Episode 17: The Janus Protocol: Drones – The New Face of Warfare

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.

Articles:

• Ukraine drones hunt down Russian soldiers as incursion into Belgorod continues – YouTube/The Sun – 10 Apr 2025 (video)
• Battle For Pokrovsk. Ukraine's Drone Pilots Are Trying To Stop Russia | Ukraine Front Line Update, RFE/RL – 7 April 2025 (video)
• Ukraine's DIY drone makers are helping fighters on the front lines, E. Beardsley, NPR, 12 Apr 2025
• Ukraine Is Making FPV Drones Without Chinese Parts And At Lower Cost, D. Hambling, Forbes, 8 Apr 2025 (paywall)
• US Army tests FPV drones in Germany under ‘Project Shiv’, G. Allison, UKDJ, 6 Apr 2025
• Ukraine has capacity to produce 5 million FPV drones per year, advisor says, M. Fornusek, Kyiv Independent, 8 Apr 2025
• Marine Corps stands up ‘attack drone team’ to take lessons from Ukraine and teach them to grunts, J. Schogol, Task & Purpose, 4 Apr 2025
• The century-long reign of the machine gun is over, a Russian strategist argues, M. Peck, Business Insider, 16 Mar 2025 (paywall)
• Ukraine’s Future Vision and Current Capabilities for Waging AI-Enabled Autonomous Warfare, K. Bondar, CSIS, 6 Mar 2025
• Heven Drones unveils new hydrogen-powered, long range UAV at IDEX, S. Frantzman, Breaking Defense, 13 Feb 2025
• Survival of the quickest: Military leaders aim to unleash, control AI, R. Ruitenberg, Defense News, 13 Feb 2025
• The Proliferation of Drones in Naval Warfare with Tuneer Mukherjee, W. Mills, CIMSEC, 7 Jan 2025 (Sea Control Podcast)

Guests:

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.