At the Air Force Academy, Brown was an Army major teaching on an exchange program. (The Army had lent him to the Air Force.) After a year, the Air Force Academy invited him to stay on as a tenured professor. He quickly accepted. The family was very happy there even though their living quarters were cramped with four children and a dog. This was a wholesome place to raise a family, and they enjoyed good Christian fellowship.
But there was a hitch to the offer. He would have to leave the Army and be permanently assigned to the Air Force. This required an interservice transfer and high-level maneuvers in the Defense Department. If Brown had initiated it, it would have never gone through. But the Air Force Academy had clout and generally got what it wanted. So one day Brown was told to hang up his green uniform and start wearing a blue uniform. Soon he was placed in charge of thirty-five professors who were teaching calculus to freshmen. He felt at home in the Air Force because the two services were similar.8
Three years later, the Air Force sent him off to the Air War College for a year so that they could get him current with what the Air Force was doing. He was wearing a blue suit now and had an impressive background, but how much did he really know about the Air Force? The officers who are sent to the War College are the ones they think might become generals. Brown finished at the War College as a distinguished graduate.
The next year the Air War College invited Brown back to give a lecture on operations research, sometimes called systems analysis. These are the mathematical techniques that the military was starting to use to make important decisions. (This is not to say that all decision making is purely mathematical, but there are often quantifiable aspects that can be worked through before experience and subjective factors are considered.)
Brown was now in charge of the Operations Research Division at the Air Force Academy, and he understood these techniques and their applications well. The War College liked his lecture so much that he was invited to join the faculty. So after five happy years in Colorado, he left his tenured position at the Air Force Academy and moved the family to the War College at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama. Peggy’s father had died recently, and this move would bring the Browns closer to Peggy’s mother.