Military Archives - Zeihan on Geopolitics

Russia Is Struggling to Defend Its Own Capital

Image of St. Basils Cathedral and the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia

A leaked Moscow memo stated that Russian air defenses are being concentrated around the Kremlin. This leaves the broader Moscow region, including refineries and key infrastructure, vulnerable to Ukrainian attacks. And if Moscow is this vulnerable, it gives you an idea of just how bad things are throughout the rest of Russia.

In addition, the Russians are looking to kick off a peripheral mobilization of ~300,000 people. However, all of the recruitment sources carry political risks for the Kremlin. If they depopulate the Far East, it weakens the border with China; if they take non-ethnic Russians and could fuel unrest; or you target immigrant workers and worsen the labor shortage.

Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from Colorado. Today we’re talking about the combination of things that have come out of Russia. We’ve got two things. The first one is that a memo that was being circulated among the Moscow mayor’s senior staff has leaked. And basically they are admitting that even with the government, the national government, the Kremlin, redirecting the bulk of the country’s air defense to the Moscow region, the defenses are so concentrated around the Kremlin itself that they’re not providing enough anti-air defense for the broader metro region, which is the economic and political and cultural hub of the country, which means that refineries which are on the outskirts can’t really be protected at all. And they are expecting the refining system to not simply continue to come under attack. But they’re expecting the city to run out of fuel before the end of the year, and perhaps a lot sooner than that. So they are spitballing ideas of what to do about that. And the leading candidate right now is to break up Russia’s refining complex instead of the 100 odd refineries it has right now, and build a thousand plus that are just much, much, much smaller.

Now, it isn’t so much that this is a good idea because it’s not. You’d lose economies of scale. You’d still have to cluster the refineries around pipelines. So you have like five refineries, smaller refineries, where a bigger one used to be. That doesn’t really solve the problem, but more importantly, it would take years to build out and require lots and lots of equipment that the Russians can’t build and would have to import. So all of a sudden the sanctions come into place. So it’s really not feasible. But the point that the smartest people in the largest and most successful city in Russia are now desperate for options simply to keep the fuel flowing, tells you everything you need to know about the stability of the Russian economy right now. Because this is the capital, this isn’t some far flung province out on the edge. That’s piece one.

Piece two came out of Kyiv with the Ukrainian President Zelensky sharing some intel that they’ve been garnering on the Russian military system. Apparently, according to Zelensky, the Russians are preparing a fresh what they call peripheral mobilization for this coming September immediately after elections. And when they say peripheral in Russia, what they mean is non-ethnic Russians. Ethnic Russians, according to Russian statistics, are probably about 75% of the population and of course make up the super majority in the major cities, most notably Moscow. But when you move out of the Moscow region, out of the Saint Petersburg region, you’re going to be hitting higher and higher ethnic minority concentrations. And there are several republics, several dozen republics across Russia where non-Russian are either the full majority or the near majority. So far in the war, the Russian government has done everything it can to not pull ethnic Russians into the fight, favoring the forced recruitment of non-Russian ethnics whenever they possibly can, because they’re feeling is if those people rebel, you can just kill them. But if Russians, ethnic Russians rebel and you put them down like the Russians like to, that might spawn more protests in other Russian regions. And if you don’t have the buy in of the Russian population, or at least it’s apathy, then that is how the Kremlin falls, because that’s happened before. Reasonable, reasonable political analysis. The problem, of course, is that this is not the first time the Russian government has done this. It’s done this in three rounds so far in the war to date. And with the Russian government losing somewhere between 25 and 45,000 people a month in this war, the question is, how long can this hold the line before things break?

According to Zelensky’s Intel? And so far, when the Ukrainians have shared things like this on the development of the Russian military, they tend to be right, I’d say 90% of the time. But, you know, some of the details might be fuzzy. The Russians are talking about this peripheral mobilization, about 300,000 people, which would be enough to supply troops to maintain what the Russians have been doing at the last years burn rates for another 6 to 9 months. So it doesn’t really change the math in the long term. It simply allows the Russians to continue to plot on with what they’re doing as to where the people would come from. The greatest hits, where the greatest percentage of the local population would be drawn out, would probably be from the Far East. These are areas that are relatively lightly populated, relatively low urbanization, penetration. And basically the Russian state just goes through and rounds people up when they’re going about their daily business. The second big concentration would be recent passport holders. So there are a lot of people who have moved from Central Asia to Russia because as bad as the economy is in Russia, it’s worse in Central Asia. So especially in places like Tajikistan or Kyrgyzstan, you’ve got several million people over the last 20 years who have moved north. And because they’ve had to get passports, they are in the system. And so basically what the Russians are doing is saying, hey, you’re in the system, we know where you are. Come work in the war because you don’t have a choice anymore. Getting Russian citizenship, the price is dying in Ukraine. The biggest concentration, the biggest numbers are going to be from ethnic republics that are closer to Moscow, that are more densely populated. So you’re talking here about places like Chechnya, Tatarstan, and Bashkortostan, densely populated provinces with reasonably high birth rates, especially compared to the ethnic Russians, where you do have a presence of the Russian state that can basically force people in.

