RIP Major General (ret) Gerald Watson

A true champion of the U.S. Army Chemical Corps

It is with deep sadness that I note the passing of a giant in the Army Chemical Corps pantheon — Major General (retired) Gerald Watson. He was 90 years old when he died in Lebanon, Tennesse on July 2. His wife of 65 years marriage passed in 2014. Here’s a short snippet of his major command positions.

Major General Gerald G. Watson, a native of Kilgore, Texas, graduated from Trinity University in 1957 with a degree in chemistry. Commissioned a second lieutenant in the Chemical Corps, his combat arms detail was to the Artillery.

Major General Watson’s assignments included command of Rocky Mountain Arsenal, Commanding General of Fort McClellan, Commandant of the Chemical School and Chief of Chemical. He was also Deputy Inspector General and Director of the Defense Nuclear Agency. He played key roles in preventing disestablishment of the Chemical Corps in the 1970s and the revitalization of the Corps in the 1980s.

Major General Watson’s numerous awards and decorations include the Bronze Star Medal, the Legion of Merit and the Distinguished Service Medal.

After retiring from active duty in 1992, Major General Watson has remained a strong supporter of the Chemical Corps and was appointed Honorary Colonel in 1994 and inducted into the Chemical Corps Hall of Fame.

Watson was also a veteran of the Vietnam conflict during which he worked in Operation Ranch Hand. His plane “Patches” is retired at the Air Force Museum at Wright-Patterson as the airframe that sustained the most direct hits and continued missions. He earned two Air Medals and the Bronze Star during that time.

I had the opportunity to meet MG Watson a few times in my career. He was the commander of the Chemical School in 1985 when I was a brand-new lieutenant going through the Chemical Officer Basic Course. I’ll never forget when he first visited our classroom to talk to us. He did the usual speech about welcoming us into the Corps and how important the mission was, and he asked if there were any questions. One of my classmates, whose name I don’t remember now, asked him about the morality of providing U.S. military support to the contras in Nicaragua given news of human rights abuses. Watson became very angry and told this student that this support was necessary to support U.S. national security interests, and if he didn’t like that, then he needed to consider another profession. We had all stopped breathing in the meantime, and after the general stormed out of the room, the assistant commandant stayed behind to more gently explain that it wasn’t a good idea to pitch political viewpoints to the boss in that forum. We all understood that, but this rockhead of a lieutenant had not figured that out.

I am sure that everyone who ever met Watson has their own personal story. He was always active, always advocating for the Corps. Here’s a video of the general highlighting the Combined Arms in a Nuclear/Chemical Environment (CANE) exercises, which was an attempt to better understand and quantify the impact of CB weapons on military combat operations.

In the late 1990s, I had a chance to interview the general about some history regarding the Chemical Corps and Operation Desert Shield/Storm. When General Creighton Abrams decided to kill the Chemical Corps in 1972, Watson (then a colonel at Rocky Mountain Arsenal) had the chance to talk to the general. He asked why it was necessarily to disestablish the Corps. Abrams replied that the Chemical Corps had become too technically focused — working on chemical weapons and developing military specialists who understood CB weapons — and were not true partners with the combat arms forces like the Aviation and Engineer Corps had become.¹

The Chemical Corps was not disestablished only because Abrams died in 1974 (cancer) and the Army bureaucracy moved too slowly to close the action out. The Chemical School had moved to Aberdeen Proving Ground as a special weapons branch of its new master, the Ordnance Corps. One of the big challenges was that Congress had mandated a Chemical Corps in 1946, and that couldn’t be undone by a simple direction of the Chief of Staff of the Army. The second challenge was the Army discovering Soviet chem-bio defense equipment in Egyptian army vehicles captured during the 1975 Arab-Israeli conflict, which suggested that the Soviets were planning on using CB weapons in the future. Watson was in the Pentagon working in the Army ODCSOPS as a one-star, where he and others worked to get the Corps back on its feet. In October 1976, the Chief of Staff of the Army authorized the resumption of commissioning officers into the Chemical Corps.

Watson became the commandant of the new Chemical School at Fort McClellan, Alabama, in 1979, where the staff started revitalizing the CB defense doctrine and Army organization of chemical units. It was a major initiative that included building a “live agent” Chemical Defense Training Facility at the base (of which I was in the second group of students to enter). He was the director of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency when Saddam Hussein’s forces invaded Kuwait in 1990. He immediately became involved in preparing the U.S. military forces for the possibility of chemical and biological warfare. This included advocating to procure German Fuchs NBC recon vehicles, crafting an heliborne, long-range biological standoff detection system,² and pushing a hazard information system called ANBACIS to USCENTCOM. DTRA would also operate a 24/7 cell in which the U.S. military forces could send data to them and DTRA would craft the hazard prediction charts.

After his retirement from active duty in 1992, he remained very active in military-civilian affairs and supporting the Chemical Corps, in particular working to establish and sustain the Chemical Corps Regimental Association. He joined the ranks of defense contractors for a while, not sure how long. I remember his advocacy for a proposed long-range biological standoff detector that, while demonstrating promising technology, was not picked up for funding by the CBDP.

(picture shows MG (ret) Watson and his son, then COL Bryan Watson (now a retired two-star), at the Warner Barracks in Bamberg, Germany, undated, circa 2005?)

We’ve had a number of superstar general officers and colonels in the Chemical Corps, but none of them matched the political acumen and leadership qualities of MG Watson. He was a unique and unmatched character. Such an individual has never emerged since his times, and we do need this kind of leader. Many Chemical Corps leaders are too risk-adverse and focused solely on maintaining chemical units in the Active Army (which to be clear, is a pretty important thing). The need to engage with Big Army leadership and OSD on critical and substantive WMD concepts and strategy remains an unaddressed mandate of today’s Chemical Corps.

1. I have a longer discussion on this in my book “America’s Struggle with Chemical and Biological Warfare,” Praeger Publishers, 2000.

2. The long-range biological detection system never made it to the gulf due to technical issues.