A former U.S. Air Force special operations pilot and a veteran of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Nolan Peterson is a conflict journalist and author whose adventures have taken him to all seven continents. He is the author of Why Soldiers Miss War as well as several fiction collections. As a war correspondent, Mr. Peterson has reported extensively from the front lines in eastern Ukraine, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. He has been featured on CNN, Fox News, the BBC, Newsweek, the Heritage Foundation, and Coffee or Die Magazine.

Mr. Peterson graduated from the U.S. Air Force Academy. He attended graduate school at the Sorbonne in Paris, France. After leaving the Air Force in 2011, he completed a master's degree in journalism from Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism where he was a McCormick Foundation fellow. He recently joined the Atlantic Council as senior fellow and the Pentagon's Irregular Warfare Center as a warfare expert.