Okay. Peter Zeihan coming to you from Arches. We’re continuing the Revolution military affairs series, and today we’re going to talk about artillery. Artillery has been one of the three most important military breakthroughs of the last couple of centuries because it allows, a force to assault another force from literally miles away. The artillery that the Russians, for example, areas in Ukraine generally has a range, between 10 and 20 miles based on what piece of hardware they’re using. 

But you throw drones into the mix where a single first person pilot a drone costs less than an artillery shell. You change the math. So I am no artillery expert here. And the technology is changed very quickly. So the purposes of today’s video is basically just to talk out loud through what we’ve seen and where it might lead. 

Countries that rely on artillery really do fire on it. The joke in the military is that Russia is an artillery force. It just happens to have some tanks. Hold on. 

Okay. Where were we? Right. Russia. So in the Napoleonic Wars, France, which had the most technologically advanced military at the moment, invaded Russia, made it all the way to Moscow. And the Russians kind of got their asses handed to them. And if it wasn’t for some very stubborn defense and Partizan attacks, and especially a very, very rough winter, Moscow probably would have fallen. 

And the Russian lesson from that was that they needed to do an upgrade for their military. However, this is a country that was basically entirely serfs. There were no technical skills among the population. They didn’t have much of a intelligentsia from a technical point of view. And so they settled on artillery because aside from the guy who was like pointing and aiming, everything else was just kind of like looking around. 

And that Russian serfs could do and that the Russian, Crown would trust them with. Because artillery is really not the best weaponry for. So, you know, taking on Red square. Anyway, so they invested heavily in that and that is basically dominated Russian and then Soviet military planning ever since. Very low value added soldier base and just focus on obliterating anything in front of you from miles away. And don’t advance until there’s nothing but rubble. 

So the problem the Russians are facing now is that it’s not that the artillery is irrelevant. It’s just it’s incredibly vulnerable. And they basically have to do something that called shoot and scoot, because between, acoustic detection and radar, they really can only get one shot off before counter battery fire starts. 

The Ukrainians, in order to detect drones coming in, basically built an acoustic detection system around the perimeter of the country and all over the front lines so that as soon as the drones are coming in, they can translate the sounds for what kind of drones are coming on, what vectors, so they know what air defense to activate. 

It works for us as artillery too. So it used to be that once an artillery shot fell, you’d use radar to basically track it back and then shoot back. But now with the acoustics, they can figure out when it fires and so the kind of battery fire can actually happen before the shell is even hit. So artillery an order of magnitude less useful than it used to be. 

So the Ukrainians and the Russians are discovering that what they were trained on during the Soviet periods is no longer how war works, because the technology has left the artillery piece behind for the most part. This won’t necessarily be true everywhere. When you consider things like the Paladin system, for example, that the US has, not only is it self mobile, but it can fire multiple shots at different angles and then hit the same target at the same time. 

It’s kind of cool, mobile being the key thing there. But for most artillery, you know, it’s in the past, it’s no longer cost effective for what it can do. Which brings us to a different sort of problem. So a big attraction, for artillery, for the Russians. Was that anyone, any idiot, any village idiot could operate? 

Most of it because it’s just lugging stuff from point to point with drones. It’s first person shooter. You basically have to fly it manually and direct it, and that’s all. Well and good. And that doesn’t require a huge amount of skill either. Outside of, you know, the Tendo, the problem is in manufacturing, you can produce, artillery shells and artillery back in your industrial plant and then send to the front line. 

And you need a limited source because, you only make a few of the tubes and you make a lot of ammo. Well, with drones, the Russians and Ukrainians are both using thousands of these things a day. So it’s a very different workforce. It is much more technically skilled. It needs to be an a lot larger number. In Ukraine, which was the heart of the old aerospace industry back during Soviet times, this has not been too heavy of a pull. 

And based on whose numbers you’re using, the Ukrainians have gone from producing about 5 to 20% of the parts for their drones at home to now 70 to 90% based on the style. The Russians are nowhere near that good, because the Russians don’t have anywhere near that sort of technical skill within the country. And most of the people with those skills left, either in the 1990s or the 2000 or more recently to avoid the draft. 

