Adam Telle had no military or engineering training when he arrived in Washington as a college graduate in 2005.
Twenty years later, the Alabama native is set to become the 14th assistant secretary of the Army for civil works, where he will manage the nation’s navigable rivers and harbors, while also trying to build a more flood-resilient country.
The job at the helm of the Army Corps of Engineers — which boasts a workforce of more than 30,000 people — has tested leaders with more extensive résumés within the Corps bureaucracy.
Telle, 43, learned the ways of the Army Corps in Congress, where he climbed the ladder at the offices of Republican senators from the South, states historically among the nation’s largest recipients of the agency’s civil works dollars, largely due to their extensive navigation networks and high need for river maintenance and coastal storm flood protection.
