rehearsal might be. Unit rehearsals are often a shambles if they occur at all. The OPFOR on the other hand, who fight these battles every day, always rehearse, but they have developed their own techniques through trial and error. BLUFOR commanders do not have that luxury. It was also clear that the BLUFOR scout platoons were ill-equipped. They had only tracked vehicles, while the OPFOR used a mixture of tracks and wheeled vehicles. It is almost impossible to conduct stealthy operations with tracks, so we recommended that some wheeled vehicles be added to the scout platoons. In this instance the Armor School went beyond our recommendation and conducted a test of two platoon configurations, and decided to provide only wheeled vehicles to the battalion scouts. Unfortunately the US Army does not possess a wheeled armored scout car (every other major army in the world has them) and our scouts are quite vulnerable in their HMMWVs. I have gone on at some length about this study, because it became a model for all those to follow. Also, it had a substantial impact on the Army in terms of training, doctrine, and equipment. It is called Tactical Reconnaissance, and there is a copy in the reports file. As a consequence of the tactical reconnaissance study, I mentioned that the Army decided to try wheeled vehicles in two different organizations during a rotation at the NTC. I was an eager observer of this experiment, and at the request of the Armor School I took some data and recorded my observations. This is reported in a Working Draft called Observations of Wheeled Scout Platoons at the NTC. Because the units were known to many, and because we were always careful never to identify the units we studied in open publication, this was not an open document. The all-wheeled scout platoon configuration worked out better in that rotation, and the Army went forward with that choice. I do not believe one rotation provides an adequate comparison of competing factors, owing to the training differences between units. In this case I knew of substantial differences in capability between the battalions, but the Army often does things like this. That was one of the problems with CALL, in its efforts to learn what was going on at the NTC. They would have what they called a ‘focused rotation’ to look at one battlefield operating system or another A group of observers from Ft. Leavenworth and other branch schools would watch one rotation, and try to draw conclusions. But every unit is different in many ways, and what one needs to find is the common threads among them. Thus the CALL system was doomed to failure. The next major study we undertook stemmed from the findings in the fratricide study. There the data clearly showed a lack of accuracy of artillery fires. Fewer than one-third of BLUFOR fire missions hit the OPFOR, and the arty seldom had a decisive effect on the battle. The OPFOR artillery, on the other hand, was extremely effective. The training system was the same, so we wanted to find out the cause of the differences. Now evaluating the overall utilization and effectiveness of artillery would be a task of mind-boggling proportion, quite beyond the resources we could bring to bear. So we confined our first look strictly to the question of accuracy. Jim Hodges again worked with me, and we were joined by Lee Burn, an artillery Captain assigned to the Lynx team at the NTC. We used the same fire logs and recorded fire plans that I had used before, and the data show continuing lack of accuracy. We were able to trace down the cause by reviewing a body of research the Artillery School had conducted years before. Their conclusions were that forward observers, the soldiers who called in the artillery fires, were not able to adequately locate either themselves or the enemy when relying only on map and compass. But doctrine ignored these facts, and the arty units and the maneuver battalions were led to believe that artillery fired without adjustment is sufficiently accurate. (Adjustment is when the FO observes the fall of the first rounds, and directs corrections to the firing units over the commo nets.) Actually the Army had equipment in its inventory to overcome this problem, but it involved the use of lasers that were not eye-safe, and could not be used at NTC. However, an eye-safe training version was in the works, and we pointed out the importance of fielding that equipment immediately.

