Jesse Nuese is a researcher and practitioner in defence innovation and private security, with more than 10 years’ experience across military operations, cyber threat intelligence, defence technology assessment and academic research.

He is a doctoral researcher in the Defence Studies Department at King’s College London, supervised by Professor Christopher Kinsey. His dissertation examines how private security contractors shape military innovation in Ukraine, Taiwan and Israel, using Actor-Network Theory to follow technology, expertise and capital across the boundary between state and commercial security.

He is Managing Partner at Palisade Bergschrund, a cross-border defence technology research and advisory firm working across New York, London, Brussels and Kyiv. His earlier career spans the U.S. Defense Innovation Unit, cyber threat intelligence at Recorded Future on its Strategic and Persistent Threats team, and geopolitical strategy at Boeing. He has also worked with several cybersecurity and geopolitical risk startups.

Jesse served as an infantryman and paratrooper in the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division and deployed to Afghanistan.

Education:

• Mandarin language study, Peking University, Gilman Scholar (2019)

• BA, Columbia University (2021)

• Master of International Business, The Fletcher School at Tufts University (2023)

• MS Cybersecurity Risk and Strategy, New York University (2024)

Research interests

• Private security contractors and the privatisation of security

• Military innovation and defence technology adoption

• Public–private defence innovation ecosystems

• Technology validation and battlefield feedback in procurement

• Dual-use technology and military–civil fusion

About the research

Jesse’s work sits between private security studies and military innovation studies. His dissertation asks how private security contractors influence military innovation in high-threat environments, and which mechanisms move technology across the private–public boundary.

Ukraine, Taiwan and Israel anchor the comparison. Each faces a severe and distinct threat, and each has built its own arrangement for pulling commercial technology into military use, from Ukraine’s wartime accelerators to the movement of personnel between Israeli intelligence units and private firms.