The Future of Naval Tech & War on the Seas

Photo of a US aircraft carrier on the water

The nature of naval warfare is evolving – with advancing drone tech leading the charge – but not all of the world’s navies and regions will be impacted the same.

Drones are all the rage right now, and they come in all shapes, types, payloads, and ranges. But which countries will struggle with these drones the most? The isolated nature of Russia’s fleets leaves them open to attacks, while the US Navy tends to operate away from coastlines and can unite its fleets if needed. The Persian Gulf and parts of the Mediterranean might be hotter than others, but the US has enough regional allies to keep a strategic advantage. The Chinese navy will face geographical bottlenecks (like the first island chain) that will limit their naval reach and projection power.

The US is stuffing another ace up their sleeve with its Replicator Initiative, which would allow US ships to be converted into drone manufacturing platforms. So again, drones are changing the way in which naval battles are fought, but there will be some obvious winners and losers.

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For those who would like to donate directly to MedShare or to learn more about their efforts, you can click this link.

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Transcript

Hey everyone. Good morning from Colorful Colorado. Today, we’re going to take an entry from the Ask Peter forum. Specifically, do I worry about the primacy of the U.S. Navy in a situation where the drone technology being developed for the Ukraine war becomes more widespread? Well, let’s start by saying they’re going to become widespread. We’re only seeing something that’s barely out of the prototype stage right now.

And it is proven that in close quarters, relatively speaking, it is already more than capable of defeating an old-style surface navy. Now, I don’t want to overplay this because the Russian Navy is not great under normal circumstances, and that’s if they could all sail together into a single mailed fist. And they can’t—look at the Black Sea, the Baltic Sea, the Arctic Sea, and the Pacific Fleet—all of them independent, all of them having to operate under constrained circumstances.

Now, something to keep in mind about the drones. You’ve got two types: air and naval. Your air-launched drones, at the moment, can’t really carry warheads that are more than 100 pounds. And while that can certainly ruin your day or take out a tank or a building, against a ship, it’s going to be more limited in its ability to be successful.

Keep in mind that ships can move, and if you don’t have over-the-horizon visual capability, just getting the drones to where they need to go is going to be a bit of a problem. So most of the assaults that Ukraine has been launching against Russia’s Black Sea Fleet have been naval. Naval drones don’t have as much range, typically, but they can carry a lot bigger payload.

And since they’re in the water, once they get closer, there’s not a lot that the ships can do about it because they’re used to shooting up at air assets, not down at sea-level assets that are well below the angle that they can fire. So the Russians have to basically counter with small arms. And that would be true for any naval asset.

But keep in mind, there’s this geography issue. Not only are Russia’s navies sequestered from one another, but they’re also in relatively limited bodies of water that are highly contested. So, the Black Sea is obviously the issue of the moment, where the Ukrainians obviously have an outlet on the ocean that is adjacent to where the Russians would like their ships to operate.

But you also have NATO members—Turkey, Bulgaria, and Romania—which have significantly more frontage on that body of water than the Russians. So if you marry these new technologies to the assets of NATO and the industrial plants of a country like, say, Turkey, then the Russians simply can’t have anything floating on that body of water at all.

The same holds true to an even greater degree for the Baltic Sea Fleet, where you’ve got NATO members Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, and Finland, basically countering potential naval power. So if we ever get into a situation where there is a fight on the Baltic Sea, every ship that the Russians have will be sunk, probably within the first 72 hours.

It’s a little bit better on the Arctic, but then you’ve got the ice pack. So for a submarine, if you get below the ice pack, you’re probably okay. But Norway’s right there, and anything that’s going to stay on the North Atlantic has to go right by it, and it’s going to get sunk. And then, probably almost as bad as the Baltic, is the Pacific Fleet, which is completely bracketed by Japan.

Anything that’s going to leave from the Vladivostok area—that just leaves one base at a place called Petropavlovsk—but still, in here, which is a sub base where the subs can kind of go off and drop into a trench and hopefully evade detection. That base, which has no road and no rail connection to it whatsoever, could still operate, but that’s just one spot.

And everything basically has to be flown in to support it. So maybe, like, Russia’s—it’s just absolutely hosed. Compare that to the extreme on the other side with the U.S. Navy. We’ve got an Atlantic and Pacific Fleet that can sail through either the canal or around the Americas to unite into a single force if they want to. It tends to also be long-range-based: supercarriers, missile frigates, that sort of thing.

And so they very, very rarely engage a foe that they can see. You’re talking over-the-horizon hundreds of miles away. Well, that pretty much obviates any capability of the air- or sea-based drones in our current imagination of hitting them. Also, they tend to operate in the deep sea. They never go within sight of the coast if they don’t have to.

So there might be some bodies of water that are constrained, where operating there would be heavily restricted, where there are potential foes who could field a drone force. Places that are probably going to be a bit of a problem include, of course, the Persian Gulf. The days of having a carrier there without, you know, having to worry about it are probably gone now.

The Mediterranean could be a little constrained. But keep in mind, the entire northern coast of the Mediterranean are NATO countries, and the entire southern coast are countries that, for the most part, are favorable to the United States: Egypt, Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia. The one holdout is Libya, and it’s not that Libya’s hostile; it’s that Libya has basically fallen into civil war and is falling apart as a government. Everywhere else that I can already see as a possibility.

Not necessarily because there’s a lot of governments there that are hostile, but it’s becoming a stateless zone in its own way. And the Houthis are probably the best example of that. Just keep in mind that the Houthis of Yemen don’t have an industrial plant. So any weapons they fire are something they’ve brought in from somewhere else. Closer to home, the only thing to really worry about would be the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean.

And because there are hostile countries there, most notably Venezuela and Cuba. But if, if, if, if, if we ever get to the situation where that is a problem, a couple of things to keep in mind: Number one, most U.S. naval assets aren’t in the Gulf of Mexico, so you don’t have to worry about a base getting closed in.

And second, in the very, very unlikely situation where we have a military conflict in that area, there will be a land invasion of Cuba in a very short period of time. This is not me recommending—let me make this very clear—I think there are much easier ways to get Cuba on our side, if that’s the goal.

