The Reward of Working with Soldiers: Mr. Doto is the retired Director of the US Army Communication, Electronics, Research and Development Center

Q:        How did you come to engineering?

A:        You want to know why I went to engineering school? I’m not sure. In my family, I was the only one to go to college. I’m one of seven kids. My mother is an Italian immigrant and my father was first generation American born, also Italian. It was in the middle of the moon-shot era and my math was pretty good, so I chose engineering school. I wound up applying to Newark College of Engineering, so I could live at home. The college is now called New Jersey Institute of Technology. It was a good school. I was happy with it, but I don’t think they were that happy with me. I was on the 4 1/2-year plan. In other words, I didn’t have the credits to get out in four years. I graduated in 1968.

Q:        When and how did your career with the Army begin?

A:        My first job was with Walter Kidde Company, an alarms company in Belleville, NJ. I worked there for six months or so designing small circuits. I really didn’t get much satisfaction from the job. I had just taken up golf. I played a round with a couple of friends – they tolerated me – I stunk. An Army captain was there from Fort Monmouth. He played with us and invited us to go to Fort Monmouth for an interview. They were hiring people. It was the Vietnam build-up and the Army needed engineers. The Army had not hired or trained people for many years. I went down with my two friends, mainly because I was dissatisfied with the work I was performing. I had three or four interviews, but I didn’t have the background or grades for the R&D side of the house. They took me to the production engineering side of things, and I was offered three jobs in the Production Engineering Directorate that day. If you had a pulse and an Engineering degree, they were hiring. I recall that my start date was July 3rd. I thought to myself, this is funny because I work one day then I get a day off; this could be a good gig. I got the 4th off.

On the production engineering side, once the equipment transitioned out of the laboratory, we got it ‘lock, stock and barrel.’ Due to their advanced age, none of the engineers wanted to travel; and they just didn’t want to leave home. I got the job supporting the Project Engineer as a Test Engineer for the AN/MPQ-4, which was a US Army Counter-Battery Radar used to find the location of enemy mortars. It was the predecessor to the AN/TPQ-36. They handed me travel orders to Syracuse, NY, and gave me the specs, called 810B (MIL-STD-810B Environmental Test Methods, now MIL-STD-810H) and the radar system spec.

I went to Syracuse, and I remember at the beginning the per diem was $16.00 a day. If you were staying alone like I was, it was impossible to get a hotel and food for $16.00. You probably spent $22 or $23 a day if you skimped. I went to the General Electric Corporation, who didn’t like the idea of a kid fresh out of school telling them how to run a test program. One of their quality guys gave me a hard time. He was all over me, and I learned a lesson on this job; he who has the money makes the rules. But I didn’t understand that at the time. I was there every single day for environmental testing and bore sighting and things like that. I didn’t like it, but it was what I had to do. They continued to give me a rough time, one guy in particular. At one point we were negotiating an add-on to the contract, and I was asked to review it, to evaluate the test hours based on what they did and what they didn’t do. It took me several days, then I met with the contracting officer, who is now gone. He and Gus, the Army project engineer, met with me one night and asked who the guy was giving me all the trouble, so I gave them his name.

During negotiations, the Contracting Officer asked that I sit next to him in the room where they were doing the negotiations. I didn’t know why; I only evaluated the one section of the proposal. When it came to the test section, Fred put the GE guy on the rack; he disputed everything. After an hour or two, he leaned over to me and whispered, “do you think the guy has had enough”. I told him yes, but he decided to go at him a little more. He beat the guy up unmercifully. At that time, I learned the rule of implied authority, by sitting next to the Contracting Officer. As we were trading notes back and forth the GE Team believed that I was tight with the Contracting officer. As a result, the GE Team believed that I had some implied authority, which I did not. From that day on they laid off me, they brought me coffee in the morning; I was in the club.
I did some production testing, and they were all sent to Vietnam. As I think back, the computer was an electromechanical computer to locate the shooter, but they were effective. I met guys later who were at fire bases with the Q-4, and they said they never took mortar fire when the Q-4 was there.

Q:        What are some other systems you were involved with?

