Army of One

n Christmas Eve 2001, Undersecretary of the Army Les Brownlee took an Air Force C-130 transport plane to Baghram Air Base in Afghanistan, where about 200 soldiers were battling al Qaeda and the terrorist organization's Taliban sponsors. It was a dangerous flight. To reduce their chances of drawing enemy fire, the pilots landed at night, with their lights extinguished. Brownlee spent the evening and following day meeting with soldiers, listening to their experiences and offering encouragement and praise for their service. He had been in office less than two months when he made the Christmas visit, but it established a pattern. With little fanfare and no press attention, Brownlee has spent every holiday since then in the field with soldiers.

Brownlee's boss at the time, Army Secretary Thomas White, was the public face of the Army, testifying before Congress and participating in Pentagon press briefings with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, while Brownlee was quietly managing an expanding portfolio of responsibilities. In March 2002, Brownlee was made acting assistant secretary of the Army for civil works, taking on oversight responsibility for the Army Corps of Engineers, a position that would last until this past August, when President Bush appointed John Paul Woodley to the job. In the meantime, Rumsfeld fired White last April and Brownlee became acting Army secretary.

For four months last year, Brownlee simultaneously held the positions of Army secretary, undersecretary and director of civil works. During this time, the Army went to war in Iraq and began the biggest civil works project since World War II-the $18 billion program for rebuilding Iraq. Despite his enormous role in what is arguably one of the most profound shifts in U.S. military posture, Brownlee has received very little media attention, a fact that clearly suits him.

"He's a humble and completely dedicated man," says John Hamre, deputy Defense secretary during the Clinton administration and a former colleague of Brownlee's when both worked on the Senate Armed Services Committee, Brownlee for Republicans and Hamre for Democrats. "He does not seek press. He refused to let me have a dinner in his honor when he became undersecretary. He just said, 'I don't think that's right.' Les is one of my best friends, and I said 'Les, please, this is for you,' and he said, 'Please don't do it. I know how much you care,'" Hamre recalls. "He completely wants to dissolve his own personal identity into the good of the Army," Hamre says. "Without question, he is one of the finest people I've ever worked with."

A 'GET-IT-DONE FELLOW'

If a Hollywood producer were casting a film about the Army, the service secretary might very well look like Brownlee. In an interview in March he appeared tanned and fit, handsome, square-jawed, blue-eyed, silver-haired. He wore a navy suit, a white shirt with French cuffs and a red, white and blue tie, the uniform of official Washington, but for the Silver Star pin in his lapel, a hard-earned award for valorous conduct on the battlefield nearly four decades ago. Brownlee earned two Silver Stars in Vietnam, along with three Bronze Stars and a Purple Heart. He may look like a politician or a banker, but he is a soldier's soldier. Brownlee's bearing is formal and gentlemanly and he speaks in a measured, low voice. After introducing himself at the beginning of an interview, his first comment is: "I've never really done this before." A press hound he is not.

Brownlee's résumé is remarkably suited to his responsibilities. A highly decorated infantry company commander in Vietnam, he served a full career in the Army before retiring as a colonel in 1984, after serving as executive officer to James Ambrose, one of the most dynamic Army undersecretaries in modern history. "I thought he was a real comer and a very effective fellow," recalls Ambrose. "I think of Brownlee as a superb organizer-a get-it-done fellow."

After leaving the Army, Brownlee went to work on the staff of Sen. John Warner, R-Va., a stalwart on the Senate Armed Services Committee. Three years later, Brownlee joined the committee staff, where he worked for 14 years, several years as staff director under the late Sen. Strom Thurmond, the committee chairman whose failing health greatly impaired his participation in Senate business. "Les single-handedly ensured the authorization bills were produced in some very difficult years," recalls Hamre. "Had it not been for Les to hold the committee together and move those bills forward . . . there were a couple of years we weren't going to have authorization bills. Les made it happen."

While working for the Senate, Brownlee oversaw some of the most profound changes in military posture since the Korean War. He was a major player in decisions surrounding the reduction in military forces and the cancellation of major weapons programs following the end of the Cold War, and he played a key role in establishing requirements aimed at helping the services navigate the strategically messy decade of the 1990s.

In the summer of 2001, Bush administration officials asked Brownlee if he would take the job as Army undersecretary. He was still mulling it over on the morning of Sept. 11, when he turned on the television in his Senate office in time to watch terrorists fly a second plane into the World Trade Center towers in New York. A short while later he spoke to his son, a U.S. attorney in Roanoke, Va., who told him: "You know you have to take the job now." "I knew he was right," says Brownlee.

SHUNNING PERKS

To get to Brownlee's Pentagon office a visitor must walk past an empty suite of offices designated for the Army secretary. When he became acting secretary a year ago, Brownlee declined to move into the secretary's spacious third-floor suite. Nor would he let his staff change the nameplate on his office door to reflect his position. "The morning I signed the papers to become acting secretary I told my staff I would not be using the secretary's office, I would not use the secretary's car and I did not want my picture up on the wall [with other Army secretaries]. I assumed there would be a nominee. It didn't seem appropriate [to assume the perks of office]. It's a personal thing," he says, when asked about it.

