Exclusive—Dakota Meyer: The Army Can't Afford Leaders Who Have Never Had to Carry Out the Order

A decision made inside the Pentagon can look very different to the soldier under fire who must carry it out. Sometimes the consequences are a matter of life and death.

Washington has no shortage of people who know how to make a decision. What every soldier needs to know is whether the person making it understands what happens after the order leaves the building. Anyone who has served, knows the feeling of wishing that someone several levels above understood what they were asking.

I learned that lesson in Ganjgal. My team was trapped under heavy fire, calling for support that was not reaching them. I was at the patrol rally point, listening to the fight unfold over the radio. I asked for permission to go in after them and was told no. I asked again and then again. Eventually, Staff Sgt. Juan Rodriguez-Chavez and I went anyway.

I still remember the anger and helplessness of knowing that men were fighting for their lives while decisions affecting them were being made far from the reality on the ground. I wished that somebody up the chain had been standing where I was. I wished they understood the responsibility for the people beside me and the fact that their call had become my problem to solve.

That experience changes the way a person looks at readiness, training and equipment. Readiness is not a PowerPoint slide when you have depended on it to stay alive. Training is not simply a metric when you have seen what happens when training meets combat. Soldiers are not numbers on a spreadsheet when you have led them into combat and carried the responsibility of bringing them home. The civilians who lead the Army will never be on that radio, but they should understand who is on the other end of it. Sean Parnell does, because he has lived both sides of it.

At 24 years old, Sean was an infantry officer in the 10th Mountain Division, leading soldiers through a 16-month deployment in Afghanistan. He saw substantial combat and was wounded. He came home with two Bronze Stars, one of them for valor and a Purple Heart. His combat injuries ended the Army career he had intended to continue, and he lives with those injuries today.

Sean could have walked away from service after that, but he did not. He knows that service does not end when the deployment does, because he has lived that transition himself. Today he sees the institution from another vantage point. As Assistant Secretary of Public Affairs, he is in the rooms where the highest-stake decisions are made. He was inside the National Military Command Center during Operation Midnight Hammer and he stood alongside the Secretary when Operation Epic Fury began. That combination is critical: a leader who remembers what it is like to carry out orders on the battlefield and who now sits in the room as consequential military decisions are being made.

The Secretary of the Army is a civilian leadership position and combat experience alone does not prepare someone to oversee an institution as large and complicated as the United States Army. The job involves Congress, budgets, modernization, acquisition, recruiting, readiness and an enormous bureaucracy. Sean has been doing that work. He leads the department’s Recruiting Task Force and chairs the Afghanistan Special Review, and the Secretary has repeatedly entrusted him with the department’s most demanding assignments. He knows how the building works, and he knows where it does not.

Those are the credentials. What sets him apart is what cannot be learned from a briefing book. Sean understands what readiness means to the soldier who will depend on it. He understands what equipment means to the unit taking it into combat. He knows what happens when a plan written in Washington finally meets reality.

Whatever the next Secretary of the Army is called upon to decide, soldiers will ultimately have to execute those decisions and live with the results. Sean Parnell has lived that reality from both sides. After everything his country has already asked of him, he is still willing to give more.

Dakota Meyer is a Medal of Honor recipient, Afghanistan War veteran, and New York Times bestselling author.