A:        After the MPQ-4, the next big program I was on, this time as the project engineer, was for the AN/PPS-5, a lightweight ground surveillance radar. An IFB (Invitation for bid) was issued for production of the AN/PPS-5. The winner of the contract was a small business that bid the contract for less than the bill of materials. He had no real plan on how to build the radar. We thought the drawing package was pretty good, not perfect. The system was a challenging mechanical and electrical engineering design because of the weight. The use of germanium transistors and magnesium cases contributed to the difficulty of the production process. We gave this guy a contract and nothing was happening. I would visit and still nothing was happening. About that time, we issued a change order to him. If I had been more experienced, I would have fought the change order, but I wasn’t. The problem was that we were getting field interference between the radar and the SINCGARS (Single Channel Ground and Airborne Radio System) radio. There were going to be thousands of SINCGARS but only hundreds of radars. What turned out to be a shielding problem fell upon the radar to fix. In retrospect, we probably could have shielded the IF and called it a day and it would have worked. But what came down from the Lab was build a Faraday cage around the radar. We painted everything silver underneath the OD, and we put in silver gaskets. This was not smart because magnesium is a highly corrosive metal. If you got a scratch in the case that goes through to the silver, you effectively had a battery working on your metal. He rebid the thing, adding maybe $1000 or so to the bid, but he was still less than the bill of materials of the radar, so he wasn’t going to get there.

I got friendly with some people at AIL (Airborne Instruments Laboratory) Cutler Hammer on Long Island, the original developer of the radar. The Program Manager was a guy who had built radar systems since World War II. He was instrumental in the radar ring that was built around London. Hank and I became friends, even though he didn’t have a contract with us, and I would call Hank and ask to learn about the radar. He sent me data on the materials, costs of the 20 most expensive items, and where you get them if they’re source-controlled. I learned a lot about the materials in that radar and where to purchase parts and what the issues were and things like that. That was when I realized the guy was never going to build the radar and these were needed in Vietnam, we were already six months behind. I asked him for what I called an installed schedule – what he was going to do month-to-month and week-to-week, when he expected items to arrive, when he would start assembly, and he gave me that. It contained several thousand items. I embedded it in the contract for the shielding mod. I was making weekly trips to Baltimore. I was there probably one or two nights a week. I used the chart to see what was done and what was not done; hardly anything was done, he wasn’t making any progress at all. I reported up the line. The legal office contacted me, and we did what was known back then as an anticipatory breach of contract for default. He had not met the schedule yet, but it was obvious from my discussion that he was not going to meet the schedule and I could prove it. I had lead times, costs, and sources. The guy hadn’t contacted any of the sources. He was taking progress payments, of course, and we ended up terminating for default. He appealed it but we won.

We re-solicited and this time I forced contracting to go best value. We had six offers with technical proposals, and I was young and stupid. I threw five out, all but the developer. I was dragged into the CGs office with my Division Chief, who didn’t know anything about the job. I was forced to defend everything, and the CG asked the legal guy if we could defend our selection. The legal guy thought it might be tough and recommended reevaluating the proposals. We reviewed everything again with the team and a month later I went back to the CG and told him we were sure only the developer could do it. The original awardee filed a protest, and I got dragged before Congress. I was a kid, and I was scared to death. I went to the attorney at AMC (Army Materiel Command) who explained what would happen. They would scream, point, and yell at me, trying to make me concede. He said I had to do one thing – take the file with me. It was a big, thick document of all the critical correspondence. I knew everything in that book, I had memorized almost all of it, I didn’t need it. If I was asked a question, I could respond without looking in the book. The lawyer advised me not to do that. He took a yellow piece of legal paper and ripped it up into long thin, one-inch-strips of paper, and he put them in the file randomly. He explained that the chairman or committee member would point his finger at me, scream, and ask a question. He said I should think for a minute, open the book to one of the yellow tabs, and give the answer. I didn’t need to be looking at the correct tab, I just had to give the correct answer. Then I was to shut the book, sit back, and expect this to happen a few times. That’s exactly what did happen, just like the attorneys predicted, and they backed off. They weren’t happy, but they said OKAY and let me go. We gave the contract to AIL Cutler Hammer and I started to see progress. I was out there every week when it was in test. It was probably 1 or 2 years before we started to ship and then we were shipping maybe 10 or 15 a month. Out of the production lot, two were picked as random samples. I went up to the contractor and took four days to test them.