All of these come at certain risks. When you start taking out people from the Far East, you’re depopulating them to the point that there’s an open question about relations vis a vis the Chinese, who have 100 million people just on the other side of the border. When you start going after the people who are recent passport holders, you disincentivize people to come into Russia where there’s a demographic bomb going off in real time even before the war, and you’re losing the workforce, you need to keep the system going. And when you go after groups like Chechnya, Tatarstan, and Bashkortostan, you’re talking about big population centers that if they ever did rebel, it’s not clear whether the Russian state could resist them. A new Chechen war would be as bad for the Russians as what’s going on in Ukraine right now. And if the Tartars or the Bashkirs rebel in any meaningful way, the Russians lose all the infrastructure connections they have to Siberia and Siberia, at the moment, is the only part of the oil complex that is likely to still be exporting a year or two from now. So none of these are good decisions, but it’s not like there’s a better one on offer, and we’re now seeing the entire system start to seize.

Russia, though, is capable of maintaining an incredibly high tolerance for pain, basically suffering as the Russian equivalent of baseball. And none of these by themselves are enough to break the system. But we’re seeing the weight increase at the same time as we’re seeing the Russians start to not just stall on the front, but be turned back. And every major Russian revolution in the past 300 years has been because the Kremlin has lost a military conflict. So you take the social pressures that this mobilization are likely to generate, play that against the battlefield situation. And yeah, this is looking pretty bad for the Kremlin.

Ukraine’s Flamingos Crush Russia’s Space Program

A cruise missile launching into a starry night sky | Licensed by Envato Elements

Ukraine sent a flamboyance of Flamingos (cruise missiles, not those pink things) and struck a Russian space complex in Samara. This complex was responsible for assembling Soyuz-2 rockets, as well as electronics and precision testing.

The missiles used, the Flamingos, are Ukraine’s version of the U.S. Tomahawk; dumber than the Tomahawk, but cheaper and easier to produce. These strikes and Ukraine’s growing large-scale strike capability are crushing Russia’s industrial and technological base.

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from Colorado. It is the 15th of August. And the news is that Ukraine, using a modified weapon system, has just attacked the city of Samara in Russia and severely damaged one of the space complexes, specifically the place where the Russians assemble the Soyuz-2 rockets. This is the primary Russian launch vehicle to get satellites up into space. Damage levels at this point are questionable, but we know there have been hard hits on the major buildings that actually do the work, especially for things like electronics and precision testing. So for the moment, Russia’s space program is now offline, and the idea that the Ukrainians won’t hit again is kind of silly.

Right now, Russia has kind of a hybridized space program. They’re still participating with the United States on the ISS, although I wouldn’t expect that to last a whole lot longer. ISS is the International Space Station, and they do have some legacy satellites up there, but they were hoping to build their own network of a couple hundred satellites. That to be kind of a local Starlink equivalent, so that they have independent military observation and independent communications, that is at a minimum on hold now.

They were really only planning on launching ten, maybe, if they’re really lucky, 20 satellites a year. And now that’s completely at zero. In addition to that, there’s the question of how the Ukrainians did this. It’s something called a flamingo missile. Now, if you remember back a year or two ago, there were some conversations about the United States sending some of its new truck mounted Tomahawk missiles, which is the United States premier mid strike cruise missile. Anyway, sending them to Ukraine. Ukraine lobbied very, very hard for that. But ultimately the United States decided no. So the Ukrainians, for all intents and purposes, built their own. The Flamingo has a warhead that is significantly more powerful than the Tomahawk. It’s modular, but it can be up to 1000kg, which is well over twice what the typical tomahawk carries. It has a slightly better range with a lighter warhead. It’s not quite as fast. Probably the biggest weakness of the Flamingo versus the Tomahawk is that the United States can use, off course, it’s satellite network to retask it on the fly, where the Ukrainians cannot yet do that. Although, considering, what they’re doing with drones, some version of that is probably going to be possible in the not too distant future anyway.

It, in essence, is a flying truck bomb. It’s not as accurate as the Tomahawk, but because it hits so much harder, it is almost as good. And the really important thing is it’s because it’s a simpler piece of equipment. Fiberglass instead of titanium. The Ukrainians can crank out three of them a day where as the tomahawk, they can only produce about 60 a year. So that’s what, five a month? Yeah, five a month. So a half a dozen of these things were used in the attack on Samara. Most of them were shot down, but with three a day being the production rate, it’s very, very simple to see this being a major industrial factor in the weeks and months to come.

