FORT BELVOIR, Va. –
One month after accepting the Defense Logistics Services Center, Army Lt. Gen. Andrew T. McNamara announced he was moving its cataloging, standardization and utilization programs from Washington, D.C., to Battle Creek, Michigan. According to a newspaper account, men swore and women wept. All programmers working at the center quit, as did 80 percent of its headquarters personnel and 92 percent of its data processing operators. With mass resignations predictable, why did the Defense Supply Agency’s first director insist on the move?
The real reason will perhaps never be known. Lt. Gen. McNamara stated he wanted to decentralize his agency’s supply, service and supporting functions, something relocating DLSC 600 miles west would surely do. He also saw an opportunity with the Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization having just vacated the federal center in Battle Creek, uncovering good office space when good office space was hard to find in D.C. The capital and Pentagon usually pull agencies into their orbits. For OCDM, Washington lured; for Lt. Gen. McNamara and logistics services, it repelled.
Other possible reasons for the move can’t be proven. Retired Army Lt. Col. Bill McNamara, Lt. Gen. McNamara’s son, has wondered if the reason was connected to Battle Creek’s standing as the original headquarters of Kellogg’s and Post Cereal. While the town’s professional workforce and proximity to a railway undoubtedly factored, D.C. had even more eligible workers and an even better transportation network.
Others possibly noticed these disparities at the time. Beyond intonations of “why?” from affected workers, Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara may have questioned the move. In a cryptic response long after he retired, Lt. Gen. McNamara told an interviewer that, in three years of twice-monthly briefs, the defense secretary questioned his decisions only once. While DSA’s first director never revealed what that decision was, the administrative and logistical burden of uprooting a field activity suggests it could have been moving DLSC.
Was there an advantage to moving Battle Creek that Lt. Gen. McNamara didn’t share with his boss? It’s possible. Although hard to imagine today, computers were in short supply in the 1960s. Defense Department agencies owning mainframes had their schedules set by the Pentagon. The owning agency didn’t automatically have priority; those who bore the expense for the technology still had to compete for its use. By relocating DLSC to Battle Creek, Lt. Gen. McNamara not only shielded his own systems but also justified purchasing an IBM 7080, a mainframe with twice as much memory and six times the speed of the IBM 705s the agency was then using.
DLSC would operate DSA’s most advanced computers for the rest of the mainframe era. In a twist of fate, the center’s powerful computers led to DLA operating DOD’s Automatic Data Processing Equipment reutilization program. When offices replaced functional ADPE with advanced technology, the old systems could still be productive for another office. The Defense Reutilization and Marketing Service was ideally suited to determine which one.
The fact that Lt. Gen. McNamara kept his reason for moving DLSC to Battle Creek close to his chest suggests he thought sharing it might make the agency look bad. Uninterrupted access to high-end computers might have been worth replacing an entire workforce to him. It’s a plausible explanation to a mystery that may never be solved.