The Future of Drone Tech: Naval Launch Platforms

Photo of a US Naval Carrier

Naval drone warfare is nothing new, but the Ukrainians are now finding ways to spice up the Sea Babies and MAGURA drones.

Ukraine is using these naval drones as mobile launch platforms for smaller aerial drones. Since the naval drones can travel farther and are harder to disrupt, they can take canisters full of FPV aerial drones closer to targets and deploy them. This gives Ukraine better operational reach around Crimea and along the Dnieper River.

This opens up a whole new strategic envelope for Ukraine, allowing it to carry out surprise attacks without pre-positioning troops or drone teams.

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Transcript

Hey, everybody. Good morning. From Rome, where the building that I’m staying in is. If you can see this curve here at the converted interior, that 2200 year old Roman bathhouse. The bathhouse has gone. But they recycle everything here over the years. Anyway, today we’re continuing on with the drone series, new military technologies that are in the process being unveiled and used right now. And today we’re going to talk about naval drones. Naval drones aren’t new. The Ukrainians have been using them against the Russians, really, since the start of the war, especially the second year. The sea baby is the primary variant. There’s also something called the Megara that has a pretty good track record. The idea is you basically take a small boat or a jet ski or something like that. Hook it up to an automated system pilot it remotely. The advantage of a sea drone, of course, is wait. You can put a bomb that waste several hundred pounds in it and then center on its way. 

And because most vessels don’t have the ability to shoot down at things that are in the water, they’re designed to shoot at other ships. Really, all they can do is put some people on the deck with machine guns or RPGs or something like that, and try to take shots as they come in. And so the Ukrainians have had immense success with these. 

The problem is simply range. And you can solve that with more fuel tanks to a certain degree. So we’ve seen a number of attacks that have gone quite a distance, even going as far as Novorossiysk, which is the major Russian port on the Black Sea and has made the Russian Navy’s position at places several completely untenable. And so the Russian Navy has actually had to evacuate Crimea. 

That’s all old stuff. What’s new, what’s happened in just the last month is that the Ukrainians have now regularized the installment of aerial drones on naval drones. See, one of the fun things about naval drones is because they’re on the water. They’re really hard to interrupt with electronic warfare and jamming. So you can basically right up to your target, whether it’s a port or a ship, before there’s any danger of it being interrupted. 

Whereas an aerial drone, if it’s flying in, sometimes it gets within a kilometer or a couple hundred meters of a target. And the ECM that the Russians use will then interrupt the signal and the thing will crash. That’s one of the reasons why these new memory drones are so important, because they get around that by giving decision making to the drone and the terminal phase. 

With naval drones, there’s really no chance of them being intercepted along the way. So what the Ukrainians have done is have built canisters that are incorporated into these sea drones. And when they get to a certain point, maybe ten, 20km away, they then eject aerial drones that are technically first person drones controlled by a pilot. And those fly into target things, which means that if you put it on a fiber optic tether, which they are, you get somewhere between a ten and a 50 kilometer range where you can send smaller drones out by about a half a dozen at a time. 

A couple of things that have already happened. Number one, they’ve got these canisters to launch them. So this isn’t an experimental technology already. It’s already in full deployment. The Ukrainians just kind of sprung it on everybody just a few weeks ago, which is causing a lot of havoc. Number two, you’re limited in terms of payload because those FPV drones typically can only carry a payload of 10 pounds or less. 

So they’re great for anti-personnel or maybe even anti vehicle, but you’re not going to use them to blow up say a battleship. But if you know what you’re doing you can target strategic pieces of ship, strategic pieces of refineries or ports and cause a lot of havoc in a way that the Russians haven’t yet to invent a technology to cope with, except for maybe a net that only gets you so far. 

Third, and for the war, the moment. Most importantly, there’s a lot of naval frontage in play. If you remember from the early phases of the war, the Russians invaded from the east and the south, with about 100,000 people moving north from Crimea to the Kherson area and east from the territories that the Russians had captured in the last war back in 2014, all the way to the Dnieper River. 

And that whole southern and eastern front is in place to a certain degree. Well, with these naval drones, the Ukrainians can now do whatever they want around Crimea and can go up the Dnieper River and hit the Russians in any number of spots without having to first preposition forces, much less drone pilots that can use long range transmission or even satellite communications to control the naval drone and then tether that through the existing telemetry out through the fiber optic cables to the first person drones. 

So the degree to which the Ukrainians just surprise assault really, anything at this point is only limited by the number of drones that they can have on the water. Now, this does change the nature of the sea babies and things like them, because now they’re becoming drone carriers as opposed to just suicide drones. That will probably trigger a new evolution in the manufacture, because right now they’re designed to be one way and that’s it. 

