By most folks’ measure – including his own – recently retired U.S. Army Col. Daniel D. Mitchell was an unlikely intern.
He also was an extraordinary one, say the Quad Cities Chamber and business and community leaders who interacted with Mr. Mitchell during an unusual and impactful 90-day Department of Defense SkillBridge Program internship at the chamber.
That’s in part because the 47-year-old commander and West Point graduate spent more than 25 years in the Army, the bulk of it leading soldiers, before retiring in December 2024 after a two-year stint as Rock Island Arsenal garrison commander.
It’s not unusual for companies to sing the praises of enlisted personnel and lower ranking officers who have served as interns during their last six months of service through SkillBridge’s DoD-paid internships. It’s rarer, however, for a full-bird colonel and military installation commander to take advantage of that successful national program.
“I gained a new colleague, I gained a new friend,” said Christine Caves, who worked closely with Mr. Mitchell in her role as the QC chamber’s vice president of business retention, expansion & workforce. “This was one of the most positive professional experiences with an intern that I’ve truly ever had and I think his participation in the program obviously benefited him, but it really benefited the Quad Cities Chamber.”
Mr. Mitchell, whose internship ran from Sept. 4, 2024, to Dec. 13, 2024, said the experience was “everything I hoped it would be.”
He told the QCBJ, “I very much wanted to take that opportunity to do a 90-day internship with a local business and figure out what would be a good fit for me coming out of the military so I can find a place to invest my time and talents that I’ve developed over the past 25-30 years.
“It occurred to me that the chamber of commerce is a great place to get that familiarity with what is the Quad Cities without my military filter put over it.”
So he met with Chamber President & CEO Peter Tokar III to talk about a SkillBridge internship. They worked out the details, and got the special permission they needed from the DoD to make it happen “because it was a nonstandard internship – it wasn’t one of the ways that was on the standard list of things to do,” Mr. Mitchell said.
A complex assignment
The task the chamber set for him was an important one which that organization had lacked the capacity to attack before they brought Mr. Mitchell on board.
“We weren’t directly addressing succession planning and it was percolating up in the community as an issue that we needed to pay closer attention to as many, many people are moving closer to retirement,” Ms. Caves said.
Mr. Mitchell proved to be the right person for the job. “What a great opportunity to bring in an experienced professional to apply their transferable skills in just planning and leading meetings, putting out surveys, asking questions … and coming up with a strategy, all of these things that Dan was already experienced in,” Ms. Caves said.
Once chamber leaders explained their needs and objectives, Mr. Mitchell hit the ground running. “After three months, he was able to put together a recommendation leveraging local contacts, businesses and resources to help the Quad Cities Chamber understand the issue better and then understand maybe how we want to address it moving forward,” she added.
Mr. Mitchell, who was searching for an internship opportunity where he could make a difference, was excited by the mission and his role. “It was almost like being a consultant on a project for a period of time to figure out what are the right questions to ask, what are the dynamics with it and to provide kind of a report to the chamber to help them understand the problem better so that we can speak intelligently about it.”
That effort matters, Ms. Caves said, because a record number of business owners are looking to retire, in part, because of a pandemic that “rapidly pushed people toward making decisions about selling their businesses or retiring altogether.” What happens to those businesses will impact the Quad Cities now and in the future.
“Because of our strength in manufacturing as a community, we have to protect those assets within the supply chain so that we continue to help keep manufacturing as a sustainable industry in the region,” Ms. Caves added.
“It’s especially important that the critical members of the local supply chain aren’t exiting without approaching the chamber to help give them the resources they need or identify people who would want to take over those businesses so we can have that continuity of service,” she added.
Experience opens doors
Ms. Caves also stressed that the chamber did not “train” Mr. Mitchell. “He has had a career already of these professional skills that he’s developed. The learning curve with a Skillbridge intern is so short, and a military garrison commander, that is just crazy.”
