Hey everybody. Hello from the Vegas airport at 0 dark 30. Today we’re going to pick up on the drone tech series and talk about different kinds of drones, specifically first person drones, which are typically quadcopters or hex copters. Verse is glide drones and flight drones, which are more fixed wing. Both of them have their own places. And one of the things we’re seeing in the Ukraine war today is that they’re starting to merge a little bit. 

So first quadcopters or hex copters, you’ve seen them. These are the hobbyist ones that have been pressed into military use, with new models coming out pretty much every week. The advantage of a quadcopter is control. They can hover. They can land to conserve fuel. You have direct control over them at all times, and that means you can do really crazy things like position them above a military asset, like a tank that has a hatch open and drop something on it, or even drop the helicopter right into it. 

You can fly into a hangar and look around and figure out what it is you want to go after the repair bay and aircraft, a fuel tank, whatever it happens to be. The degree of precision really is extreme, but the problem is, is these things have to have the rotors spinning all the time, so that really limits the range. 

At the beginning of the Ukraine war, these things really only had a range of 2 to 3km, which is about the same as a javelin missile by the way. So the way to extend range was to fly them towards an enemy position, land a lot of nearby and then send one ahead to Scout, and then the others would spin back up. It would buy you a little bit more control and flexibility, but ultimately range was the issue. But as the batteries have gotten better, specifically lithium phosphate batteries and they’ve improved aerodynamics, the range has gone from 2km to 5km to ten kilometers, 20km to 25km. 

And that has turned the entire front line into an area just littered with drones all the time. There’s also a lift issue, so their warheads generally are 10 pounds or less, with most of them being like 3 pounds or less. Fixed wing are different. They require some sort of launching system, which sometimes is no more complicated than kind of a large scale slingshot. They can carry more. They get a lot more lift because they have a wing system that gives them lifts. Quadcopters have no lift. You just have to have the rotors running. And this means that the fixed wing drones have significantly larger range, typically four and five times as long. If you’re spending the same amount of money and a significantly larger payload, because once they get up to a certain altitude, they can just kind of glide for a while and conserve fuel. 

And you can also build larger models. There’s definitely an upper limit when you come to a quadcopter. As they get bigger, you the lift to weight ratio changes against you, so you can only get so big, whereas a bigger and bigger and bigger airframe for fixed wing generates more and more lift proportionally. And so it’s the fixed wing ones that are carrying the bombs that are in excess of 100 pounds, who can fly 600 to 700 miles, really without any major problem. 

And those are the ones that are being used against most distant targets, and especially things like refineries and infrastructure. The advantages pretty extreme there. You can bring a lot of destructive power at significant range. The problem is control. With an FPV drone, you generally have either a digital tether from, say, satellite or cell phones or a fiber optic cable. 

But when you’re starting to talk about a fixed wing drone, the further away they get, the more the chances are that they can be disrupted by electronic warfare. You never have a line of sight to them anymore, and if they fly through an zone, you probably are going to lose the drone. Although there’s certain things you can do with buffering that allows them to kind of stay the course in the hopes that they’ll emerge on the other side of it. 

And you can pick up the signal again. But as a rule, the further away you go, the greater the chance you’re just going to lose control altogether. So these two broad classes have kind of defined everything with the war fees for close in and fixed wings for further destruction of infrastructure. But what we’ve seen in just the month of May is a new hybrid drone coming out that looks a little bit like a biplane, but the most of the rotors are horizontal as opposed to vertical, or the Ukrainians are starting to do is put detachable wings on the drones to get some of the best of both worlds, so you still use the horizontal rotors to achieve the thrust that’s necessary to leave the ground. But as they get going. The wing bevels into place and they can get lift from that as well. And in their first iteration of these things that have popped up in just the last few weeks, we’re already seeing the Ukrainians using these new hybrid drones to go 100km, which is double what we had before just in April. 

And it’s 20 times what these sorts of drones could do at the beginning of the war for years ago. And what that means is, in one stroke, these new drones are roughly doubling the strike range of Ukrainian closing drones, increasing their weight capacity a little bit, too, because of the extra lift. That is something that the Russians are wholly unprepared for. Basically, with each stage of this war as a new weapon has been developed. There’s a period where the attacker, whoever that is, achieves local supremacy and a significant tactical advantage. 

And then the other side developed countermeasures or copies of the technology, and the situation equalizes. But we’ve had so many Ukrainian innovations hit just since March that the Russians are reeling. So we now have memory drones that are hunting and self-selecting targets 50, 60, 100, 150km behind the front line, completely eviscerating the entire logistical system and now close in. 

Individual Ukrainian drone operators have doubled their hunt range. So any sort of movement within 50 to 60km of the front on the Russian side is becoming a no man’s land. Russian positions are becoming isolated and without the Ukrainian suffering any blowback whatsoever. It’s not that the Russians have had to abandon all offensive capability, but they can only focus in specific points. 

