Times of Crisis 89 



trated by the fact that, "I can't pay this man enough to keep him on my staff, and 

 I need him desperately." This was the problem we were always confronted with 

 in some degree or another. We were competing with the defense contractors 

 who could pay more. We couldn't even get what we thought we were legiti- 

 mately entitled to out of the people who were doing the classifying. We would 

 make representations to them, and they would say, "Sorry, that's the way the 

 law is." We knew perfectly well it wasn't. We knew what the law was. We'd read 

 the law too. It wasn't the law but their interpretation of the law. It is the usual 

 problem you get into when you have a bunch of administrators who are 

 completely divorced from responsibility. 



I don't feel any particular animosity toward them, although they caused an 

 enormous amount of trouble. I can understand why they did it. What we were 

 principally annoyed at was the system that allowed this to happen. That prob- 

 lem was fought on a great many fronts. It was fought all over the Navy. The 

 final happy resolution came when we were allowed to add the position classifica- 

 tion function to our own Personnel Department. I watched it very carefully 

 because A WCO said what would happen if you let everybody get everything he 

 wanted. It wasn't true. 



Waldo Beck* was our first classifier. He did a very conscientious job, and he 

 was quite aware of the trouble that could arrive if he were too permissive. All of 

 our difficulties went away when we had someone who was as interested in the 

 success of the Naval Weapons Laboratory as I was. 



What time frame are you talking about here? 



About 1960, I would say. That was the time we had won the fight, but the 

 fight had been going on since 1948 or so. It was a long fight and an extremely 

 frustrating one. 



You have already touched on this, but can you give us some more of the highlights of 

 Dahlgren work in the late 1940's and through the 1950's? 



There was considerable growth in computation and ballistics. That was 

 in increasing our machine capability, learning how to use computers, and 

 really acquiring more responsibility from the Bureau. One other thing that I 

 should note is that after the war, the Bureau began to find it more and more 

 difficult to retain technical competence in the Bureau itself. In the older areas, 

 they had some people who very often had come up as draftsmen and after years 

 of service were then sort of limited engineers. They did a good job. However, 

 they were not the kind of people on whom you could build the technical 



* Waldo H. Beck came to Dahlgren as a Position Classifier in 1955 and is presently Head of the Wage 

 and Classification Division in the Civilian Personnel Department. 