But from an engineering point of view, that is actually a very, very simple problem. Taking a suicide drone, taking the explosive off of giving it more fuel, more range capacity, and then ultimately more of these canisters. That’s something we’re probably going to see within a month or two. I could almost do that in my garage, and I’m kind of a technical invalid when it comes to things like that. 

Big shifts in that space. That’s it for now.

The Future of Drone Tech: Mid-Range Drones

Photo of a military drone

The battlefield of the Ukraine War continues to be transformed by drone innovations. The latest is the (affordable and scalable) modification of existing drones to travel farther and independently identify and strike moving targets.

This has eliminated the notion of a safe rear area, as these drones can strike anywhere and anything. This makes moving troops, fuel, and ammunition much riskier for the Russians. If Ukraine can continue to produce these modified drones at this rate, we’re looking at a much different battlefield in just a few months.

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Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Future of Drone Tech: Long-Range Strikes

Drone firing a missile

Ukraine has ramped up its long-range drone program, allowing it to strike targets up to 1,800 kilometers away. So, what does this mean for Russia and its oil?

With Ukraine able to strike targets well into Western Russia, energy infrastructure is increasingly vulnerable. Thanks to the recent surge of foreign financial support rushing into Ukraine, drone production has ramped up. Russia might be able to shut down and restart the southern oil fields, but any fields shut down in the permafrost would take years or even decades to repair and restart.

So, expect Russian transport and export capacity to continue to drop, especially if these longer-range strikes continue throughout the summer months.

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Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Taking Naval Options Away from China

A Chinese Naval chip in harbor

There were some recent tests in the Philippines involving the Japanese Type-88 anti-ship missile system and the U.S. Typhon launcher. These truck-mounted systems can move throughout the islands, rather than relying on fixed bases.

Deploying these systems across the first island chain would limit China’s naval access to the wider Pacific. We’re also seeing Japan step into a new era of defense policy, reflected by a broader regional effort to contain Chinese naval power.

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Transcript

Hey all. Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from Queta in Umbria in Italy today. We’re talking about a couple of events that happened in the Asian rim in the Philippines specifically last week. We had two test fires of weapon systems. First, the Japanese launch something called a type 88 anti-ship missile. And the United States launched something from what’s called a typhoon. 

Excuse me, typhoon launcher, which is basically a tomahawk, those long range cruise missiles the US is famous or infamous for, based on whether you’re target or not. Both of them launched from the Philippines. Both of these are truck mounted systems. The Chinese threw a bit of a shit fit, but there’s really not a lot they can do about them. 

The issue is two things. Number one, the first island chain, which is the line of islands including Japan, the Philippines, Taiwan, Malaysia and Indonesia, they’re all at least nominal US allies. But more to the point, they block the Chinese from accessing the wider world unless these nations allow it. What are the things that has held up during the Cold War? 

The post-Cold War era is that the United States has not reinforced the first island chain, because during the Cold War, China was an ally against the Soviet Union. And it’s only in the last couple of decades that that has really changed in the last few years, where they’ve become outright hostile, which means that we are now in the early stages of fortifying the island chain, not just the United States, but the countries in question. 

Because if you can install weapons systems that can hit ships, then the Chinese are permanently locked into the lake that is the west side of the the island chain. And now that is happening. Second, like I say, we have three things. Second, the weapon systems involved are truck launched. So you don’t even need a fixed installation. The Typhon Tomahawk launcher, you know, has the range of a normal tomahawk, which can be pushing 1500 miles. 

And the type 88 is shorter. It’s actually an older system that only has a rate of about 100 miles. But they have newer systems that they haven’t just put into place in the area right now. But you take the Philippines, which is one of the most erratic, probably the best word countries in the region with the lowest military capability. 

You have a bunch of trucks running around, some driven by the Japanese, some driven by US Marines, and all of a sudden everything within several hundred miles of the archipelago is completely no go for Chinese vessels. And that’s before you consider more capable states such as, say, Taiwan. So these two weapon systems are basically enough to completely castrate the entire Chinese military position. 

So of course the Chinese are kind of losing their minds. Third thing, this is the first time that Japan has tested an offensive weapon system outside of home islands since World War two. 

Japanese were forced by the United States in the aftermath of the war to have permanent neutrality, and that is now rapidly eroding away. And if you take a country that has the second most capable navy in the planet, you allow them to start stationing military assets outside of their country. And it doesn’t matter, really, what the relationship with the United States happens to be. The Chinese aren’t going anywhere. So we’ve now had a very, very clear example of what can happen with these new systems or even old systems. 

Something to keep in mind. There are a number of countries in the world that, operating all by themselves, that have the ability to completely destroy the Chinese economy because they can interfere with any sort of corporate shipping. China is the most dependent country in the world on globalization because they import a lot of their food, they import the inputs they need to grow their own food. 

