154 Dahlgren 



of bombing. All the bombing work was going to China Lake. I doubted if they 

 knew themselves where they were going. 



You were here at Dahlgren during the transition period when Dahlgren shifted from a 

 proof and testing laboratory to a research and development laboratory. 



No, the decision to change it from one to the other took place in 1959, and I 

 arrived in 1964. 



So the transition had been made. 



A certain amount of it had been made, but it still clung to its primary role, 

 which was the proofing of ammunition. When I arrived, that was about 50 

 percent of the work. When I left, it was less than 1 percent. That's a big change 

 in a period of over 9 years. 



Was there any major reorganization during this time? 



There was some reorganization before I arrived. I think Russ Lyddane was 

 involved in that. I'm not sure I would identify it as a major reor- 

 ganization. I knew that I had to make a reorganization, but I also knew 

 that making it on paper was worse than useless. You can make an organization 

 chart on paper and distribute it and say, "Now here, attach this or attach that," 

 and there's no assurance at all that it's going to work. What I did was study the 

 situation for about 4 years and made sure that the key people — and I had to 

 identify them — would be comfortable with changes and wouldn't be too at- 

 tached to organization charts that already existed. So, I had lots of people 

 attempting to do things that they thought made sense, that they believed in. 

 They had quite a bit of freedom to do those things, and pretty soon organiza- 

 tions began to build up around them in an evolutionary way. I knew the time 

 was right for a formal reorganization when quite a few of the younger enter- 

 prising men came to me and said that we're disorganized, and that we ought to 

 get organized. So what actually happened was that we formalized what had 

 begun to exist, and then it was very easy to get acceptance of the new organiza- 

 tion, which was really a revolution. The revolution had taken place in an 

 evolutionary way. It's one of the few organizations — and I give myself credit for 

 this because I did it deliberately that way — it's one of the few organizations in 

 which we got acceptance of a reorganization without promoting anyone. 



Did you see any trends in the surface Navy that brought about significant changes in the 

 Dahlgren mission in the 1960's? 



Yes, there were changes taking place all along. Some of them were almost by 

 osmosis with nobody really engineering them, just people coming to conclu- 