So in summary, the Russians probably won’t have a space program by the end of the year that makes them completely dependent upon third party reconnaissance, primarily from China. The Ukrainians are being able to throw so much tonnage into the air that there’s really no industrial facility in Russia within a thousand miles of the border now that is safe at all, because if you’re not going to defend your space program as Russia, there’s really not much left that is more important aside from Moscow itself. And we’ve seen a contraction of Russian air defense around critical sites in Moscow and very little else. What we’re seeing is the disembowelment of Russia’s capability of being a technological power, and all that’s left is for it to be a resource power, exporting raw materials such as crude oil, in order to get the currency it needs in order to purchase Chinese product. But as the Ukrainians basically march with drones through the entire industrial plant, that capacity is disappearing. And we’ll probably see an end of Russia’s ability to be a large scale resource exporter before the end of the year as well, at least as regards the Black Sea and the Baltic Sea. And that’s going to be over two thirds of the total. So we really are seeing the industrial destruction and removal of Russia from the global space.

That has thousands of downstream impacts. And that is a topic we will revisit at length in the days and weeks to come.

Moving Beyond the Patriot Missile

The U.S. is hesitant to allow Ukraine to manufacture Patriot missiles locally, partially to protect U.S. military IP, but more so because it doesn’t want Ukraine to do it better. The reality is that highly sophisticated weapons like the Patriot aren’t the right tool for modern warfare.

Sure, in an American-led globalized system, these weapons are the cream of the crop. But that’s not the world we live in anymore. $4 million price tags and complicated supply chains are no longer viable. Modern wars require cheap weapons that are easy to produce locally at scale, like the drones we’ve seen across the Ukraine War.

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.

The Limits of China’s Military Reach

Despite China’s growing military, it remains constrained by geography and dependent upon U.S. secured trade routes.

Even if China manages to expand its Navy to the point where it can break through the First Island Chain, it still needs to find a way to replace the U.S.-maintained international system. And that’s no easy feat. The Chinese proved they could adapt and buy themselves some time during the Iran War, but it could not avoid the pitfalls associated with being the world’s largest oil importer.

Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from Yosemite National Park. This is Royal Arch Lake. This is the very first place I ever went camping when I came to Yosemite years ago. So it’s kind of cool to be back almost by accident. Anyway, taking a question from the Patreon page today specifically, why don’t I see the Chinese going all bonsai in their neighborhood?

Why are they not being more militaristic? I would argue that until eight years ago, when chairman G. Jinping got rid of his last real advisors, he had a very accurate understanding of the world about how China was arguably the country in world history, most dependent upon international trade, and how China utterly lacked the military means in order to protect that trade, even within sight of its own shore.

Trying to basically faces three layers of problems. Number one, their chief sources of demand, primarily the United States, but to a slightly lesser degree, the European Union are on the other side of continents from them, and they’re broadly hostile. That means unless they can find a consumption source to absorb their goods, their current economic model won’t work at all.

And since their own demographics are so totally horrid, they know that that consumption boost can’t happen at home and the developing world, writ large, has less than half the consumption power of the United States, and much less the US and the EU put together. So there is no option for China except to maintain some version of the current system.

And the United States is the one that has a global Navy. That’s problem one. Problem two even if the Chinese could float a navy that was equal to the United States, and right now we outgunned them roughly 15 to 1, they still need to get through the first island chain that is Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore.

It’s not so much that those countries are de facto US allies. In most cases, it’s that if the Chinese are going to project power to the wider world, they have to get past these islands regardless of who controls them. And it’s much, much, much, much, much easier to sink ships, especially commercial ships in a straight than it is to dominate an archipelago.

You’re talking about a combined population in the zone. That is, Indonesia has 250 million people by itself, so well over half a billion. I don’t think I’ve ever done that math before. Taiwan has about 30. Philippines I think is 70 these days. Lots of people. Well, well, well beyond the capacity of the People’s Liberation Army Navy. That’s what they actually call their navy, as well as the People’s Liberation Army.

The Chinese Army is not designed to project power and hold territory. It’s mostly for domestic control, which is something that does pretty well. Anyway, so that’s problem two. Problem three. Let’s assume that they can outrun the US Navy and dominate the first island chain. And those are some wishful thinking there that doesn’t solve their problem.

They still have to get to North America to dominate that commercial base. So have to get to Europe to dominate the commercial base. They still have to get to the Middle East to have energy. The Chinese system, from a strategic point of view, has always been in a bind. And so I’ve always found it hilarious that the official stance of CCP is that the United States.

Should patrol the world and secure the ceilings on behalf of China. Their official plan is that we can’t do it, so you should do it for us. So no no no no, not a lot has changed. We have had a little bit of color that has come in because of the Iran war, in that the United States bungled everything.

