Surely the professional origin story of the chief of engineers of the United States Army—the commanding general of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the world’s largest public engineering, design and construction management agency—goes all the way back to childhood. Surely there were LEGO sets and Lincoln Logs. Tonka trucks. Maybe a long summer weekend spent helping his father build a treehouse, or afternoons tagging along with a grandfather who owned a roofing company.

Surely, Lt. Gen. Scott A. Spellmon knew, before he consciously realized it, that he wanted to be an engineer.

“Oh, no,” Spellmon says with a short, dry laugh. “That came much later.”

Spellmon is sitting in his office at the Corps’ headquarters in Washington, D.C.—several floors in a General Services Administration building that, in a perfect bit of happenstance, is located directly across the street from the National Building Museum. It’s late May, and the TV on the wall is tuned to the Weather Channel, which is tracking Typhoon Mawar as it moves over Guam. Spellmon is genial and engaged—he seems pathologically driven to make everyone around him comfortable, rank be damned—but his attention is never far from the broadcast. “It’s hurricane season,” he explains. Indeed, two days later, the Corps will deploy as part of the emergency response to Mawar, which cut electricity and access to water for most of Guam’s residents and did $112 million in commercial damage.

Back to that origin story. Spellmon grew up in northern New Jersey, in a one-stoplight borough called Bloomingdale. He played football in high school and wanted to continue playing in college, and when he visited the U.S. Military Academy at West Point with his father, something about the prestigious institution resonated. “It was just something different and unique,” Spellmon says with characteristic understatement, “and something I wanted to try.”

But not for that long. “I remember telling my dad, ‘This will be a great opportunity, but I’m going to do my five-year commitment [after graduation], and then I’m going to get on with the rest of my life.” Another ironic chuckle, this one because it’s 37 years later and Spellmon is still wearing Army fatigues, albeit trim, crisp and garnished with three stars.

Late into his junior year at West Point is when he started locking onto engineering—“I like building things, and I like to understand the science behind it”—and that quickly became his area of concentration. When Spellmon graduated in 1986, he was commissioned as a lieutenant into the Corps’ Engineer Regiment, leading a sapper platoon at Ford Hood, Texas. Over the ensuing decades, he earned master’s degrees from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (civil engineering) and the U.S. Army War College (national security strategy); got married and raised three kids with his wife, Sharise; served in both Iraq wars as well as the war in Afghanistan, earning two Bronze Stars and a Purple Heart, among other medals; and held command positions including commanding general of the Army’s Operational Test Command at Fort Hood and commanding general of the Corps’ Northwestern Division. He was serving as the Corps’ deputy commanding general for civil and emergency operations when President Donald Trump nominated him for commanding general in September 2020.

Now the guy who just wanted to play football at West Point—where, full disclosure, he caught a go-ahead touchdown pass during the 1985 Peach Bowl—oversees a military organization of some 37,000 civilians and soldiers operating in more than a hundred countries, with an annual budget that runs into the billions. During a recent interview with Construction Executive, Spellmon discussed his long career in military engineering and construction.

Understanding that the Corps is a gigantic and complicated organization, do you have an elevator-pitch version of what you do that you share with people?

In the simplest terms, I like to say we engineer solutions for our nation’s toughest challenges. That’s our vision. We do that with three programs.

First is our civil-works program; think water infrastructure. Today we own and operate 715 projects around the country that impound water—dams, large and small. We own and operate 234 locks on our inland waterways that allow goods to get to market. Our inland waterways really are our national treasures, and we get to play a big role in that. We maintain 577 federal navigation channels across 1,200 ports in the United States that allow our goods to be imported and exported.

With our military program, we’re doing projects large and small in the United States for the Army, for the Air Force, for the Veterans Administration, for many other federal agencies, but also for our combatant commanders. We’re working in 110 countries today.

And then our final program is our research-and-development program. We have amazing research scientists that not only help us in our core missions within the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, but also help the Army and its modernization priorities. That’s everything from future vertical lift and our next generation of helicopters to long-range precision fires and precision targeting. Just a fascinating array of work to lead and to be involved in.

How about the elevator pitch for your specific role with the Corps?

I tell people I wear three hats, or three helmets. I’m the 55th chief of engineers—General Washington appointed the first chief of engineers, Col. Richard Gridley, at Breed’s Hill outside Boston in June of 1775—so I’m an Army staff officer. In that role, I give advice to the secretary of the Army and the chief of staff of the Army on all matters related to engineering. I have oversight responsibility for our 90,000 engineer soldiers out in the operational force—everyone from our sappers to our bridge builders, our construction engineers and our geospatial engineers.

My second hat is the commanding general for the Army Corps of Engineers—just under 38,000 engineering professionals from all disciplines, and of those, only 800 are military men and women like me. The rest are our very, very talented civilian workforce.

And then my final hat is the chief of our engineering branch. I get the opportunity in this role to sit on things like the Civil Engineering Advisory Board at West Point and work with cadets and instructors and on the curriculum. I also have some oversight responsibilities with our U.S. Army Engineer School at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, working with instructors on curriculum and training for soldiers coming into the Army who want to be an engineer soldier.

How do you approach leadership at an organization that is such a fluid mix of military and civilian? Does anything change depending on who you’re talking to or what project you’re working on?

