Should China Invade Siberia?

Cleaning the tents in northern Siberia

While the Russians are busy throwing everything they can at Ukraine, could China make a move to seize Siberia?

This is highly unlikely and there’s really no point for the Chinese to make a move on Siberia. Best case, they get some oil fields (which they can’t operate without Western assistance) located in a cold and barren region with limited potential for any growth. And they run the risk of the Russians whacking that scary red button.

If any power wanted to challenge Russia in the Far East, they would need to cut off Moscow from Siberia. This would involve severing the Trans-Siberian Railway and making a move on the choke point in Tatarstan. But again…that nuclear carrot would still be dangling over the invader’s heads.

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Transcript

Hey, all, Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Colorado. Today we’re taking a question from the Patreon page. And that is with the Russians. So obsessed with all things Ukraine, with all our military force going there, with the dependency they have on the Chinese for military equipment, would now be a good time for China. Just take over Siberia, I think. 

I see where you’re going. But, invading Russia is never as easy. It sounds, three things to keep in mind. Number one, the single most valuable thing in Siberia is the oil and natural gas. And the Russians aren’t the ones who really produce that. You’ve got something called the covector field, which is the general vicinity of Irkutsk, which is by, Lake Baikal. 

And then you have the fields offshore of Sakhalin Island in the Far East. Neither of these are operated by the Russians. They’re very technically challenging projects that are done by Western companies. And there’s still Western consulting work being done in order to allow the production to continue under sanctions. And if that were to end, or if the Chinese were to take over those facilities themselves, the Chinese do not have the technology to operate them either. 

So it would be kind of a wasted effort. So that’s number one. Number two. Population. Yes. There’s only 10 to 15 million Russians in Siberia. But that’s because the carrying capacity of the land is very low. You’re not going to be able to forward stage a population there that can really do much. The agricultural potential is shitty because the climate is so crappy. 

Third, if these reasons do not dissuade you, consider that the Russians still have the world’s single largest nuclear arsenal, and they made it very clear during the Yeltsin years that should the Chinese attempt to invade, that the Russians would not meet them with tanks and with guns and with men, they would just nuke China’s cities. And that policy formally remains in place. 

So if, if if the Chinese decided that they wanted to make a bid for Siberia, what they have to do is prevent the Russians from interfering in the operation. And the first piece for that would be to sever the Trans-Siberian railway. The TSR is a single transport network that allows European Russia to interact with Asiatic and Siberian Russia. 

And if you were to cut it somewhere closer to European Russia, then there’s really not anything the Russians could do in a conventional set to counter Chinese actions or Japanese or anyone coming in from the Far Eastern theater. The logical place to do that cut would be a place called totter Stand, the Tatars are an ethnic minority, the single largest minority 

in Russia and Kazan, their capital, is not only a relatively advanced city. This is not only the educational system that generated Mir. This is not only an oil area in its own right, but it sits on top of the TSR. So if Tatarstan were to declare independence or fall into rebellion in some way, then the Russian ability to manipulate events in the Far East, much less send troops, would be gone. 

And then all that would be left would be the nuclear card. And then we could talk about some really interesting things. No sign that that is happening right now, by the way, same goes on the Ukraine war. There’s a specific city that sits upon all of the connecting infrastructure that links Moscow to the Caucasus, Rostov on Don. 

And if Rostov on Don, which has been a major staging point for Russian forces in the Ukrainian war, were to fall or rebel or whatever, then all of a sudden Russian power in the Caucasus would be shattered and we’d be dealing with, at a minimum, a new Chechen rebellion. So there are these nodes in Russia that really matter. 

But at the moment no one is poking them with any sticks.

America’s Generals Gathered for…That?

Official government photo of Pete Hegseth

It appears Trump and Hegseth have been getting the Led out, because the song ‘Ramble On’ pretty much summarizes how their speeches went the other day.

With America’s generals gathered, I was worried that Defense Secretary Hegseth and President Trump would make some dangerous comments or announcements. While they both managed to make everyone seriously uneasy, it was more mush than alarming.

Hegseth focused on culture-war themes. Trump rambled about God-knows-what, with a few coherent sentences that the teleprompter fed him. But both speeches highlighted the lack of strategy and alarming drift of US military leadership.

Don’t believe me? We are including the text of the speeches so you can enjoy the fun yourself.

Link to Hegseth’s speech

Link to Trump’s speech

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Transcript

Hey, all Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Colorado. This is a topic I was hoping to avoid, but so many people have written in on the Patreon page, and I feel like I kind of have to. Today’s the 1st of October. Yesterday was the 30th September. And, yesterday was the day that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and the US president, Donald Trump, addressed the entire coterie of American generals who were flown in for the speeches. 

Honestly, it reminded me of, Gaddafi of Libya or Fidel Castro of Cuba in their later decades when they would stand in front of an audience, says blah, blah, blah about nothing for hours. There didn’t seem to be a point to the speech at all. And the day before, two days before, when Trump was talking about putting himself on the agenda, he said something along those lines. 

Isn’t it nice that so many people are coming from so far away? But Secretary of Defense ordered them to come. This wasn’t a social call. 

I was originally very much dreading the speech. I was expecting perhaps a really dark turn in American form and strategic policy. Luckily, we did not see that, which is not mean that there was anything that happened to the speech that makes me feel good. I just that sense of dread I was feeling is no longer there. So, let’s start with Haig stuff, because that was the more substantive context. 

And then we’ll move on to, Donald Trump, because of, least qualified defense secretary in American history. His words, not mine. I just happened to agree with them. He said them during his, confirmation hearing. He actually said somebody who doesn’t know anything about the sector whatsoever, if they were to go in, could actually do better, than any of the secretaries of defense that we’ve had since World War two. 