They import the raw materials they need to make their manufactured goods, and then they have to export the manufactured goods to pay for it all. You interrupt the sea lanes and it all falls apart. So Japan and the United States obviously have the direct naval power to do that whenever they want to. Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia do, because they control the straits that allow the Chinese access Middle Eastern crude and European end markets. 

The Australians have weapon systems that can reach that entire zone as well. And now the freaking Philippines has a bunch of dudes running around on trucks that are getting weapons systems so that they can do it to the degree to which the Chinese are in a box here is immense. So it really doesn’t matter from my point of view, what happens with demographics or relations with the United States or globalization in general? 

Every time you look at this from a fresh angle, the Chinese are screwed and the state media really realizes that, which is why they’re having such an outrage rejection of what’s going on right now. And the Japanese side, this is barely even talked about. They’re just kind of sneaking in the background. Anyway, that’s it for me for today. Until next time.

Latvia’s Political Flux Caused by Drones

Photo of a military drone

Latvia’s government is in flux following the firing of the defense minister, his party leaving the coalition, and the prime minister resigning. All of this was caused by some Ukrainian drones being electronically redirected by Russian countermeasures and striking Latvian infrastructure.

This specific event involving Latvia highlights just how quickly drone technology is evolving. The Ukraine War has been a testing ground for all of it, and several countries are now partnering with Ukraine to mass-produce Ukrainian drone technology. The U.S. is not on that list of countries and will likely fall behind the eight ball on the drone front.

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Transcript

Hey all, Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from Umbria in Italy. Olives. Because, you know, Italy today we’re talking about a little nonstandard thing about a government falling in Europe. Now, there’s 30 odd governments in Europe, and one of them is always in crisis. So I usually don’t follow the blow by blow. But this one’s really interesting, Prime Minister. 

Let’s see if I get this right. You silly. Is the Prime Minister was the Prime minister of Latvia, which is one of the three Baltic countries population of about 2.5 million. She resigned this past week over a defense crisis. The situation has to do with drone technology and the Ukraine war. So specifically the Ukrainians have been using drones more recently, new types of drones to attack various chunks of Russia’s energy sector and trying to destroy the logistics support that makes Russia’s participation in the Ukraine war possible. 

So they’ve been very active around places like Mariupol in going after logistics. They’ve been very active in places like the Black Sea and the Baltic Sea in going after energy assets. Now there are multiple types of drones, but let’s talk about two. So in the first one you’ve got something called an FPG first person visual. And that’s your typical drone that you might buy from a company like say DJI in in China you have a controller. 

Sometimes it’s on your phone, you require a digital tether to it and you send it off. And if something interrupts that tether, the drone just goes in a straight line or crashes or returns to you based on its programing. Option number two is something called a GPS drone, for lack of a better phrase. There’s lots of subtypes here, and it follows GPS coordinates that you kind of lay down like a breadcrumb. 

And it goes from point to point to point to point to point. And then when it gets to its end destination, it either crashes into the last point you gave it. It takes a quick glance around and makes a decision as to what to hit. Now, with this second type of drone, you don’t need a digital tether to it, but it does need to be able to receive a signal from a satellite or some other sort of signal that allows it to know where it is. 

So cell towers, for example, work. So if you can jam that signal, the drone then flies off into the night or crashes or return homes based on its programing, what it’s capable of doing. And it might have a little bit of buffer, so you might have to jam it for more than, say, 30 to 60s in order to make sure you really wreck it. 

But within this type of drones, that requires on external signals for guidance, not from the controller, from something else. With good enough electronic warfare, you can convince it that it’s somewhere else and flying somewhere else and basically give it new targeting instructions. And that appears to be what has happened in the Latvian situation. So last week, well, last month actually, what went down is the Ukrainians started doing more and more and more attacks that the Russians were starting to twist the instructions. 

And some of these drones were bent back into the Baltic states and at least on two occasions, were actually able to successfully target Latvian energy infrastructure, specifically fuel tanks. And so there was a spat among the coalition partners in the Latvian government. The prime minister is from one party, the defense minister is from another party. The defense minister was fired, the Defense Ministers Party pulled out of the coalition that kept the prime minister in office. 

It’s a whole to do in Latvia with, you know, 2.5 million people. Doesn’t take much people to have a whole to do. And now the government is in flux and were trying to figure it out. They need to have a new government or just have new elections. They were already scheduled for October. So from a big point of view, it’s not really there from a political issue, but from a military issue. 

It shows the ongoing evolution of drones, because if the Russians can somewhat reliably undermine this class of drones, then the Ukrainians have no choice but to stop using them. Now, I would argue that Ukrainians are well on their way to that point. Remember I mentioned that one of the subsets of these drones are ones that when they reach their final target coordinates, they can look around and make a decision that is already a significant step up from what the Russians can do. 

