Hey, all Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Capitol Reef National Park. We are continuing our series on the future of military technology. And today we’re going to talk about staffing and recruitment. What is the United States or really any country need if it’s going to succeed in this changed era of warfare? 

Well, the short is that we really don’t know yet because we haven’t invented the future. 

What we know for sure is that the military is going to have to be more flexible. And if you look at the Ukraine war, it’s easy to see why, as little as a year ago in the Ukraine conflict, it was all about fighter jets and bombers and artillery and tanks. But in that time, it’s evolved completely, with most of those platforms no longer being able to hold their own against evolutions in drone technology. 

And drones are just leading edge of this revolution that combines new types of digitization and energy transfer material science to completely new packages. We now have, for example, our first rocket drones, which have a range of over a thousand miles that can easily take out a refinery. The world is changing. What we do know is that the old style of doing war, which is basically throwing a bunch of bodies at something else and see who comes out on top, isn’t going to work. 

One of the biggest problems that I have with the current administration, most notably Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, is he doesn’t seem to understand how the numbers work. Hegseth is on a roll, basically on the warpath against something that he calls Dei diversity, equity, inclusion and the idea that one group should have favoritism over the other. I agree is silly, but in the military context, that’s not how Dei has ever been implemented. 

Dei in the military is a recruitment tool based on how you look at the numbers. At most, 30% of the American population are straight white males, and on average, straight white males are older than the average American population. 

So no matter what your definition is of what a good soldier, marine sailor, airman happens to be. The bottom line is, if you’re drawing from a small pool that it’s getting smaller and you’re fighting a war of numbers, by your own definition, you’re going to lose and lose badly. And that’s before you consider the changes that are coming to the technology. 

We need better skill sets embedded within the system, and that means recruiting people there in a different way than how we do it now. right now we generally bring in people in the age bracket of roughly 17 to 25, and we break them down. 

We indoctrinate them into the system, train them on systems that have existed not for years but for decades. Well, that’s not going to work when the technological time to target is measured in weeks to months. We also need to change procurement. The idea that the military goes out there and says what it wants, and then private military contractors go out and design the system, basically parade it in front of the military to see what works. 

And then years from now, we get a prototype, and years after that we get mass production. That won’t work because this all has to go from the point of imagination to the point of deployment in less than a year. So everything about how we fight right now needs to evolve, 

And that means a broader skill set with as wide of a diversity of backgrounds as possible. 

And so why, while we’re going through these transitions, will you tell anyone in the United States who is a woman or who is black, or who is Hispanic, or who is gay, that they have limitations on how they could choose to serve their country? It just doesn’t make any sense from a strategic point of view. 

About the only argument that I have seen that argues for a different direction in order to maintain power is basically the Elon Musk approach, which is to basically go out for everyone who is a white, straight male who has employees go out, sleep with 12 of them and start generating a new white race. 

Well, you know, I don’t know if you knew how math works, but if that all happens today, you’re not going to get your new crop of your new race for 18 years. And we will be on the other side of this military transition by then. We need to work with what we have, and that means using the skill sets of absolutely everyone who has an interest of being in the US military.

Hey all, Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from an aspen glade in Colorado where it’s definitely hiking season. So I’m out and about. Today we are taking a question from the Patreon crowd that’s also going to apply to our drone series, A Future of Warfare series. The question is, in an age of terminal demographics, how does that shape military strategies and tactics? 

That goes perfect with the military? Revolution? We’re experienced with drone technology as new technologies, information transfer, energy transfer and digitization and material science combined to enter a completely new world of warfare. But before we talk about where we’re going, let’s talk about where we’ve been, because it’s really instructive. So if you dial back the clock like, really dial back the clock to the late dark ages, early Middle Ages, when the Mongols were starting to boil out of the eastern Eurasian steppe and sweep across the world, the new technology of the day massed cavalry charges and cavalry, information transport and cavalry driven trade, gave the Mongols a degree of speed, lethality that no one had experience in the human condition to that point. And over the course of a few decades, they just absolutely rampaged across, China and eastern Russia and eventually knocked off the Russian government in Moscow itself, as well as all of the areas in the step to the south. The issue was pretty simple. A bunch of dudes on horse, if they know what they’re doing, can go fast and free over the plains, come in, raid, kill a bunch of people and take what they want, and then gallop away and be over the horizon before any sort of interpretive infantry or archer force can ever do anything. 