And the Chinese, I don’t want to say that they bungled or that they had a a home run. It was somewhere in between. It exposed just how vulnerable they were to energy disruptions. And they did showcase through switching for petrochemical inputs and for using EVs, that they could reduce their demands by about 2 million barrels per day, maybe not even quite that much.

But, you know, that’s a significant volume to reduce your crude by. That’s like, geez. United Kingdom uses about that much, but that’s it. So even after all the fuel switching, even after going over to electric vehicles, even after shutting down some of their refineries, they were still far and away the world’s largest oil importer from all the same places as before.

Nothing really changed. If I was going to highlight one thing that may be pointed the other way, it’s not so much that the Chinese have more flexibility, it’s that we found out just how dependent other countries were on them. Now, we understand in the United States how much were dependent on the Chinese for manufactured goods. But over the course of this conflict, Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, Australia, the Philippines all discovered how much they were dependent upon Chinese refined product.

So, yes, the math really hasn’t changed for China in terms of any sort of major conflict. But we now know that if they do go down, they’re going to be taking the fuel systems of a half a dozen countries that the United States cares a fair amount as a side effect. And the only way to fix that is for these countries to secure their own energy and specifically to develop their own refining base, which for some of these countries is something they gave up on decades ago.

So it’s not so much that we know that China is in a stronger place. They’re not. So they may have just tethered themselves to a few countries in the meantime.

Why Bypassing Hormuz is a Pipe Dream

So, you want to bypass the Strait of Hormuz, huh? Good luck finding a replacement route or pipeline that matches the 20 to 22 million barrels of oil that used to transit daily.

The UAE and Saudi Arabia have pipelines capable of transporting roughly 1.6 and 7 million barrels per day, respectively. Despite being the best alternatives, they come with long expansion timelines or vulnerability to strikes. There are a few other routes that pass through Syria and Turkey, but those are either too risky or too small.

Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Colorado. And today we’re going to talk about the bypass options for the Strait of Hormuz. Started. Hormuz, of course, is one of the world’s most important waterways. It is the gateway that tankers use to enter and exit the Persian Gulf. The Persian Gulf produces for export roughly 20 to 22 million barrels per day of oil and products, and under normal circumstances, almost all of that flows through the Strait of Hormuz aren’t really great options.

Otherwise, Iran is all mountainous. You’re not going to go that way. Iraq is a sectarian disaster and it has no other waterway access. It would have to go north through Turkey, which is mountainous. Saudi Arabia is a desert kingdom which is huge, and so crossing its distances are problematic. The Kuwaitis and the Qatari have no options at all.

And that just leaves the United Arab Emirates, which at least does border the other side of the Strait of Hormuz. But it has to go up and over some complicated geography. Anyway, there are four options that people are talking about, three of which exist in some way. So number one, you’ve got the pipeline that starts in the United Arab Emirates on the Persian Gulf and goes up and over some of that complex geography down to the port of Fujairah, carries about 1.6 million barrels per day.

The Emirates have fast tracked expansions. They hope to have another 300,000 of capacity sometime later this year, and then maybe they even will double it over time by laying a parallel track. It’s expensive, especially building it fast, but that doesn’t mean it can’t happen. And the Emirati certainly realized that unless they get another option, they’re kind of hostage.

Anything that happens between or among Israel, the United States and Iran. Number two, the big one, the Petro line. This is a line that starts in the eastern provinces of Saudi Arabia and their major oil producing region, and just shoots west, straight across the desert until it hits the Red sea at a place called Yanbu. they started construction on this during the Reagan administration.

Everyone in this area has been worried about the Strait of Hormuz for a very long time, and it’s operational has been for a couple of decades. In fact, over the last ten years, the Saudis have incrementally increased its capacity from 4 million barrels a day to 7 And they had never really tested it. So until this conflict, we were still thinking it was at four.

They have proven that with 30 to 45 days notice, they can ramp it up to seven, which from an engineering point of view is pretty impressive. There’s now talk of laying another parallel pipe and maybe increasing this by another two or even 3 million barrels per day over the next few years. There’s two problems with that. Number one, of course, is this is a big project over a large period of distance.

And then second, just getting to Yanbu is only half the problem. The Saudis have built a number of refineries up and down the Red sea coast that are not connected by pipeline. And so the old strategy was to take tankers from the Persian Gulf, Salem, all the way around the Arabian Peninsula, going through Hormuz, through Bob Deb off the coast of Yemen, and then supplying these refineries by sea, which I always thought was remarkably stupid.

Anyway, at the moment, the plans aren’t for these pipelines to support these other refineries, just to get it to the coast to open up some maritime options. Option three is for Iraq. Iraq has two different while producing zones. It’s got one in the which is the big one in the Shia Arab zone. And it’s got one in the north in the Kurdish Right now, all of the crew that comes out of the southern fields is exported by water through a couple of offshore loading platforms. They have. And all of that has basically been reduced to zero by the conflict. So the idea is you have a Western line that goes out to a city called Banias in Syria.

