OPINION:
The General Services Administration’s claim that it could reduce office space by 30% understates potential savings (“Feds say they can slash 30% of their office space, save billions after remote work empties buildings,” web, Nov. 24).
I was involved in developing computer systems for military logistics beginning in the 1960s. None of the work today known as “telework” requires actual hands-on production of goods or services.
If telework involves mental activity to troubleshoot or diagnose a problem, human analysis will be required. My experience suggests that Pareto’s 80-20 principle will be found to mean that perhaps 80% of telework can be replaced with algorithms requiring no office space at all.
The Air Force did not have experts to analyze and design systems in the 1960s, so it selected experts in accounting and finance, supply and maintenance and taught them how to write code for computers of their generation. Military logisticians like me used those systems successfully in Vietnam and have continually upgraded critical decision routines since.
The Air Force saw the need for research into using computers for logistics and so created the Air Force Logistics Management Center in 1975. Some of its research was summarized in the 1982 “Logistics: DOD’s Achilles Heel?”
Russia and Ukraine are discovering the truth of that article’s assertion over 40 years ago. Is America’s commander in chief prepared to tell citizens that under his command, logistics is not an Achilles’ heel?
JOE BOYETT
Montgomery, Alabama
