The day after tomorrow, after sixteen hundred hours, I'll dictate a statement to a civilian secretary recapping the whole thing in onesyllable words.

It took the civilian secretary five minutes to find them, and in the interim Jake visited with three officers he knew from his shipboard days.

The civilian secretary of defense has ultimate control, under the president.

The city has a Police Department that shares a building with the Sheriff's department with 13 sworn officers and a civilian secretary.

The service chief also responds to the civilian secretary of his department, the Secretary of Defense and occasionally the President.

Army clerks are sort of like civilian secretaries, except that many of them are men, though I'm seeing more female clerks these days.

The nation's history has seen a series of shifts in decision-making power among the White House, the civilian secretaries and the uniformed elite.

"Mercer's looking for you," hollered Karen, our longtime civilian secretary, as I got into the office.

I breathed a sigh of relief when she left, and my next patient turned out to be a dowdy civilian secretary in her early sixties.

Moreover, the top uniformed officers would be weakened to enhance the civilian secretary's control over his service.