So they do this over and over again, through over government, after government, after government, and eventually discovered that they could pack a little water with them and actually cross short periods of desert and attack from directions that no one had seen before. And there just weren’t any good defensive technologies to counter them. Well, eventually, after they killed enough people and destroyed enough governments, including what was the Russian government of the day, people started to develop counters, by hook or by crook? 

By accident. The first one was developed by the Russians, and that was basically just going to hide in the forest, because if you’re in a forest, it’s really hard to get a good straight line for a cavalry charge. The people would have to dismount. And since there were never more than a few tens of thousands of Mongols in the entire space of the former Mongol Empire, any time they did dismount to pursue people into the woods, they were always wildly outnumbered and wildly hated. 

And they didn’t last. So we got this zone where the Russians had retreated. Some of the Russians, the true Russians, if you want to use that term, had retreated north of Moscow into the Tay guy, where they were basically living off of lichen for three generations, and the Mongols, who controlled the open flats by the time the Mongols got to Europe proper, a different strategy, had been developed. And that was to be perfectly blunt. Fortifications. Doesn’t matter how fast your horses, doesn’t matter how good you are with a boar or a lance, if someone is behind a stone wall, you’re kind of out of luck and they’re just raining arrows down on you. So Europe entered their fortification era initially in Poland because of the Mongols or other reasons to have fortifications. 

But in this sort of system, you basically developed feudalism where everyone would run into the fortification when the Mongols or some dudes on horseback or bandits would show up, you’d wait them out, and then you’d go out, back out to your house and tend to the fields. And so everyone tried to store about a year of grain within the fortification so they could wait out a siege. 

That was the technology, the offensive versus defensive development of the day enter a world of demographic decline. And we are literally running out of people aged 50 and under who can say, pick up a rifle or a base plate in a mortar and march out into the field and do things. One of the problems when it comes to military technology is what happens the next day after the battle. 

And if you have a long, grinding conflict like most conflicts are, you have to be able to hold the ground and protect the civilian infrastructure that is necessary for the civilian population to exist. Otherwise, there’s no point in having a military in the first place. So back in the day, people would live in the forests. Not a great option, but the Russians have lower standards. 

Or you would run into the fortifications. In today’s world, the new horses of the plains are drones which can, on a tether, go ten kilometers out from launch point or without a tether can go maybe a thousand, even 1500. Those numbers will only go up. And if you have an opposing force that is in range of you, that has a lot of drones, they can basically make your terrain completely unlivable. 

So we’re probably going to see a resurrection of an old term that dates back to Roman terms, the march, areas that are on the edge of your terrain that you cannot reliably protect. But the opposing force coming in cannot reliably occupy. They’ll become a no man’s zone. 

We already have extensive territories like this in eastern and northeastern Ukraine, where the Russians have basically made it impossible for people to live or farm or maintain basic civic services. 

And the Ukrainians lack the manpower that’s necessary to reoccupy these lands to provide a buffer for the civilians. And so we’re getting an ever widening band that is becoming unlivable. Some version of that is in our future, unless and until we develop a better defensive technologies. Now, at the moment, if you want to take down a drone, your only option is a really good rifle shot, good luck or jamming, which generally only has a range of a few hundred meters if that. 

So we are very early into this transition, and the combination of less manpower to establish that buffer, combined with an insufficient defensive envelope to provide passive cover for that buffer, means that more and more territory across the planet is simply going to be unlivable because of conflict. You think that’s not going to come to a town near you? 

I hope you’re right. But keep in mind, we’re already seeing the echoes of the Ukraine war technology percolating throughout the European militaries across Africa. And really, the laggards here are everyone in the Western Hemisphere, where we haven’t had a meaningful war in well over a century. And honestly, we’re a little out of practice when it comes to actually protecting terrain. 

All of the conflicts that the United States has been involved in since World War One have been on a different continent, and that means we have prepared for different sorts of things. We have been the functional Mongols. We have been the ones that been writing fast but not really bothering to protect very much, with the exception of nuclear cover during the Cold War, which is a very important exception. 

But what it does suggest is that the state, the power of the state, is going to become significantly more potent as the ability to man an army becomes less capable. It’s going to be more about denying the other side the ability to function. Then it’s going to be about protecting your own until the technologies change again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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