“A large part of my 23 years in the military has been leading,” Mitchell told
The American. “I’ve just been blessed with another opportunity to command a district.”Mitchell previously commanded the Nashville District of the Corps, 2009-11, but that is only one of several prior leadership positions. He also has commanded Bravo Company of the 168th Engineer Battalion at Fort Lewis, Washington and the Iraq Area Office in the Middle East District of the Corps in Baghdad.
“You won’t find too many officers like myself with such a versatile portfolio,” Mitchell said. “I might be the first African American to take command here, but I am here because of my experience.”
Mitchell came to St. Louis direct from a leadership position on the U.S. military’s largest stage, at the Pentagon. He was director of the Operational Energy and Contingency Basing Task Force and principal advisor to Assistant Secretary of Army Katherine Hammack on matters related to operational energy.
“We were looking at more sustainable ways to train and move the force of the Army in a manner that is more conservationist in how we use energy,” Mitchell said.
“The way we move fuel up and down the battlefield has contributed to a number of lives lost, so going forward we need to be able to move the force in a more efficient manner. I spent the last year working on that, shaping that policy.”
Now he is operating far from battlefield logistics, commanding roughly 700 employees in a 28,000-square-mile district that is almost equally divided between Missouri and Illinois. The principal enemy – and ally – here is the Mississippi River.
“We protect people from water, protect water from people and make water useful,” Mitchell summarized the district’s mission.
The St. Louis District of the Corps protects people from water by maintaining 87 levees (totaling 750 miles in length) constructed to protect 575,000 acres of economic and agricultural interests in the region.
The district protects water from people by doing environmental restoration, environmental river engineering, regulatory oversight and cleaning up hazardous and toxic waste material connected to Department of Energy activities in the 1940s-1960s. “We’re responsible for environmental stewardship,” Mitchell said.
The district makes water useful by maintaining a Congress-mandated nine-foot navigation channel on 300 miles of the middle Mississippi River, 80 miles of the lower Illinois River and 36 miles of the Kaskaskia River. This is accomplished through maintenance of a lock and dam system, among other types of river engineering.
“That river is very important to our region and nation,” Mitchell said. “We facilitate several hundred billion dollars of commerce up and down the river. It’s important to keep that navigation channel open so we can move that traffic.”
Mitchell himself navigates the river on most workdays, since his office is in the Robert A. Young Federal Building in downtown St. Louis and he moved his family to O’Fallon, Illinois. His wife, Trena, is a military veteran of 18 years, and they wanted to live near a military base, in this case Scott Air Force Base, for proximity to services provided to military families. They also liked the area schools available to their sons Malik, 16, and Tyriq, 14, who will attend O’Fallon High School.
An older son, Anthony Jr., 21, already has begun his military service as a specialist stationed at Fort Campbell, Kentucky.
In a sense, Mitchell owes his military career to his own father, the late Albert Mitchell Jr. “My father ran our household like a military boot camp,” Mitchell said, “so I figured joining the Army was something I was going to do down the line.”
He was recruited into Army ROTC while studying biology at Prairie View A&M University, an HBCU outside of Houston, Texas. He competed for and won a two-year scholarship. “I enjoyed what I was doing and what I was learning,” he said. “I thought I could be of value to the service.”
He came to Missouri for the first time for his basic officer training at Fort Leonard Wood, which he followed with a battery of higher education in both engineering and military studies, including a master’s degree in engineering from the University of Texas at Austin and a master’s in strategic security affairs from the National Defense University. READ FULL