He has proven that to be lovely, inaccurate. At this point, most of his speech was spent on the culture war. Basically, it was like he was giving a long monologue back from when he was on Fox News as a correspondent. Very, very short version. He made it very clear that any sort of protections that existed for any sort of group, whether it’s women or blacks or whatever, they were all going away, the physical requirements for anyone who is in a combat role will be based on men, which basically will exclude, 80 to 90% of women who are already serving from continuing if these policies are instituted. 

Keep in mind that the United States is going through demographic decline and the single largest growth unit in terms of recruitment for the military for the last half decade has been women, especially as we move to a more technical military. So by establishing these criteria, we’re basically guaranteeing that we’re not going to be able to hit our, recruitment numbers, and it’s going make hitting the technical numbers very, very difficult. 

Probably what this will mean is the United States will have to take a page from what it did during the war on terror, specifically in Iraq, and start playing, six figure salaries to contractors because we can’t generate the staff that is necessary. So from a strategic technical, recruiting, equity and especially warfighting capability, these pieces are just a series of horrible ideas. 

He also made it very clear that all of these generals who have decades of experience, if they don’t like it, they can quit, which is, you know, how it’s supposed to go with policy. But he was kind of rude about it. Anyway, I spoke to a number of people who were in the room, and, let’s just say that Secretary Hegseth is not exactly well respected because there’s a lack of credentials. 

And, well, some secretaries, like, say, Secretary Rollins in agriculture came in not knowing much, but really put her nose to the grindstone in order to school herself up on the issues in play. Hegseth has done nothing like that. He hasn’t even built a senior staff yet. So he does a lot of proclamations like this speech today or yesterday. 

And then he goes and does some social media or maybe pumps iron with the troops, because that’s what a secretary of defense is apparently supposed to be. My favorite line from someone in the room was that, if Secretary Hegseth just wanted to remind us all that he was incompetent and not worthy of the position. He could have just done that in an email. So harsh. Then Donald Trump. Oh, okay. So we’re going to append the full text of both speeches, Hegseth and Trump’s to you. So you can read this for yourselves. But oh my God. 

If I were to sum it up in one word, it would be bumbling. There were really only about three full sentences and an hour of him yammering on about loves lost and fights one, and how wife is one of his favorite words. And it was obvious when those three sentences came up because he was reading directly from the teleprompter. 

In his opening paragraph, he said, you guys can do whatever you want. You can laugh, you can cry, whatever. Of course, if you leave the room, then there goes your career. Super inspiring. Dude. There were no policy announcements. There was no strategic guidance. There was really no reason to be there. aside from the fact that he had a captive audience, and from what I heard from the people who were in the room, everyone was just sitting there. 

Stone faced the whole time because it wasn’t even a political speech. It was just rambling and the line of somebody who shared it with me that really got me was like, if the president wanted to highlight to us that he was no longer capable. Mission accomplished. I’ll let you read the speech yourself. I’ll let you decide for yourself. 

The one item that did perk people’s ears up is when the president said that he was considering using American cities as proving grounds for the US military. There is not a successful country in human history that has done that. Because once you turn the defenders of the nation on the citizens and the social contract is broken, and you need something new that is based on fear, that is the downfall of the Roman Empire and the Hittites and the Byzantines and any number of things since you keep your internal security forces and your external security forces separate at all costs and yes, yes, yes, Portland annoys me too. 

But the idea that you’re going to use Chicago or Nashville or anything else as a training ground, no, it was almost as if the president was daring the assembled generals to carry out their oath to defend the constitution of the country from all foes, foreign and domestic. And I am not comfortable with where this might lead. About the only thing I can say about it is that this was one of those bumbling passages that was made in passing, that was not the centerpiece of the speech. 

It was one line amongst a lot of mush. 

I don’t think anyone walked out of that room encouraged by their leadership or the current state of military policy. But considering some of the things that we have seen in military and strategic policy in the last few months, I still count this as a win.

Ukraine (And Everyone Else) Develops Glide Bombs

A Russian FAB-3000 with a UMPK guidance kit attached, converting the unguided bomb into a glide bomb | Wikimedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glide_bomb#/media/File:FAB-3000_with_UMPK_kit.png

Ukraine has added glide bombs to its list of military ordnance, enabling Ukraine to send modified dumb bombs up to 100km away. This likely won’t alter the outcome of the war in Ukraine, but the democratization of this technology is setting off alarm bells in the US.

Joint Direct Attack Munitions were the bread-and-butter for the US military, maintaining a multi-decade monopoly on the precision strike technology…but all of that is changing. Now that Ukraine and Russia both have this tech in their hands, it’s only a matter of time before it appears everywhere else.

This is yet another sign of the US stepping back from its role as global protector; meaning American strategic primacy is coming to an end.

You can find more info about glide bomb technology appearing in Russia’s arsenal and the beginning of the proliferation of this tech in the linked video released on March 12, 2024:

Russian Bombs Get an Upgrade
Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Transcript

Hey, all Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Colorado. And today we’re going to talk about a change in military tech that just happened in Ukraine. Specifically, there are factions of the Ukrainian military industrial complex that are now putting together glide bombs. Glide bomb is basically when you’ve got an old dumb bomb that you put a guidance kit on. 

It has kind of wings on it. And so instead of dropping it, it kind of glides to the target and the Ukrainian prototypes that are being tested right now indicate that they can go upwards of 100km, about 60 miles, which is well beyond the front lines. 

Why this matters, the Ukrainians have been on the receiving end of glide bombs these last couple of years. The Russians have converted several of their old Soviet bombs, which are typically a much larger than the ones the US uses. We use, 500 pound bombs. Sometimes they use either kilo bombs. Sometimes there’s even a thousand kilo bombs. 

