Send David Axe To Africa

I am a huge fan of David Axe, and when I heard he had this opportunity I immediately offered to help as best I can. This is the scoop.

It took a year of lobbying, but the NATO force dedicated to deterring and interdicting pirates off the Somali coast has finally approved my request to embark on one of its warships. The offer for a four-day embark this month came just days ago, after I’d already accepted an embed with U.S. forces in Afghanistan for October. All my resources are currently devoted to Afghanistan, so if I’m also going to join NATO for an African pirate adventure, I need your help.

The invitation is to spend a period in late September aboard the USS Donald Cook, pictured, a Burke-class destroyer assigned to Standing NATO Maritime Group 2, a counter-piracy force that also includes British, Greek, Italian and Turkish frigates. The cost of economy-class airfare is around $2,000. I’m asking readers for donations. If I cannot raise the funds in the next 10 days or so, I’ll have to politely decline the invitation. In that case, I will return any donations.

If I do manage to embark, what can readers expect from my reporting? For starters, I’m interested to see how a diverse naval force coordinates vessels, crews and aircraft from different nations. I’m also eager to see how well a guided-missile destroyer, designed for big wars, adapts to the kinds of dirty, tedious maritime security missions that are becoming more common in our globalized world. I want to find out, as best I can, whether naval patrols have contributed to the recent, modest reduction in successful hijackings. Finally, I hope to record some kick-ass high-seas action: helicopters zooming overhead, boats churning through swells, ships slicing through the waves in pursuit of dangerous, heavily-armed criminals.

Covering pirates from the at-sea perspective would complement my efforts last year to report on piracy, from the point of view of its victims on land. My plans include blog series, dispatches for newspapers and magazines and video spots. But the reporting requires your support. Please consider giving via the Paypal button at left.

I've done the math. If 1% of this audience donates $20, David goes to the Gulf of Aden and finds out the scoop behind the coalition piracy efforts, and NATOs work in particular. It is about information, and we choose our news sources. There are so many questions about the US effort to fight pirates, much less the international effort in total, that sending David seems to me to be one really smart way to get a bigger picture.

How many questions have gone unanswered?

How effective is the coalition force in preventing acts of piracy? How much coordination is there really between the various commands: CTF-151, NATO, EU, Russia, China, Iran? How do we end the piracy problems? What is the role of the United States Navy in that maritime security coalition?

There are dozens of questions, too many to just list out. Independent journalism has emerged as an alternative to the mainstream information sources, but the level of competition independent journalism will have is almost entirely dependent upon how we, the consumer, decide to spend our money on information. Those who care about the piracy story and are not satisfied with the mainstream alternatives have options like David Axe, but it comes down to whether you wish to donate towards those alternatives.

Donations via PayPal here.