But a country with the population and the industrial plant of Cuba could not survive in the face of an American onslaught should it come to it. And really, that’s the only other spot where there’s a constraint. Between geography and allies, the U.S. looks pretty good. That just begs the question of what is the situation for maybe some other countries that have navies.

In the case of the United Kingdom, yes, it’s close to other land borders—the North Sea, the English Channel—they’re not that big of a barrier. But again, Norway, Denmark, France—you know, these are friendly countries, not hostile ones. And in the case of East Asia, things get really dicey. Japan’s okay because all of its ports are on the east side of the island, so they sail out and then come back to wherever they want to.

So they’re pretty much immune to this. But China—China’s got the first island chain, and any vessel that leaves China has to get by Japan or Taiwan or the Philippines or Indonesia or Singapore. Assuming the United States isn’t playing at all, that’s going to be really hard. And one of the things that the U.S. Navy is working on right now is something called the Replicator Initiative, which will turn its ships into not just combat platforms, but manufacturing platforms to produce exactly the sorts of drones that would be needed to sink everything that the Chinese have in a short period of time.

In the case of a war. Hopefully it’ll never come to that, but Replicator is supposed to be operational by the end of calendar year 2027. That’s not that far away.

Israel Attacks Iran, Again – Part 1 & 2

An Israeli F-35I "Adir", the model of aircraft reported to have taken part in the strikes.

Part 1

Recently, Iran attacked Israel, again. And so last night Israel attacked Iran, again. Believe it or not, this is normal AND good news! At least until the Russians come to the party.

Part 2

Now that we’ve had a bit more time to see what happened in Israel’s latest attack on Iran, let’s dive a bit deeper. Israel struck military facilities like missile storage and production sites, but avoided nuclear and oil infrastructure.

This damage will set Iran’s missile capabilities back for a while, but these defenses were lackluster to begin with. A more significant takeaway from this attack was the absence of any meaningful resistance for the Israeli aircraft, which pokes some serious holes in the Russian-made S-300s and similar Chinese models.

Israel’s attack not only diminishes Iran’s military power, but also gave the world some insight as to shifting regional power dynamics.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Here at Zeihan on Geopolitics, our chosen charity partner is MedShare. They provide emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it, so we can be sure that every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence.

For those who would like to donate directly to MedShare or to learn more about their efforts, you can click this link.

Learn about medshare here

Transcript

Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Austin, Texas. It is the 27th of October, and we’re going to do a follow-on to yesterday’s video about the Israeli retaliatory strike on Iran. Now that we know a little bit more about what was hit, the Israelis were able to target military facilities. They didn’t go after the nuclear program and they did not go after oil facilities.

Instead, their primary targets were facilities that stored missiles and were a critical component in the construction of the missiles that the Iranians like to use. Basically, there’s two types of fuel that you can put in a ballistic missile. The first is liquid fuel. This is cheaper and technically easier, but it’s very dangerous because you can’t store the rocket fuel in the rocket.

If you’re not going to launch in the next couple of days, you generally leave them empty. So, it’s easy to know when the bad guys are going to launch a bunch of missiles because satellite images can show the trucks pumping in the somewhat toxic, very explosive, very dangerous fuel.

Now, the Iranians have moved on from liquid fuel to solid fuel, which is much more stable. You can store the fuel in the rocket indefinitely, but it’s more technically involved, and the Iranians don’t know how to do it themselves. They bought the facilities to make this fuel from China, and now those are mostly smoking holes in the ground after the Israeli raid.

Until these facilities are rebuilt, and given Iran is now under much stricter sanctions than when it acquired these originally, the Iranians will have a hard time running their missile fleets as they have been, which is clearly what the Israelis were aiming for. They may have one or two operational fuel fabrication facilities left, but certainly not at a scale that poses a real threat to Israel.

So, you know, strike one, Iran. The second point to keep in mind is that wherever Israeli fighter bombers went—whether over Iraq, Lebanon, or Iran itself—they took out all the air defenses along the way. Most of the air defenses the Iranians use are called S-300s, which are the second from top-of-the-line system that the Russians produce and export.

The top model is the S-400. The Iranians knew this strike was coming, had plenty of notice, and still couldn’t shoot down a single Israeli jet. Between this raid and the war in Ukraine, where many of these S-300s are in use, we’ve been getting a bit of an awakening for people who have relied on Russian equipment all these years—it simply couldn’t do the job.

All of these air defenses are now smoking holes in the ground. On a larger stage, this has made the Israelis quite confident that whenever they feel the need to establish air superiority, they don’t even need jets—they just need to take out the air defenses since no one in the region has competitive air power.

Looking at the broader strategic picture, the Russians do have some S-400s, but not enough to provide full coverage, and they’ve already lost several in the Ukraine war. Yes, the S-400 is the most advanced air defense system the Russians have, but it’s not that much more advanced than the S-300. More importantly, the Chinese have their local air defenses, the HQ-9 and HQ-22, which are essentially knockoffs of the S-300 floor model, though upgraded in some ways with Chinese technology. We’ve never seen them in actual combat, but now we know the Israelis, who don’t even have a first-rate air force, were able to take out every S-300 they encountered. This suggests that the U.S., with its superior air force, would likely have no trouble operating in a similar environment if push came to shove with China.

Surely this isn’t what the Iranians planned when they conducted their raid on the 1st of October, but they’ve given strategic thinkers a lot to chew on, indicating that air defenses on the other side might not be nearly as interesting or capable as we’ve long assumed. So, you know, as

**Photo of an Israeli F-35I “Adir”, the model of aircraft reported to have taken part in the strikes by Wikimedia Commons.

China, Navy, Nukes, Tech, and Politics

Photo of a submarine emerging out of the water

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Our focus turns toward China today, specifically at the technological struggles facing the Chinese military and manufacturing industry. And yes, we’re starting with the nuclear submarine that sank in port…

The Chinese have been looking to make some upgrades to their technological capabilities across the board, but they’re not gaining much traction. As evidenced by the nuclear submarine that sank near Wuhan, China’s nuclear deterrent system is one area that could use some love. Unlike the US nuclear triad that provides redundancy and security, the Chinese really only have ICBMs to bail them out of nuclear troubles.

