James Patton Rogers is the Executive Director of the Brooks Tech Policy Institute, the home of technology and national security policy research at Cornell University. An expert on drone warfare, disruptive technologies, international security, and geopolitics, he is currently the NATO Country Director (PI) of the Full Spectrum Drone Warfare project, supported by NATO SPS, and leads the Strategic Foresight Analysis component of the DoD-funded US Semiconductor Research Hub. An award winning teacher, James leads courses on Contemporary Security Policy, Global Policy Challenges, Disruptive and Emerging Technologies, and Country Risk Analysis (available through eCornell).

He has worked with the United Nations Security Council, United Nations Office of Counter Terrorism, EU Commission, and UK Parliament (among others) on the transnational threat of terrorist drones and autonomous weapons. This includes contributing to the Delhi Declaration (2022) and the Abu Dhabi Guiding Principles (2024) adopted by the UN Security Council Counter Terrorism Commitee. James has also worked with NATO Allied Command Transformation, the Royal Navy, the Danish Armed Forces, and Sandia National Labs on Arctic security, geopolitics, and duel use technologies.

Before joining Cornell, James was Associate Professor in International Politics within the Center for War Studies and Danish Institute for Advanced Studies at SDU in Denmark. Prior to this, he was a fellow at the University of Oxford, Stanford University, and Yale University. He has also held visiting positions with the US Air Force Air Command and Staff College, Sandia National Labs, and Loughborough University. He obtained his PhD from the University of Hull (UK).

The author of two books – Precision: A History of American Warfare (2023) and The De Gruyter Handbook of Drone Warfare (2024) – he is currently working on Drones: What Everyone Needs to Know for Oxford University Press (with Professor Sarah Kreps, 2025), Rethinking Remote Warfare: Drones, AI and Future War for Palgrave (with Dr J Wesely Hutto, 2025) and War Path: The Rise of Drones and Lethal Autonomous Weapons’, a single-authored non-fiction trade book to be published by Bonnier in 2026. His peer-reviewed academic articles have been published in The International Journal of Human Rights, International Politics, International Peacekeeping, The Geographical Journal, and Defense and Security Analysis (amongst others).

James is a TEDx Speaker and regularly writes for the Washington Post, TIME, and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. He often provides expert comment to news outlets, such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, NPR, and BBC. An experienced broadcaster, he has worked with Netflix, the History Channel, PBS, History Hit, and CNN; while his Warfare podcast reached over 640,000 monthly listeners (12.6 million all-time) in 180+ countries.