After shipping, we started to uncover some things with the radar that were not mature enough; the radar was way ahead of its time. There were two tubes, an A tube, and a B tube, that had two displays. There were germanium transistors that we couldn’t source anymore, and there were magnetron tubes which were difficult to produce. Occasionally, we had an issue with the magnetron. I had two guys who were down in the bowels at the Lab who told me what was wrong. We ended up fixing some of those things and I went through two or three ECPs with AIL at the time. But I was smarter, having seen what happened years before on the Q4 program about making the rules. Now I’m the system engineer and I got a young contracting officer with me and we’re negotiating one of the jobs. We have a solid-state local oscillator, a Gunn diode that worked very well, so we ended up putting that in the radar. About 30 radars were already built so we had to retrofit them, which meant the whole front end had to come out.

I had a radar back in my office. I took the front end apart myself, put it back together a couple of times. Then I knew how to do it and how long it took me, which was 6 hours the first time. After I did a couple of times, it took me 3 hours. AIL bid 30, 40, or 50 hours, something like that. Since it took me three hours I wouldn’t agree to their numbers during the negotiations. (I didn’t tell them I had disassembled it myself.) The AIL program manager, Hank, was a guy I had dealt with before and was a good friend of mine, as well as the PM for the contract. He didn’t really get along with his production guy. They were at odds, and these were the production guy’s numbers. I didn’t know that at the time. I told him that we would not accept their estimate of time, that it wasn’t defensible. The contracting officer nudged me and told me to go easy, that we couldn’t defend our position. The production guy claimed he had verified the repair time. So, I asked him to bring a radar and a tool kit to negotiations, and he couldn’t believe it, neither could the contracting officer. They brought a radar on a cart and a tool kit and went to lunch while I proceed to disassemble it. When negotiations resumed, I noted that it had been four hours, and I was almost done. What did they plan to do about their estimate? I knew they had to create documentation and other things. They brought down their estimate by half, which was still high, but nobody could believe that they moved that much. We accepted it.

Meanwhile, radars were already deployed, and we were getting feedback that the magnetrons were failing. The magnetrons could tune 500 megahertz, which didn’t matter since there were never two radars on the same base such that you had to detune one for the other and not interfere. There was a test procedure that the maintenance guys in the field could use to see if the magnetron could tune all 500 megahertz. It didn’t matter if it tuned 100, 200, or not, as long as it worked in the band 16 – 16.5 gigahertz. It’s funny because they all worked, but they all didn’t tune enough. We were getting magnetrons back. I was then sitting with the lab people at the Evans Signal Lab at Fort Monmouth. I was getting tubes back like crazy and the tube guys didn’t know what to do. I went to Varian and Litton, two of the manufacturers, trying to fix this problem. They worked as fast as they could, but we couldn’t fix it. Without the magnetrons the whole system was down. We decided to save all the magnetrons that came back and tested them, even though they didn’t tune. That was the only thing that was bad on them, so we wrapped them, put them back in a box, and put them in the attic. When we got a bad tube back, we would go to the attic, take an old, returned tube, and ship it out to Vietnam. They installed the old tube, and they didn’t know it was bad until the next time they ran the full tuning test, which might be two months, then they would send it back. We rotated what were bad magnetrons. We knew that but there was nothing else we could do. It didn’t matter in the field, they still performed correctly. You only had to detune them if you were getting interference; the radar performed fine, but it did indicate my ignorance with the Army maintenance system.

I had to brief a 1-star when I was a GS 12. We gave him a good brief on the radar, and he knew about the magnetron problem. He asked me what we were doing about it. I explained to him that we didn’t have a handle on it yet, but that it didn’t matter for the time being. (The magnetrons would not tune the whole band, other than that, they worked fine. They only had to tune if there was interference from another source, another radar, which there was not.) I go up in the attic and get another tube and send it out. He was perplexed about going in the attic and could not understand what I was talking about. I explained that we stored returned magnetrons in the attic at Evans. We didn’t yet have a handle on the cause or solution. It seemed to be working fine and we got 3 or 4 more months use out of them. He responded, “I guess keep doing what you’re doing, but you don’t tell me anymore.” So, we kept doing it.

The radar had germanium transistors in several circuits. We had an ECP to get rid of the germanium transistors. There weren’t that many, but we no longer had sources for them. It meant we had to redesign modules, which meant we had to test every single module to make sure that it met the module specs. AIL did a good job on it. We ended up deploying about 150 AN/PPS-5s. It was probably the thing that was the most fun to work on for me. I knew it inside and out; I knew every wrinkle in the manufacturing process.

