Daniel L. Davis joined the Army in 1985. After two years as a private, he finished the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, served in Germany, and fought in Operation Desert Storm in Iraq, where he was awarded the Bronze Star Medal for Valor. He ran an unsuccessful campaign in a Republican congressional primary in a Dallas-area district in early 2002, but he returned to active duty later that year and was stationed in the Pentagon.

As a strong supporter of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, he was deeply dismayed by the failure to find the weapons of mass destruction the Bush administration promised Saddam Hussein was hiding. Equally disturbing was his work on an Army initiative that aimed to build vehicles connected to drones and sensors. He says that Pentagon officials gave inaccurate positive assessments of the multibillion-dollar program until it was shuttered.