So they’re bringing in talent and technical skill from places like Iran and North Korea, and especially China, where you can use the Chinese industrial plant to produce the parts that then flow into Russia and then make it to the front line. Anyway, bottom line of all of this is this is very much a work in progress. We’re only three years into the war. 

have a secondary power. Russia fighting a tertiary power, Ukraine. And the rules are changing every week, every month. So to think that we have a firm idea of how this is going to play out is silly, but to think that the weapon systems that we’re used to seeing on the battlefield are the weapons of the future is also silly.

Hey all, Peter Zeihan here coming to you from snowy Colorado. And today we’re going to talk about a major change that is going to come to the U.S. armed forces and most notably the Navy in the years to come. It all has to do with the USS Nimitz, which was the first of the Nimitz class, a super carriers, of which ultimately we have ten and have been the backbone of American military power projecting throughout the world for really since the 1960s. 

But it’s been a hot minute, Anyway, at last, Bremerton, Washington, on the 28th of March for what is intended to be its last sail. The Nimitz are being replaced by a new carrier class, the Ford class, which are larger, can carry more, planes, can launch and recover them faster. All that jazz? Definitely superior platform. 

Not that the Nimitz is anything to sneeze at. Anyway, the whole idea is these things have been in service for well over a half a century, and it’s time to start taking them out of circulation. As technologies change, and we can move to a military force that is more lethal and faster, and that is not going to happen. 

One of the things that people forget when they start talking about how we don’t need this country or that country is arguing the single greatest advantage that the United States has right now is its alliance network, and not necessarily because in a fight, we get to take over their armies and navies and control them ourselves, although we do have that, and that is a big deal. 

But it’s basing rights. The United States is one country, and part of our security comes from the fact that we have oceans between us and everyone else. But that means if we want to influence things somewhere outside of North America, we have to get there first. And that means a long logistical chain linking up, not just soldiers and sailors and ships, but tanks and men and ammunition and supplies and diesel all around the world. 

And with the basing network that we have right now, there are very, very few spots on the planet that we can’t reach in a very short period of time with a lot of firepower, but if the United States leaves NATO like it sounds like it’s going to if the U.S. breaks the alliances with the Japanese and the Koreans, which it looks like it’s going to, then America alone has a very different force posture. 

And one in which it can’t get much of anywhere. So what we’re going to see is, on a very large scale, the recreation of a tactic that the United States use during the early months on the war on terror. We needed to get to Afghanistan, but we didn’t trust the Russians and we didn’t trust the Pakistanis. So what we ended up having to do is take one of our older carriers, the USS Kittyhawk, and park it off the Pakistani coast and use it as a mobile base. 

It was by far the most expensive way we could have possibly done it. But in the early days after nine over 11, it was considered worth the cost. Well, with the direction that the Trump administration’s foreign policy is taking us now, any time we want to deploy anywhere, we’re going to have to do something like that. And that easily cost ten times as much as simply having an ally with a patch of ground that we can squat on. 

When you lose your alliances, you lose the ability to project power cheaply. And yes, we spend a lot on our military, but it’s nothing compared to the budget line. Items were going to be seen in the future, as we have to take things like the Nimitz and repurpose them from being some of the world’s best warfighting assets and basically being floating rafts.

Hey, all. Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Nashville, Tennessee, right outside the Country Music Hall of Fame. Today we’re launching a fresh series on the future of military technology and specifically how it’s going to change strategic efforts by various countries, and the policy that goes along with it. And before we can go forward, we need to take a big step back and understand the last couple of major revolutions in military affairs. 

The first one really begins with the dawn of the industrial era, and how the advancement of things like gunpowder and steel and electricity started to interface with the way we ran the military and the conflicts in question, or the Crimean War of the 1850s and the American Civil War of the 1860s. 

Both of these conflicts, we saw technologies that had been percolating for decades suddenly come into their own very real way, where they could be mass produced as opposed to individually crafted. 