And if you just up the amount of memory you have in the drone that’s capable of doing that just a little bit, then all of a sudden it doesn’t need that external signal. It can follow geographic landmarks like mountains or buildings or roads, and then it doesn’t have to have a signal. And so there’s nothing to jam. And we’ve already seen the Ukrainians start to introduce drones like that, just not across the board. 

So as with everything with Ukraine war, there is an ongoing tug and war between attack and defense and attack and defense and attack and defense. It’s way too early to know how it’s going to turn out. But what I can tell you two things. Number one, in the last two and a half months, the Ukrainians have introduced more models of drones with more active internal decision making capacity than the Russians have in the entirety of the war. 

To this point. They’re also have launched more drones day on day for the last two months than the Russians have, even though the Russians have bottomless supplies of Chinese parts. So we really have turned the corner where the Ukrainian pre-war defense base, which is where the Soviet Union got its rocketry and its aerospace stuff, has really come into its own and now surpassed what the Russians can do. 

Number two, the Ukrainians are no longer alone because the Trump administration is looking for fresh ways to shit the bed. With all of the allies in Europe and the Middle East, we now have a dozen countries, ranging from Poland and Sweden and Germany, the United Emirates and Qatar and Saudi Arabia, who are actively building out physical infrastructure in partnership with Ukrainians to mass produce Ukrainian drones for their own use and for Ukraine as well. 

So if you fast forward this to the end of the summer, the volume of drones at the Ukrainians are likely to be able to bring to bear is just going to dwarf what the Russians can do, and they will be more technologically advanced. Now, under normal circumstances, I would say that’s going to change the nature of the war. 

Of course, it’s going to change the nature of the war, but it would probably turn the tide. But keep in mind that this is a fresh technological revolution. I didn’t see this coming three months ago to project three months for and say, this is how it’s going to go. It would be really stupid of me. All I can tell you is that the pace of this is overwhelming. 

What we understand aerospace, what we understand, automation, what we understand war to be. And we’re about to have some crazy stuff happen in calendar year 2026, as all of this comes to a head in multiple theaters. Because keep in mind, just because the Ukrainians are succeeding at this doesn’t mean the Russians can’t try. And we’ve already seen some kernels of this sort of technology in play in Iran recently. 

This technology will go global, and at the moment, the country that’s at the back of the line to kind of play with the technologies, the United States, because the Trump administration doesn’t like the president of Ukraine.

So You Want to Break Iran…

Satellite view of the Strait of Hormuz

The blockade of the Strait of Hormuz has forced Iran to get creative with its oil storage.

Iran hasn’t been able to get its oil out of the Gulf, so they’ve started using available shadow fleet tankers as floating storage near Kharg Island. But as the other tankers begin to return from their delivery routes from before the blockade, dozens could get stuck waiting to get home.

Now, I’m not one to give targeting advice, but if the U.S. needed to do something that would force Iran to the negotiating table…I can think of a couple of really appealing targets.

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Transcript

Hey, all. Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Utah today. Today we’re going to talk about an aspect of the energy crisis is going on in the Middle East and a possible partial solution. I don’t want to oversell. It has to do with what you go after. Now, I don’t provide military targeting data. Oh my God, no. But if I were to, this is where I would nudge things. 

It has to do with tankers. We know that with the double blockade in place, the Iranians are losing access to places to put crude. Normally they export about 2 million barrels a day, mostly on shadow tankers, mostly in violation of sanctions. That goes out of the Strait of Hormuz to India, around India, around the Strait of Malacca and up into Northeast Asia, primarily China, but also a little bit to Taiwan, Korean time and Japan. 

Anyway, that is currently blocked for them. So they’re pulling tankers out of mothballs, parking them near Kharg Island, which is their primary export point in the northern extremes of the Persian Gulf, and loading them up to use as floating storage. They can do this until they run out of tankers. Here’s part two. The type of tankers that the Iranians use are very large. 

You either have the literally VCs, very large crude tankers that can carry up to 2 million barrels, or even a few ultra large crude carriers. It can carry up to 4 million barrels. Now, when those things take this trip, they can’t go through Malacca, especially the ulcers, because the strait isn’t deep enough. And the draft of these ships, when fully loaded, makes them detour further east around a place called Lombok. 

Well, getting from Cargo Island out of the strait around the subcontinent, through Lombok and up to Northeast Asia, that takes about 28 to 30 days and then about five days for them to kind of turn around and queue into port, unload everything, and then come back, usually come back through Malacca because they’re not as heavy then. You do that time frame and you look at the point where the US really started the, blockade, and next week is when the last of those tankers comes back. 