Anyway, they drop them from outside of air defense capability. They drop them from within their air superiority envelope. So they just have basically modified dump bombs coming in that can’t be intercepted. And some of the bigger ones, when they hit, have a blast radius that’s more than a quarter of a mile. 

And so you drop a dozen or so of these in the general vicinity of a fortification, and then Russian forces can then move in. That’s how they’ve been used to this point. The Ukrainians probably won’t be using them the same way because they don’t have the manpower. That’s necessary to penetrate the Russian lines. And there’s multiple layers of minefields as well, making that more difficult. 

So we use it against things like supply depots and, convoys. But the Ukrainians are already doing that with first person drones. So the ability to change the battlefield in Ukraine, by Ukraine, having some of these is probably pretty limited. The targeting sequences are probably just not going to be as robust as it might be for the other side. 

For a country that is more likely to be on the attack, the Ukrainians are typically on the defense. So it’s not that there’s no utility. It’s not. It’s just not a game changer. Also, there’s just the amount of effort that it takes to build one and test it because every prototype is destroyed as opposed to like a first person drone, where you can fly it back and forth without actually having it blow up to make sure it works. 

And you can get new iterations every month. This one will probably take a little bit longer, but it still has a huge impact, just not in Ukraine and everywhere else. The issue here is that the United States has had a de facto monopoly on this sort of technology for decades. We hear we call them Jay Dams, Joint Direct Attack Munitions. 

We took our old Cold War bombs. We put a kit and some things on it and do precision targeting. And through the 1990s, the US had a total monopoly. These were first debuted during the first Iraq War. 

Desert Storm back in 1982 and then have been incrementally upgraded since then. But really, it wasn’t until as recently as five years ago that any other country in the world had their own. 

Well, the Russians developed their own last year, and now Ukraine, a country that is much smaller, with a much smaller technical base and industrial base, has them as well. And if Russia and Ukraine can have them, you know that it’s just a matter of choice before countries like Korea, both of them, Japan, Taiwan, China, Thailand, Vietnam, Singapore, Malaysia, Australia, Canada, pretty much every country in NATO, Brazil, Argentina, Algeria, Israel, obviously, I don’t know if Iran could do it, but the United Arab Emirates could. 

Anyway. The point is, there is a long list of countries where this is no longer a technical barrier. And the technology that the United States has had a complete monopoly on this last generation, which has allowed it to shape strategic environments around the world, is now gone. And it’s only a matter of time, probably months, not even years, before we see copycat versions of the Russian and other Ukrainian versions popping up in a half a dozen different countries, and within five years they will be everywhere. 

Which means if the United States is going to maintain its military posture of having a global position without really any meaningful pushback, it’s going to need new technological tricks to do that. Most likely, combined with the Trump administration’s backing away from every alliance we have, this means that the United States is going to vacate militarily large portions of the planet and just let the chips fall where they may. 

Now, for those of you who’ve been following my work for the last decade, you will know that this was in some version probably going to happen because of American political considerations anyway. But we’re now set up a technological U.S. cannot just leave because it wants to. It’s going to be technologically pushed out from certain areas. And the question now is where first. 

And we just it’s too soon to have an answer to that question. There’s too many decisions that have to be made up at the white House, that color where the map is going to go blue and where it’s going to go red. But bottom line, the era of American strategic primacy with global reach that is now over. 

And it’s now a question about managing the withdrawal and dealing with the consequences of that.

Everybody Wants to Bomb Qatar

Hands holding the flag of qatar in front of a building in the middle east

Israeli airstrikes on Hamas targets in Qatar mark a significant shift in Israel’s positioning in the region. Israel has made it clear that they are willing to strike anywhere, regardless of alliances or presence of US bases…bad news bears.

Qatar may be filthy, filthy rich, but all that money couldn’t buy military aptitude. These strikes caught Qatar with its pants around its ankles, something that rival Arab states weren’t upset about.

However, the bigger story here is that Qatar hosts america’s regional military headquarters, and Israel only gave the US a ten-minute heads up before the missiles started flying. Whatever influence the United States had over Israel military actions has quite simply dissolved. And THAT will be noticed globally.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Transcript

Hey all, Peter Zeihan here comes to you from Colorado. And today we’re going to talk about what went down on September 9th in the Middle East. Specifically, the Israelis dropped a few bombs and missiles on sites in the country of Qatar. That’s a little thumb like thing in the Persian Gulf. Small country, less than a million population going after some Hamas targets. 

Hamas, of course, is the military slash political group that used to run Gaza and is now on the receiving end of the Israeli occupation campaign of Gaza. Three big things. Oh my God, so many things, but three big things that come from this. First of all, let’s talk about Israel. Israel has never, ever, ever bombed anyone in the Persian Gulf. 

I mean, they’ve gone after Lebanon because it’s right there. They go after Syria, especially as it’s fallen apart. And, they’ve gone after Iran most recently in a big way. But the last time they bombed anyone else was like in the 1980s, they took out a nuclear reactor in Iraq. And before that, you’re talking about the Arab-Israeli wars of the 1970s and 1960s. And 1950s. 

This is a significant escalation. There’s been an expansion of their capabilities as they’ve gotten the Joint Strike fighter. They’ve gotten better weapons from the United States that have better range. Looks like what happened is they flew down into the Red sea and launched missiles over Saudi Arabia to hit Qatar. They didn’t do a direct overflight. 

Probably. 