While the sinking of that sub is embarrassing, it’s far from the only area that the Chinese could use some help in. China is a manufacturing hub for low-tech stuff, including less advanced semiconductors. However, China has struggled to make much (if any) progress on the chip front, because they lack the expertise and access to operate the necessary machinery.

And things aren’t likely to improve anytime soon. US-China trade tensions are on the rise, and the coming US election isn’t likely to change that…regardless of who wins. With sanctions, tariffs and technological controls limiting China’s capabilities, it will be difficult for them to achieve technological parity with the US.

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Here at Zeihan On Geopolitics we select a single charity to sponsor. We have two criteria:

First, we look across the world and use our skill sets to identify where the needs are most acute. Second, we look for an institution with preexisting networks for both materials gathering and aid distribution. That way we know every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence. Then we give what we can.

Today, our chosen charity is a group called Medshare, which provides emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it. Until future notice, every cent we earn from every book we sell in every format through every retailer is going to Medshare’s Ukraine fund.

And then there’s you.

Our newsletters and videologues are free and we will never share your contact information with anyone. All we ask is that if you find one of our releases in any way useful, that you make a donation to Medshare. Over one third of Ukraine’s pre-war population has either been forced from their homes, kidnapped and shipped to Russia, or is trying to survive in occupied lands. This is our way to help who we can. Please, join us.

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Transcript

Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from Salt Creek Beach, just outside of L.A., in California. Today, we’re going to talk about beacon policy, technology, China, and the U.S. elections. Yeah, that’s going to get me in trouble pretty much everywhere.

Okay, so the new news that leaked out over the last few days is that back sometime in the spring, the Chinese new nuclear attack submarine sank at a dock via Wuhan. It was a first-in-class ship, and first-in-class ships are notoriously buggy, but they usually don’t just, you know, sink. They had to fish it out of the river with a bunch of floating cranes.

Now, I don’t want to suggest that submarine engineering is easy, especially nuclear submarine engineering, but I gotta say, like, the definition of a submarine is something that doesn’t sink unless there’s a torpedo in it. So getting the basics wrong on this sort of thing is beyond embarrassing. And if you can kind of put this in context, imagine if in San Diego, a nuclear-powered vessel sank in harbor and the government tried to hide it from everyone. That’s basically what’s gone down here.

So, very, very sloppy engineering work, a sloppy propaganda campaign. But from a strategic point of view, I think it’s really important to understand what the Chinese do and do not have when it comes to nuclear deterrence. They have silos—ICBMs that would launch mostly from western China. They don’t have a functional sub arc, and they certainly don’t have a bomber arc.

So we’re talking about one type of deterrence, not the three that the United States has for redundancy. Now, whether that’s good, bad, or indifferent depends on what you care about, but the whole reason the United States maintains the triad is so that no matter what flavor of attack hits the United States, it always has at least one, probably two, backup plans. That sort of deterrence means countries aren’t going to nuke the United States, even before you consider things like missile defense. China is nowhere close to that, not in number of warheads, and certainly not in delivery methods.

This brings us to the general topological issues that the Chinese are trying to crack here. China has a lot of ambitions, and they say they’re planning on going into this, that, or the other thing. But desire is not the same as performance. So, consider, for example, semiconductors. The Chinese have something called deep ultraviolet technology that they’re pretty decent at, and chips that are in the 80-90 nanometer range or dumber, they can make themselves. But when the chips get more advanced—and that’s like what you put into most automotives, for example—they need not just foreign equipment, but foreign staff and foreign software.

Most of the chips being made today—things that are, as a rule, 20 nanometers and smaller—don’t use that technology unless you want to be wildly inefficient with it. Instead, they use something called extreme ultraviolet lithography, which is a technology basically completely controlled by the Dutch company ASML. Even if the Chinese were able to get their hands on some of those more advanced machines, it’s not like they could operate them. There are staffing issues, experience issues, and software issues. Plus, the Dutch have built their machines with remote kill switches, so they have to be involved in the process.

I don’t mean to say this to insult the Chinese. I mean to say this to insult everyone. No country controls enough of the semiconductor supply chain for anything that’s mid- or high-tier chips to do it themselves. You’re talking about a constellation of thousands of companies and dozens of countries, and it really does take a village. So, the Chinese desire to do all of this in-house? It’s just not going to happen, or at least not without a significant shift in how this technology works. It’s more likely to get more complicated in the future rather than less, which means we pretty much know what’s going to happen with U.S. politics and trade relations, because the parameters of what can and cannot be done with the technology are already known.

So, regardless of who wins the American presidential election—and we all have our own ideas on that—we’re looking at a situation where, on the Trump side, we know that tariffs are the plan. But the Biden administration has never repealed any of the tariffs that Trump put into place. On the Harris side of the equation, we know that technological controls are the preferred tool. But I can’t imagine a President Trump ever repealing those.

So, we’re looking at a tightening technological noose as the United States does something that China just can’t call on other countries for. Because, even at the depths of the Trump administration, when relations with allies were at their lowest, you still had countries that needed the United States for this, that, or the other thing. And so the United States was able to do technological sanctions on things like lithography that basically stalled the entire Chinese technological push.

They were able to use older technology like that deep ultraviolet I mentioned in order to brute force through some relatively low-quality chips that hit a couple of technological markers but were huge energy hogs, took up a lot more space, and generated a lot more heat. Not the kind of thing you’re going to use to reset the technological tables, especially when you start talking about some of the newer things ASML is trying to work on, like high numerical aperture, getting down to a one-nanometer chip. The Chinese don’t even have a finger in that world yet.

It takes everyone, played out across the economy, and there’s only so much the Chinese can do. They just don’t do the high-end stuff at all. They do the low end; they do the assembly. And that’s a multi-trillion-dollar operation—that’s not something to be scoffed at. But that’s not the same thing as parity, nuclear or otherwise.

