I want to take a moment to congratulate Miroslav Kurka as he has received the inaugural Individual Industry/Government Engagement (IGE) Award from the Society of American Military Engineers (SAME)! This award honors individuals who have led efforts to advance solidarity and cooperation between engineers in civil and military life from inception to project completion.
SAME was founded in the aftermath of WWI to preserve lessons learned in the war and facilitate engagement between industry and government professionals. This engagement serves to enhance our nation’s security, and SAME continues this mission today.
Miro was presented the award in large part due to his tremendous efforts with the SAME Tulsa Post. He organized and facilitated the first ever Industry-Government-Engagement workshop in Tulsa in October 2017. The workshop focused on maintaining the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ aging civil works infrastructure in an era of limited funding. The results provided key insights to both Tulsa District and USACE, and the findings were published in The Military Engineer.
This past March, Miro helped facilitate an all-day workshop focused on cost engineering. The workshop brought together private sector members from the architecture-engineering and construction industries, and government members from USACE and AFCEC to form two moderated panels on cost engineering—one from a governmental perspective, and one from a private sector perspective. Through this collaboration, solutions were uncovered that neither group may have come to alone.
Through a long and successful career spanning both the public and private sector, Miro has worked to achieve the goals of SAME and IGE. Miro’s decades of experience across both public and private sectors affords him a deep appreciation for what can be accomplished through uniting the military and the civil sides of the engineering industry.
Please join me again in congratulating Miro for this great accomplishment and recognition. Your continued success uplifts your community and helps promote national security.
