US war veteran now fighting to save Africa’s elephants

NAIROBI, Kenya — A decorated U.S. war veteran with two decades’ experience in military intelligence, Lt. Col. Faye Cuevas spent half her career providing intelligence support to U.S. counterinsurgencies in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Horn of Africa.

[...] she is using her expertise to fight a different kind of conflict: the war on wildlife poaching.

If you start to really untangle how poaching happens — how poachers are armed, how they’re connected into larger networks and how those networks can move ivory and horn on a global scale, who protects them?

In the Air Force, Cuevas worked on America’s drone program, collecting intelligence on individuals and organizations identified as threats.

Together with the U.S.-based International Fund for Animal Welfare, Cuevas introduced a smartphone-based software app that allows rangers and field investigators to enter and share information immediately, rather than write it up in reports at the end of a day’s patrolling.

[...] the reality is that there are other challenges — from a cyber perspective, from a global criminal network perspective — that really necessitate security approaches integrated into conservation strategies.