Could Jet Ski Bombs Change the Way Navies Operate?

*This video was recorded during my backpacking trip through Yosemite in the end of July.

The US Navy and its fleet of carriers (and super-carriers) haven’t had much of a challenge on the seas since WWII. But of all things, it might be some low-tech jet ski bombs that change the way the world’s navies operate.

As the Ukraine War evolves, we’re seeing warfare innovations that could reshape all future conflict. This has come in the form of modified speedboats and jet skis with bombs, used to disable Russia’s Black Sea Navy. And other countries are starting to take note.

For countries with constrained naval access points, this could spell trouble; think of regions like the Black Sea and Baltic Sea or countries with punchy neighbors like Israel and Turkey. These innovations are low-cost and accessible to just about everyone…even worse, they’re difficult to defend against with current tech. So, how does this look for the major naval players?

China is vulnerable to attack from smaller countries due to their port locations. For the US, UK and Japan, there’s less concern given their geographies and strategic partnerships. However, everyone should be updating their defense systems and working to handle this new style of water warfare.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Here at Zeihan On Geopolitics we select a single charity to sponsor. We have two criteria:

First, we look across the world and use our skill sets to identify where the needs are most acute. Second, we look for an institution with preexisting networks for both materials gathering and aid distribution. That way we know every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence. Then we give what we can.

Today, our chosen charity is a group called Medshare, which provides emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it. Until future notice, every cent we earn from every book we sell in every format through every retailer is going to Medshare’s Ukraine fund.

And then there’s you.

Our newsletters and videologues are not only free, they will always be free. We also will never share your contact information with anyone. All we ask is that if you find one of our releases in any way useful, that you make a donation to Medshare. Over one third of Ukraine’s pre-war population has either been forced from their homes, kidnapped and shipped to Russia, or is trying to survive in occupied lands. This is our way to help who we can. Please, join us.

Support medshare's ukraine fund
Support medshare's global efforts

Transcript

Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from Yosemite. Really doesn’t matter beyond that because I’ve been pushed into my tent by some Thunder boomers for the last hour anyway. Thought I’d use the wet as an excuse to talk about the future of movies around the world. Since World War One—really, World War Two—the carrier has been the backbone of everything that matters, largely because they can project power. More conventional ships like, say, battleships have to get into engagement range, which is, you know, measured in miles or tens of miles, whereas a carrier can launch fighters and fighter bombers from hundreds of miles away and never be in danger itself.

That’s why the Soviets invested so much in trying to break through the American carrier perimeter with things like airlines, cruise missiles, or submarines to questionable effect. But anyway, that was the goal. Now, for the last 30 years, the United States has been the only game in town. It’s not just carriers the United States has. It has supercarriers. It has ten of what most countries consider carriers, which are the core of the Marine expeditionary units, and then another ten of the Nimitz class carriers, which are the ones that, you know, outshoot everybody. One of those has more projection-based firepower than every other navy in the world, with the exception of the Japanese and the British navies, who are allies anyway. So, big difference. And then, of course, the United States is in the process of floating three Ford-class carriers, which will be even more powerful. So, from a conventional naval point of view, the United States is in a league of its own. Might as well be on its own planet. The question is whether that is changing.

One of the things that we have seen in the Ukraine war is that the Ukrainians have been able to modify speedboats and literally jet skis with remote controls, put a couple hundred pounds or 500 pounds of bombs on them, and send them off. In doing so, they’ve basically sunk or incapacitated the vast majority of the Black Sea navy of the Russians. It’s actually worse than it sounds because the Russians moved a lot of ships into the Black Sea just before the war, and those are all gone too. So recently, the Russians abandoned the port of Sevastopol. Basically, they’re not having naval assets in the Crimean Peninsula anymore. They’ve moved everything back to Novorossiysk. But the Ukrainians have already hit Novorossiysk, so they’re probably going to have to move it back to Tuapse, or maybe even Astrakhan. Basically, the Russian Black Sea Fleet is no more. It’s no longer a fleet in being. It no longer has the capacity to project power, and it’s basically hiding in its supposed home waters. Say what you will, but the Ukrainians are creative, and they’re working with very, very little. There’s not much about these naval drones that is particularly sophisticated; we just haven’t seen them patched together like this before. So, to think that this technological innovation is going to stop just in Ukraine is kind of stupid.

So you need to look around the world for other navies that really shouldn’t exist much longer because if they get in a shooting war with a neighbor, all it’s going to take is a few non-dudes on jet skis, and they’re gone. The country that is going to suffer the most from this is Russia. All of Russia’s maritime access points where it has naval ports are contested. I mean, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s got that really, really, really crazy long Arctic coastline, but hardly anyone lives there, with the exception of Arkhangelsk and Murmansk, which are the bases for the Arctic Fleet. And both of those are within jet ski range of Norway. Saint Petersburg and the Baltic Sea Fleet are even more constrained. Anything that wants to operate there has to get by Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Sweden, Denmark, Poland, and Germany. So yeah, not happening. The only other remaining base is out in Vladivostok, where the Russians are completely circumscribed by the Japanese islands. So, you know, any meaningful conflict involving any of these theaters, and the Russians lose it all very, very, very quickly to jet skis. I mean, that’s just embarrassing. The Russians have never been a naval power because all of its navy points are constrained, and one fleet can’t really reinforce the other, but still, this is just a little over the top.

They’re hardly alone. Basically, there are a lot of countries that are near one another, they don’t like one another, and getting a few motorboats or jet skis together to throw things out of whack is a really good plan. So, for example, if the Israelis and the Turks don’t find a way to get along, both of them can largely decimate the regional navies. This is a bigger problem for Turkey because it’s on the Black Sea, and that means it has to have good relations with not just the Russians and the Georgians, but the Romanians and the Bulgarians. And of course, then there’s the Greeks. The Aegean Sea is probably going to be a no-go zone for the Turkish Navy, which basically makes it really important for the Turks to get along with Israel. Otherwise, they won’t have a navy at all.