And that requires a degree of massing of forces. And those massing of forces usually happened more than 30km away, but less 100km away. All of a sudden, that is no longer viable. So we’re seeing a disintegration on the front right now. The question at this moment is whether or not the Ukrainians have enough offensive plunge and mine removal capacity to take advantage of that in any sort of sustained way, or we’re just waiting for the Russians to adapt these tactics adopt them to their own. 

It’s just too soon to know. But considering that this is happening in the first week of June, we have all of June, all of July, all of August, all of September in the first half of October, which is kind of the ground fighting season when the climate encourages offensive activity. And the Ukrainians have now spent the last 2 to 3 months preparing the battlefield in a way that has just completely decimated the entire Russian order of battle and pre-positioned logistical caches. 

At the same time, preventing troops on the front from being supplied with new men, new equipment, food, water, all the rest of the things. So I don’t want to overplay this because Russia’s defensive capabilities are immense. But it does look like this could be a summer where the Ukrainians break multiple parts of the front, and if they can get through those minefields, then we really are in a new game.

Hey all, Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from Italy, Rome. This is the let’s try column there. And we are in the forno de, which I again doubtfully mispronounced. Anyway, continuing with our open ended drone series, there’s a couple of things that are going on in Ukraine that are fundamental breaks with previous military technology in the mid-range drone category, so that’s things that are free flowing roughly 10km to 200km. 

So not quite mid-range, not quite short range somewhere in between. Basically you’ve got a two step process. Step one is you have a pilot that kind of directs a drone to an area. And step two, the drone has the capacity with just a little bit of memory and a little bit of optics to kind of look around and pick a target and zoom in on it. 

This is already a significant step up from just what the Ukrainians were using two months ago, because it can actually target moving targets now, speed, which this is unraveling and shifting is really crazy. Anyway, what this means is that the concept of a front line from a logistical point of view, is basically collapsed. Used to be that the front line was a real danger zone, where if you were within 20km of it, then the fiber optic drones and the first person drones could target anything and do so in the hundreds of drones per day. 

Further back, you’d have things like the American app cams or advanced artillery that maybe came from the French. That would push back the Russians to force logistical support into an area that was more than a couple hundred kilometers from the front, so they’d be out of range, because we all remember from two years ago when the cams arrived in Ukraine. 

Then all of a sudden, all of these ammo dumps and airfields started blowing up. So the Russians just moved everything back. Well, with these new pieces of equipment, it’s not individual strikes, it’s not dozens of strikes. It’s hundreds of strikes every day. And they’re targeting everything from individual troops to trucks, which means that the entire logistical tail, not just the depots, the entire logistical tail going all the way back from the front line to wherever the supplies are, is now under threat every day from every angle. 

And we’re seeing a de facto collapse and the Russians capacity to even man the area. And so what we’ve seen in the last is 3 or 4 weeks is significant Ukrainian gains in any number of parts of the front, because the Russians can’t bring troops forward, they can’t bring fuel for they can’t bring ammo forward. And if they try, the Ukrainians just dice them up. 

So nobody has superiority in this area. But instead of having this shadow zone of 10 to 20km around the front, it’s now stretching halfway to Moscow. And in that sort of environment, the Russians don’t have a strategy, can’t have a strategy, because they’ve always relied on strategic depth to protect them. But that doesn’t work when you can have a free ranging weapon system that’s in the hundreds and very soon in the thousands that’s going over this entire zone, and anything that’s on a road or train is suddenly a target. 

This single point advantage isn’t going to last forever. Eventually, countermeasures will be developed, but it’s much more difficult for the Russians to do that than for the Ukrainians. But we’re going to save that topic for another day. Oh, one more thing. It raises the question of how financially viable this is long term for the Ukrainians. And the short answer is extremely. 

These are not fundamentally new drones. These are modifications made to existing proven models like the Seth or the dart, for example. Really, all you need to do is plug in a small processor and a moderately sized memory chip, nothing that was considered cutting edge in the last 15 years, so nothing’s under export control are really inexpensive. Total modifications, probably top out, about $100 per drone and in some models no more than 15. 

So yeah, they can do this in the tens of thousands per month. No problem at all. 

Hey, all. Peter here still in Rome, approaching all the forums, continuing our open ended series about the changes of military technology. Now we’re going to deal with longer range drone system things with an excess of 300km. The Ukrainians have launched a series of systems over the course of the last roughly ten weeks that have increased their range upwards of 1800 kilometers total. 

