Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from Colorado. We have to talk about this whole signal gate thing. Oh, my God, so many, so many, so many things going wrong. Signal gate is this little scandal that has popped up in Washington because a number of top Trump administration national security officials had a chat on a third party unsecured platform about tactical military operations involving the strike on Yemen in mid-March, I think was the 12th and 13th of March. 

Anyway, reason we know about this is a reporter from the Atlantic was accidentally keyed on the conversation and basically had the whole thing. So we’re going to talk a little bit about classifications then, and secrecy issues and operational security. And then we’re going to talk about more of the implications of this and what it actually means for us as a country. 

And it’s not a happy story. So, from my brief and limited experience in the government, both in the State Department and the Defense Department, it’s drilled into you as an intern, operational security, the things you don’t talk about, the things you do talk about, where you talk about them with, who you talk about them. And the key thing is that every topic has its own set of rules. 

So if you have a certain level of security clearance, that doesn’t mean you can just go into the archives and read everything. There has to be a certain need to know. And if there’s a conversation on a certain topic that is sensitive, those conversations can only happen on specific locations or on specific platforms, none of which involve third party software. 

Which is very vulnerable to hacking. More on that in a minute. Anyway, so the fact that this conversation happened at all is bad. The idea that it happened with the people who were involved is worse, because one of those people was in Russia at the time using his personal phone, and one of those people was the Treasury secretary, who had no business being on a communication about tactical military operations at a place like Yemen. 

And then, of course, this was tactical military operations. What pushes you way above the, you know, the classic classification of top secret and is the ultimate of the need to know. Now, anyone who is a rival to the United States, or honestly just curious, is going to be targeting our Treasury secretary, because he apparently is involved in these conversations that have nothing to do with the Treasury Department, and there nothing in his background, and there’s no one in his circle that suggests he has any experience in operational security. 

So we just identified our top finance individual as being a leaker and intelligence target for intelligence operations for the rest of his term. That is a disaster in of of itself. But now let’s talk about the actual format here. Signals a third party app for communications. No third party apps are allowed anywhere in the State Department or the Defense Department or the intelligence agencies specifically because it’s illegal. 

It’s a bad idea to be communicating outside of government channels. When you’re talking about information that should be classified, part of it is illegal, because the little simple thing of the Freedom of Information Act, so that decades from now, we know how things happen on the inside. Part of it is to help future administrations see inside the decision making process for the current administration. 

All that information will be lost, but most importantly, it’s because it’s fucking hackable. And specifically with signal. The week that this went down, the Defense Department warned everyone in the defense Department that the Russians were actively circumventing the security measures on signal. So Pete Hegseth, who was the defense secretary, is the one who set this up. And he should have known better at every possible level. 

And every person who was involved in the chat should have known that everything about this at every level was not just a bad idea in poor statecraft, but illegal as well, for all the right reasons. That all of that is part one. second issue is the general mismanagement of information in the public sphere of the Trump administration at this point. Now, when this story broke, the smart play, the national security conscious play would have been to contact the reporter and make sure that information got wiped. Instead, they did what they always do, and they went on the attack saying that, nothing was shared. 

That was a war plan or classified information. And it is the fault of the reporter who doesn’t even have a security clearance, that this information was out at all. In fact, it got so bad that Tulsi Gabbard, who is the director of national Intelligence, even went to Congress and testified that this is no big deal. Now, I have an opinion. 

Most of the intelligence community in the defense community are of the opinion that Tulsi Gabbard is a Russian agent that is actively working against American interests, right at the very top. Little professional tip, Miss Gabbard. If you don’t want people to think you’re a Russian agent, quit acting like a Russian agent. So, for example, lying to Congress about the use of the platform at the use of security, about the use of commercial information, and then actually what was in the conversation in the first place, because within hours of her doing that nonsense, the reporters like, well, if you don’t think this is classified information, I guess I can release it. 

And he did. And holy shit, it talked about specific assets, specific attack vector, specific times and locations. This is as high as it gets in terms of operational security needs. Which brings us to the third question why? Why is the Trump national security team so moronic? Two things going on here. First, Trump himself. When most leaders spend time out of power, they reflect on what went wrong and they build a team that fills in the gaps of what they don’t have. 