This pipeline technically exists, but it was shut down in the 1950s and has never been turned back on. And so if this route is going to be explored, all of that equipment has to be 100% replaced. And you’re talking about a project conservatively is going to run $8 billion. 20 might be a better guess. And it’s not clear that the Iraqis have the financial wherewithal or the engineering skill to do this themselves.

So you’re talking about bringing in companies from the outside and having to pay them, and that means it’s not going to happen this year or next year or this decade, and maybe not next decade. This would be a big project. In addition to the fact that about 40% of the route is going to be going through Syria, which until recently has been in a brutal, decade long civil war, and we’re just kind of counting the moments until the second phase of that civil war starts up.

Not to mention that Banias on the coast is a different sectarian group than the majority of Syria. So it’s going to go through the Kurdish zone, and then it’s going to go through the Arab zone, and then it’s going to go through the Alawite zone. I wouldn’t invest in that if it were up to me personally. Final option also kind of exists.

It’s the northern route that goes from Kirkuk, which is the oil capital. The Kurdish zone north into Turkey takes a dog leg going straight west to the Mediterranean port of Chian. And Chian is kind of in that elbow of the Mediterranean, where Turkey almost meets Syria. That pipeline has been operating for the last ten years at about half a million barrels per day.

It was built to spec back in the 80s at 1.6 million barrels per day. But disputes between the Turks and the Kurds, much less the Turks and the Arabs in Baghdad, have meant that it’s always operating at a lower capacity. It’s not clear if it can handle that 1.6 anymore. Anyway, there’s problems with all of these pipelines. It takes a while to build them.

They’re expensive. The Emiratis are showing that they can be fast tracked, but the Emirati one is probably the simplest over all. But the bigger problem is it doesn’t really solve the issue. I mean, yes, you can bypass Hormuz. And yes, that is important. But keep in mind the weapons systems we’ve seen deployed around the world in just the last six months.

In the case of the Ukrainians, they’re now regularly striking industrial targets across Russia that are a thousand miles and more from Ukrainian territory. The Iranian weapon systems are not nearly as complicated, but they’re still striking things that are 500 miles away without a problem. And most of the infrastructure that we’re talking about here is within that 500 mile range.

And so the Iranians can just program in what they want to strike, whether it’s a pumping station, part of the pipe itself, the loading facility, the tankers, a cluster of the loading facilities and go to town. Specifically, they’ve already hit Fujairah, the Emirati option, and Yanbu the Saudi option. And to think that they can’t hit any of these spots with today’s technology, much less the technology they will command when this construction is finished is just silly.

Really. The only option for a bypass pipeline that might, might, might be resistant or immune to what the Iranians can do today, much less tomorrow, is the Turkish option, because the Iranians do not want to pick a fight with a superior local military power like Turkey. So that is really the only thing that works. But that one of the three that are operational is by far the smallest of the three.

The petrol line is not a solution, the pipeline is not a solution. And honestly, anything that’s going to depend upon Syria instability is probably not an option. That just leaves the Chian pipe, which at the moment is maxed out theoretically at 1.6 million barrels per day. Operationally probably half that. And if the decision was made to double, triple or more of that, you’re talking about a project that’s in the tens of billions of dollars because eastern Turkey is not flat.

So none of these really work. They’re going to generate a lot of talk. The Trump administration already has their fingerprints all over them. Like this is going to be a quick and easy fix. It is not you can take that to the bank.

Ukraine’s Military Reshuffling Highlights Resource Problems

Ukrainian President Zelensky has now dismissed two of the most senior military leaders, Defense Minister Fedorov and Commander-in-Chief Syrskyi. Beyond the speculation of internal power struggles, these dismissals highlight Ukraine’s glaring issues with resource allocation.

This is a multi-vectored war that is constantly evolving, which means the new drone tech is just as essential as the infantry and artillery, and vice versa. So, Ukraine can’t win without either capability. But with limited resources at its disposal, Ukraine has an allocation problem.

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.

The Future of Drone Tech: Naval Strategies

Ukraine can strike anywhere across the Black Sea thanks to its Sea Baby naval drones, and since jamming is less effective in open water, Ukraine can remotely guide them toward targets.

Take a shadow fleet vessel, for example. Ukraine can use satellite and transponder data to determine targets and then strike the engines and propulsion systems of these ships. With few effective counters, Russia’s ability to protect shipping in the Black Sea is steadily eroding.

If this current trend continues, Russian exports of all kinds, including oil, grain, fertilizer, timber, and more, could be lost.

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Pike National Forest, from the southern slopes of Mount Silverheels. Behind me is the Colorado Intermountain, which is home to fair play, among other things. Anyway, today we’re going to talk about something that’s very mountain, you know, naval drones. So in the Ukraine, where we’ve seen several models and the ones we were to talk about today are the sea Babies.

