24 



Dahlsren 



Dr. Thompson (left) and Admiral Parsons (then Commander), Experimental 

 Officer of the Proving Ground. 



Can you comment on how you approached general manageynent problems in order to reach 

 your objectives'? 



This is all part of the general area I referred to earlier. What do you do to get 

 the best work from the people involved? It was the thing that was not so easy to 

 do in the early days — getting a response that seemed adequate to meet the 

 requirements of the facility. You couldn't do sciendfic work at a place like 

 Dahlgren without having technical foundations that were necessary to under- 

 stand the problems and then to get at them. We had to have a gradual building 

 up in interest and in understanding of the problems that were necessary to 

 solve. 



There were many people in the old days who thought it was a waste of time to 

 do a lot of looking into underlying research questions, and yet a good under- 

 standing of those underlying questions was necessary. It was perhaps one of the 