So for those of you in metric, that’s roughly 900 to 1000 miles. And Moscow was only about 300, 350 miles from the front line. This means that Ukrainians can relatively reliably strike anything that is west of the Urals at this point, and even a few things opposite the URLs, if they really push it. These things are carrying warheads that are typically in excess of 100 pounds. 

They’re using them to heavily target not so much military assets directly, but infrastructure related to energy production and transport, pumping stations, refineries, ports, that sort of thing. Now, pre-war, the Russians exported about, oh, 2.5 million barrels per day of oil and about another million and a half barrels per day of refined product that is now facing some sphere problems. 

It’s really hard to give you accurate numbers because everything is changing day by day, and the Russians aren’t just sitting there. They’re repairing things as they go. So let’s talk about the technology and then talk about the impact. So first the technology, unlike the modified short to medium range drones where it’s just a matter, you know, just a matter of putting a couple new pieces of semiconductor to give it a limited decision making capability. 

This is a range issue. And so with the range issue, Ukrainians are limited by their industrial base, which they’re rapidly building out. We’ve had the number of drones per day in use, roughly Quinn Tipple over the course of the last ten weeks, and there’s no reason to expect that to slow. If anything, it’s probably going to accelerate. One of the things to keep in mind is because of the Iraq war and America’s inability to provide adequate air defense and missile defense to the Arab states, as we now have a cavalcade of countries in the Middle East and Europe that are providing funding for the Ukrainians to expand their industrial plant all over the place, and that’s giving them cash that is necessary to expand industrial plant and build out at home. Keep in mind that there are so many startups in Ukraine that are providing drone technology now that the Ukrainians actually ran out of money to fund them all. That’s not a problem anymore. So everybody is in the process of spinning up, and by the time we get to mid-summer, we’re probably going to be seeing daily strikes in dozens, if not hundreds of these things across the length and breadth of Russia regularly, every single day, most likely in terms of impact. 

It’s hard to get firm numbers on this because everything is a moving target. But oh yeah, fun little fact. The Romans had so much marble they used it for like, dust boards. Anyway, what this means is that we’ve had over 80 discrete energy targets across Russia come under sustained attack, sometimes getting hit three and four times a week. 

Major ports have gone offline and back. Online tanks are gone, pumping stations getting damaged. Even direct pipe strikes probably. There’s really no average here. But I would say on average, we’re looking at an overall reduction of somewhere between 1.5 and 2.5 million barrels per day of a combined transport and pumping and port capacity, and that gets well into the danger zone for the Russian system. 

The Russian oil complex kind of has two big phases down in the southern provinces. You can have some older fields that are basically supplied by water injection, and those you can run on reduced capacity or even shut them down safely and bring them back later. But collectively, that’s only about one to maybe 1.2 million barrels per day. Everything else is in permafrost territory, and because of heating and cooling problems, you can’t maintain a steady temperature at the production site at the bottom of the wellbore. 

In the pipelines and the pumping stations, everything cracks apart. Or in the case of some things, wax congealed in it. And then you have to replace the infrastructure completely. We’re now on the point where that has to be shut down, at least in part, and that stuff cannot be restarted on anything less than a multi year time frame. 

The last time this stuff all got shut down, it was in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse, and it took the Russians 20 years to bring it back up to snuff like they had it during the Soviet period. So we are now already today at the beginning of the end of Russia, as a country that can even export petroleum or petroleum products at all to its west. 

And if you keep up this crescendo of attacks throughout the summer, by the end of the year, the Russians really won’t be an oil power in the western provinces at all. And that includes most of the western and northwestern Siberian fields as well. That’ll just leave what is out on the east side of the Urals, which is a separate infrastructure. 

But at the rate the Ukrainians are going as entirely possible, that that may be in range by the end of summer anyway. So from a war point of view, this is how Russia pays for everything. All is the single largest inflow point for the Russian state budget, which funds. Of course, the military natural gas is kind of like the kicker on the side, but most of the natural gas, a lot of the natural gas has already been shut in because it can’t be redirected in the way that liquid oil can be. 

So the Ukrainians haven’t felt the need to go after it. They’ll probably find some reasons in the next few months, as energy targets become harder to find, because there just won’t be all that many left. And that’s Palatine Hill behind me. That’s one of the original seven cities of Roman, where most of the rich folk lived during the High Imperial period. 

One more detail. We already have reports from several Russian oil officials talking about shut ins in places like Tatar, Saturn and Bashkir stand, which is where the water recovery basically pumped down. Water increased well pressure, and the oil comes up and you skim the oil off the top, where that’s already been shut down by a significant margin, at least in the high hundreds of thousands of barrels. 

But we’re also getting that’s the stuff you can turn back on. We’re also getting some reports of things further north, where we were getting some panicked reports about wells that will never come back on at all. So we’re already well into this, and the Ukrainians aren’t letting up, if anything. Intensification over the summer.