So what we’re seeing is the development of a tanker parking lot off the coast of Iranian parts in the Indian Ocean, which means there’s already about 20 there. We’ll probably have another ten there next week, and then that’ll be all of them. Well, these are all Iranian government owned. These are all shadow tankers. And if something were to happen to them, then the Iranians, even if the sanctions were lessened, couldn’t export without using unsanctioned tankers. 

So if you’re looking for a way to force the Iranians to accept a deal that also closes down the shadow fleet, this is probably the way to go. And since these tankers are being held out in the Indian Ocean well away from population centers in Iran, you also wouldn’t face the same degree of damage or threat from Iranian military capabilities if they were to all be seized and relocated. 

So again, I don’t provide targeting information, but if you’re looking for an economic way to force Iran to the table in a more serious way, going after the royal production is probably not the right way. But if you take away their transport options, then they really don’t have another choice.

This Ain’t Your Father’s Tanker War

Navy warship with guns facing forward

No, the U.S. can’t escort tankers in the Persian Gulf today as it did during the 1980s Tanker War.

Back in the 80s, the U.S. swooped into a regional conflict where attacks on shipping were limited, and the Strait remained open. Neither of those is the case with the Iran War. The U.S. Navy has fewer ships today than it did back then, so widespread protection is a much different conversation (especially with thousands of commercial ships trapped). And of course, modern warfare has evolved. We’re dealing with drones and missiles that leave the U.S. Navy much more vulnerable.

You add all that up, and we’re looking at a very different Tanker War than the one your daddy saw in the 80s. So, the only path forward is likely a political one.

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Transcript

Morning everybody, from a foggy Colorado. Today we’re taking a question from the Patreon crowd specifically why the US can’t escort tankers and civilian ships like them to and from the Persian Gulf like we did back in the 1980s during the Tanker war? Well, three big differences. Number one, first, the nature of the conflict. 

The last time around in the tanker war, the United States was a late comer. It was originally a conflict that was a subset of the Iran-Iraq War of 1980 to 1988, and by the time we got to the town of that conflict, both sides were trying to destroy the other’s economic opportunities. And since they lacked the military capability to make a meaningful pushes towards oil production, they went after concentrations like the tankers. 

And so you had Iraqi aircraft that were Iranian tankers, and the Iranians would use a combination of surface ships, speedboats and missiles like the Chinese Silkworm to go after Iraqi and everyone else in the street was just kind of caught in the crossfire. 

Most of the damage done, most of the attacks were in the northern part of the Gulf, where most of the was originally exported. And so the United States came in with an aircraft carrier battle group, put it in the Gulf along with multiple task forces. And at any time involving 40 to 80 ships and some ships like Kuwaiti tankers would be reflagged and others would just be escorted in. Each cluster typically had five destroyers and a number of Coast Guard cutters assigned to it, and they would go in big convoys. 

That’s all different this time. This time it’s a direct conflict between the United States and Iran. And Iran has chosen shutting down the strait as a direct means of attack in the United States has chosen shutting down Iranian shipments as a direct means of attack. So unlike last time when the strait itself was open and the Iranians and the Iraqis were selective in their targets, now are on is willing to attack, pretty much anything in the United States is blocking all shipments from all Iranian ports. 

So that’s the first big difference. The nature of the conflict is very, very, very different. Second, the the nature of the US Navy is very, very different. Back then the United States had a 500 plus ship Navy. Today we’re under 300. And while today ships are faster and tougher and far more lethal, they are fewer in number. And so putting as many vessels into the Persian Gulf is just not an option. 

Also, something that was present back then was the Coast Guard. But the Coast Guard has been steadily whittled down over the course of the last 40 years and doesn’t have enough ships to spare. In addition, the US ships that are involved are tend to be larger and tougher, and if they’re going to slow down in order to convoy, that’s a bit of a problem. 

So remember, there were like 60 ships at any given time that were part of the escort effort last time. Today we only have 60 destroyers, and half of those at any given time are designed to protect the carriers and United States under Donald Trump, I think, wisely, has chosen to not put a carrier in the Gulf. Yes, you would be able to use closer munitions that are cheaper and easier to replace, and that’s our very real consideration. 

But it also means that a carrier could be attacked by the third difference, which is a new generation of warfare. Back then, Iran was only emerging. I was on the tail end of a really long, grueling war with Iraq. Its weapons choices were somewhat limited. You had the Chinese silkworms that had a range of about 50 miles and 1,000 pound warhead, and the Persian Gulf isn’t 50 miles wide. So it was pretty easy for something like a carrier to be over the horizon, be basically immune to anything that the Iranians can do. That’s not where we are anymore. Today’s drones might need GPS targeting, but we now have a series of things called super heads, which don’t, which means that they can choose their own target when they get close. 