But the real fun starts in the Persian Gulf, where Iran, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman can basically, whenever they want to, bomb each other’s navies. Not that any of them have navies, but it’s a commercial thing. All of these countries are dependent upon the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz to get crude out, and now it takes really, really low-tech stuff to interrupt it. But the real, real crazy exciting stuff is going to happen in East Asia because every Chinese port is on the wrong side of the first island chain. That’s the line of islands going south from Japan to include Taiwan, the Philippines, and Indonesia. I would look to Indonesia and the Philippines to really explore these technologies because they’re not naval powers, but anyone can buy some bombs on a jet ski, and all of a sudden, all this money that the Chinese have been investing in their navy is completely pointless.

Now, of course, if you’re talking about the big three navies in the world, that’s the United States, Japan, and the United Kingdom. Those are the three big naval powers. The game might be a little different. One of the reasons why these three countries are the world’s biggest naval powers is because of their positioning. Obviously, Japan and the United Kingdom are islands, so they have to have a navy, and then the United States is basically on a continent more or less by itself from a strategic point of view. Well, in the case of Japan, all of its ports are on the east side of the island, so they’re out of jet ski range. For the United Kingdom, as long as they get along well with Norway, Denmark, and France, there’s nothing to worry about there, and that’s one of the many reasons why NATO tries to keep an eye on all of these relationships. And to be perfectly blunt, the French and the Brits—there’s a lot of bad water under the bridge there, but they’re not about to go bombing one another, and the Danes, the Norwegians, and the Brits have gotten along well for centuries, so that’s probably okay.

There’s still the open question, though, of where can you operate? Just because you can get your ship out of port doesn’t mean you can do anything with it because if you come in range of a foreign coastline, the jet skis may very well come out. So we’re going to have to see a counter-revolution in naval technology here. I don’t want to go so far as to say the age of the supercarrier is over because those things are really tough to sink, and they are really fast, and they are really useful. But if someone’s coming at you with a fleet of jet skis, you don’t have the right weapons for that. There’s nothing on the ships or even in the ring of ships that supports them that can shoot down at an angle to engage these things, so we’ll need something new.

Now the Navy is working on something called the Replicator initiative, which isn’t simply going to field a bunch of drones; it’s going to turn all of the major surface combatants into drone manufacturing centers, so they can kick out dozens of these things in a few hours, is the theory. And if that happens, you get some serious drone-on-drone action. While using a jet ski against a capital ship is a big bang for your buck, using a small drone against a large drone is an even bigger bang. So, according to the Navy, within two years, Replicator should be online, at least in a prototype fashion. We’ll see what it looks like then. It’s all a question of whether or not the existing naval powers can innovate at the speed that the upstarts are. I can tell you this for sure: they’re putting a budget behind it because they don’t want to lose those big boats.

All right, that’s it for me. Until next time.

Why France and Azerbaijan Are Fighting Over New Caledonia

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It’s no surprise that the French like to be “involved” in as many places as possible, but what’s going on with the current rebellion in the French protectorate of New Caledonia?

The independence movement is gaining traction in New Caledonia, but the French are changing electoral laws to prevent the movement from succeeding. Given France’s recent moves in Armenia, they’ve attracted the attention of Azerbaijan to this little foothold in the Southwest Pacific.

While Azerbaijan might not have the most experience in supporting dissidents, they do have the financial resources to piss off the French. Tensions are rising and this little island known for nickel mining might be getting more interesting than usual.

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First, we look across the world and use our skill sets to identify where the needs are most acute. Second, we look for an institution with preexisting networks for both materials gathering and aid distribution. That way we know every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence. Then we give what we can.

Today, our chosen charity is a group called Medshare, which provides emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it. Until future notice, every cent we earn from every book we sell in every format through every retailer is going to Medshare’s Ukraine fund.

And then there’s you.

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Transcript

Nothing says power politics quite like a castle. So I thought this backdrop would be a great way to talk about the Southwest Pacific. specifically, we’ve got a rebellion going on in the province of New Caledonia. It’s an island that’s a French protectorate colony. And we’re starting to see people walking around with flags of Azerbaijan. So, you know, this requires a little bit of unpack. 

So, first of all, this is a territory that survived as a French protectorate. even after the rest of the colonies were hived off. And, on purpose or not. In the aftermath of World War two, during the decolonization period, the French held on to New Caledonia for two reasons. Number one, strategic position in the Southwest Pacific gives them a leg in that part of the world. 

And second, and from an economic point of view, far more importantly, New Caledonia is the third largest mine for nickel in the world. Nickel, obviously is using stainless steel, and of late it’s becoming far more important for green transition technologies. Everything from solar to, electrical grade steel to electric vehicles. Now, New Caledonia has had a kind of a rough time over the last few decades, because their nickel isn’t all that economically viable. 

the mines are the best in the world and far more importantly, takes a lot of energy to process nickel. And to be perfectly blunt, if you’re on a small island in the South Pacific and it’s really, really expensive. So it hasn’t broken even for much of the last 30 years. And even companies like Glencore, which are how should I put this? 

Typically not bound by a lot of ethical concerns are in the process of trying to get out. but but but but but if the green transition really does happen, we need ten times as much nickel. And that’s going to change the math for pretty much everything involving the island, which is why we’ve got the unrest right now. 

There is an independence movement that is gaining steam, and the French are in the process of making sure that it cannot succeed. So they’ve changed the electoral laws. It used to be that if you had been in the province, on the island for more than 25 years, you could vote in local elections. And that gave the local Kanak minority majority status. 

But, the French are in the process of changing that. So you only had to have lived there for ten years. And if you include all the mainland French imports to the island that have moved in the last decade, all or in the last 15 years, you’ve got a very different picture and the independence movement will never succeed. 

So that’s what’s going on to the French point of view. That’s what’s going on from the island point of view. That just leaves the observers. How do you flags? as we talked about recently, France is getting involved in the caucuses, specifically helping out Armenia, where it can diplomatically thinking that that’s going to give them a leg up in the caucuses. 

