[10/21/04]Vicksburg’s three Corps installations appear to be safe from changes that may come with military base closures, the Corps’ top officer said here Wednesday.

Lt. Gen. Carl A. Strock made his comments during an interview while on his first trip to Vicksburg as chief of engineers, a command he took July 1.

Base Realignment and Closure recommendations from the Secretary of Defense are due May 16, and the possibility that Vicksburg’s Corps operations could be considered for closure has been raised since the announcement was made, in 2002.

“There has been some discussion about whether or not we should be included in BRAC, but so far it does not appear that BRAC will have any impact on installations here,” Strock said.

The Corps’ Mississippi Valley Division, Vicksburg District of the MVD and Engineer Research and Development Center are headquartered here. About 3,500 Corps employees are based in Vicksburg, the largest number outside Washington, D.C., and about one in 10 of the Corps’ 35,000 employees.

Strock, the 51st chief of engineers, said he is visiting employees at all levels in each of the Corps’ nine divisions during the first six months of his four-year assignment.

The MVD, which controls the Mississippi River and Tributaries project that was begun following the Flood of 1927, has a budget of $970 million, 23 percent of the Corps’ civil works budget of $4.2 billion. The Vicksburg District’s current-year budget is $139.6 million.

The ERDC comprises all Corps research and development operations into one organization, conducting about $700 million in research annually at Vicksburg’s Waterways Experiment Station and three other U.S. sites.

“I think it’s fair to say that the work being done here in Vicksburg on the research and development side has increased lately, particularly on the military side,” Strock said. “The civil side is down a bit with the decline in resources on the civil side but the military side has grown a bit because of the (military) operations going on right now.”

In its current budget, the Corps has emphasized completing projects rather than starting new ones. Top Corps officials have taken a closer look at many projects’ cost-benefit ratios, cutting some that were marginally beneficial, not central to the Corps’ mission or where cost-benefit ratios had not been sufficiently analyzed.

Strock said he was impressed with the pride local Corps employees show in carrying out their missions, which include supporting U.S. warfighting forces and contributing to the nation’s economic prosperity and environmental quality.

“We contribute to the defense of the nation, and we’re doing that in a lot of ways right now, very visibly in Iraq and Afghanistan,” he said, adding that hundreds of Vicksburg-based Corps employees have served overseas, with a significant number still abroad.

“Nowhere is (the economic aspect of the Corps’ work) more evident than on the Mississippi it’s the navigation, it’s the flood control, it’s the recreational opportunities, all those things,” he said.

Public understanding of what the Corps does seems to be declining, as the amount of money the organization has been receiving has done, Strock said.

“So, in spite of all that wonderful pride, there’s a bit of anxiety that people don’t fully appreciate what we do and we’re not very well-resourced to do what we know we need to do,” he said.

Strock, who was born in Georgia and grew up in an Army family, was stationed in Mississippi from 1980-1983. He served as resident engineer at Columbus Air Force Base and as project officer for the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway in Mississippi and Alabama, and earned a masters degree in civil engineering from Mississippi State University.

An Army officer since 1972, he has been with the Corps for seven years. During that time he has commanded two divisions and, more recently, served six months in Iraq as deputy operations director for the Coalition Provisional Authority.

Two of his main goals in coming to Vicksburg were to listen to Corps employees here and to speak to them about the 10-year transformation plan the Corps began about two years ago.

That includes organizational changes, including at least one that continuing advances in communications technology have helped make possible.

“What we have done at our headquarters is taken functional groups and reformed them into interdisciplinary teams with a regional focus,” Strock said, adding that the MVD now has a group of people in Washington “that knows their projects and their needs very well.”

In addition, centralization is being effected at each division level so that each district is less self-contained.

“What we’re doing now is moving the center of operations from the district although that will still be very important up to the division level so that we operate more as a region,” Strock said.

And virtual “communities of practice” are being formed to maintain and expand communication among workers who perform similar functions.

“We recognize that in order to maintain our technical expertise we need to do it in different ways than having everybody kind of sit together in functional groups,” Strock said.

The organizational structures for these changes have been put in place and the Corps continues to learn how to use them, Strock said.

“It requires moving people in some cases, moving missions,” Strock said. “So we’re learning how to do this.”

The Corps has also developed a new strategic plan, which Strock said he expects the MVD to be one of the leaders in putting in place. A major feature of the plan is to formalize that environmental aspects of projects will be assessed simultaneously with their engineering aspects.

“Now what we’re doing is rather than get to an engineering solution and then think about the environment, we’re doing the engineering and environmental together,” Strock said.