[Congressional Record Volume 150, Number 67 (Thursday, May 13, 2004)]
[Senate]
[Pages S5469-S5471]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




        IN SUPPORT OF LES BROWNLEE, ACTING SECRETARY OF THE ARMY

 Mr. SHELBY. Mr. President, I rise today to praise the Acting 
Secretary of the Army, Les Brownlee, for his wonderful leadership and 
great job he has done under very difficult circumstances as the Army 
copes with the stresses of heavy involvement in the Global War on 
Terrorism, especially in Afghanistan and Iraq, and as he juggles many 
demands and complex priorities as the Army continues to transform.
  Acting Secretary Brownlee is indeed a highly distinguished public 
servant who has performed with great humility, energy and passion on 
behalf of all our active and reserve soldiers and their families. I was 
particularly impressed with the article ``Army of One'' by Katherine 
McIntire Peters which appeared in the latest edition of Government 
Executive magazine and believe that every member should take time to 
read it. I ask that this article be printed in the Record in its 
entirety.
  The article follows.

                              Army of One

       Acting Secretary Les Brownlee once again leads troops 
     through tumultuous times. On Christmas Eve 2001, 
     Undersecretary of the Army Less 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

[[Page S5470]]

     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. 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 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 resume 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 though 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 designed 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.''

[[Page S5471]]

       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.''

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