Nolan Peterson, an award-winning journalist and former US Air Force pilot, and Kateryna Bondar, a defense advisor in Ukraine, unveil the revolutionary impact of drone warfare across battlefields. They discuss the swift evolution of drone technology since 2014, contrasting traditional military methods with Ukraine's innovative grassroots approaches. The podcast explores drones' lethal capabilities, their psychological effects on soldiers, and how AI integration is reshaping combat strategies, marking a new era in military operations and procurement.
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insights INSIGHT
Drone Warfare Shift Since 2014
Drone warfare isn't new but shifted significantly around 2014 in Ukraine with small drones used for direct attacks.
It evolved from air warfare supplements to dominant low-altitude battlefield tools.
insights INSIGHT
Civilian-Driven Drone Innovation
Ukrainian drone innovation emerged from civilian sectors and commercial tech, not government.
Civilian tech integration accelerated battlefield use unlike traditional state-driven programs.
question_answer ANECDOTE
Farmers to Front Lines Drone Expertise
Ukrainian farmers' use of agricultural drones transferred expertise to the military.
Volunteers brought civilian drone skills to war, overcoming bureaucratic resistance before official military adoption.
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Guests Nolan Peterson and Kateryna Bondar join host Dave Brown to discuss the rapid expansion of drone warfare across numerous conflict zones. Janus, the Roman God of new beginnings, symbolizes the change from one condition to another and from past to future. The two faces of Janus also represent transitions because he could see into the past with one face, and toward the future with the other. This is a perfect metaphor of this momentous shift in technical weaponry unfolding right in front of us. The future of the modern battlefield is here, and it’s most clearly seen in the rapid growth in drone warfare capabilities and the increasing lethality of the current threat environment it is creating.
Nolan Peterson is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center. He is an independent defense consultant, award-winning journalist, war correspondent, and author who has lived in Ukraine since 2014. As an international correspondent, Peterson has covered conflicts around the world. Apart from his work in Ukraine, he has been embedded with US armed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan and with the Kurdish Peshmerga during the battle for Mosul in Iraq. He deployed on the USS George H.W. Bush off the coast of Syria to report on the coalition air war against the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham. Peterson is a former US Air Force special operations pilot and a veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Graduate of the US Air Force Academy, and Middlebury College after two years of study at the Sorbonne in Paris, France. After leaving the US Air Force in 2011, Peterson completed a MA in journalism from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, where he was a McCormick Foundation fellow.
Kateryna Bondar is a fellow with the Wadhwani AI Center at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). Before joining CSIS, she was an adviser to the government of Ukraine, where she was responsible for implementation of reforms in defense, the financial sector, and innovation ecosystem development. From 2019–2020, she was a fellow of the Ukrainian Emerging Leaders Program at Stanford University. Prior to that, she was a senior project manager at PricewaterhouseCoopers, where she managed technical assistance projects implemented in Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense. From 2014–2018, Kateryna was a project manager in the National Reforms Council under the president of Ukraine and the Reform Support Team at Ukraine’s Ministry of Finance. Prior to working in the public sector, she held a position of financial control manager at Microsoft. She holds a MA in IR from Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv.
The Trident 
