The Army engineers who once ran West Point and now run America's dams
America's military engineers began with a chief engineer and two assistants fortifying Bunker Hill in 1775, many of the early recruits being borrowed French officers. Today the Army Corps of Engineers is overwhelmingly civilian, manages locks, levees and reservoirs nationwide, and supplies nearly a quarter of the country's hydropower capacity.
The Continental Congress authorised the first chief engineer on 16 June 1775, and Colonel Richard Gridley took the job under George Washington. Lacking trained engineers, Congress asked the French court for help. Louis Lebègue Duportail, secretly sent over in 1777, rose to command all American engineers and directed the allied siege works at Yorktown. The corps was disbanded in 1783, merged for a time with the artillery, and then refounded on 16 March 1802, when Thomas Jefferson signed a law stationing it at West Point as the nation's military academy. Until 1866 every superintendent of that academy was an engineer officer.
Peacetime work arrived early. An 1824 law put the engineers in charge of clearing sandbars from the Ohio and snagged trees from the Mississippi. Officers mapped the Great Lakes and helped run lighthouse districts. In the Civil War, engineer-trained West Pointers led both armies, including George McClellan and Robert E. Lee, and the Confederacy, starting with few engineers, ended the war with more in the field than the Union.
Handed military construction in December 1941, the corps took on more than 27,000 projects in a $15.3 billion wartime push, from camps for 5.3 million soldiers to the Manhattan Project sites and the Pentagon. Its combat engineers cleared underwater obstacles at Normandy and bridged the Rhine at Remagen. At home the devastating Mississippi Flood of 1927 greatly enlarged its disaster role, and by the late 1960s it had also become a major environmental restoration agency.
Today it has about 37,000 staff, roughly 97% of them civilians, and a budget of $7.8 billion in FY2021. A lieutenant general, the chief of engineers, commands the combat engineers, sometimes called sappers, while civil works focus on navigation, flood and storm protection, and restoring aquatic ecosystems.
Source: United States Army Corps of Engineers