No, I’m the same person. I don’t think your leadership principles ever change, whether you’re leading a battalion at Fort Hood, Texas, or a brigade in Afghanistan. You know, I’m in the Army Corps of Engineers. I’m dealing with very talented senior civilians—technical experts in their fields—and you do a lot of listening to those folks when you’re working on your recommendations that you want to take to the secretary or the chief of staff of the Army. It’s a little bit different when you’re out in a battalion or a brigade, where you have done all of those jobs, leading up to the command positions, and are a little bit more in your comfort zone. Your leadership style may be different, but certainly your principles don’t change.

How did your career take you from one extreme to the other—from leading a battalion to serving as commanding general?

I was first commissioned into the engineer branch, and the beauty of the engineer branch is you get to do a lot of different things. I started out as a young sapper platoon leader at Fort Hood, and really for the first 27 years of my career, I worked in and around armored divisions, which is all about mobility. How do you keep those tanks and those Bradley Fighting Vehicles on the move? It’s a lot of river crossings and a lot of learning how to breach all types of obstacles.

That was the first two-and-a-half decades of my career. If I had one regret, I came to the Army Corps of Engineers very late. I had been a one-star general for two years before the 54th chief of engineers, Lt. Gen. Thomas Bostick, called and said, “Scott, I think it’s time that you come over and start another phase of your career.” He sent me to Portland, Oregon, where I led our Northwestern Division—think of the Columbia River Basin and the Missouri River Basin—and I learned about this fascinating corner and unique capability of the Army Corps of Engineers and all that we do for the nation.

Are there any postings you had along the way that are particularly influential on the work that you do today?

Aside from this job, I think the most rewarding job I had came by complete surprise. I was in the Army War College [in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in late 2008], about to head to our 18th Engineer Brigade, which was headquartered in Heidelberg, Germany, and then I was going to go to Mosul, Iraq. At the war college, in addition to my course material, I went to night school to learn Arabic. I had served in Iraq before, but I wanted to be able to serve a little bit more effectively on my second tour.

Then I got a phone call as I was wrapping up the war college: “Hey, Spellmon, we need you at Fort Polk, Louisiana, in five days. You’re going to take a new brigade to Afghanistan.” I drove to Fort Polk. At-the-time Brig. Gen. Mark Milley—now our chairman [of the Joint Chiefs of Staff]—met me there. He was assistant division commander for the 101st Airborne at the time, and he laid out a map on a table and said, “These are going to be your four provinces in Afghanistan. I’ll see you in 60 days.”

I didn’t know any of the commanders—I was meeting them all for the first time—but I saddled up and deployed within 60 days, and served a 15-month tour in Afghanistan, working for some incredible leaders and with some very talented battalion and company commanders. I had a four-province area of responsibility: Bamiyan, Parwan, Panjshir and Kapisa. I will tell you, in Kapisa and half of Parwan, we were shooting every day, and then in Bamiyan and Panjshir, we were building roads and schools. So, a very diverse mission set but incredibly rewarding.

What are the biggest challenges of your job?

I’ve been at this now for two-and-a-half years, and about 60 days into this position, I was in the Pentagon, and the secretary of the Army pulled me aside and said, “Okay, Scott, you’ve been at this a little bit. What do you see as your No. 1 challenge and your No. 1 opportunity?” I told him that, as is often the case, it’s one and the same: It’s our workload.

We have an organization that was designed or structured for what about 30 years ago was $15 billion to $20 billion in budget authority; today we’re above $90 billion. Back in the early ’90s, we were above 40,000 people in the Army Corps of Engineers; today we’re at 37,000 people, doing nearly six times the work. Great challenge for us, but also a great opportunity. I get to work with Congress, the administration and Army leadership on tools that we hadn’t had before to get this massive amount of work in the ground.

The civilian construction industry is currently dealing with a major shortage in skilled labor. Is that a problem for the Corps as well?

Absolutely. As we have a number of cost increases on our projects, it is primarily due to labor shortages across the country. I feel that here with the folks that we hire. Last year, we hired 5,000 new engineers into the Corps; I lost 4,000 at the same time. So, we’re working hard on retention and on hiring. One of the tools that we’re very appreciative of is called Direct Hire Authority—what typically takes months to bring someone into federal service we can now do in days. It’s really enabled us to get the best and brightest, not only coming out of school but from other industries as well.

What advice do you have for somebody who might be considering a career in military engineering or construction?

I would tell them, first of all, give us a call. [Laughs.] What entices people into the engineer branch in the United States Army are the opportunities that we have. You can spend your career out in the field with infantry divisions and armor divisions and jumping out of airplanes, because we need great sappers and leaders in the field. You also have the ability to come over to the Army Corps of Engineers as a soldier and work with these incredibly talented civilians on really complicated projects. We’re going to get you to graduate school for your master’s degree. If you want to get your Project Management Professional certification or your Professional Engineer license, we’re going to bake in those opportunities and pay for all of that for you as well. Whether you keep the uniform on and serve in the Army or go out into the civilian world and industry, we’re going to make sure that you’re prepared.

At the end of the day, do you see yourself as a soldier who works in engineering or an engineer who happens to work for the Army?

Definitely a soldier first. As I mentioned, the Army’s my home, the Army’s what I love, and that will always be our first priority—to make sure our Army is ready to do the mission that it has. But over time, the capabilities and the talent of our workforce have been noticed by other federal agencies and certainly by our combatant commanders around the globe, and we’re often asked to come in and tackle some of their tough engineering problems as well. As I’ve said, it’s incredibly rewarding work.