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We found the usual deficiencies in the doctrinal manuals, which was exacerbated by the fact that the maneuver units used one set of manuals, while their arty fire supporters were trained from another set. We took these findings to the Artillery School, with mixed results. Because arty was largely ineffective at NTC, the school felt that it was the fault of the NTC system. Some officers tumbled to the real problem, but the highest levels were not that interested. Only later did I find some receptive ears at Ft. Sill. Anyway, the Artillery Targeting Accuracy report is in the file. Later in 1990 another project leader at Rand asked me if I could find some data at NTC to help them with their work. What they needed to know was how intruders, such as scouts, were acquired by security forces. I made up a little data card which was used by OPFOR security to get the data needed. It was a very limited study, but seemed to meet their project purposes. The work is reported in a short Working Draft titled Intruder Acquisition by Security Elements, and is in the file. One of the problems that had attracted my attention at NTC was the ineffectiveness of the TOW anti-tank missile. This weapon played a central role in the utility of the mechanized infantry in the so-called Air-Land Battle, our overarching doctrine. TOWs were employed by anti-tank companies mounted on a vehicle called an ITV (Improved TOW Vehicle). This was a M-113 armored personnel carrier with a special TOW turret, called a hammerhead. The TOW was also carried by the then new Bradley infantry fighting vehicle. We knew that the TOWs accounted for very few OPFOR kills. Yet the OPFOR used an equivalent weapon, the AT-5, which at NTC was mounted on an armored car equivalent called the BRDM. (It was actually a modified HMMWV with a TOW launcher mounted in the gun ring on top.) The OPFOR AT-5s killed beaucoup BLUFOR vehicles. Why? We could deduce a great deal of information about how the BLUFOR used their TOWs by reviewing the battalion operations orders in the archive. After looking at about twenty rotations, certain patterns became clear. On the other hand, no archive of OPFOR orders is kept. To understand the OPFOR I simply rode along with them in a number of battles, and interviewed their soldiers and leaders about their plans and tactics. One of the failings of the Army people assigned to lessons learned was that they didn’t use the OPFOR as a resource. The OPFOR was able to make the problem very clear. They used both the ITV (because they had to maintain their skills as a deployable US troop unit) and their own AT-5. They regarded the ITV as having many problems, reliability, lack of speed, inability to quickly stop and shoot, among others. They also found that it was very hard to maintain the boresight of the MILES laser in the ITV turret. The MILES transmitter in the AT-5 also had its problems, but they had become accustomed to handling those. It was also clear that the OPFOR leaders had carefully thought through the appropriate tactics for the AT-5 and never failed to assign them an appropriate mission. On the other hand, the BLUFOR had accuracy problems with the MILES which they were not able to resolve. The problem was well known in the Army, but defied solution. We found that doctrine was fairly weak concerning TOW utilization, and offered inadequate guidance to leaders. Owing to the difficulty of trying different techniques of using the TOW at home station, units came to the NTC without a clearly defined role for the TOW in their plans. We recommended the abandonment of the ITV, and a better doctrinal treatment of the TOW. With the conversion to the use of Bradleys (which were equipped with TOW) by all units, the rationale for retaining the ITV was very weak. In due course the ITV was dropped from the Army inventory. Likewise, with all the infantry companies having a TOW capability, it was difficult to support the requirement for an additional anti-tank (TOW) company, and this unit has also disappeared from the Tables of Organization and Equipment. The copy of the TOW report in my file has hand-written comments from General Tom Tait. He was associated with the Armor School and was involved with the ‘Lessons Learned’ from Desert Storm (the Gulf War). We had first met when he was an assistant commander of a division and I presented work on reconnaissance to them. He was very supportive, and wrote a trenchant critique of US Army combat doctrine in one of the Army journals, Military Review. He would continue to be supportive of our work at NTC, and support at that level is very important to maintain access to Army affairs and to insure that something is done about the implementation of research findings.