And this level of aggression, this willingness to ramp up this newborn policy of taking action wherever and why ever, is immense. Because, you know, Qatar is a U.S. ally. Saudi Arabia is a U.S. ally. And for the Israelis to be so brazen, this is something that is going to continue until and unless a significant series of countries that includes up to in the United, including the United States, levy some sort of massive economic or military penalty on Israel for acting like this way, at the moment doesn’t seem like that is in the cards. 

And honestly, if you’re in the Persian Gulf, the Arab states of the Persian Gulf, like Qatar or the United Arab Emirates or Saudi Arabia or Kuwait, there’s really nothing you can do. So this is the new norm of Israel just dropping bombs wherever in the region it wants to. And that will cause any number of political complications and strategic complications, because at the moment they’re going after Hamas. 

But there are other militant groups that the Israelis are not big fans of. And should a government in the region become more hostile, the Israelis have now demonstrated that really doesn’t matter what your air defense systems are, the Arab states of the Persian Gulf, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and Qatar, they have some shiny hardware, but it’s clear they don’t know how to use it very well. 

And as the Israelis discovered with Iran, even if you’ve got stuff that you’ve integrated over decades, it really can’t stand up to the technology the Israelis can bring to bear. So all the royal houses of this region are now on notice. And if they do things that the Israelis don’t like, they can expect visits by explosives. 

The one thing that was really holding back the Israelis before, from doing things like this is the idea if you knock off the government, you could have Sunni jihadists boil up and turn the area into a scarred wasteland that would eventually cause problems for Israel. 

Well, some version of that has happened in Syria and Israel looks just fine. So if the nightmare situation is not something to be avoided, then destabilizing the neighborhood is something they don’t have a problem with. So that not all of that is number one. The Israeli side, number two is the Qatari side. Qatar is a small country. 

doesn’t have a lot going forward except for a big natural gas field, a little bit of oil. And in doing so, it’s become one of the richest countries in the world in per capita terms, because there’s very few people, the locals are the fattest humans in history because the national security program has run by Doha, the capital is to get everybody, heart disease and obesity so that they can’t protest. 

So, I mean, these are a whole country of taboos, that basically do nothing but eat all day, and they’re serviced by a couple to maybe 4 million today, expats who basically take care of their every whim. 

As a result, no shock that they don’t know how to use their own military equipment. But they do have, however, is ambition and arrogance and just supreme levels. The ruling government of the of the ruling family, is convinced that they were ordained by Allah himself to be a major power. And since they were late to the game, they basically went out and cut deals with everyone that nobody else would deal with. 

So the deal with the Muslim Brotherhood, they deal with Hamas, they deal with everybody, in order to prove how important they are. And then they throw a lot of cash at whatever the issue happens to be. So they are on the opposite side of a lot of the other Sunni governments in the region. And so while no one in the region is thrilled that the Israelis have gone and basically proven how powerless that they are in the face of a superior military force, there are a lot of countries, most notably, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, that are pointing at and kind of going, because they are not loved at all. 

And seeing them taken down by such a big notch and made to look so incompetent and so impotent, is honestly very rewarding to a great number of people. What impact this will have on Qatari foreign policy moving forward is unclear, but certainly Israel is indicating to them that there’s certain lines they just can’t cross or bombs will fall. 

The government was not targeted. This was all targeted against Hamas groups and the Hamas groups were only kind of sort of taken out because they use longer range weaponry. But we now know with refueling that the Israelis could easily get there and back with more precise weapons. So something to watch for the future. In the meantime, Qatars on notice. 

Third, and perhaps most importantly, is how the United States fits into this, Qatar is the location of Centcom headquarters. This is where the United States coordinates everything throughout the entire region, including the recently closed down wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and a lot of countries in the region and up to and including Israel until very recently and until last week, thought that having Centcom headquarters in Qatar made Qatar bulletproof because the Americans offered an express security guarantee to the country. 

Well, that has proven to be wrong. And we now have a really interesting situation shaping up. Yes, the United States is willing to allow countries to bomb places where it has bases and not do anything that makes the United States look toothless. And for Israel, specifically, Donald Trump is now in a position where he can’t get the Israeli government to do or to not do anything. 

The Americans were notified of the attack less than ten minutes before the missiles flew. No. No way, no way. Enough time to get through the chain of command for Trump to say, call up Benjamin Netanyahu is the prime minister of Israel. Say, don’t do this. So the United States is now being actively ignored by the country, in the region that is supposedly its closest religious demographic and strategic ally in the region. 

That is not a good look for an administration who thinks that it’s tough, and that will have consequences here, there, and a lot of places in between.

The Automation of War Drags On

A silhouetted soldier in a black background

As we look out onto the battlefields of the wars of tomorrow, will we see humanoid robots and AI-driven autonomous weapons instead of soldiers?

Unfortunately, humanity can’t hang up the fatigues and boots quite yet. While AI can process and distill vast amounts of data, it can’t truly “think” or react independently without huge amounts of power and the most advanced sensors. Even if chips and sensors advanced quickly, there remains mobility, stability, and power supply problems.

And allow me to kick this dead horse once more…the semiconductor supply chain is fragile and will fracture along with deglobalization. If everything went perfectly in developing the hardened, next-gen chips required for military applications, we still wouldn’t see those emerge until the 2030s. And that’s one big ass IF.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Transcript

Hey all, Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Colorado today. We are taking an entry from the Patreon Ask Peter a question page specifically. Yes, demographics are in decline. Yes, that is going to change a whole lot of things. But when it comes to military issues, won’t artificial intelligence and automation and above all, humanoid robots and androids be able to take the place of humans in the not too distant future, like, whoa, whoa, hold your horses. 

Okay, so let’s assume for the moment that the supply chain for high end semiconductors does not break down. And that is a very poor bet. Just put that to the side. We are nowhere close. There’s two issues here. One is something that AI is reasonably good at and that is processing take huge amounts of data and processing and distilling it down. 