That wealth of experience also opened doors for Mr. Mitchell to fulfill his private-sector mission. “It’s ironic that the Skilbridge program calls them interns, and so we would have a little fun with that when we would go in to meet with CEOs of manufacturing companies.”
For example, Ms. Caves said, “Dan, without a uniform, looks like everybody else, so when he joined a conversation no one had any idea that he was a high-ranking retired colonel until we shared that.”
His extensive military career and ties to Arsenal Island also helped. “What I found is that in the Quad Cities people are very proud of the Rock Island Arsenal,” Ms. Caves said. “People are very loyal to service members in the veteran community and that introduction immediately established rapport. People were very engaged.”
Going forward Mr. Mitchell hopes that his internship and leadership experience will help him find a new career here.
Though he grew up in Deerfield, Illinois, outside Chicago, his family has ties to the Quad Cities. His mother’s parents, now in their 90s, still live on the family farm in Orion, Illinois, where the family gathered for Christmas.
His parents met in Moline and as a young man he knew the Rock Island Arsenal and had visited it. “Even though the Arsenal is a small base, when I was named as the garrison commander we knew exactly where it was and as a family we were pretty excited about being stationed close to our extended family,” Mr. Mitchell said.
He and his wife who live in Bettendorf, also are high on Quad Cities schools and a friendly community that he said feels small and welcoming but has the advantages of a metropolitan area.
“My faith tells me God ordains our steps and being in a location that’s close to family; a place where my daughters can know they’re from somewhere, and realizing then that we’ve come to a great community here in the Quad Cities, one that’s enriching to our family and a great place to finish raising our kids who are 15 and 9,” Mr. Mitchell said.
Language of business
Another advantage of the chamber internship was that it helped him discover more about other aspects of the community he now calls home.
“I got a chance to learn about what economic development is and how it works,” he added. “How do folks work at enhancing the growth of a community, economic, population, education, all those different aspects, which was kind of a lingering question that I had started to get in my head as the Arsenal garrison commander because we’re all one community here.”
Importantly, too, Mr. Mitchell learned critical “civilian lingo” and the language of business. “Some things that were baffling to me were things like the different position titles. I didn’t know what the difference was between a senior vice president versus a vice president. What is an executive director? What is this; what is that? It didn’t mean anything to me.”
Mr. Mitchell is eager to find out where this civilian path will take him.
“There’s a lot of thoughts about whether you need industry experience to lead in an industry,” he said. “There’s a certain natural benefit to that, I’ll acknowledge. But I wouldn’t count a military service member out because we make them change jobs every two years.”
They’re also flexible.
Mr. Mitchell said he has had a new boss nearly every year of his 25-plus years in service and his experiences have included writing policy, leading a team in Iraq, commanding a large recruiting team in North Carolina, and, of course, acting as city administrator for the Rock Island Arsenal “a town of 7,000 with some of the oldest infrastructure in the Army.”
He said, “I am open to all kinds of things. I enjoy learning new things.” Potential future roles include but are not limited to: “leading an organization and that probably translates to some sort of operations role,” pursuing his passion for developing leaders in a business setting and helping drive organizations to accomplish their objectives.
Mitchell Career Highlights
Col. Daniel Mitchell retired from the U.S. Army as Rock Island Arsenal Garrison commander in December 2024. Career highlights include:
- Enlisted and enrolled at U.S. Military Academy at West Point at age 17.
- Operations chief, U.S. Army Special Operations Command’s Force Modernization Center, where he arrived after completion of the U.S. Army War College.
- Recruiting battalion commander in North Carolina leading more than 300 recruiters.
- As commander of the Rock Island Arsenal, he fully reopened the installation, bringing remote workers back to work and welcoming the Quad Cities community, Boy Scouts and others back to Arsenal Island.
- Confronted and resolved a major aging infrastructure crisis in mid-November 2023 during his first year at the Rock Island military installation after a water main broke, leaving the island without potable water.