And if there was a carrier in the Gulf, I can guarantee you that the United States would be under constant missile bombardment. And as we’ve seen with the Arabian side of the Persian Gulf, the U.S. is basically run out of interceptors, and the ability to protect its own ships would be limited. Over the weekend, when we saw the first effort by the United States to escort vessels, that was really the first time we’d seen major surface combatants from the United States in the Gulf at all. 

In this conflict, we’ve been doing everything at arm’s length. That means we’re running out of long range munitions, which is a problem. But it also underscores the degree to which that this is contested space now. And the United States can’t just sail in and break it open. In addition, when we did this in the 1980s, you were talking about typically 11 ships at a time as part of the convoy group. 

There’s 2000 ships trapped in the Gulf right now. So we’ve got different ships. It’s a different kind of conflict. We don’t have the numbers, and the numbers that need to be moved are just massive. The only way to open the Gulf is with a political solution with Tehran. And again, talks have yet to begin on that topic. 

About the only good news I can give you is that we’re now seeing early signs that the Iranians are starting to shut in oil production because they don’t have anywhere to put it. Just keep in mind that the Iranians do consume a couple million barrels a day themselves, and that will never get shut in. So they can be selective about what they’re shutting in. 

It’s not like you just flip a switch tomorrow and all of a sudden they’re out of money. But for the first time in the conflict, we are now seeing economic pressure on the elements of the regime that are making the security decisions. That is encouraging conversation. Those conversations just haven’t really started yet. The biggest takeaway is that the United States is the world’s most powerful navy, with the best projection power in human history, and we now know for the mix of geographic reasons and economic reasons and technical reasons, that the US Navy no longer has the ability to impose a strategic reality on a local basis against a to be perfectly blunt, fourth rate security power. This is a big change in how the world works. It is very, very, very easy to deny civilian access now. And it is very, very difficult to restore it. And you can play this specific scenario out on almost any place in the Eastern hemisphere. And it’s difficult to see the US Navy doing any better. So if we do get into a fight with a real country in the future, we should count on those waterways being closed for at least the duration of the fighting.

Why U.S. Deployments in Germany Matter

German military doing exercises in the field

Relations between the U.S. and Germany are quickly deteriorating. German Chancellor Merz has criticized the U.S. for lacking a coherent negotiation strategy. President Trump responded by floating the idea of reducing U.S. troop deployments in Germany. It’s one big mess.

The issue with Trump’s proposal is that it assumes the only reason for the bases is to defend Germany. These bases aren’t just some peace offering; they are the backbone of U.S. global power projection.

Without key facilities like Ramstein Air Base and Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, U.S. operations in the European theater (and beyond) would cease.

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Transcript

Hey all. Peter Zeihan here. We recorded this video on German relations with the United States and the future of U.S. military power. Back on the 1st of May. That was Friday for release today on May 4th. But events have kind of accelerated. So we need this little topper. Very, very short version is Donald Trump announced the imminent withdrawal of 5000 US troops from Germany. So it’s not a threat to more. It’s actually happening. This is the beginning of the end of the alliance with Germany specifically, which has huge implications for everything the United States does. But we’ll get to that in the video. 

Hey all, Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Colorado. Today we’re going to talk about the most recent leg of the American alliance system that looks to be breaking. That is the relationship between the Americans and the Germans. The key issue is that last week, Mertz said  Mertz is the chancellor of Germany, said the quiet part out loud that the United States doesn’t have a negotiating strategy and doesn’t even really have negotiators. 

And it’s just kind of embarrassing to watch how the Iranians, who have both are humiliating the Americans at every turn. It’s an assessment that is not particularly controversial outside of manga circles. The State Department has been gutted. The prime point person for American negotiations is Jared Kushner. Not that he’s incompetent, but his assistant is Steve Wyckoff, who is incompetent. 

And the only other person who’s been involved at this point is JD Vance, who has never negotiated anything. So, yeah, it’s going really badly for the United States in these talks. And in the meantime, the global economy is starting to sag. Something impressive. Anyway, Donald Trump being a little sensitive, a little sensitive snowflake decided that now is the time to talk about cutting the American troop deployment into Germany. 

So I thought it would be useful for everyone to understand what the United States gets out of that. There’s this feeling in some parts of Washington, the American political spectrum, that the American deployments to Germany are about protecting Germany. And there is a degree of truth to that. But keep in mind that Germany has not been a front line state since the expansion of NATO in the early 2000. 

And now there’s this whole Poland thing between them and the Russians. So the two main facilities that the United States has are an air base in the hospital. Ramstein is one of the largest air bases in the world and allows the United States to project power throughout the European, the former Soviet spheres, directly and then indirectly into the Middle East. 

We basically ferry troops and equipment through there. And then there’s Landstuhl, which is the military hospital that over the course of the war on terror, serves as the primary evacuation destination for any forces operating throughout the broader Middle East who were injured and in the end, probably saved 100,000 lives. If you’re going to slim down the American position to either of those facilities, and collectively they are, one of America’s top three deployments, kind of moves around with Korea and Japan. 