That’s basically what ChatGPT has been doing for a while, and is getting incrementally better at. That is not the same as thinking. Thinking requires significantly more processing power than you can put, not in just one chip, but into a whole server blade of chips or a whole server stack of chips. You basically need an ongoing connection to a server farm, with all that processing and computing power, in order to do something that a proxy emits thought. 

So taking data and distilling it or processing it sure. Thinking and reacting to your real life environment, that’s a whole different issue. And it is shaped by the data that you can feed in, which is not an AI issue or a chip issue. It’s a sensor issue. And our sensors are not nearly as good as anything else in the processing department. 

That’s problem one. Problem two is much more direct. Let’s assume that your sensors are perfect. Let’s assume that we do have AI chips that are an order of magnitude more advanced that we have, right now. Let’s assume that maybe you can have a data link back to a data farm without any sort of jamming. And by the way, good luck with that movement, people. 

Movement. You have to be able to have a device, an android, a robotic tank, whatever it happens to be that can loiter, that can operate at range without a whole lot of decision making that is done by humans. And the problem there is power and acuity. 

Right now, lithium is the best battery system we have, and it can maintain a charge for a few hours of action for, say, an electric vehicle, which is nothing compared to what you are going to need when you talking about tracked vehicles or articulated joints. 

The second issue is stability. Not only do you have to have good sensors to be able to perceive the environment, you have to be able to manipulate that environment. I’m sure a lot of you have seen that viral footage from about a year ago of a humanoid robot basically doing a back flip up and landing on the table behind him. 

I was like, ooh, we’re about to be replaced. You know how many attempts that took? 11,000. 400. You know how many more attempts it took before I could do it again? Another 13,000. These things can’t learn. They can take actions. There are rules for them. Pack mule might not sound sexy. Kind of a big deal on things like desert warfare. 

Autonomous weapons systems, though, are simply not anywhere close. And then I have to go back to that thing that I said we were going to ignore. And that’s whether or not the chips are going to get better. The highest end chips we have right now are rapidly approaching one nanometer, but they require 30,000 pieces and 100,000 manufacturing supply chain steps and 9000 companies. 

And over half of these things are single point failures. It doesn’t take a significant shift in the international environment to make a few of them fall out of the constellation, and when that happens, no more chips will be made. Not to mention that the chips, as they are existing right now, are designed for measures that we already have. 

Things we already need, things we already use, which means that they’re not shuck tested, they can’t handle vibration, they can’t handle temperature variation. They certainly can’t handle things like dust. We would have to first design a fundamentally new chip that is far more advanced than anything we have already that incorporates this sort of hardening into it. We haven’t even started that design process and assuming that everyone got it all right on their first try, you would see your first volume run of those chips come online probably around 2033. 

So no, not something I worry about.

Can China Break Through the First Island Chain?

Photo of a submarine emerging out of the water

I often hear rumblings of China’s naval power, but one of the many reasons I pay no mind is the first island chain. This is a line of islands stretching from Japan through Taiwan and the Philippines down to Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore. And China has very little chance of breaking through that chain…here’s why.

China would have to occupy and pacify Taiwan and the Philippines’ Luzon. Then the Chinese would have to defeat Japan, which is laughable to even entertain. But let’s say China magically pulls that off, they’re still facing demographic collapse, dependance on imported materials, and trying to maintain global sea access. And of course, the US would withdraw protections from Chinese commercial shipping. Oh, and don’t forget the regional powers who would step in and ensure that China was contained.

Long story short, I’m not worried about China breaking through the first Island chain.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Transcript

Hey all Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Colorado. Today we are taking a question from the Patreon crowd specifically. It’s about the first island chain and whether I think that can be the basis of an alliance that does not involve the United States to contain, the Chinese. Good question. For those of you who are not familiar with the strategic geography of the Western Pacific, the first island chain is a long line of populated islands that basically parallel roughly the entire coast. 

So Japan in the north, Taiwan and the Philippines in the center, Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore in the south. And the reason that the Chinese stress about the first island chain is that there’s no obvious place for the Chinese to achieve naval breakout and project to the rest of the world. To this day, the United States counts basically all the members of the first island chain, except for Malaysia as firm allies. 

And Malaysia is obviously a robust trading partner. And so the Chinese have basically lost the opportunity to even attempt a breakout in any meaningful way. And most Chinese naval strategy is about how to punch through the first island chain and get beyond. The question, of course, is whether or not this can happen without the United States. And the short answer is yes, it’s pretty easy. 

Two things. Number one, achieving a temporary breakout for the Chinese achieves nothing. Let’s say that they are able to break through between the Philippines and Taiwan, for example. There’s a fairly big gap there. Okay. They’ve now made it out into the wider Pacific. But all their supply lines run through that break. So the Chinese don’t simply need to get a fleet out. 

They then need to keep the break open. And the only way to do that is to occupy the entire approach to and from that break, which in this case would mean the occupation and pacification of the Filipino island of Luzon, which is where the majority of the population lives in the Philippines, as well as the entirety of Taiwan. If they can do that, then they have a way in and out. Problem one that’s really hard and that’s probably the softest place in the chain. 

Problem two because of the presence of Taiwan right off the coast, they can’t just do this in one location. Southern China requires a breakout in the Southwest Pacific. Northern China requires a breakout in the Northwest Pacific, which means you’re not just occupying Taiwan and Luzon. 

You now also have to get the Japanese home islands. All of a sudden, you’re talking about a completely different sort of fight against a much more capable foe, that is much better able to defend itself. Otherwise, you might have a breakout for Shanghai, or you might have a breakout for Beijing, but you need both. That is the only way that China can survive in a world that has turned hostile. 

