Colonel Chester Phillips was the officer in command of the secret project in the Strategic Scientific Reserve aimed to create a series of super soldiers for the US Army. He was the chief of the training camp in which the candidates were trained. The scientist in charge of the project, Abraham Erskine, presented him with a potential candidate, Steve Rogers, but Rogers' frail physique and numerous health problems lead Phillips to believe that Rogers was unsuitable, at one point suggesting Gilmore Hodge, a physically superior soldier but also a disagreeable showboat. To prove his own theory correct, Phillips threw a fake grenade at the soldiers, but Rogers was the one who attempted to shield the blast with his own body while the other soldiers, including Hodge, take cover. Phillips reluctantly gave in, though he still felt that Rogers is too skinny.
Later on, after Rogers was transformed successfully by Erskine's serum, the doctor was killed by an HYDRA agent named Heinz Kruger, and Phillips decided to leave the untrained Rogers behind and to continue the war the old fashion way. When a huge platoon of 400 men goes missing, among them Rogers' best friend James "Bucky" Barnes, Phillips, though regretful for his soldiers' fate, refused to allow Rogers to attempt a rescue mission, planning to bomb the facility instead, although Rogers defied Phillips' order. When Rogers was successful in rescuing the men alone, however, Phillips allowed him to work in the field, and entrusts him with a special elite commando force, rather than punishing him as Rogers had believed.
After Arnim Zola was captured, Phillips successfully interrogated him and located Johann Schmidt's last secret HYDRA base. While Rogers distracted the enemy, Phillips himself led the assault on the base, defeating a large number of HYDRA agents. Eventually, he helped Rogers in reaching the Red Skull's experimental plane riding Schmidt's special car, ending on the edge of a ravine and seeing the plane flying away with Rogers and the Skull aboard. His last words to Rogers are "I'm not kissing you!" after Rogers kissed Peggy Carter goodbye.
Later on, when Rogers relayed the news to Peggy over the radio from Schmidt's plane that he was going to sacrifice himself to destroy Schmidt's weapons of mass destruction by crashing the plane into the arctic, Phillips listened in on Rogers' final conversation. When the radio went blank, Phillips, visibly saddened at his friend and comrade's apparent demise, walked away, and later handed Rogers' file to Peggy.
Colonel Phillips' current fate was unknown, though it is most probable that he died of old age in the seventy years before Cap's awakening.
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