Hey everybody. Good morning from Colorado. Peter Zeihan here. And today we’re going to chat about a new innovation that the Ukrainians are using on the front in the war ground drones. Now when people think about ground drones, they naturally think of some sort of early version of The Terminator, you know, a giant track thing with giant machine guns that just plows through human formations. That’s not what’s in play here. These things at max are about 90 pounds, usually about half that. And they look honestly a little bit like some of the little off road radio controlled toys that you might have used as a kid. You got a photo of a couple of the models here. 

They’re used at the moment, it seems, in two different ways. The first one is for direct assaults on Russian positions, and basically they just drive up and explode. So, you know, think of tremors if you remember that movie. Alternatively, a heavy bomber drone, which the fact that heavy bomber drones even exist, heavy bomber drones can carry 90 pounds, ergo the limit, and they drop them behind enemy lines to attack vehicles and logistical support. Now I’m reading between the lines here, because the Ukrainians are not talking a lot about the details of these, because it’s a new weapon and it’s in operational use. And every place they’ve used it, they’ve surprised the hell out of the Russians. But it appears that the ones that are used for the direct ground assault on the front itself generally have fiber optic cables trailing behind them. And by doing that, they can’t be jammed. But it also means that their range is very, very limited and their maneuver is limited. Because once you start dropping a cable behind you, too much maneuvering and you’re going to get tangled up and it become useless. The big advantage of ground drones over air drones in this sort of operation is they can park and wait for hours, for days. Normally, an air drone is only going to be aloft for a few minutes, maybe as much as an hour. When you talk about the ones that are targeted to the front, but this way you can position things slowly ahead of time and then come back and activate a whole slew of them and just obliterate the Russian position in concordance with direct aerial attack and humans and maybe even tanks. 

The ones that are dropped behind enemy lines are really interesting though. Remember, the Russians are the best in the world at electronic warfare. And so one of the problems the Ukrainians have, especially on the front line, is getting through that. And that’s why those tethered drones, the fiber optic drones, exist both for ground and air units. But once you drop it off behind enemy lines, there is no way that you can have a digital tether to it. You’re talking about 5 to 15km behind enemy lines. A couple of things they have going for them. Number one, E-W is normally directed forward and up because they’re worried about communications and the worry about aerial attacks. It’s not necessarily going backwards and down. And so it is possible for the Ukrainian ground drones if they’re dropped behind enemy lines, literally sneak up behind the Russian positions in places where there’s more powerful EM, where it’s really more of a dome. However, that still won’t work, and you still need to control this thing. There is no sign at present that some of the memory drones that are capable of limited decision making are implanted into the ground units, because there just isn’t enough pilot data to really work with. So you do have to have a communications. So it does have to be outside of the EM bubble. That suggests that they’re using another aerial drone as a relay when they activate these things, but then they’re going after trucks on roads and tanks and depots and things like that that are well behind where you could reach with front line drones or artillery. And in doing so, it appears over the last several weeks, the Ukrainians have just completely gutted the Russians ability to supply parts of the front. 

So you can combine that with deeper strike drones, air drones, that are hitting things 100 and 200km behind enemy lines and basically the entire front section of the Russian front, the last 100-150km has become a no go zone for anyone who doesn’t have strong EM, and that has made resupply impossible. And that in at least in part, explains why the Ukrainians have made so much progress actually retaking territory throughout September. 

As with all technologies like this that are really just based on putting old parts together in new ways, you shouldn’t expect this to be a perennial Ukrainian advantage. Probably by this time next year the Russians will be using them. But you also have to consider that the technologies here are not going to be limited to the Ukraine front of the war between Russia and Ukraine. We’ve already seen some of those memory drones leak out and be used by the Iranians. And probably very soon the Houthis. You start applying the same logic to the ground drones, and we’re talking about a new sort of warfare emerging that is going to make it very difficult for any sort of projection based military to push force somewhere else. So just to pick a topic, the US Army, the hardest thing they do is the logistical supply to keep their forces operating. In Afghanistan, that required daily convoys of diesel trucks going through Pakistan, for example. In an area that is saturated with aerial drones, especially now ground drones, that becomes impossible because it used to be that they would have to worry about things like IEDs on the roadside, and that required certain techniques in certain vehicles and certain detection methods. If you’re dealing with a ground drone, it’s an IED that can move, and all of a sudden the entire supply system for what the US did throughout the war on terror just isn’t viable. And we’ve got to find a new way to do everything. We’re not going to figure that out in six months.