And they put together legislation so that when they get back into power, they can actually make their vision reality and make it last beyond their term. Trump didn’t do that. Trump fired everyone from his circle, inner and outer, who knew anything about anything. Because people who know things share what they know. And that means that Trump can’t be the smartest person in the room. 

He instead surrounded himself with loyalists, people who, you know, the recruiting process, competence didn’t make the list for anything that he wanted. So we have a DNI who works for a foreign power. We have a defense secretary that is a former TV host, and it shows. The second issue is when you’re first asked, when you get into the white House, is to pardon the people who protested and rioted on January 6th, complete with those who had attacked law enforcement personnel. 

Anyone who knows anything about national security won’t work for you because they’re like, fuck that noise. So the pool of people that Trump could draw from self-selected out, leaving only the people who would be personal, loyal, loyal, and really didn’t know anything about the process. Trump then went on to gut the upper echelons of every single department, not just the undersecretaries and the deputy secretaries, but everyone down as far as he possibly could fire. 

Removing all the knowledge base of everyone throughout the entire federal government and then replacing them with lackeys. And so we have people like this who literally have no idea how to keep information secure, who are making policy on behalf of all of us. And so, of course, it is all going horribly wrong. And that’s before you even start talking about the specifics of what those policies are.

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from a sunny Colorado. Today is the 21st of March. And there was just a press conference between American President Donald Trump and American Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, where they announced the launch of a new fighter program called the NGAD, the next generation air dominance fighter. It’s been, dubbed the F 47 because it’s Trump’s the 47th president. 

 But anyway, you can’t make this stuff up anyway. It in theory will be made by Boeing and should come into manufacture in a few years. That’s the goal. Before we go forward and talk about what it can do and implications, let’s talk about how we got here. So if you dial back to the 1990s and the early 2000, the Defense Department realized that they had a window. 

The Soviet Union had collapsed, and the Russian Federation, which emerged from it, was a pale shadow of its predecessors. And so there was going to be an extended period of time where the Soviet slash Russians weren’t going to be able to develop new air products. No new bombers, no new fighters. They did get a couple off the drawing board, but they were never able to produce more than one of them at a time. 

And even now, 35 years later, they only have 12 of some of their more advanced fighters. And that meant you had an opportunity to skip a generation. So Donald Rumsfeld, who was working with the Defense Department at the time, had this idea that we will look at the best technologies we have available right now and build the absolute minimum that we possibly can, and then research the next generation. 

Back at the time, we were dealing with F-15s and F-16s and the two programs that were greenlighted to proceed on that limited production basis were the F-22 air superiority fighter, which I think is one of the most badass pieces of military technology I’ve even heard of. It can hit supersonic speeds without using its afterburners, and all of its weapons are internal bay, so it has the radar cross-section of a small bird. 

I mean, it is bad ass. And then the other one is the F-35 joint strike factor, which is a flying pig. From my point of view, yes, it’s better than what we had, but its range isn’t very good. And the technology that’s gone into it has had all kinds of teething pains, and this has driven up the cost of the fighters to over $100 million per fighter. 

And it’s not very good at doing what it needs to do because its range is so limited. And that’s even before you put external weapons on it. The problem is it’s a Joint Strike fighter. It’s designed for both air to air combat and ground assault. And by being a multi-role platform, yes, you can do more, but you don’t do any of it particularly well. 

So we only made a few less than 200 of the f-22s, even though they are the perfect tool for the job, because we also need ground strike. And so the decision was made to do more and more and more of the F-35s, despite its many, many shortcomings. And that meant looping in lots of allies in order to help defray the overall production cost. 

And that brought it down to $100 million per airframe. Anyway, Rumsfeld and people like him thought, you know, we’ll just build the minimum we possibly can and then launch forward. And then the war on terror happened. And in the war on terror, what we discovered is we don’t need an air superiority con or a fighter against the Taliban because they don’t even have blimps, much less jets. 