These are things that the Ukrainians have basically taken motor boats, put a bomb on the front, automated them, and off they go. They are typically always first person drones because when you’re dealing with water, there’s really no option for doing a meaningful fiber optic line. There’s usually not going to have a lot of guidance because there are no landmarks.

So while there are certain things you can do with maybe a little bit of memory to provide a targeting suite, really these are things that have to be piloted by a person, and the terrain, such as it is, works to that pretty well. You see, jamming is something that the Russians are very good at electronic warfare in general, but you can’t really do it over the water.

I mean, if you’ve got a warship, maybe, but if you’ve got a warship, then all of a sudden the Ukrainians are going to be sending aerial drones against you to that have the memory to target specific things on the boat. But when you’re talking about, say, shadow fleet vessels, well, you’re not going to put a jammer on a Shadow Fleet vessel because it’s technically not a Russian ship.

And the Russians just don’t have that many of them to go around. So what happens is the Ukrainians now have these sea babies that have a range of 1500km in east to west. The Black Sea is only 1100 kilometers long. So it’s not just that the Ukrainians can hit any ship on the Black Sea, It’s they can go out there and loiter for a while.

So what the Ukrainians do is they pull down commercial imagery. SA is the type of synthetic aperture radar, and it basically lights up everything in a strip. And that strip can cover as much as 50,000km, which is a good portion of the Black Sea. And then they just go to a commercial website and see what ships are around.

You see, every ship in the world has a transponder except shadow fleet because they turn them off in order to avoid sanctions. So basically, you get this sheet satellite data that is accurate to like a quarter of a meter, and they then play forward and map out all the legal ships that have transponders. And anything else is a Russian shadow vessel.

And if they’ve got a sea baby near it, off they go. It’s also pretty predictable because there’s only 3 or 4 ports for the Russians on the Black Sea. Places like an overseas. And unless they’re going to a specific Turkish port, they’re all going to the Turkish straight to get out of the Black Sea and get to the wider world.

And that’s a straight line sail. So what we’ve been seeing in the last couple of weeks is these sea babies, which have like half a ton of explosives on them, basically getting in close to a commercial vessel, approaching them from behind and blowing the shit out of the engine room and the propeller. We’re not to the point where it’s had a huge impact yet, but again, these tactics are just like a month old.

Now, normally what you would do when you’re dealing with something like this on the defensive point of view is you’d fight these things off with helicopters. Small arms fire from the top of a ship really doesn’t do much, and battleship really doesn’t have the ability to lower their guns to the point that they can fire at something in the water and small arms fire.

Just so you use a helicopter. Now, number one, you don’t base a helicopter off of a commercial vessel. And in a few times when the Russians have had a military vessel nearby, or the Sea Babies have been sufficiently close to the coast that a helicopter from land can interdict. The Ukrainians really learned fast. Okay, we’ll just put an anti-air missile or two on this.

And they scored many hits. And so Now the Russians aren’t even doing that.

There’s really no good counter here. Helicopters were really only it, and the Ukrainians are now fielding more and more of these things. And as the Russians basically lose control over Crimea because they can’t have fuel. Even using Crimea as a base for helicopter is disappearing. What this means is probably by the end of the year, we need to start thinking about not simply the Russians losing access to the Black Sea for purposes of shipping out all and oil products, which is 1.5 to 2 million barrels a day.

Big deal right there. But also shipping anything wheat, fertilizer, timber, whatever it happens to be. Basically, the whole Black Sea is starting to become a no go zone. And again, the Ukrainians have only been doing this for about 4 to 6 weeks at this scale. They keep ramping it up just for a couple more months. There’s not going to be much left of the Shadow Fleet in the Black Sea at all.

South Korea Goes All-In on Drones

Drone Aircraft Dropping Bombs over Misty Landscape | Photo licensed by Envato Elements: https://app.envato.com/search/photos/c058515b-6f36-40c6-837a-4f0644a0809e?itemType=photos&term=military+drone

The South Koreans are going all in on drone warfare, announcing that every soldier will be trained to operate drones. This is a relatively inexpensive way to offset the challenges facing South Korea.

South Korea has shown time and again that it can pivot on a dime. So, incorporating drones into its military strategy to remedy demographic decline is a natural progression. And since they already possess a large industrial base, producing these drones at scale in the coming years isn’t a stretch. South Korea is also facing increased threats from North Korea and weakening U.S. security guarantees, so the case for drones is even stronger.

While the drone warfare of today will likely look far different in ten years, South Korea is well positioned to lead the next generation of military drone technology.