Hey everybody, Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from near the trailhead of Sherman Sheridan in the Mosquito Range in Colorado. Took me so long to find a place without wind. Anyway, the news today is kind of all over. Specifically, I want to talk about defense contractors. We have a situation where it’s leaking out that the United States Trump administration, Donald Trump specifically, is unlikely to allow Ukraine to license production locally of Patriot missiles. The reasons that were given. The first one that is being said out loud is intellectual property protection, which is reasonable once you hand over the plans so that somebody else can make them, somebody else has the plans. The second one that is being said behind closed doors, that is probably more compelling for Donald Trump, is that if Ukrainians learn how to make these things, they’re going to iterate them and they’ll learn how to make them cheaper, faster and probably better. 

And that makes sense, because Ukraine was the node of aerospace and rocketry for much of the former Soviet Union, and that’s been applying those skills in real time to the war technologies that they’ve been developing in the last four years. And obviously, many of their weapon systems, most notably their drones, are now light years ahead of anyone else on the planet, including the United States. 

And so to say that they couldn’t apply aerospace and rocketry technology to what is ultimately a rocketry question is obviously silly, but as true as that is and as much as that is likely to be the rationale for Trump ultimately denying the Ukrainians access to the plans. It’s kind of missing the point. We’re at a point here where we’ve got two reinforcing and contrasting trends. The first is deglobalization, and we’re losing access to the global supply chains that allow sophisticated equipment to be made. So, for example, when people talk about AI weapons, they’re probably blowing smoke out their ass. Because the technology just doesn’t exist yet. High end chips. Things below, let’s call it seven nanometers that are etched into silicon. Just can’t deal with heat or stress or shifts in momentum or vibration. You know, all of those things happen a lot when you’re dealing with military equipment. And these supply chains are fragile, so it doesn’t take much of a deglobalization event for them to break completely. Now, military folks get around that by using special materials like gallium when making the chips instead of silicon. The problem is that the gallium supply chain is also very vulnerable. So the idea that the United States is going to be able to keep making these high end weaponry systems is itself kind of a stretch. 

Second problem, the United States is unique among all of the major powers in history, and that it basically has a hemisphere to itself. Ever since reconstruction and the Spanish-American War, there really hasn’t been a major power that has a sufficient footprint, much less a native presence in the Western Hemisphere to challenge American security dominance in a meaningful way. 

And that has allowed the United States military to develop differently from everyone else’s. Everybody else, whether you’re a naval power or a land power, ultimately you have rivals that are relatively close. And so your military technologies that you develop, the military systems that you field always have a degree of short term desperation built in. The United States has never had to worry about that unless we’re in a long, protracted, hot war like, say, World War Two, we develop our weapon systems based on the idea that the homeland is fundamentally safe and that we just need to project power across the ocean. So our systems tend to be far more durable. They tend to be far more technologically advanced. They tend to be expensive, but they have reach and lethality that nobody else has. Because everyone else is worried about bringing large numbers of relatively disposable things to the fight as soon as possible. All right. We’ll finish this in a minute.  

Okay. Had a hard time finding a place without wind. So here we are from the Colorado Intermountain above Fairplay, Kenosha pass. Where was I? Basically, we’re dealing with a changing environment in which the defense systems that were maintained by the global superpower and basically maintained during the Cold War in the post-Cold War era aren’t applicable anymore. The new weapon systems are simpler to build with more basic technology, whereas the more advanced systems that the Americans rely upon require global supply chains. And so we’re going to see a complete overhaul in how we handle defense over the next five, ten, 15 years. And the Patriot missile, while it is today by far the best anti-missile system on the planet, is probably going to lose that position. 