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During the Gulf War and the build-up period leading to it, the normal pattern of activity at the NTC was dropped, and the resources of the post turned to the train-up of National Guard units that had been mobilized for the conflict. Rand had a deep research interest in the Guard and Reserve, and I was asked to help with their work. The commander of NTC at that time was BG Wes Clark, who had formerly been Chief of Operations Group (and who became NATO commander) . He also had some ideas of what I might usefully do in terms of observing the Guard training. He was very kind about seeing that I had the cooperation that I needed. For example, on my first trip out to the field for observations he took me out himself in his chopper and introduced me to the trainers on the ground. Now those fellows probably had no idea what it was I wanted to do, but whatever it was, they were sure as hell going to be sure I got what I wanted! The Army Headquarters knew that the Guard’s affairs were not to be talked about openly, for political reasons, and they wanted no loose cannons rolling around the field. For that reason I was formally assigned to work for a the Army Inspector general, who had a small contingent at the NTC to evaluate the Guard training. They were a good group, and I helped them, but probably only a little. They knew very well what they were doing. The only work I did during this period was submitted directly to them, and there was no independent Rand output. It turned out that the Brigade Commander of the Guard unit (48th Georgia) was the same Colonel Davis who had lost his son in an accident in 1984. I got to know him quite a bit better during this period, and developed a lot of respect for him. He was thoughtful about what had happened during their training, and summed it up when I had dinner with him just after they had finished. He said “Marty, we didn’t know what we didn’t know!” What that reflected was the fact that part-time soldiers are not immediately ready for war, unless they are in a support branch that can practice enough at their home station. Wes Clark also conducted another interesting project during these months. Everyone was expecting that the Coalition Forces were going to have to breach very well established Iraqi defensive lines on the Kuwait border. They were well-known to be tenacious defensive fighters. Thus the assault and breach was expected to be a costly exercise in terms of blood, and we knew that our forces had a great deal of difficulty conducting these exercises at the NTC. Therefore Clark determined to produce a training film to be used in Saudi Arabia by our forces. He used the OPFOR as players, and his video section as producers. The engineers built a fine training set-up, where play could include live fire, particularly demolitions, mine clearing, etc. I watched a good deal of this, and it was very exciting, of course. What was found out, to everyone’s dismay, was that even the OPFOR troops had difficulty synchronizing their play, and many parts had to be repeated several times. But the film was completed, and I have a copy in my archive. As it turned out, our actual operational plan avoided the necessity for the frontal assault, in favor of the wide flanking maneuver. This was a wonderful example of the application of our AirLand Battle doctrine, but it was essential that the Iraqi (and everyone else) continued to believe that the frontal assault was coming. Some day we may have to carry out one, and the old video can be dusted off. The last major field study I worked on at the NTC was an examination of the use of mortars. Tales of battle in modern times are full of references to mortars, and all the damage they could do. The CALL at Ft. Leavenworth pointed out to me that they were receiving reports from all the Combat Training Centers (CTC) that mortar effectiveness was minimal. At the NTC I had observed that the mortars were almost non-players. Because of the terrain at NTC, dismounted infantry often played lesser roles, and because mortars were thought of as infantry weapons it was suggested that this non-use was idiosyncratic to NTC. So I made inquiries at the JRTC, the light infantry training center (similar to the NTC) located at Ft. Chaffee and was told that in the opinion of the O/Cs there, mortars were underutilized. I checked also at the CMTC, the NTC equivalent for the US Army in Germany, where the terrain is more infantry friendly. Same answer, the mortars were not reaching their potential. These reports were sufficiently troubling to CALL to warrant a full-blown investigation. I was fortunate at this time that LTC Steve Kirin had recently arrived at Rand to be an Army Fellow for a year. He was an artillery officer with extensive field experience in Germany. He jumped at the chance to work with me at the NTC and the other training centers. Aside from his experience as a field officer, he turned out to be a fine analyst and was skilled at writing. In addition he was a wonderful friend and companion, and we developed a real working partnership. I’m sure that when he received the Rand