Hey everybody, Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Colorado. Today we’re going to talk about South Korean defense policy. Specifically in June, the Koreans decided that they’re going to make every soldier competent. Drone operator. Five big things come from this. Number one, why they needed to do it primarily is a demographic situation. Korea has been one of the great success stories for turning a backwards agrarian economy into a forward looking technocracy.

Doing it really in just a generation, generation and a half fastest infrastructure build out in human history, and a fast urbanization rate that was surpassed only by the Chinese couple of decades later. Anyway, you combine that with the heavy drinking male culture and women deciding that, you know what, maybe there’s an option for me other than the home and you’ve got a high divorce rate, a low marriage rate, and arguably the lowest birth rates in the country.

And so this has been going on for over half century. And so the Koreans now have more people in their 60s and their 50s and the 40s and the 30s and their 20s and 30s and kids complete inversion of the demographic pyramid. So a normal military structure is to take a lot of young men in their 20s and put them on the front line.

That’s that’s just structurally not an option for the Koreans anymore. And so they’ve been exploring new possibilities. Drones appear at the moment to fit the bill. Second problem, of course, is North Korea, the North Koreans, while there’s their economy, is a shriveled raisin compared to the robustness that is the South. Something like a third of GDP goes to defense spending, not to mention a not insignificant nuclear arsenal, but more importantly, somewhere between 10 and 15,000 artillery emplacements within range of Seoul.

So in the case of a war, by the time the first shell hits Seoul, there will be tens of thousands in the air already, and there simply is no conventional or even nuclear solution to that. But maybe with drones there might be. We’ll see. Third problem is the United States. The United States is in the process of ripping up all of its alliances.

And for countries like South Korea that have faced artificial restrictions put on them by the Americans on what sort of military technologies they can develop, that really puts the Koreans in a bind. So, for example, one of the ways you might be able to counter the North Korean nuclear program and all that artillery to develop your own ballistic missile program, the Americans flat out have barred that since 1955.

And so the Koreans are now coming into this period where the Americans have become unreliable to absent, and they just don’t have the tools of statecraft or military craft that are necessary for the strategic environment which they find themselves in. Drones offers a cheap and fast way to move into something new. Maybe we’ll see. These technologies are still being developed.

And that brings us to the fourth thing the industrial plant. Most countries who are moving into drone warfare are discovering that almost all of the parts come from China. And since China is the primary sponsor with Russia of North Korea, the South Koreans definitely don’t want to become dependent upon that. But unlike other countries that have been starting to move into the drone space, the Koreans are already a premier technological manufacturing power.

And you don’t have to do a lot of creative thinking in order to convert what the Koreans already have and things like aerospace and weapons and automotive and turn it into a drone industry, everything right down to the microchips and the the batteries. So when the Koreans say they’re going to be producing millions of drones a year within a few years, I tend to believe them because they have a lot of the base industrial plant already in place.

It just requires modification. Now, as the plan stands and it is very early in development. The idea is you make everybody a drone controller and with the technologies of literally yesterday, that makes a lot of sense. But that’s not the technologies that are likely to be used on the battlefield in two, three, four, five, ten years. You see, at this point, most of the drones that have been used by the United States, the Russians and the Ukrainians have been what are called first person view drones.

Basically, you have a live telemetry fee to your drone. You can see through its optics and you can direct it manually. And that works in any number of circumstances. But it faces two problems when you’re dealing with, say, North Korea. Number one, that link can be jammed. And while there are fiber optic drones with ranges upwards of 50km now, which is nuts, that’s not enough to get all of the potential artillery that could target Seoul.

So some decision making has to be put into that drone. So it’s not simply unmanned, but it’s to at least a degree autonomous. The way you’ve been doing that to this point is with something called Nand, which is flash memory, cold memory. Think of thumb drive. Nand memory can hold a short decision tree. So you can tell your drone to look for 4 or 5 things and select a target among that list.

And once the target has been selected, there’s nothing can be jammed because the decision was made on board. You then have to kinetically intercept the drone, which is a lot harder. But there’s another generation of memory beyond Nant. It’s called Dram dynamic random access. Hot memory much faster can hold a much larger decision tree instead of 4 or 5 steps, maybe several thousand steps.

You’re trained on pilot data, which the Ukrainians have been generating in mass. And the Koreans. South Koreans tend to like the Ukrainians because the Ukrainians are fighting North Koreans. Now, North Koreans have sent troops to assist the Russians in the war. So the South Koreans have become one step removed anyway. The the Dram approach is a different sort of drone with a lot more autonomy.

And it’s better at, say, following a roadway until it finds a train and then targeting specific parts of the train, for example. Now this is new technology. It is not being used in Ukraine yet. It’s in the process of being invented, quite honestly. But the prototype, the first generation drone, Zeta Zidane is a South Korean product. It’s not militarized yet.