The solid-state oscillator fixed another big problem. We got a Gunn diode back from theater, just one, and the guy says it’s crazy, it doesn’t work. I didn’t understand, it’s a solid-state device, they don’t go bad, you can bang them around and everything. I went up to the depot and tested it. It turned out that if the radar’s sitting on a tripod, it doesn’t work. If you take the RT unit, lay it down, turn it over and wait a minute, it works. This is insane. I took the Gunn diode back to Monmouth and went up to the solid-state device’s guys. We got a screwdriver and opened it up. The glue that held the quartz tuning rod in place couldn’t withstand the temperature. When it went bad, when the glue failed, the tuning rod fell and closed off the cavity. If you turned it over, gravity took it back the right way. It may not have been at the exact same frequency you wanted, but you could still adjust it upside down, it would go up and down, but it was a crazy thing.

Early on we had a couple of engineers on the ground in Vietnam who actually reported back on things that were not working properly and that we had to fix. One thing was a 50-foot cable the radar had between the transmitter and the display, so the operator could get away from the transmitter in case it took an inbound. It turns out that the cables were bad resulting in many failures. These were 30 or 40 pin connectors, with 30 or 40 single cables in it, and I started a whole program to redo this cable. We ended up putting a wire in the cable; it was nuts. One day I get a picture from theater of a Soldier on the top of a 50-foot tower hauling up the transmitter by the cable, which was attached to the connector box. I said “there’s the problem” but we had already redesigned the cable. Now he could tow a truck with the cable. It was such a waste. But who knew? There were a lot of changes to that thing just to keep it going early on like that. But we had a production run for probably 2 years or so.

Years later, I was a Branch Chief in Radar, and I got a job from the Marine Corps for offset bombing beacons. We drifted into the world of offset bombing beacons. In those days it involved sending data to an incoming close support aircraft from an observer on the ground, who measured distance and azimuth to a target. The beacon would send up the digital data to the plane on the frequency of the radar. It had two or three modes, and within each mode 5 or 10 different settings to account for all radars and all variations of them. There were several planes that did this, and several radars in those planes and several modes. It was a complicated little system and Motorola made that for us.

I put a woman engineer in charge of the program. I had been mentoring her for several years and I had total confidence in her ability to do it; the Marine Corps didn’t like that. They took me aside and said this can’t happen, she can’t handle it. I told them that she’s going to defend the Marine Corps position, just watch. I told her to give Motorola a hard time in front of the Marine Corps in the first meeting. I sat back in the back of the room and let her go at the Motorola team and she did quite well (remember my earlier comment about implied authority). The Marine Corps came back and agreed she was good and should stay. They needed to see that she would look out for their interests, and she did.

Q:        How did you get into Program Management?

A:        COL Bob Stryjewski, who’s gone now, one the best O-6s I ever worked for, asked me to go for an interview with PM EW/RSTA (Electronic Warfare/ Reconnaissance, Surveillance and Target Acquisition) as Tech Director. I had little or no experience in SIGINT, yet it was a major piece of this program, but I had people that worked in the PM Shop who were very strong in SIGINT. I was offered the job, accepted the position, but I was given one condition. The O-6 told me that when he announced my hiring, the Lab would try to promote me to a GS 15 to get me to stay. He said he would accept a handshake as my commitment to taking the job. I told him I’m taking it. What he predicted is exactly what happened. My home organization held up my promotion for about a month while they jerked me around. I refused to stay; I had given my word. That’s how I wound up going to a PM shop.

After that, I was hired for the Deputy PM position in Combat Identification. I’d always had the money, but now I really had the money. I had two or three Product Managers who worked for me. I was at Monmouth and my boss, COL Tom Rosner, a great guy, was in Washington. He would stay down there most of the time, and I would work the Monmouth end. It worked fine for about three years.

