Cogs of War

Is it too late to stop criminals and American adversaries from exploiting AI to conduct cyberattacks or design novel pathogens? Has regulation kept pace with the threat civilian drones pose to critical infrastructure? AI researcher Lennart Heim, Army drone strategist Paul Lushenko, and CEO of Sentinel Bio Claire Qureshi join Jonathan to discuss the trade-offs between protecting the public and letting the private sector forge ahead. The conversation gets into synthetic DNA, the risk of drones at the FIFA World Cup, and whether the U.S. government should get early access to Silicon Valley's newest large language models.

Ryan sits down at the Cogs of War mic for the last time to introduce Jonathan Panter, the new host and executive editor of Cogs of War. Jonathan shares his background, from naval officer to scholar. They discuss major defense tech issues, and Jonathan shares what he hopes to accomplish at the helm of Cogs of War.

What happens when one of the defense industry's leading technology integrators partners with one of Silicon Valley's most influential venture firms? Bryce Pippert of Booz Allen and Matt Cronin of Andreessen Horowitz join Ryan to unpack their new partnership and discuss how the United States is trying to tap into the tech ecosystem. The conversation gets into venture capital's growing role in national security, how this partnership is supposed to work in practice, and why getting real technology into government hands is still harder than it should be.

The tech soldiers carry will shape their performance in combat, missions, and their safety and health. If you care about any of those things, you will love this episode. The next generation of American soldiers will operate with systems that blur the line between human and machine, but that future is still being worked out in real time. In this episode, three former servicemembers turned industry leaders look ahead to how frontline capabilities may evolve over the next decade and what will constrain them.

This episode is about far more than countering drones. It is about how America prepares for and fights its wars. With three leaders from three companies at the forefront of counter-drone solutions (AeroVironment, Epirus, and Hidden Level), the conversation explores how America and its enemies are adapting, how the U.S. military is and isn't keeping pace, the problems with how America buys things, and more. This episode also features a rant from Ryan about companies that exaggerate the value they are providing to Ukraine. The idea for this episode precedes the latest war with Iran, but the fight in the Middle East makes this conversation so much more urgent.