But we do need ground strike. And so the F-22 was pushed to the side, kind of stuck with that initial plan of just a limited run. And the F-35 went into mass production. And we’re getting lots and lots and lots of those. Fast forward to today, because of the war on terror, we spent 20 years fighting ground wars, and we weren’t able to put the resources that would have been ideal under the Rumsfeld plan into the next generation. 

We’re only now getting there, took this long, and the end gap is supposed to be an air superiority fighter. The next generation after the F-22. Well, that leaves us with four complications. Problems. The first is cost. We saw the cost of the F-35 go up and up and up and up and up, and the end guard got a really nasty review from an internal Pentagon audit. 

I think it was just last year or the year before where they said it looked like the cost could be upward of $300 million per airframe. And the days of us being able to spread that out across the alliance are gone. The Trump administration is careening very rapidly to breaking most of our alliances, including the NATO alliance, which is where almost all of the F-35 sales we’re making are going. 

And every country that is committed to buying them is now rethinking it. Because if the United States is not going to be there in a real fight, not only are you not getting the implicit security guarantee that you thought you were getting, but if the Americans are responsible for all the tech and all the technicians and all the repair work and all the servicing, all the software and a lot of the weapons, do you really want to be dependent on the Americans at all in this brave new world we seem to be falling into so the F-35 is likely to get even more expensive, and no one is likely to sign up for the end guard at all. Problem two range. This is a black issue. It’s just an issue of, classification. We don’t know what the range of the guard is yet. It is in limited production, very limited, basically handmade. Nothing manufactured. The manufacturing wouldn’t be in for a few years yet. 

Three at the absolute low end. So this is a weapon system for the future, not for tomorrow. And until we know that range, it’s really hard to know if this is going to give us some of the advantages of the F-16 and the F-22, or weigh us down with some of the restrictions of the F-35. We’re just going to have to wait for more details on that. 

The third problem is that the end guard is going to need a complement. It is an air superiority fighter in the vein of the F-22, and we will still need something for ground attack. And if it’s going to be the Joint Strike Fighter, if that’s what we’re going to use for the next 30 years, then that puts some really huge limitations on what the United States can do militarily. 

Its range is just about 600 miles. Not great in terms of deep strike. And if we are moving into a world where the United States is walking away from most of its alliances, then we’re losing all the forward bases that allow us to launch these things in any meaningful way in the first place, which means we will also need a new ground strike jet. And that is an entirely new program that is going to have its own cost structure. And overlaying all of this is the question of technology during the course of the last 60 years. We haven’t seen actually almost 80 years. We haven’t seen a lot of changes. I mean, yes, yes, yes, we’ve gotten better at stealth. 

Yes, yes, yes, our missiles have gotten more accurate. All that’s true. But we haven’t really seen a change in what, a fighter or what a fighter bomber does. Until really recently, in the last few years, we’ve had building breakthroughs in things like materials science and digitization and energy transfer. And we don’t know where this is going to take us in terms of military technology. 

Yet the end guard looks interesting to me. It’s basically like a narrower version of the B-2 bomber, which is a badass piece of equipment, but it’s not a fundamental break. The stealth is cool. Don’t get me wrong, stealth is awesome, but it doesn’t do anything that you wouldn’t expect an air superiority fighter to do. These three breakthroughs in technology are in the very, very beginning stages, giving us drone technology, and we have discovered that the Ukrainians, for less than 20,000 a pop, can build a thousand drones that can saturate a battlefield, or for something closer to $200,000 a pop, develop rocket drones that can strike targets that are about as far away as the F-35 can reach. So we’re seeing these newer technologies come in and we don’t know how they’re going to mature. And so investing billions, tens of billions, hundreds of billions into a new manned fighter program, you got to wonder if this is the right call. I’m not saying it’s not. I’m saying we don’t know. And in a world where the United States is walking from its alliance structure, the new systems are probably not appropriate to what bases we’re going to have in a few years. 

I don’t mean this so much as a condemnation of Trump, although there’s plenty of that going around right now, but just a recognition that as our technological envelope evolves, one of two things has happen. Either we develop technologies to match the geography of our deployments, or we change our deployments to match the evolution of the technology. 

And there’s plenty of examples throughout history of both happening. We don’t know where we’re at yet. What we do know is if we try to do both.