News
Tech Policy Institute Collaborates with Bitcoin Policy Institute and Fedi To Launch New 2-Year Study
Drone Vulnerabilities and the Threat of Directed Energy Weapons to Drone Survival
On Friday, January 23rd, Cornell Brooks Tech Policy Institute Director’s Fellow John Miller gave a seminar on how drone warfare has evolved over the past decade and what it means for future conflict. He traced the shift from expensive, high‑end systems like the Predator and Reaper to cheap, mass‑produced DJI‑scale platforms now central to the war in Ukraine, where entire units are dedicated to drone production, modification, and employment. John highlighted how existing taxonomies of drones fail to capture operational realities and explained his current research on drone fault hierarchies and vulnerabilities, including GPS spoofing, communications jamming, and emerging directed‑energy threats. He noted that while many electronic warfare risks can be mitigated through advanced signal processing and software, high‑energy lasers pose a growing challenge as more states develop scalable directed‑energy systems. His ongoing work explores low‑cost sensing solutions that could help drones detect laser targeting in milliseconds and enable swarm‑level evasive behaviors, with implications for both U.S. doctrine and adversary counter‑drone strategies.Cornell Tech Policy Institute Hosts Senior Director at Cisco
Eric Wenger (‘90) – Senior Director for Cyber and Emerging Tech Policy at Cisco, addressed more than 250 students.
2000 METERS TO ANDRIIVKA- A film by Mstyslav Chernov Follows Ukrainian soldiers fighting for every meter of land during the war sparked by Russia’s Full-Scale Invasion of Ukraine. Shot on the front lines, it captures the brutal...
Defending America Against Drones; A Whole-of-Government Approach Paul Lushenko and Joseph Amoroso On October 7, 2023, Hamas used drones to initiate its attack on Israel. On June 1, 2025, Ukraine conducted Operation Spider Web, using over...
Earlier this semester, Tech Policy Institute Senior Fellows Paul Lushenko and Keith Carter guided a bipartisan national security threat simulation hosted by the Brooks School’s Institute of Politics and Global Affairs (IOPGA) at the U.S....
The Cornell Tech Policy Institute (TPI) has published its 2024–25 Annual Report, reflecting a year of growth as technology and security questions moved to the center of public policy. The report outlines TPI’s continued work across...
TPI co-hosted The Svalbard Consensus? workshop in London on November 19th-20th. Funded by the Royal Navy, and held in partnership with Loughborough University, the workshop was built around a full day of expert briefings and a...
On November 10, Septian Hario Seto, Executive Secretary of the National Economic Council of the Republic of Indonesia, delivered a presentation at Cornell University examining Indonesia’s value-added strategy for critical minerals....
The Tech Policy Institute was proud to convene the panel Soft Power, Hard Questions: Debates in Arctic Science and Technology Cooperation at the Arctic Circle Assembly in Reykjavik. We would like to thank Dr. Karl Attard, Dr. Gregory...
Cornell has named President Guðni Th. Jóhannesson of Iceland as 2026 Messenger Lecturer. The Messenger Lectures are the highest recognition of scholarship awarded by the University. For close to 100 years, they have brought to campus an...
Denmark and Australia recently co-hosted the Cyber & Tech Retreat at the World Economic Forum in Silicon Valley, bringing together senior diplomats from more than 25 countries for one of the world’s premier forums on international...