That is it for American power projection in Europe, in the former Soviet Union and in the Middle East. If we were to try to project power to any of those three regions, without those German facilities, we would have no logistics support and no backup should something go wrong. And as we’ve seen in every single military conflict the United States has ever been involved in any of those three regions, something always goes wrong. 

That’s just the nature of war. We would also, and perhaps this is the one that will resonate more with some people. We will also have significantly higher death rates. Landstuhl is a crisis center for medical needs. And so if you get hit by an IED or shrapnel at the time it takes to fly you back to the American mainland, you’re probably not going to make it. 

But if you only have to make the Germany, that’s a different question. Anyway, bottom line is, with the possible exception of American military forces in Okinawa, in Japan. This is arguably the most important footprint the United States has anywhere in the world for power projection. And if a real effort is made to slim that down, you honestly can’t slim it down too far before it simply becomes nonfunctional. 

It takes 30,000 American forces to keep these things open to the degree that’s necessary to facilitate American military power. Now, if you just want to abandon the entire Eastern Hemisphere to its own devices, then yeah, by all means, close it down. Just be prepared for spending a lot more than $2 trillion a year on the defense budget, because at that point, doing everything alone means having to have the equivalent of carrier stationed around the world at all times simply for logistical support. 

That is by far the most expensive way to do.

Russia Tucks Tail in Mali

National Flag of Mali

The Russians are getting the boot from the Sahel, and it’s all thanks to an unusual alliance between Tuareg separatists and a local branch of Al-Qaeda. These rivals have teamed up in Mali to drive back the Africa Corps, Russia’s paramilitary force.

When the French withdrew from the region, the Russians stepped in and picked up operations. However, maintaining control in the region is no easy feat, and the Russians are figuring that out. The Sahel’s harsh geography, the war in Ukraine, and now, jihadist groups partnering with Tuareg separatists, are all weakening Russia’s position

Without reinforcements or easy extraction points, this could turn into an embarrassing retreat from the region for Russia.

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Transcript

Hey all. Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Colorado. Today we’re talking about Africa, specifically the central African country of Mali, which is in the transitional zone where the tropics bleeds into the desert and an area called the Sahel. What we’ve had is over this past weekend, Tuareg forces, their local ethnic separatists and a branch of Al-Qaeda which operates in this area. 

Both of these have been militant forces operating in the area for quite some time, decided to coordinate their attacks, their normally quite robust rivals, and attack the city of Kadal in the northern part of the country, in the Sahara, as well as a number of other places throughout the country. And in doing so, they forced Russia’s Afrika Korps into full retreat. 

The Afrika Korps is the successor to what used to be called Wagner, basically, a group of people who have had the ethical part of their brain. Mellon scooped out and basically sent to kill people for the power of Russia. In the case of the in general in Mali, in specific, they cut security agreements with local governments that are not particularly nice to their people, and in exchange, they get mining concessions, most notably. 

And for them, definitely, what they’re after is gold, because it allows the Russians to evade sanctions more effectively. They just fly gold for payment instead of having to worry about, say, the US dollar system. Anyway, the quick back story is as Ukraine war got going really, really hard in the last couple of years, Wagner became more a group of paramilitaries. 

With the ethical center scooped out, Ragnar became more and more important to the Russians in manipulating not just events in Ukraine, but throughout the world, because they were basically soldiers for higher that would carry out the interests of the Russian state, which in general is to cause as much trouble in as many places as possible to cause problems for Western governments. 

So in the case of the Sahel, the target was always France, where in French former colonial territories here and the French had troops throughout the countries in order to fight the jihadist remnants of al-Qaida. And in that they were doing, I would argue, a relatively decent job. 

For the French, Al-Qaeda was the target, and they would cooperate with anyone who had helped them against al-Qaida in this case, including the Tories. And the government of Mali was like, well, you’re cooperating with one of our secessionists against the militants. We don’t like that. It’s a sovereignty issue. And then the Russians came in and the French were booted out. 

And some version of that has happened throughout what is once known as French West Africa. And the French footprint in the region now is basically zero. And we have Russians now across the entire band. But as as I said, what happened when this went down is the cell is not a particularly great place for anybody. There’s not a lot of water. 

So you don’t have population density, which means you have these isolated populations, posts like Cadle that have a few tens of thousands of people. And that’s it, which means that any sort of rebel group or militant group can run fast and free through the rest of the country, just like we saw in Iraq or Afghanistan and the war on terror, just like we see sometimes in northern Mexico with the cartels, just like we see in Syria with ISIS. 

