Let’s talk about the current state of electronic warfare in the Ukraine War and how Iran is fitting into all this.
Drones are all the rage. You’ve got fancy autonomous systems, short-range with remote pilots, and fiber-optic tethered. The next logical step to countering drones is to beef up jamming capabilities; Ukraine has done just that. However, the Russians have taken this logic one step further. They’ve created a tool called the Kalinka. The Kalinka is a mobile detection system that listens for signals. This gives them an early warning for drone strikes and other signal-based attacks.
Electronic warfare innovations are spreading quickly, and this tech is already appearing in other regions. For instance, Iran used the Russian Kalinka tech to locate Starlink users during the protests, allowing them to shut down comms and suppress dissent.
Hey all, Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Colorado, I hope everybody who is east of the Rockies is enjoying the cold front because, Canada worst. Anyway, today we’re talking about what’s going on in Ukraine and Russia and Iran from a technical point of view, specifically electronic warfare. Drones basically fall into three general categories. Number one, you got autonomous ones that can make decisions on their own. Those are incredibly rare and incredibly difficult to maintain because the chips themselves are unstable when there’s vibration or heat or cold or humidity or anything. So really, aside from a few here and there that are very expensive, not a lot of play. The second are those that you fly first person, and for that you have to have a connection to them somehow so that the telemetry can come back and forth and you can control them.
Now, the United States does that with things like Reapers through satellite connections. The Ukrainians primarily do it on a shorter range, and the Russians also on a shorter range, typically no more than, 20km. And the problem with that is they can be jammed. And so both the Ukrainians and the Russians have gotten very, very good at here.
I mean, I would argue that right now, today, Ukraine’s jammers are by far the best in the world, probably an order of magnitude better than America’s. Once you consider in cost. And then the third type is to do, fiber drones, which have a thin fiber optic cable that they drag behind. Now, these don’t have nearly as much range as a rule, but they can’t be jammed because there’s a hard line.
And these, as a rule, are five kilometers or less. Although there are now some models where the fiber optic cable is light enough. You can go more than ten. Anyway, so those are kind of what’s going on there. But there’s another aspect to countering drones or any sort of electronic battle platform, that doesn’t involve jamming, but it’s still electronic warfare.
And in this, the Russians have definitely, cracked the code on a new tech that is really interesting and has a lot of applications. So they call it the clinker. It’s basically a electronic warfare detection system that is mounted onto a truck or an armored vehicle. You basically drive around, find a place to park, and then you just listen and you pick up signals whether this is a cell phone or a drone connection or more importantly, in recent terms, as we’ve discovered, a, Starlink terminal.
So one of the things that the Ukrainians have been doing is taking mobile Starlink terminals and putting them on things like drones, and then they go out into the Black Sea and blow up something that’s Russian. And the Russians don’t like that. But if you’re having a constant link in from a Starlink terminal and you can detect that, then the Russians finally have a way of knowing that it’s coming.
I’m not saying it works perfectly. The range is only about 15km, and one of the CBP drones, they’re pretty quick. It’s not a lot of time to react, and it doesn’t jam the connection. It just detects it. So the Ukrainians have learned to turn things on and off every couple of minutes so that the Clinkers can’t, link up.
But one of the things you have to keep in mind is that we’re in a fundamentally new type of warfare here, and when drones first appeared on the battlefield in a meaningful way that was not American. It wasn’t in Ukraine. It was in Armenia. We had a war back in 2020 between Armenia and Azerbaijan. And the as a region has had, Turkish drones that they basically used to completely obliterate the entire armed forces of Armenia in the disputed territories and would go on a crowbar.
The Armenians weren’t ready for it. And so what we’re now starting to see is Ukrainian and Russian technology coming into other theaters and just completely wiping the board. So, for example, in the last couple of weeks, we have we’ve had those big protests in Iran, and people were wondering how the Iranians were able to shut down communication so effectively.
Well, it now looks like the Russians gave the Iranians a few clinkers, and they basically just drove them around town, identified where all of Starlink’s were kicked in the door, shut the people involved, or brought them in for beating or imprisonment or whatever it happened to be. And lo and behold, the, situation from the Iranian point of view was diffused.
So we now have a technology that has very, very strong implications for use in a civilian management system. We’re going to be seeing more and more things like this of technologies from a hot zone where they’re iterating every day and every week suddenly pop up in a theater that you wouldn’t expect, where it completely outwits maneuvers outclasses the preexisting systems. Iran is just a taste of what is to come on a global basis.