Problem three let’s say they do that. Not likely, but let’s say they do. So China is a country in demographic collapse. It lacks the consumption to produce what it needs. China is a country that is starved of raw materials. It has to import them almost first and foremost, including energy foods up there, too. So China doesn’t simply need to achieve breakout, it needs to achieve sea dominance on a global basis in order to access the world’s raw materials and end consumer markets. 

And, you know, I don’t know about you, but if a country starts conquering countries simply in order to get naval access for what? It’s commercial shipping, that’s a bad plan. So the very act of achieving a degree of security control over its near abroad pretty much ends any opportunity the Chinese would have for economic access to the wider world. 

One of the problems that the Chinese face, one of the issues that everyone who assumes that the Chinese are on this endless rise forgets, is that the Chinese economic system is utterly dependent upon freedom of the seas, and the only country on the planet who can guarantee freedom of the seas is the United States. Probably the best way to guarantee that the United States will stop protecting your civilian shipping is to start conquering other countries. 

So for this scenario to work for the Chinese, the United States not only has to say bygones and go home and cut all of its alliances and cease importing and exporting on a global basis. You then also have to have no one else trying to rise to that position, and the Chinese would have to conquer functionally the entire first island chain, which is an area with a combined population of roughly 300 million, I think maybe close to 400 million now that I’m thinking about it. 

And that’s just to achieve step one of a global breakout. So would an alliance of the first island chain be enough to stop them? Absolutely. Wouldn’t the alliance be needed now because the Chinese simply are incapable of taking on the whole thing, and taking on the whole thing would be the first step of getting to places like, I don’t know, the Persian Gulf. 

And along the way they would come across countries that are not part of the island chain, which could also wreck the entire thing. Australia, Vietnam and India being the big three. So this this firmly goes under the list of things the Peters Island doesn’t worry about.

The Revolution in Military Affairs: Artificial Intelligence

ChatGPT logo with a synthetic brain hovering above

AI is working its way into just about every aspect of modern life. I mean, who didn’t fall for that video of the bunnies jumping on the trampoline. But artificial intelligence might not be the game-changer in warfare that you think it is…at least not in the short term.

AI promises faster processing, targeting, and decision-making, which all sounds great, until you throw in the wrench of deglobalization. As the globalized world collapses, the semiconductor supply chain will fall apart. The most advanced chips will not be able to be created anymore. Between the bottlenecks of EUV lithography and the countless single points of failure, we’ll be stuck with what we currently have (or yesterday’s tech).

When you factor this into military applications, it means older systems like cruise missiles and smart bombs will be mainstays. Fully AI-enabled systems will be severely constrained and reserved for the really important stuff.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Transcript

Hey, all. Peter Zeihan here come to you from Cassidy arch. And where am I? Capitol reef National park. Sorry, it’s been a busy week. Today we are going to close out the series on the revolution in military technology. As advances in automation and digitization in materials science and energy transfer come together to remake how we fight. 

And we’re going to close out with something that you probably don’t need to worry about. And that’s artificial intelligence in war. The whole idea of AI is it can process faster than we can’t make decisions faster than we can, and potentially target with lethality faster than we can. 

I don’t think it’s going to happen. The problem is that the semiconductor supply chain for the high end chips that are capable of doing AI, and as a rule here, the cutting edge is going to be three nanometers and smaller, simply isn’t going to be able to survive the globalization age. So any chips that are not made in the next relatively short period of time, no more than a single digit of years, are really all we’re going to have for a good long time. 

And that means that the machines that are going out and doing the fighting have to rely on something that is older, that is not capable of processing and has to be linked back to something back home, either via wire or telemetry or some sort of radio communication. And that makes for a very different sort of beast. 

There are roughly 30,000 manufacturing supply chain steps that go into semiconductors. The high end stuff. And there’s about 9000 companies involved, and about half of those companies only make one product for one end user. There’s literally thousands of single point failures, and it only takes a few of them to go offline for you to not be able to make the high end chips at all. 

But the place that I think it’s going to be most concentrated, the place where we’re all going to feel like the place where is going to be obvious is going to be with the lithography. Specifically, we are currently using something called extreme ultraviolet, which is done by a company called ASML out of the Netherlands. And they are the world leaders in all of this. 

There are other companies that do the fabs other than TSMC and Taiwan, but the lithography can really only be done by the Dutch. And it’s not like this is one company. This is a constellation of hundreds of companies, and every time one of them either has a generational change or goes public, ASML basically sweeps them under the rug, absorbs them completely, puts the staff in different areas and puts it all under referential lockdown so there is no way to duplicate what they have. 

And so if you take this gangly supply chain that wraps the whole world and any part of that breaks, we can’t do EUV at all. And that means functionally, no chips that are worse than or better than six or 7 or 8 nanometers based on where you draw the line, we can still do something called deep ultraviolet, but extreme ultraviolet. 

It just becomes impossible. And that means that the best chips that we will have ten years from now are going to be very similar to the best chips we had ten years ago. And that limits what we can do with any sort of technological innovation. For the purposes of the military, it becomes very, very truncated. Old weapons like smart bombs and cruise missiles actually don’t use very sophisticated chips. 

20 year old chips are just fine. It’s the high end, the thinking, the processing, anything that’s more than guidance and requires a degree of decision making, that is what’s going to be off the table. So while I applaud all of us for having these conversations about the implications of AI, what it means for the workforce, what it means for culture, what it means for morality and legality. 

These are great conversations. It’s very rare that we get ahead of the technology in discussing what it can and can’t do, and start thinking about the implications for us as people, but I think we have some extra time because once this breaks, it’s going to take us 15 to 20 years to rebuild it. And that was back before everything accelerated with the Chinese fall and the Trump administration. 

