David J. Danelo
David Danelo graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1998 and served seven years as an infantry officer in the Marine Corps. In 2004, then-Captain Danelo served near Fallujah with the First Marine Expeditionary Force as a convoy commander, intelligence officer and provisional executive officer for a rifle company. He was awarded a Purple Heart and a commendation for valor during his tour in Iraq.
In 2005, after Danelo left active duty, the U.S. Naval Institute commissioned him as a freelance correspondent for Proceedings, their flagship publication. He spent a week reporting from the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina, and a month covering the U.S. military in Ethiopia, Kenya, and Djibouti. The same year, Danelo traveled to Vietnam to write a comparison of modern-day Vietnam and Iraq for Nguoi Viet Daily, the largest Vietnamese newspaper in North America.
Danelo's first book, Blood Stripes: The Grunt's View of the War in Iraq, was published in 2006. A third-person account of five corporals and sergeants who deployed to Iraq in 2004, Blood Stripes was awarded the 2006 Silver Medal (Military History) by the Military Writers Society of America. It was also named a Notable Book of 2006 by the U.S. Naval Institute and is on a mandatory reading list created by General James Mattis for Marines deploying to Iraq and Afghanistan.
After writing a March 2007 cover story on the future of the Iraqi Army for Parade, Danelo spent three months traveling from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean for The Border: Exploring the U.S.-Mexican Divide. An investigation into a region that has rapidly become a conflict zone, The Border includes interviews with Border Patrol agents, local politicians, police officers, immigration activists, deported migrants, and religious officials. The Border is the first literary exploration of the 1,952 mile US-Mexico border from coast-to-coast, as well as the first detailed examination of the border conflict by an Iraq war veteran.
Because of his non-partisan, educational approach, Danelo’s work has been endorsed by The Economist, former Secretary of State George Shultz, and the Military Writers Society of America, who awarded The Border a 2008 Gold Medal (Current Events). Texas Books in Review called The Border, “an unequivocally compelling read.”
From 2009 until 2011, Danelo was a Senior Fellow with the Foreign Policy Research Institute, where he completed an extended field study of northern Mexico and produced a series of talks and papers about the geopolitics of the region. During the same time, Mr. Danelo was also frequently retained as a subject matter expert for the U.S. State Department's Anti-Terrorism Assistance Program, where he assessed and evaluated security along several international borders.
In June 2011, David Danelo was appointed Executive Director of U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s Office of Policy and Planning. In this position, Danelo leads, directs and guides strategic plans and policy for the 60,000-person law enforcement organization responsible to the American people for safeguarding at and beyond the borders.