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assignment he thought it would serve only to further his capability in his sub-field of operations analysis. What he actually experienced was an opportunity to work with a number of fine Rand ops analysts, but also the chance to get a look at the ‘dirty boots’ army that was different than anything he had seen before. At his departure party after nearly two years at Rand, he was kind enough to credit me with showing him a part of the field army he had never experienced. We spent a lot of time in the field, observing the mortars in both force-on-force and in live fire. For the first time ever, the Lynx team assigned me a HMMWV for one of the rotations. Steve and I chased around the desert by day and by night. I drove and he navigated. He was really good with the map and kept us out of trouble. He also understood better than I how to operate the radios. It was a lot of fun to do that with him. I always carried a military driver’s license in case an O/C wanted me to move his vehicle or take it somewhere, but this was a new experience. We visited the CMTC and the JRTC and prepared the way for their O/Cs to do the type of data cards I had used for so long at the NTC. We were greatly aided by the resident representatives of the CALL, who picked up the data cards from the O/Cs and forwarded them to us with answers to our questions and some useful observations. What I was finding was that once our Rand project had established a reputation around the field army, there were few bounds to what these officers and non-coms would do to help. They were just absolutely devoted to their Army and their country, and would bust their ass for us. Steve was a very through and methodical reporter, and the mortar report is a real primer on mortar operations. What we found was that the utilization of mortars was indeed abysmal. However, this could not be blamed on shortcoming of equipment, or really of doctrine. Doctrine suffered only from being scattered in many places. The failing was almost entirely one of command and staff. The mortars were ill-assigned and ill-used. Many fire missions perfectly suited to the mortars were being directed to the already overworked arty. The mortar sections were often left without adequate orders, and often were not kept where they needed to be. In some ways they were misused as were the TOWs. We also pointed out the same problems in obtaining accuracy with mortars as was found with the arty. I wish that I could report that our work resulted in immediate improvements, but I cannot. The Artillery School sort of said ‘that’s an infantry problem’ which it was not. The Infantry School was highly incensed that anyone would criticize their mortars. The assistant commandant there didn’t understand a word we told him, and Steve and I left the briefing looking at each other big-eyed. Oh, well. All these difficulties we had uncovered with the scouts, the TOWs, the mortars, and the general lack of success with recon and counter-recon (security) caused me to think of an alternative way of organizing these disparate activities. In 1990 I prepared a briefing to show to some offices around the Army. Of course I spoke with the NTC people, and I also took it to Ft. Leavenworth and some of the branch schools. We received a lot of useful comments, and as an example the copy of the annotated briefing included in the file is covered with notes by General Tait. The topic rolled around in my mind, and in 1992 I wrote up a re-organization proposal in a Rand Working Draft. It created a fair amount of discussion, but the main thrust of the recommendations have never been implemented. The separate TOW companies have disappeared from the mechanized infantry, but this was probably owing more to personnel cutbacks rather than reason. By this time I had reached another major decision point in my life. I was turning 62 at the end of 1991, and my old bones were feeling the strain of field work. I had tinitus (ringing in the ear) from a close encounter with a tank main gun at live fire. I had developed bi-lateral inguinal hernias from the pounding in the vehicles. Field work was becoming more difficult all around. Then a new problem came up. The old apartment building I had been using during the week was becoming more of a burden to Rand and they really wanted to tear it down. So they decided to close it, and I was out of a place to stay. Management told me to work out of the house if I wished (telecommuting), so I tried that. I actually hated it – home is for private life and offices are for work as far as I was concerned. So I resolved to retire at my 62nd birthday, and so informed Rand. I willingly agreed to work part time, perhaps one-third or less, to finish up what I had been doing., and help others get some new things going. So at the end of the year Rand put me on the retired list, and had the customary retirement gathering. Actually it was a very pleasant affair, and several people made very kind remarks. In particular, Dave Kassing, who after being deposed as President of the Center for Naval Analysis came to the Arroyo Center at JPL, paid me some very gracious

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compliments concerning my role in getting the Arroyo Center underway and setting the ground rules under which it still operated. There is a sort of banner, signed by all and sundry, in my archive box. Major General Paul Funk was now the commandant at the Armor School and he asked me to undertake a re-look at the scout activity at the NTC. He wanted to know if the changes that had been instituted by the Army had been effective. So I went back to see the O/Cs and get their take on the situation. I made plans to use a new data card to obtain objective answers to the question. This was the one time I ran into a problem in the O/C department. One very opinionated and noisy Major thought that all the scout work had been wrong, that the NTC was useless for learning lessons, and that all the people who wanted to do so were crazy. He ranted and raved, but in the end he was effectively told what to do and we went forward with our work. While he had made the promotion list to LTC (how I do not know), he was passed over for command and left the Army. He was an embarrassment in the way he treated his subordinates. I infuriated him, of course, by simply smiling and nodding as he shouted. But you can’t make a civilian do anything. Particularly a retired civilian. My report on this study was the