Last July, months after Brownlee assumed the job of acting secretary, Bush nominated Air Force Secretary James Roche to become Army secretary. Some observers saw the move as another sign of Rumsfeld's widely reported discontent with the Army. Almost immediately, Roche's nomination ran into trouble in the Senate, where members have questioned both his role in promoting a controversial deal to lease air tankers from Boeing and his handling of sexual assault cases at the Air Force Academy. Last month, after it became clear the Senate would not move on the nomination, Roche withdrew his name from consideration.

Whether Brownlee or anyone else will be nominated for the Army secretary's position is a topic of speculation at the Pentagon, but in a contentious election year, many are doubtful. "I don't think it really matters," says one senior Army officer who asked not to be identified. "Brownlee is a workhorse. Soldiers respect him and he knows how the Hill works. He's doing the job far more effectively than many of his predecessors who didn't have 'acting' in front of their titles."

Brownlee typically works 15 hours a day, six days a week. He says his expectations for the job were largely formed by his work for Ambrose. "He had an enormous appetite for work. The first day I worked for him he came out of his office around 8:30 p.m. and apologized because he was leaving early. The next day we started at 4 a.m." Brownlee's hours are marginally better. One of his staff officers complains that working for Brownlee is like being on a deployment-he rarely sees his family. When asked what he thinks of Brownlee, he says, "I think the world of him."

SHAPED BY COMBAT

As a child growing up during World War II, Brownlee was fascinated by military history. Although no one in his family had served in the military-his father, an explosives expert, ran a bomb plant in West Texas during the war-Brownlee was drawn to service. He attended the University of Wyoming, a land-grant school where ROTC was compulsory. Brownlee enrolled in the Air Force ROTC program, but failed to pass the flight physical, so he switched to the Army ROTC program. He was commissioned as a lieutenant in the infantry in 1962 and in July 1965, he was a distinguished honor graduate of the intensely competitive U.S. Army Ranger Course. By year's end he was part of the 173rd Airborne Brigade, the first major ground unit to enter Vietnam.

"As a soldier, there's one thing worse than going to war-that's not going to war," he says. He wondered if he had what it took to lead men in battle. The rifle company commander got his chance soon enough after deploying to Vietnam. "As we came under fire the first time I heard this steady, commanding voice, and I found it very reassuring. Then I realized it was my voice. It was very strange," he recalls.

The July 18, 1966, orders for his first Silver Star award give some measure of his experience in Vietnam. The award reads, in part: "With complete disregard for his safety, Captain Brownlee dragged his fellow officer to the rear. While performing this heroic action he was seriously wounded in the arm and leg by intense hostile fire. Demonstrating outstanding courage and stamina, he continued to move his wounded comrade and lead his men to the rear. Though seriously wounded, Captain Brownlee refused evacuation until all the others wounded had been evacuated and an attempt at recovering missing equipment had been made."

Pat Towell, the senior defense reporter at Congressional Quarterly for 25 years and now a visiting fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, says Brownlee brings a personal credibility to the job that is important. "The [Army] is under a lot of stress. I think it's especially important for the institution that [soldiers] have the reassurance that the civilian who represents them in the leadership is one of them," Towell says.

Arnold Punaro, who was the Democratic staff director on the Armed Services Committee during the time Brownlee was Republican staff director, says, "One of Les' strengths was that he always worked issues from what was in the interest of a strong national defense and the country and not from a partisan angle." A retired major general in the Marine Corps Reserve, Punaro adds, "He's a true leader. I say that from having worked with him when he was still in uniform."

Punaro says that when Brownlee worked in the Senate, he came up with an important plan, called the Soldier Marine Initiative, to get better fighting equipment to soldiers and Marines. "We were always buying big airplanes and big ships and big submarines, and Les was asking 'What are we doing for the foot soldiers?' He was instrumental in improving body armor for troops and improving the helmet and head protection. He was in the minority at the time. That initiative stuck and has produced a tremendous amount of good for the soldiers and Marines."

The improvements in body armor Brownlee championed while in the Senate proved so successful in saving lives in Iraq and Afghanistan that the Army in recent months faced a public maelstrom, forcing the service to field the protective gear more quickly and broadly than it had earlier planned. Brownlee recently visited an armor manufacturing plant to press managers to further ramp up production. According to one person who was at the meeting, Brownlee left no doubt about his seriousness that the production schedule would have to improve dramatically. "If it involves force protection, then do it with the utmost urgency," Brownlee says. "If you only get it out there one day early, you still might save a life," he says.

"Here's a guy that goes almost every day to visit troops at Walter Reed [Army Medical Center in Washington]," says Punaro. "I don't think many people know that about Les, and Les wouldn't want anybody to know about it. But this is a guy who cares deeply about men and women in uniform and their families. It's not just something that happened since he became acting secretary."