Now it’s probably going to take longer. So have these discussions. I think that’s great. But it’s really probably going to be a problem for the 2050s.

The Revolution in Military Affairs: What’s Ahead

Photo of a soldier pointing to a tech screen

Before we close out this series on military tech, let’s discuss what military advances are on the horizon (and our last episode will cover something we don’t need to worry about).

Many of the larger evolutions coming down the pike are related to drones. Whether it’s strikes, surveillance, detection, or deadly jobs…drones will likely be taking it on.

These technologies are just the beginning though. As battery science improves and more advances are made, the battlefields will be going through countless iterations.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Transcript

Peter Zeihan here coming to you from a foggy Colorado today. We’re do another in our Military Revolution series how changes in Materials Science and Data Transfer and Energy storage are shifting, the way the military works, and some of the new things that will be seen in the not too distant future. Today we’re going to talk about some edge cases that are likely to move into the mainstream in just the next few years. 

And these kind of fall the two general categories. First, you’ve got the topics where humans just aren’t the best tool for the job. These are things where they’re either dangerous, or expensive, we have to train someone up to an extreme level to do a job that then has a high mortality rate. 

You know, things you don’t want people doing. And the first one of those is saving other people, search and rescue in a combat environment uses a huge amount of resources to cover a large amount of land to save 1 or 2 people. It doesn’t matter if it’s a fighter pilot, it’s been shot down or someone who’s been shot out of the field having drones do this not only builds up your combat awareness for the field in general, but also allows you to provide, say, targeted supplies and of course, guide the real force in to pull the person out of trouble. 

The general topic of recon, something that is starting to be called perch and stair. Basically, you have a recon drone, but rather than flying around at altitude, it finds a place at, say, a quarter of a building and just parks and stays there. Maybe it has solar panels on its back so it can extend its battery life and it just looks around. 

It’s a mobile sensor that, for the most part, isn’t mobile. You know, you might call this a spotter or a spy in another condition, but if you can automate that, and instead of having one guy in one place that might be able to move around, you can have hundreds if not thousands of mobile sensors that can extend their life to span by just not flying the whole time. 

And third is something called an underwater swarm. Submarines are among the most expensive things that most modern navies can float. And if you can throw a few dozen things into the water, not only do you get some excellent acoustic collection for purposes of locating them, you know, you put like a one kilogram charge on each one. It doesn’t take a lot of those to take a multimillion dollar sub completely out of action forever. 

So these are technologies that you apply them to. What we know we need. And all of a sudden they really are game changers in terms of efficiency. Now the second category are things that we used to do and maybe even used to do well, but we haven’t done it for a long time. Keep in mind that the US military has not been preparing to deal with another peer adversary until just a few years ago. 

And the immediate post-Soviet era. We thought of the Russians no longer as an enemy. And so we stopped preparing to fight a global conflict with them. We then spent 20 years in the war on terror, focusing on counterinsurgency. That means going against the Taliban. And that means you don’t really need air power. You really don’t need air defense. 

And so certain aspects of our military were allowed to atrophy just from lack of use. And the two biggest ones are air defense suppression and hunting mines, whether land mines or sea mines. The general idea was, you know, if there is no big force out there fielding things you need to shoot through, then why would you maintain an entire arm of your force doing things that are just going to sit around? 

So, for example, we really only have a couple of minesweepers left, but naval minesweepers that are drones are a great idea. In essence, you have a drone that’s hooked up to your ship as it’s puttering around at a relatively low speed doing a sonar capture. You locate the drones and you send out a suicide drone to take it out. 

They’re already doing this in, say, Romania in the western part of the Black Sea. You can use aerial drones with radar to triangulate metal signatures in the soil and locate landmines before anyone can step on them. 

And for air suppression. Back in Vietnam, we had this thing called a wild weasel. Basically, it was a bunch of suicidal maniacs on a plane who would fly into Vietnam ahead of the bombers to activate air defense. Well, do that with drones. Don’t do that with a manned plane. In fact, do that with drones backed up by other drones so that by the time the real bombers get in the air, defenses are already gone. 

Same basic concept holds for coastal patrol. Now, the United States has never really been good at coastal patrol because we have oceans between us and everybody else. But this is one of those technologies that everyone else is going to find really useful. Again, in the post-Cold War world, everyone slimmed down their military spending, with navies seen as just something you would never need again. 

History was over. It was a world of commerce. Why would anyone shoot at anyone’s commerce? Well, that’s gone, but the time it would take to build up a coastal fleet and coastal patrol capability is going to be measured not in years, but in decades. Or you can just have a fleet of drones. It basically flies patrols out on your coast and then, if necessary, a more robust naval vessel can go out to take care of whatever the issue happens to be.  

So these are all things we’re going to see in probably just the next five years, certainly the next ten. And this is just the leading edge. These are things that me as a nonmilitary guy can kind of just think of based on the gaps in the system right now as the military technologies continue to evolve. We’re going to see radical applications of all of these. 

And keep in mind that drones are really just the leading tip of this. We don’t know what our material science is going to be in the next five years. Maybe we’ll get a new battery chemistry that allows for longer loitering, that generates an entirely new field of military tech. We’re just at the beginning here.

The Revolution in Military Affairs: Water Wars

Water sloshing from a cup

Today, we move onto the backbone of civilizations, the lifeblood of (most) meaningful empires—water. Will future wars be fought over it?

The short answer is that it’s unlikely to happen. Water is a pain in the ass transfer, making it impractical for long-distance or military-scale operations. Water doesn’t make sense if you need to move it, you must settle, build, and expand with water in your backyard.

