Strategist, New America

Peter Warren Singer is strategist at New America and an editor at Popular Science magazine. He has been named by the Smithsonian as one of the nation’s 100 leading innovators, by Defense News as one of the 100 most influential people in defense issues, by Foreign Policy to their Top 100 Global Thinkers List, as an official “Mad Scientist” for the US Army’s Training and Doctrine Command, and by Onalytica social media data analysis as one of the ten most influential voices in the world on cybersecurity and twenty-fifth most influential in the field of robotics. As a member of IDS International’s Advisory Board, he has aided in discussions that range from global futures to cybersecurity and social media.

Singer’s award-winning books include Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry, Children at War, Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century; Cybersecurity and Cyberwar: What Everyone Needs to Know, and Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War, a technothriller crossed with nonfiction research, which has been endorsed by people who range from the chairman of the joint chiefs, the co-inventor of the Internet, and the writer of HBO’s Game of Thrones. His latest is LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media, out in October 2018.

Singer’s past work includes serving as coordinator of the Obama-08 campaign’s defense policy task force in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and as the founding director of the Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence at Brookings, where he was the youngest person named senior fellow in its one-hundred-year history.

Before joining New America, Singer was the founding director of the Project on US Policy Towards the Islamic World at the Saban Center at Brookings, where he was a founding organizer of the US-Islamic World Forum, a global leaders conference. He has worked for the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard, the Balkans Task Force in the US Department of Defense and the International Peace Academy. Singer received his PhD in government from Harvard University and a BA from the Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University.