last one I ever published. The copy in the file has a couple of letters from officers whom I had asked to review the work. One was the COG at the NTC, and the other a senior staff member of the Armor School. I saw the former COG, Scott Wallace out at the NTC last year in his role as Major General, Commander of an Armored Division from Ft. Hood. Another TELEX in there was sent from Paul Funk to Headquarters supporting Rand’s work. It seems that particular General Officer disliked all sorts of analysis, and was doing his best to have the Arroyo funding cut back (or eliminated). So this was the kind of political help organizations often need, and you get it by satisfying the needs of people like Funk. He went on to be a three star corps commander before retiring from the Army. He should have been given a fourth star and the Training and Doctrine Command. His heart was in it – many other holders of the post were just that, placeholders. I had started another project, this time on recon at the brigade level. I had hoped to get another fellow to start working on it with me, but for different reasons that didn’t happen. I had outlined a report much along the line of the battalion recon report, and set up a data gathering operation with the Bronco (brigade training) team at NTC. We started getting some pretty good information, and I wrote up the preliminary field results. But things went slowly, and I was running out of time. That draft is in with my archive. I was gradually working less and less, and by the time we were to leave for a long boat trip in the Fall of 1997, I was down to ten percent or less. I told Rand I would be gone for about eight months, but in fact I never went back to work at all. So that was the end of my working life. I visited the NTC once or twice, invited by friends, and talked to some folks at Rand, but that was it. Something happened last year that awakened memories of a lot of the NTC activity. Bernie Rostker had left Rand to join the DoD as an Assistant Secretary, and he was the one who got stuck with the investigation of the Gulf War syndrome problem. He did a good job, and apparently was recognized for it. I got a call one day from the office of the Undersecretary of the Army. It was Bernie, who had been given this higher post, and he asked me if the Army had ever made any formal recognition of my work for them. I said they had not, although many individuals had clearly been grateful for my efforts. He said that he was going to fix that, and he’d get back to me later. A couple of months went by and his secretary called and asked if I would be available on a given date in December to receive an award at the NTC. I agreed that the date was OK, and as it came closer the protocol system started working. Brita and I were invited to the NTC, first for an award ceremony, then to visit some old friends, and to have dinner with the commander, BG Glen Webster, who was also an old friend. Then in the morning we were to be taken out to the field so that Brita could watch a live fire exercise. Needless to say, she was very excited by the prospect. Originally we were to be flown out to the area by chopper, but someone dredged up an old regulation that said no spouses could be carried on Army aircraft. As it turned out, we went out in a HMMWV, which for Brita was almost as good. Sitting in the passenger seat while a driver pushed on through the pitch blackness, navigating with his night vision goggles, made quite an impression.

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Anyway, the ceremony began right on time in the headquarters conference room, and Bernie and his military aide were there from Washington. The Executive VP of Rand, and the Director of the Arroyo Center were there, along with a half-dozen or so of Rand researchers who had done some work at NTC. Among them was Jim Crowley, about the first officer I had worked with out there. Rosey (OPFOR Commander) and his wife were in attendance as were a number of the NTC staff. A lot of nice words were spoken, both by Glen Webster and by Bernie, and I was given the Outstanding Civilian Service Medal. I responded to the award with more than a few words, and it was a very, very nice thing for Bernie and the NTC people to do. Maybe the most gratifying remark came from Webster, when he pointed out that ‘Rand Data Cards’ were still being used at the NTC to analyze events there. It is one thing to give a person a fish, it is quite another to give him a fish hook. After we came in from the field the next day, Rosey showed Brita through their facilities. What really got to her was the motor pool, with all those tanks and other vehicles lined up, and everything as neat as a pin. Some of the engine hatches were open, and the machinery had been removed for service, so here were engines and transmissions in the process of repair. Brita asked who did the work. She was told, of course, that the soldiers did it. She asked how they got all those soldiers who could do such things, and was told, of course, that they learned to do it in the Army. She was very impressed as any citizen would be if they could see how the armed forces did their business. Three days after our return home, a videotape arrived by UPS, which had been taken during the ceremony. Naturally I couldn’t wait to show it to our children. Then a week or so later came a large package with a framed memorialization of my ceremony produced by the public affairs staff at the NTC. It was General Webster’s doing of course. One of the first things I had ever learned about the Army, on the trip to the Army War College, was that it treated its friends with care and hospitality, and this whole closure to my career with them bears that out. The Army is the best gang I ever worked with, bar none.

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