Of course there are some exceptions to the rule. The Nile will become a heavily disputed resource between Egypt, Ethiopia, and Sudan. Over in Central Asia, diversions of water from the Soviet-era have drained the Aral Sea and countries like Uzbekistan may have to invade neighbors to secure dwindling water supplies.

Water scarcity is real, especially in these hotspots, but water wars are not likely to become a global threat.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Transcript

Hey, Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Colorado. Today we are taking a question from the Patreon page specifically about water wars. Do I expect the distribution of water to be the source of military conflict in the future? Short version is this is something I usually don’t worry about, for the simple reason that water is really hard to move and it’s pretty corrosive to any system that you’re going to use to move it. 

So, for example, if you just spill some water on your countertop and touch it, you’ll notice how it clings to your finger in that weird drop. That’s something called hydrogen bonding. It’s an atomic feature that a small molecule that has some very strong positive and negative aspects tends to link together without actually forming. See ice. That hydrogen bonding basically causes a cling between water and everything, including itself. 

So pumping water outside of a municipal environment is very, very difficult and very, very expensive. So if you are going to move large volumes of water from one place to another, you’re generally not going to do it by pipe. You’re going to use gravity. And that means basically digging some sort of canal and allowing the, the world to do the work for you. 

There are some exceptions, of course. Whenever you have a municipal situation, you obviously need water treatment and distribution. That is all done by pipe. But again, it’s very, very energy intensive. And you will always have some places like, say China who work going to let something little like physics or economic rationale get in the way of national unity. 

And so the Chinese are in the process of basically diverting several of their rivers in order to ship water from the south, where it’s more humid and more jungly to the north, which is more heavily populated and more arid. But this comes at a huge cost environmentally and economically. What that means is it’s really difficult to imagine a situation where people will go somewhere to get the water and bring it back. 

If they’re going to get the water, they’re going to go there and they’re going to stay. And that is also very hard as a rule. Economic development follows, the same track. You start with water. You use that water to grow food. You use the food to expand your population. You use the capital from that population growth and then agricultural sales to establish a tax base and eventually an industrial base. 

You then use that industrial base to build a military. And it is all rooted in having water at the very start. If you don’t have that water, you’re never going to get the industrial base that is necessary to have a projection based military. And so if you look out throughout history, while you do sometimes have dry cultures that conquer wet ones, the only ones who then become meaningful cultures that can project power in the future are those that then stay, conquer, assimilate, wipe out the generation that they’re conquered and then move on. 

It’s just the technology that is required for the industrial age just doesn’t allow it to go any other way. So, are there exceptions? Of course. Every rule has exceptions. Let me give you the two big ones. The first one is the Nile region. Most of the rain that fuels the Nile River falls in the highlands of Ethiopia. 

It then flows down through the tributaries of the Nile, through Sudan, before eventually entering Egypt and becoming the riverine culture that we all know from history. Well, the water falls in one place, passes through another place, and is ultimately used in the third place in the existing treaty systems that date back to the colonial era say that Sudan, and especially Ethiopia, aren’t supposed to tap the river at all. 

It’s all for Egypt. Well that’s breaking. And we’re seeing the Ethiopians and the Sudanese starting to take more and more water from the river for irrigation purposes in order to stabilize their populations and have economic growth. Hard to argue with them, but that does mean there’s no longer enough flow coming down into Egypt to sustain Egypt long run. 

So sooner or later, something is going to crack. Either we face an economic and ecological collapse in Egypt, or the Egyptians, get creative with military power and go up river with the intent of blowing up the dams, preferably in a way that does not trigger a fresh biblical flood in Egypt. No easy solution, but there’s certainly not enough water for everyone to come out on top. 

The second big issue is in Central Asia, where the premiers provide the headwaters for a couple of rivers called the AMA. When the sphere and those two rivers flow through Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan before dead, ending in the Aral Sea. Well, during Soviet period, cotton plantations were planted throughout these areas, most notably in Kazakhstan and especially Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. 

And now most of that water never even makes it to the Aral Sea. So it’s become desiccated. And right now, what’s left of the arrow, the little bits that are left are only about 10% the volume of what existed there. Back when these diversion systems were built, back in the 1960s. So the entire area is gradually drying out. 

And after having a few decades of agricultural runoff get into those rivers, they’ve basically polluted what is now the open salt plains of the formal Aral Sea bed. And hotter, drier conditions mean more winds, which means those salts are being whipped up in storms and dropped several hundred miles away and are causing health issues for everyone in Southeast Asia. 

So sooner or later, one of the downstream states, if it has the capacity, is going to invade the upstream states to control what little of the water there still is. Of the five stand countries, the one with by far the most military capacity is Uzbekistan, and it is very close to the physical borders of Kyrgyzstan into Guestand, which control the headwaters. 

So expect a hot fight there, with the Uzbeks moving in with the intent of taking over. And unlike the situation that we have, say, with Egypt and Sudan, there isn’t a big giant chunk of trackless desert to serve as a barrier. These population centers are all on top of one another. So for water, that’s what you’re looking at pretty much a local issue. 

We still obviously have issues with distribution in the United States, but it’s very rarely cross-border issue. And where it is, it’s really just limited to those two locations.

The Revolution in Military Affairs: Recruitment

Cadets marching in the military

Most of the conversations in this series will revolve around technology, but recruitment is a large component of keeping a military productive. We’re not talking about the high school pull up competitions that the recruiters do, but more of the systemic ideology around recruitment itself.

As military technology evolves, we’re seeing the equipment on the battlefield change overnight. However, finding the people to operate this tech and fill out the ranks needs a refresh as well. Considering that 2/3 of the American population are not straight white dudes, the DEI conversation is about to get a new angle.

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Transcript

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.