And that might provide them with some diplomatic heft that they’re losing in West Africa. Azerbaijan’s on the other side of that conflict, as a region in Armenia for a number of wars. And at the moment, Azerbaijan’s doing a lot better for a number of reasons, twice the population, 20 times the economic strength, much more powerful military and has recently kicked the Armenians ass in a couple of regional wars. 

Well, so France mucking about in Armenia has triggered a counter response, with Azerbaijan now monkeyed around in New Caledonia. Now Azerbaijan brings nothing to this fight. They have no experience in supporting it with dissidents. They don’t know how to do paramilitary attacks at all. But what they do have is a metric butt ton of money. This is a country with barely 10 million people who have a million barrels per day of oil exports, and they can throw a lot of cash at a lot of things, at a lot of places if they want to. 

And for their first big trick, they’re trying to sponsor a revolution in the South Pacific just to piss France off. It’s working. 

Why Are the French Getting Involved with Armenia? || Ask Peter

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Today we’ll be looking at why the French are considering sending military aid to Armenia…and no, its not because they’re looking to swap croissant and nazook recipes.

Let’s disregard NATO and EU ties to Azerbaijan for this discussion, because this move by the French is more motivated by Turkey’s support of Azerbaijan and Iran’s declining regional influence. There’s also some Armenian ex-pats who might be helping push this forward.

The French are coping with their loss of influence in West Africa by expanding their reach to Armenia in hopes that it will help give them some influence in a new sphere. This move would also help to position the French against the rising Turkish influence in the region, so two birds I guess.

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First, we look across the world and use our skill sets to identify where the needs are most acute. Second, we look for an institution with preexisting networks for both materials gathering and aid distribution. That way we know every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence. Then we give what we can.

Today, our chosen charity is a group called Medshare, which provides emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it. Until future notice, every cent we earn from every book we sell in every format through every retailer is going to Medshare’s Ukraine fund.

And then there’s you.

Our newsletters and videologues are not only free, they will always be free. We also will never share your contact information with anyone. All we ask is that if you find one of our releases in any way useful, that you make a donation to Medshare. Over one third of Ukraine’s pre-war population has either been forced from their homes, kidnapped and shipped to Russia, or is trying to survive in occupied lands. This is our way to help who we can. Please, join us.

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Transcript

France recently has been, entering conversations about military assistance for aid or supply to Armenia. France, you know, famously has a large Armenian ex-pat population, but NATO, the EU, very broadly have deep energy trade monetization ties with Azerbaijan. is there a future quagmire facing, the individual elements of EU member states, the EU as an organization, NATO membership, with what seems to be a intensifying conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan. 

This is this is purely a France issue. NATO’s actually involved with the Armenia Azerbaijan issue. If anything, it’s going to be decided by which direction the two other powers in the region decide to go Iran and Turkey. In the case of Iran, they don’t bring a lot to the table anymore, especially if the Russians are out in. 

The Russians are out. the Turks obviously out of a partnership and an ethnic relationship with the Azerbaijanis, and that is getting more robust by the day. And Azerbaijan has proven to be a wonderful testbed for Turkish drone technology, which has absolutely obliterated any strategic independence at the Armenians may have once had. So the French basically are playing a little bit of a double game. 

the French have lost their position. West Africa, which from a strategic and an economic point of view is no big loss. But it was a hit to the prestige. And they absolutely blame the Russians and absolutely accurately blame the Russians for that. So now the French are in the process of doing a strategic realignment. And that means, first and foremost, take a good, hard look at the interests of the country that are causing them to do that. 

And that is the Russians. So the French are considering putting troops in Ukraine very seriously, in order to provide a bulwark for the Ukrainians and most importantly, for the French to learn about all these changes in technology, as we saw with the Azerbaijani, Armenia war of late, as well as Ukraine war. Drone drones are the newest thing and the French have no experience with that. 

So in both of these theaters, that’s one of the things they’ve got their eyes on in terms of the Caucasus, the French have a little bit more room to maneuver there than, say, the Germans or the Italians, because they’re not dependent upon as of any energy at all. and we are seeing a rising what’s the right here interaction of Turkish interests and French interests. 

Because as the United States steps back from a lot of things, the eastern med becomes a potential zone of competition. And if that turns harsh, the French are gonna want some cards to play on another front. As a region, Armenia, the Caucasus plays into that. I’m not saying that these two powers have to not get along. I’m saying that they need to figure out whether they’re going to get along or not. 

  

And France establishing a few flags on the ground in Armenia is a way to do that. Doesn’t mean they’re going to be hostile. It means they’re going to be rubbing up against each other more often. And this is preparation. 

Japan’s Navy Gets Teeth

The Japanese Navy is getting a face lift with the conversion of the Izumo-class destroyers into small supercarriers capable of holding F-35s (compliments of the US).

This marks Japan’s return to full-scale naval aviation and is a reflection of the overall strategic shift in Japan’s military posture. With regional affairs growing more dicey by the day (ahem, China), Japan is straightening out its military posture and looking to play a more assertive role.

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Today, our chosen charity is a group called Medshare, which provides emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it. Until future notice, every cent we earn from every book we sell in every format through every retailer is going to Medshare’s Ukraine fund.

And then there’s you.

Our newsletters and videologues are not only free, they will always be free. We also will never share your contact information with anyone. All we ask is that if you find one of our releases in any way useful, that you make a donation to Medshare. Over one third of Ukraine’s pre-war population has either been forced from their homes, kidnapped and shipped to Russia, or is trying to survive in occupied lands. This is our way to help who we can. Please, join us.

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TranscripT

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Florida. The news today, we’re in the second week of April, is that the Japanese have released from initial refit a beard, what they call a heavy destroyer. The cargo. It’s part of the Izumi class. this was designed to be a helicopter carrier, right? It’s really a small supercarrier, if you will.

And they’ve now completed the refit so it can take American F-35, of which the Japanese are purchasing about 150, at least a third of which are supposed to be the carrier versions. and there’s definitely going to be more coming. this gives the Japanese full scale naval aviation for the first time since 1945. Keep in mind that the world’s first super carriers or carriers of any type actually are Japanese.