You can’t really impose any sort of control over this region long term, because you can’t have the civilizational tools that are necessary to do it. And so now it’s the Russians turn to get their asses kicked. And so the issue here for the Russians is unlike France, which is not involved in any sort of broader military conflict, and unlike France, which actually has some expeditionary capacity, the Russians don’t. 

They’re involved in a large war. So only so many forces can be dedicated to the Afrika Korps or Wagner or whatever you want to call it. And in addition, there’s no chance of backup, which is a real problem. So the Russians only have about 2500 troops in region, and that includes their logistical tail. So most of what they have been focused on is destabilization and wealth extraction. 

And now that the actual fight has been joined, they are not doing very well. I always assume that by this point, countries be working to remove the Russians for any other reasons, because they are really a trouble. But when it comes to the countries of the Sahel, where state capacity is so low, getting any sort of assistance is good, especially once you’ve kicked out the French. 

So the the Russians are still fighting these groups in other parts of the country. They’ve only evacuated Cadle. But if the Tuareg, Al-Qaeda, it’s not an alliance that’s too strong. But if their truce holds, they can keep up the attacks. The Russians really have nowhere to go. You’re looking at a potentially a particularly embarrassing retreat they can’t count on the Russian state airlifting them out because the capacity isn’t there. 

And it’s just way far, too far away. Whether or not this will be the beginning of the end of the Russian presence across the cell. We’ll see. But there is a relatively embarrassing retreat in store now that will probably continue from north to south across the entire country.

Japanese Weapons Are Open for Export

Japan tanks and military parade

Japan has lifted its long-standing restriction on exporting weapons. This will bring some fresh dynamism to the global defense industry, specifically in naval manufacturing and drones.

While the impact will likely be gradual, Japan is already fleshing out plans to supply ships to Australia. The real impact will be seen when Japan’s decades of investment in automation are on display, which positions it to become a major drone producer. Collaborations with Ukraine are just the first glimpse of what could evolve from this.

As Japan leans into defense exports, it could very well reshape modern warfare and emerge as a leading global drone power.

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Transcript

Hey all. Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Nashville. Today we’re going to talk about something actually happened about a week ago. The Japanese changed their legal structures so they can now, for the first time since World War two, export weapons. So the question is, how big of an impact that this have? In what sectors over what sort of time? 

Japan has the world’s second largest navy, but they have always, by design, not had a particularly large military because of the whole World War II thing. And in all operational terms, the United States more or less operates their military on a tactical level whenever we decide what we want to. So that is, encourage the Japanese to not do a whole lot. 

And so in terms of percent of GDP, which is a threshold that most people use for defense spending, the Japanese have actually dipped down to as low as about 1% as of ten years ago. Now, as China has become more of a threat, that has risen and they’re now spending just under 2%. And, you know, if you double the size of your defense budget, you would think that your military industrial complex would expand. 

And it has, but not by as much as you might think. The Japanese are working from the theory that before we get all the hardware, we should make sure that we have the right people and the training regimen works hard to argue, and that means that the defense expansion hasn’t really kept up. So a sudden change and the ability to export weapons doesn’t immediately translate into those weapons being available. 

But this is still Japan, one of the most technologically advanced cultures with the fastest rate of change in technology, in manufacturing, in human history. And now that they can access the market, they’re going to. So kind of phase one is there are 20 countries that they consider allies, which can includes most of NATO where weapons are now legal to sell to. 

And the question is what are they going to do? The obvious one is ships, especially small ships. And they’ve already cut a number of deals, including with, say, Australia, to turn more ships out of their shipyards and get them out there. And since the Japanese Navy is one of the three most powerful on the planet at the moment the Brits, the Japanese and the Americans, I don’t doubt that they can do that in number in a relatively short period of time, but it’s the second phase that I’m really interested in. 

Japan is a partially robotic society. This is a country that has been aging very, very quickly and as the world’s oldest average population. And so 15 or 20 years ago, they established a national robot strategy to basically automate and robotics, whatever part of their economy that they could, because they knew they weren’t going to have the people and they knew that the people were going to need the obsessed. 

You mate that with what is going on in this second phase of the revolution in military affairs, and all of a sudden some really interesting things can come out of the drone world, because when it comes to actuators and things like that, the Japanese have been doing it for decades. So we now have a deal in place already between the Japanese and the Ukrainians to bring Japanese production capacity to Ukrainian drone tech. 

You put those two things together a fast adapting, automated workforce with a very quick turnaround on things like prototyping. And you’re talking about Japan becoming a massive drone power in probably less than two years. And now they have export capacity. So I don’t know what they’re going to look like, but we’re going to have Japanese built drones produced in mass and exported in mass in the not too distant future. 

And we’re only at the very beginning of understanding what drone warfare means in general. We are utterly unprepared for what it means when the Japanese take lead in that sector.