And it changed the nature of war ever since. These include things like rifling muskets to give them better range and faster reloads and lower breech chance. This includes the, early efforts with the telegraph for mass communication and sending information to and for very quickly, the railroads for the rapid distribution of troops, field hospitals to prevent casualties from turning into fatalities. 

And of course, things like the ironclad, which gave rise to modern navies and all of these cases, if you were using a pre-industrial military force, if you came up against these forces, you were pretty much wiped out. The ratios were absolutely horrific and the more militarized of the countries did better. So this is not just having a little technological edge. 

This is operating in a fundamentally different technological era, Stone age versus Bronze Age versus Iron Age versus sedentary agriculture versus industrialization. It was one of those kind of seminal jumps that redefined what was possible. The Crimean War, I think, is particularly instructive because you saw the early industrial powers, most notably the Brits and the French, going against a completely, industrialized power, primarily Russia. 

And they laid a few miles of rail track and set up a couple of field hospitals. And that alone was enough to absolutely gut the Russians. The Russians simply could not maneuver fast enough to keep up with what the Brits could do. Via rail on the Crimean peninsula. That’s phase one. The phase two of the revolution. And military affairs happened much more recently, in the 1980s and then into the early 1990s, which digitization, basically taking the computer and applying it to military technology, started out in the Gulf War in a very big way with things that we call Jams now, joint direct attack munitions, where you take a relatively dumb bomb, put a fin kit on it, and a GPS locator can hit within about ten meters of its target. We’ve obviously gotten better since then. That against the Iraqi army. The Iraqis had no chance. And then you throw in things like not just satellite reconnaissance, but satellite communications, and you get cruise missiles and all the fun things that come from that direction. 

And that is now kind of the leading edge of what is possible with the US military today. And again, when we hit this point at the end of the Cold War, there was no competitor. And so every country that the United States came across was two, maybe even three generations of weapons behind. And there really hasn’t been a fair fight since. 

Unless the United States is in a situation where its advantages are denied it, like, say, in a long term occupation in a place like Iraq or Afghanistan, we are now at the verge of something new. In the last five years, we’ve had ever mounting breakthroughs in a number of sectors that are not related to military technology, most notably digitization, energy transfer and materials science. 

And those three building revolutions are combining to generate an entirely new form of warfare, of which drones are only the very leading edge. We don’t know where this is going to go. We don’t know what the military technologies are going to look like in ten, 20, 40 years. But we do know from previous periods that when the old technology comes up against the new technology, things get really exciting really quickly because either the new stuff crashes and burns because it’s inappropriate, not ready, or the old stuff is destroyed and everyone has to rip up the playbook. 

It appears at this moment that it’s going to be some version of the latter in the Ukraine war. To this point, about two thirds of the fatalities that the Russians have suffered have been because of first person drones, which is not even a particularly sophisticated technology that combines digitization, material science and energy transfer. It hasn’t gone into the second generation of technology yet. 

We’re still and basically mass producing cheap things with a small explosives on. Once the kinks get worked out, it is difficult to see any military, most notably infantry and armor, surviving in the new environment unless they can develop their own countermeasures, which will mean an additional technological revolution. So we’re nearing the point now where we need to start having the conversation as a country, as a culture, as a military, as to what it is that we want, what we’re willing to pay to get it, and how big of a technological jump we’re willing to take to try. 

Now, in this, the United States has a couple of advantages. Number one, cache. Number two, a existing military industrial complex that can always be retooled. But third, and most importantly, at the moment, we are not in a hot conflict. And the countries that we are most likely to be facing down Russia, China, Iran are already in this technological shift. 

So we get to watch what they do and learn a few things in this. The Ukraine war is going to be most instructive, because the Ukrainians have been at the vanguard of this entire transition process and are coming up against a much larger conventional military being supplied by the Chinese who are providing the bulk. And yet they’re still there. 

And that should tell us a lot of what we need to know about the technological changes that are going to be sticking with us for the years to come. 

Bottom line. The human race is about to experience a higher form of war. That means, of course, new weapons. But from that comes new everything else.