If the Ukrainians are even mildly successful, they’re going to be able to drive down the price of the Patriot. Right now, it’s about $4 million a pop. The people who make the patriot of the United States say they’re going to offer a lower tier version that’s about $2 million a pop. The Ukrainians need to get down to that, to a quarter of a million, a pop maximum. Otherwise, it just doesn’t serve the purpose in this new era where you can spam somebody’s defenses with just thousands, if not tens of thousands of attacks. There’s one more thing to keep in mind. The US is the late comer to this technological revolution, in part because of policies out of the white House and personalities and the Defense Department. The United States is not fully engaged in this new era, and is being very slow to embrace drones as the new way of doing things. That’s going to change dramatically as the rest of the world basically skips by the United States, which means the United States is going to discover waves and waves and waves and waves of hostile drones and multiple powers, some of them allies. And it will not have enough patriots for all of its needs. And it certainly won’t have enough patriots for all of its allies. So we’re probably very close to the final delivery of American patriots to anyone, not just Ukraine. And once that happens. Well, pace of anti-ballistic missile technology is going to skyrocket because everyone will be researching an alternative.

Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from Colorado.  Today is the 23rd of July, and I’m going to attempt to untangle what has been happening in Ukrainian political circles, specifically around the Defense Ministry and the Army. 

We’ve had a number of personnel changes over the last several culminating in the last several days of the dismissal of the defense minister, a guy by the name of Fedorov who is a techno guy. He’s in his 30s, big on drones. And Syrskyi who is the commander in chief of the army, a big infantry and artillery guy. This is being spun a lot of ways by a lot of people. Some are saying that it’s a debate between whether drones are the future of Ukrainian military versus the backbone that is currently artillery and infantry. Some are saying it’s personal and it’s really kind of all of the above. The very, very short version is that we’re going through a hot war and battlefield success versus failure generates a lot of changes in personnel, both from mortality and from political decisions that didn’t do enough or you did too much, or you are rising star versus you’re 

But really, the core issue is this doctrinal shift between drones and artillery. And what neither side admits is that they can’t fight the war without it. 

So in charge of the artillery has very successfully, I might add, held the line in a number of major battles where we expected the Russians just mow over the Ukrainians. But Fedorov with the drones, obviously has remade the face of warfare and given Ukraine not just a fighting chance, but the advantage in many battlefield situations. And to think that one of these will work without the other is very silly. 

The problem is, both sets work, both sets are necessary, and both sets require their own procurement chain and manufacturing capability. And it’s not clear that Ukraine has the full capacity to do both of those at the same time with the resources that have. And that’s before you consider the complexity of all of the weapons donations that have come in from the Europeans primarily, and the political complications that come from relationships with the Trump administration right now. So basically, we have our old system led more or less by Syrskyi that is infantry and artillery, and the new system that is led by Fedorov, that is drones and fiber optic cables and computer chips, and each of them requires a huge pipeline of resources, whether that is people or finance or manufacturing capacity. 

And the two don’t overlap very much. So when Fedorov became defense minister a few months ago, he’s tried to start switching all of the resources over to his preferred method of war fighting. And Syrskyi kind of had a coronary because there was no way that he could defend the 1000 mile long front without ongoing investments into artillery and artillery shells. 

Both of them are right. Both of them are wrong. And now both of them have been fired. So what’s going on now is Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, is attempting to juggle these two factions so that both of them can function because they both need to function. And the reason that the protests in Ukraine in favor of Fedorov are continuing is because they’ve looked at the personnel that Zelensky has put in place of Syrskyi and Fedorov and said that so far there’s been no change. 

And that’s true. There’s been no change because Zelensky is trying to balance the interests of two things he absolutely has to have, and the leaders of those two factions hate each other. And the only way they could work together if Zelensky was there personally hand-holding. And this is before you consider the problems with, say, corruption or consider the problems with Russian assassination, or consider competition with other branches of the Ukrainian services. 

It’s a really tough situation to be in for everybody. It’s a post-Soviet society. So the pillars of civil society that normally you would rely upon to kind of bulwark the sort of institutional discussion just don’t exist in the same way that they exist in, say, say, Germany or the United States. It’s an ugly situation. I have no idea how it’s going to go, and I am not even going to bother talking about the personalities that are replacing the two principals, because I bet they’re mostly going to be gone within a week or two. 

But at the moment we’re more or less in the same position now that we were six months ago. You’ve got these two parallel procurement and warfighting, doctrinally defined institutions, both of which are essential but really just can’t get along and don’t complement each other very well.