And so this is a skill set that they’re in the process of rebuilding. they’re also doing so hand in glove with the naval superpower, which is the United States. And obviously they’re going to be using a lot of American hardware and training to make this up to speed. So basically this takes Japan and transforms its already blue water navy into a blue water strike, maybe with significant over-the-horizon capabilities.

the Japanese who were doing this happened to over the Americas from a strategic point of view. And the vessels were already sailing together with the American fleets. the cargo will be going for sea trials now for probably about a year, maybe a year and a half before beginning full deployment. And while that is happening, the other of the two sumo class carriers, Mizuho, will now be going for its refit.

critics would say, and I would agree with them, that this was always the plan for the Izumo class. They were only called helicopter destroyers, for purposes of dealing with a population and a region that wasn’t quite comfortable with Japan taking a direct military role in affairs, but that has now turned, the Koreans have gotten quiet.

Everyone else in Asia realizes the Japanese being more fourth, which is actually a good thing. But most importantly, the Japanese population has moved beyond its general feeling to pacifism and the post-World War Two era, realizing that as the Chinese become more uppity that a firmer military position is needed and that requires hardware to accentuate the policy, it.

Apparently A Cessna and Elbow Grease Is All Ukraine Needs

The Ukrainians are getting creative and finding ways to launch longer-range attacks on Russian infrastructure. We’ve already seen strikes on pipeline nexuses and chemical complexes as deep as Samara and Tatarstan.

Attacks like these hold significant economic implications for the Russians, as any disruptions to these oil facilities could be devastating. The issue isn’t so much that Ukraine is poking holes in Russian air defense, but perhaps exposing that there…Isn’t any.

Attacks like these will likely prove to be a growing challenge for Russian security and economic stability as the conflict continues.

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First, we look across the world and use our skill sets to identify where the needs are most acute. Second, we look for an institution with preexisting networks for both materials gathering and aid distribution. That way we know every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence. Then we give what we can.

Today, our chosen charity is a group called Medshare, which provides emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it. Until future notice, every cent we earn from every book we sell in every format through every retailer is going to Medshare’s Ukraine fund.

And then there’s you.

Our newsletters and videologues are not only free, they will always be free. We also will never share your contact information with anyone. All we ask is that if you find one of our releases in any way useful, that you make a donation to Medshare. Over one third of Ukraine’s pre-war population has either been forced from their homes, kidnapped and shipped to Russia, or is trying to survive in occupied lands. This is our way to help who we can. Please, join us.

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TranscripT

Hey everyone. Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from Colorado, got a fresh dusting overnight because, you know, April, it’s April 2nd in the news in the last 3 or 4 days is that the Ukrainians have demonstrated a significantly longer range for weapons systems launched from Ukraine proper. specifically, the Ukrainians have been able to hit targets with their new drones that are in the, locations of Samara and Tartus stand.

now, these are more important than a lot of these in pieces of infrastructure that Ukrainians have been hitting with their drone campaign recently. Samara is a major pipeline nexus where a lot of the crude that comes in from southwestern, Siberia gets processed or redirected to European or Black Sea markets. And Tatarstan is even deeper within the Russian Federation, in Siberia proper.

and it is also a major chemicals and refining complex. So the significance here is pretty, pretty strong. the issue is throughput. The Russians don’t have a lot of storage. The country’s really big, and the most of these systems were built in the imperial age under the Soviets. So they were designed to supply the empire. Well, now that, the empire has gone its own way, and most of the former Soviet republics and, former Soviet satellite states are getting their crude and natural gas from somewhere else.

The Russians are completely dependent now for income on getting this crude out to the wider world. That means getting to the black on the Baltic Sea, because they can’t really use the pipes to go into Germany anymore. So when you think of that, and then you look at notes like some are in tartar, stand, we have a problem.

Because if these are interrupted, especially Samara, which is a nexus, then the crude has nowhere to go. There’s not a backup system when these clusters get taken offline, for whatever reason, pressure builds up in the pipe. Back to the wellhead. Now, this could be worse. the facilities that are in southwestern Siberia, especially places like Tarter stand in Bucharest on it, doesn’t get so cold there in the winter that the well heads freeze.

But now that the Ukrainians have demonstrated the ability to strike over 1000km from their border, it’s only a matter of time before they start aiming for targets that are north of Moscow instead of south of Moscow. And if those pipeline accesses go offline, then you’re talking about the well heads in northwestern Siberia actually freezing shut. And a lot of the stuff just goes offline forever because if the wellhead freezes shut, you have to drill it.

And you can only re drill in the Arctic summer. And that only lasts for about 3 or 4 months a year. So, that’s kind of piece one. Piece two is what’s going on in Totters on Thomaston because it is a combination of producing zone and chemical zone. A lot of these chemicals are what allows the Russian agricultural system to work.

 

And a lot of this stuff is exported to China. So what the Ukrainians are demonstrating is the capacity to identify targets that move up the value added chain, not just going after raw crude, not just going after refined product, but even downstream products, like chemicals manufacture. so the economic hit to the Russians from this continues to climb.

And now it’s really just an issue of whether or not the Russians have the capacity of getting meaningful air defense of the hundreds of facilities that they have across European and Western Siberia and Russia in order to stymie these attacks in the first place, because they’re clearly not moving fast enough on the front in order to disrupt these drones launching.

And this is a very, very cheap way to do it. These things cost more than, say, the Iranian Shi’ite drones. But you’re still talking about well, well, well, well under $1 million a pop. Whereas a refinery that handles 100,000 barrels a day is going to run, you know, $1 billion on a good day. So the disruption here is real.

It is getting bigger. And we’re getting to the point where it’s time to start thinking about what happens when Russian crude and materials processing goes offline in some form, because we’re only in the early days of this Ukrainian campaign. And now that they found a soft spot, you can guarantee they’re going to hit it over and over and over and over.