Then I came out on a ‘board select’ Program Manager list. I had been competing to get Program Manager, Electronic Warfare, in which I had reasonable experience. But the Army in its infinite wisdom selected me as a Joint PM, the only one on the list. I became a PM for a Joint Army-Navy-Air Force program called JCALS (Joint Computer-Aided Acquisition and Logistic Support). It was ten years ahead of its time; you could do it today, but you couldn’t do it then. It involved putting digitized tech manuals online so that everybody could access them. You could digitize them, but we didn’t have the bandwidth to get them to people. In addition, the software was incomplete or nonexistent. The evaluators doing the test were tech manual writers, who might be out of work if the program went through, so they had a vested interest in seeing it fail. It met many of the requirements but after a year or two in the job it was obvious to me it wasn’t going to meet enough of the requirements to field.

Q:        What observations do you have after being in positions that involved research, development, testing, fielding, and support of systems?

A:        I think it’s essential for every lab engineer to spend a year or two in a PM shop, to put them in a pressure cooker and try to get something fielded. To experience having an O-6 bang on your head to get something out the door and you’re running out of money and time. Most of the Lab guys didn’t have that experience, they thought you had the luxury of developing something as long as it took. I tried to instil the idea that we’re not here for technology’s sake. If you have a great idea, but it will take 20 years to develop, you’re working in the wrong place, you need to go work somewhere else. We were somewhere between development and helping the PM field it.

Q:        How did you get into CERDEC senior leadership?

A:        There was an opening for an SES at what was PM I2WD. I applied for that one and the competition was fierce. There were two guys who were better than I was technically, I had worked with them for 20 years, but I was the only one that was a ‘board select’ PM. So, I was selected, the first official Director at I2WD. There was barely enough funding to run the lab. We reorganized and we built up the tech base, we put together the comms and non-comms tech base, which necessitated a small CERDEC organization after Dr. Marquet approved it.

I was the I2DW Director for about two years, when the Command Group requested that I move up to CERDEC Headquarters to be the new Director after the retirement of Dr. Marquet. I was advised by everybody I knew, not to take the job; it involved no more money, just more aggravation and a different parking space. Upon Dr. Marquet’s retirement, I was appointed to the Director position by General Kern (the CG of AMC), but soon after that RDECOM was stood up. The conflict of management between RDECOM and CECOM leadership made it very difficult to manage the Lab. I was being pulled between two Generals for a period of about a year or two, so I just decided to retire. That’s when I began a small consulting company.

Q:        Is there one favorite, or most rewarding, accomplishment for you?

A:        At CERDEC, we never had all four directorates (Command and Control, Comms, EW, and Night Vision) experimenting together. If you’re trying to explain netcentric warfare to someone, you can’t without talking about almost all four of these pieces. I decided I would try to run an experiment with all four Directorates at Fort Dix, NJ.

I took the idea to ASA(ALT), Dr. Mike Andrews. I told him it would be costly, more than $10 million for all the things we wanted to do. To my surprise he gave me the money; some of it I had to pay back the following year. We were in the experiment and once Dr. Andrews saw it, he asked the Army Chief Staff to come up, GEN Shinseki. The Chief flew up and spent four or five hours there. It was dark when he left, and the pilot was angry about flying home in the dark. GEN Shinseki saw it and a bunch of other senior people came up and we got a lot of kudos for it. It was a good attempt to show how netcentric warfare would work, using a network to bring information to the user and help process it. I’m proud of the fact that ‘C4ISR On-the-Move’ testbed went on for several years. In later years it became more realistic than when I did it.

Q:        What advice do you have for people just entering Army civilian service?

A:        Toward the end of my career, we were hiring about 50-100 people a year. I was asked to give a little part of the indoctrination, since I had lived it. I told them if they wanted to do technology for the sake of technology, they were in the wrong place, that CERDEC/RDECOM was about technology maturation and transition, not basic or applied research. I explained to them that they really needed to understand what the job is and to be okay with it: it’s to help soldiers come back alive. That may mean that they cause somebody else to die who’s trying to kill our soldiers, but the job is to bring our soldiers home alive. If that’s not consistent with your thinking or the way you feel about the military, then please get another job, and don’t come here. You have to be able to live with what we do; your conscience has to be able to put up with that. I told them that directly; I don’t think any of them left. Maybe they just needed a job, but I don’t think any of them left. I did that for two or three years. I believe it’s just as relevant today.

Q:        Do you have any closing remarks or observations?

A:        I enjoyed every minute working for the military; I wouldn’t change a minute of it, it was wonderful. Working with soldiers was very rewarding. Looking back, I wouldn’t want to do anything else.