The next man to head the Missouri National Guard wants to turn it purple. He’s Colonel Steve Danner, a Hollister lawyer who sometimes sits on his back porch on a hill overlooking Table Rock Lake and watches National Guard A-10 tank-killer jets fly through the lake valley below him on practice bombing runs. He’ll move up to Brigadier General when he becomes the new Adjutant General of the Missouri Guard.

Danner is a lawyer, former member of the Missouri House and Senate, son of former northwest Missouri Congresswoman Pat Danner and a long-time member of the Guard’s legal arm as staff judge advocate.

He wants to use his administrative background to get the Army and the Air Guard together. "The Army calls it ‘Purple,’" he says, "You have the Army that is the green-suiters and you have the Air Guard that is blue-suiters. When you combine those into a joint force and we call it ‘Purple.’ I intend to see that our National Guard is Purple," he says.

Danner says his motto is "one guard, one mission."

He’s been in the military for thirty years…has been deployed to Europe and to Iraq, has been an Assistant Adjutant General and has been a regimental commander at Fort Leonard Wood.

 

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