Ukraine can strike anywhere across the Black Sea thanks to its Sea Baby naval drones, and since jamming is less effective in open water, Ukraine can remotely guide them toward targets.
Take a shadow fleet vessel, for example. Ukraine can use satellite and transponder data to determine targets and then strike the engines and propulsion systems of these ships. With few effective counters, Russia’s ability to protect shipping in the Black Sea is steadily eroding.
If this current trend continues, Russian exports of all kinds, including oil, grain, fertilizer, timber, and more, could be lost.
Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Pike National Forest, from the southern slopes of Mount Silverheels. Behind me is the Colorado Intermountain, which is home to fair play, among other things. Anyway, today we’re going to talk about something that’s very mountain, you know, naval drones. So in the Ukraine, where we’ve seen several models and the ones we were to talk about today are the sea Babies.
These are things that the Ukrainians have basically taken motor boats, put a bomb on the front, automated them, and off they go. They are typically always first person drones because when you’re dealing with water, there’s really no option for doing a meaningful fiber optic line. There’s usually not going to have a lot of guidance because there are no landmarks.
So while there are certain things you can do with maybe a little bit of memory to provide a targeting suite, really these are things that have to be piloted by a person, and the terrain, such as it is, works to that pretty well. You see, jamming is something that the Russians are very good at electronic warfare in general, but you can’t really do it over the water.
I mean, if you’ve got a warship, maybe, but if you’ve got a warship, then all of a sudden the Ukrainians are going to be sending aerial drones against you to that have the memory to target specific things on the boat. But when you’re talking about, say, shadow fleet vessels, well, you’re not going to put a jammer on a Shadow Fleet vessel because it’s technically not a Russian ship.
And the Russians just don’t have that many of them to go around. So what happens is the Ukrainians now have these sea babies that have a range of 1500km in east to west. The Black Sea is only 1100 kilometers long. So it’s not just that the Ukrainians can hit any ship on the Black Sea, It’s they can go out there and loiter for a while.
So what the Ukrainians do is they pull down commercial imagery. SA is the type of synthetic aperture radar, and it basically lights up everything in a strip. And that strip can cover as much as 50,000km, which is a good portion of the Black Sea. And then they just go to a commercial website and see what ships are around.
You see, every ship in the world has a transponder except shadow fleet because they turn them off in order to avoid sanctions. So basically, you get this sheet satellite data that is accurate to like a quarter of a meter, and they then play forward and map out all the legal ships that have transponders. And anything else is a Russian shadow vessel.
And if they’ve got a sea baby near it, off they go. It’s also pretty predictable because there’s only 3 or 4 ports for the Russians on the Black Sea. Places like an overseas. And unless they’re going to a specific Turkish port, they’re all going to the Turkish straight to get out of the Black Sea and get to the wider world.
And that’s a straight line sail. So what we’ve been seeing in the last couple of weeks is these sea babies, which have like half a ton of explosives on them, basically getting in close to a commercial vessel, approaching them from behind and blowing the shit out of the engine room and the propeller. We’re not to the point where it’s had a huge impact yet, but again, these tactics are just like a month old.
Now, normally what you would do when you’re dealing with something like this on the defensive point of view is you’d fight these things off with helicopters. Small arms fire from the top of a ship really doesn’t do much, and battleship really doesn’t have the ability to lower their guns to the point that they can fire at something in the water and small arms fire.
Just so you use a helicopter. Now, number one, you don’t base a helicopter off of a commercial vessel. And in a few times when the Russians have had a military vessel nearby, or the Sea Babies have been sufficiently close to the coast that a helicopter from land can interdict. The Ukrainians really learned fast. Okay, we’ll just put an anti-air missile or two on this.
And they scored many hits. And so Now the Russians aren’t even doing that.
There’s really no good counter here. Helicopters were really only it, and the Ukrainians are now fielding more and more of these things. And as the Russians basically lose control over Crimea because they can’t have fuel. Even using Crimea as a base for helicopter is disappearing. What this means is probably by the end of the year, we need to start thinking about not simply the Russians losing access to the Black Sea for purposes of shipping out all and oil products, which is 1.5 to 2 million barrels a day.
Big deal right there. But also shipping anything wheat, fertilizer, timber, whatever it happens to be. Basically, the whole Black Sea is starting to become a no go zone. And again, the Ukrainians have only been doing this for about 4 to 6 weeks at this scale. They keep ramping it up just for a couple more months. There’s not going to be much left of the Shadow Fleet in the Black Sea at all.