Quick addendum, there is very clear footage coming out of toddler son of a small passenger plane. Think of something like the size of a Cessna, maybe a little bit bigger, flying and ramming into, a munitions factory that builds drones for the Russian military. specifically the Shaheed type that have been causing the Ukrainians so many problems.

Now, it’s not so much the significance of this attack as attacking a factory floor with a 50 to 100 pound bomb. You know, let’s let’s call it huge, say 300 pounds, isn’t going to cause enough damage to really take anything off line. The issue is that it got there. It flew over 1000km through Russian airspace. that means one of two things.

Either number one, the Ukrainians now have kits that they can smuggle into Russia, modify a plane at an airfield within Russia and launch like that, which would be from an internal security point of view and a technical point of view, just a disaster for the Russians or the Russians have absolutely no anti-aircraft coverage in the core of the country, where most of the infrastructure is and most of the people live, no matter what the outcome here is, this is a disaster for the Russians, because there’s no doubt that the Ukrainians will be now be doing it at scale, because it’s clear the Russians can’t stop them.

How Tariffs and Drones Saved Ukrainian Agriculture

Ukrainian agricultural exports are finally having the boot lifted from their throats thanks to new tariffs on certain goods in the EU and Ukraine’s adoption of water based drones.

Exporting Ukrainian agricultural products has been no easy feat; between Russian bombardment, infrastructure attacks, and European interdictions on Ukrainian goods, there wasn’t much movement early on in the conflict. Between the proposed tariffs by the French and some recent success with water-based drones, Ukraine might finally be able to get some product out.

These new tarrifs will free up the markets for Ukraine’s primary revenue generating products, wheat and sunflower. The recent water-based drone attacks on Russian vessels have helped to reestablish the grain corridor through NATO territories, easing pressure further.

Although this is just a small victory for the Ukrainians, restoring their ability to earn through agricultural exports could help ease tensions across the board.

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Here at Zeihan On Geopolitics we select a single charity to sponsor. We have two criteria:

First, we look across the world and use our skill sets to identify where the needs are most acute. Second, we look for an institution with preexisting networks for both materials gathering and aid distribution. That way we know every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence. Then we give what we can.

Today, our chosen charity is a group called Medshare, which provides emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it. Until future notice, every cent we earn from every book we sell in every format through every retailer is going to Medshare’s Ukraine fund.

And then there’s you.

Our newsletters and videologues are not only free, they will always be free. We also will never share your contact information with anyone. All we ask is that if you find one of our releases in any way useful, that you make a donation to Medshare. Over one third of Ukraine’s pre-war population has either been forced from their homes, kidnapped and shipped to Russia, or is trying to survive in occupied lands. This is our way to help who we can. Please, join us.

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TranscripT

Hey, everyone. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Colorado. quick update on the trade and war situation in Europe, specifically Ukraine. it appears we have or they have solved the problem of getting Ukrainian agricultural goods to market. So the quick backdrop is that because of the Russian war, the Russians were bombing places like Odessa and interdicting ships on the Black Sea.

And by water is how the Ukrainians ship out. Well over 80% of their agricultural output, or at least before the war, it was, but nobody wanted to get hit by a Russian missile. So basically everyone got locked up in port and we had backlogs, throughout the entire system. the Ukrainians started to ship things by rail west into the European Union.

they couldn’t get nearly as much out at most one third of what they could do, based on product and some products, less than 10%. But every kilometer that the, Ukrainian stuff was in a rail car, was a kilometer of ton rails that the Europeans could not use. So the Romanians, the Hungarians, the Slovaks and the poles, the border states in particular, were getting cheesed off because their farmers were having a hard time getting their crops to market.

And so they would say, you could transit, but you can’t actually sell that here. Well, if you have to go all the way to Germany, that’s a lot of ton miles that were suddenly not available for everything else. So it wasn’t a very tenable such solution. So these countries may on the whole be very pro Ukraine, but they don’t want to destroy their own agricultural sectors to do it.

So two things have changed. First, the French, the French have gotten involved. Though the French are arguably among the most agriculturally protectionist countries in the world. and none of this stuff was coming to France, but, the French economy is roughly as large as all of the border states put together. And so when the French did decide to get involved, it had an impact at the European level very quickly.

And they were looking at some of the secondary products that were coming in, things like poultry and eggs and honey and corn and oats, and they’re like, okay, we produce all of these things, and now all these things aren’t necessarily making it to France. They are making it to Central Europe, which is depressing. Prices within the European Union.

So how about we do this? We do it. We give everyone in Europe the ability, put tariffs on the products that we care about. And in doing that, we then open up the ability for everything else, most notably wheat and sunflower, which are, the Ukrainians, big money makers. now everyone in the border states grows wheat, but by freeing up some categories, then things could go elsewhere and things could basically be shuffled around.

The French got happy, and it took some of the pressure off of everything else. That was part one. Part two is a Ukrainian military strategy using drones. they basically been refitting small jet boats and jet skis and going in force after Russian vessels, especially Russian landing vessels. well, in the last few days, they’ve taken out another two or at least heavily damaged another two, as long as as well as a spy ship that allows the Russians to identify where launch sites and radar sites are.

And what this has had the net effect of doing is clearing the entire western half of the Black Sea of Russian vessels, and forcing the Russians to fall all the way back to an over a cease, and maybe even even to offshore on the eastern side of the Black Sea, which ports most of the western half of the Black Sea, out of range of even Russian missiles.

So this is opened up a grain export corridor going down the western side of the Black Sea through NATO territory, specifically Romania and Bulgaria, Turkey, to the Turkish Straits and out to the Aegean and the wider world. You do that, you take pressure off those bulk commodities like sunflower and wheat. So I don’t mean to suggest that this is solved, and I don’t mean to suggest that everyone has gotten everything that they want.

But a lot of the pressures that we were seeing that were locking up the cargo shipments are now gone, or at least severely ameliorated. And all of a sudden, Ukraine again has its single largest line item export earner back. and that will help everyone, because the more that the Ukrainians can put their own money into the war, the less pressure there will be politically on everyone else.