It’s still in the kind of advanced testing stages of the prototypes, but it already exists. And once you modify those drone brains, for lack of a better term, to a more of a combat chassis, then you really are opening up a new phase of warfare. It’s not swarm intelligence, it’s not a eye where you can throw anything at them and they’ll be able to interpret.

We don’t have that hardware, but it is a significantly large enough decision tree to in many ways mimic full decision making capabilities. And guess what? Remember I said that South Koreans are already a technological economy? About 90% of the world’s high end dram comes specifically from South Korea. So what’s likely to be the next phase of the drone revolution is something that the Koreans are already the world leader at.

You put it all together, and by 2030, the Korean military is going to look very, very different. The only question is to the degree to which they decide to go all in on drones. Because if you take one of the world’s top ten manufacturing economies and apply these technologies and the strategic need, which is very, very real and very present, and the Koreans have proven time and time again that they can change direction on a dime and build huge amounts of functional product in a matter of months. So we’re going to see a significant shift, not just in the way that drone warfare happens, but in a number of strategic environments around the world that appear to have been locked in stasis for decades.

The DMZ and the Korean Peninsula probably being at the top of that list.

The Future of Drone Tech: Ukraine’s Innovation

Camo clad man flying a drone outdoors | License by Envato Elements

The U.S. has finally secured its first contract to manufacture Ukrainian-designed drones, but don’t go celebrating quite yet.

The F10 drone that will be produced is a small FPV quadcopter built entirely from non-Chinese components. This is a big step for the U.S., but it’s not nearly the crème de la crème of Ukrainian tech.

The facility where these drones will be made is yet to be built, so even this initial order of 2,000 drones will take several years to complete. Regardless, this is a step in the right direction that will hopefully lead to further cooperation down the road.

Hey all. Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Colorado. Today is the 1st of July and the news is good news. We have our first contract granted by the Department of Defense to have a US manufacturer produce Ukrainian drones under license. There’s not a lot of information out at this point. It’s all super secret, but I’ll share what I know and give you a couple of guesses based on what we know what that means.

So step one, the American company involved is called Ukrainian Defense Drones. Catchy name. And the Ukrainian company on the other side is called F drones. F drones is one of the big boys in Ukraine for producing ever more innovative policies and doctrines and designs and getting them to the front their F7 drone from last year, 2025, yeah, was basically voted the drone of the year for how good it was against emplacements and vehicles.

The new drone that the United States is going to be producing is called the F10. We know it’s 100% non-Chinese parts, and aside from that, we just know that the ten means it’s ten inches across, which means it’s a quadcopter and it is a first person drone. So you’re going to have a dude with a controller relatively close to the front line that suggests from its size that it has some range limitations, probably only 25 to 40km, and it probably can only carry a warhead that’s 3 or 4 kilos.

That’s probably not enough to take out a tank, but more than enough to wreck the day of, say, an artillery crew and go after personnel or trucks. That’s the good news. The bad news is there’s no sign at the moment that the F10 is one of the drones that has the terminal guidance that the Ukrainians have been starting to introduce across the front and across the entire drone fleet this past year. Those are the things that load a decision into the drone, so that when it gets over its target area, it can actually look around and pick a target for itself. And once it does that, it can’t be jammed. Now, this is just a contract. It’s part of the American program to try to get 200,000 drones in active service before the end of 2027, just next year.

But this is going to be a late bloomer in that, because the facility that has been tagged to build these drones in Ohio hasn’t begun construction yet. We only got go ahead for the construction last week, and they’re not expecting to finish construction until December of 2029. So three and a half years from now, and then they’ll start building out the first packet of drones.

And they’ve only ordered 2000 of them and at a rate of, say, 650 to $700. You know, these just aren’t particularly sophisticated drones, which is fine. The key thing is that for the first time, we have a direct contract from DoD for Ukrainian equipment, which is something we’ve been desperately to get in this country. I would argue, even though all of our Western allies and Middle Eastern allies are way ahead of us on this front, because they know they can’t rely on American hardware, there’s a lot of things can still go wrong.

For example, the reason we don’t have a contract until now is that Donald Trump personally despises President Zelensky of Ukraine. And it’s entirely possible at this moment that Trump is unaware that this contract even exists. And as soon as he finds out, he may well squash it. But hopefully it is the first of several thousand contracts to come that it would allow the United States to take advantage of the war zone in Ukraine, to help test an entirely new set of weapon systems and take advantage of the Ukrainian skill sets, which were by far the most advanced in the world when it comes to the designing and the use and the development of doctrine for these new types of hardware. Early days. Once this facility is constructed, it’s supposed to be producing a wide variety of defense equipment, of which Ukrainian drones are just one tiny little piece. So it’s a step in the right direction regardless. And I just hope that’s a small step all around a very long path of tighter partnership.

That’s probably just wishful thinking from me, but at least we have the first step.

The U.S. and Ukraine Make a Drone Deal