The Ukraine War, Drones, and Starlink (Bonus Video)

Hey all, Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Colorado. Today we are talking about a new technology that is evolved and how it’s, linking into other social issues that we’ve been discussing from time to time. It involves drones in Ukraine and the company Starlink, which is owned by Elon Musk.

In Ukraine, about two thirds, maybe closer to 75%, based on who’s numbers are using, of the casualties had been inflicted in the last three years of the war, have been inflicted by drones and most of those drones, what you call first person vehicles.

So you’ve got a, a drone that is controlled by a radio controller, and it goes off and blows into something, but it’s directed by a person the whole time. And the chief technology and countering that to this point has been, jamming, which the Russians are pretty good at. And the Ukrainians are become very good at. So the way you get around jamming is you have a fiber optic spool of cable on the back of the drone that just kind of just let out as it flies.

And then that can’t be jammed. It has to be destroyed some other way, which is very, very hard to do. While the Russians have hit on a new strategy, Starlink is the company that has several thousand satellites up in orbit and is providing internet coverage to everyone who can pay for it, especially in remote areas like where I live and, well, The Russians have started using portable units. You’ve got your normal corporate units or your house unit, which you put on and you point up at the sky, but you also now have these smaller units that can basically mount on a car or even carrying a backpack. The Russians have started putting those on drones and using those to send drones, not the 1015 miles you can with a first person drone or a wire drone, but hundreds of kilometers so you can attack things deep within the country.

The legal implications of this are pretty dark. Because this isn’t like having a computer chip that you sell to someone and eventually ends up in a drone. You’re not controlling that computer chip or enabling it over its operation. But with Starlink, you are using the active satellite network for a data connection, and then you control the drone through the Starlink satellites.

So you can’t basically have it intercepted conventionally, and you can use it to drive it in whatever building you want. And we now have footage that has come out of Russian channels of the Russians using this to target things like government buildings and schools and playgrounds and malls and most famously of recently, a moving train full of civilians.

Elon Musk has, taken a very direct position to confronting this, he’s basically called the European ministers who have brought this to public attention, drooling morons and has said it’s not being used this way at all. And so the Ukrainians went through the wreckage and pulled out several dozen Starlink units, complete with their serial numbers, and said, guess again.

And in the last ten days, Starlink has started to change the way they regulate their receivers in the vicinity of the war. So, for example, if you’ve got a Starlink unit that’s going 45 miles an hour not on a road, it’s probably a Russian drone, and they’re starting to shut down some of these things, which is having some really big problems for the Russians on the front line, because over the course of the last couple months, this had become the primary method for inflicting damage on Ukraine.

And if you’ve been following news, you know, there’s been a lot of hits on power plants as well as trains that provide the fuel to the power plants. Almost all of those were operated by Starlink and powered drones.

From a legal point of view, this is a pretty big deal because here in the United States, when something is used in that way with you actively allowing and empowering your product to cause a death and destruction, it’s called depraved indifference. And if someone dies as a result of that operation, it’s a second degree murder charge. And now we have dozens of cases where it’s basically been confirmed that Elon Musk’s Starlink company was actively involved in abetting, Russian attacks on Ukraine that were deliberately designed to kill as many civilians as possible.

At the moment, that seems to be addressed, but that’s peace. One piece, too, is what’s going on elsewhere in the world. One of the things that you have to keep in mind is that when it comes to free speech, the United States has a relatively different position compared to the rest of the world. We’re really iconoclastic about it.

And we especially when a new technology is involved, we want to like, see where it’s going to run before we put any restrictions on it. So the iconic example is The Telegraph, which came out after the Civil War during reconstruction. The way media worked in the United States before that was everybody was basically a local newspaper. There really weren’t any regional, much less national papers, because you couldn’t get the paper delivered in time for it to matter.

So you had all of these local papers, and all of them basically had their own political views, and they basically lied about the other side. But because it was all local, no one really cared. Once the Telegraph came out, the lies could go national instantly. And we started to get a much more visceral politic, which has continued to this day.

And it even got the United States involved in a war, because if you remember Pulitzer, he basically accused the Spanish of blowing up the USS Maine in Havana Harbor. That’s not how it went down. It was just an internal ammo explosion. But the Spanish got the blame. Americans got all riled up. We went to war.

We’re kind of in an echo of that situation now, elsewhere in the world, where they take a much more nuanced view to things like free speech. They’re starting to get upset with what in the United States is functionally a right to lie is what it’s starting to be called, because it’s exactly what it is. The idea is that no matter what you say, no matter what the social media platform is, you can’t be held legally liable for it, regardless of what you said and what your intention is.

That’s not flying very well in the rest of the world. So in some countries, like Brazil, they’re establishing a national authority that evaluates what people are saying, what they intended, and if it’s false and the intended harm, they’re starting to prosecute people in other countries. They’re simply restricting the use of social media for minors with 16 years old kind of being the general threshold against these people.

Elon Musk is also very, aggressive, calling them totalitarians or dictators, specifically the Spanish, prime minister, who Spanish is the most recent country to kind of follow that path. We also have a number of European authorities, French, most notably, they starting to raid, Elon Musk Company’s offices, specifically X or Twitter to everybody else, because we now have programs running in the background of Elon Musk, media companies that, will if you just ask them, take a photo of anyone and turn it into a porno for you.

And, you know, that’s a little ugly. And apparently it’s really popular among the pedophiles. So we have this captain of industry in the United States that is basically arguing that child porn is an inalienable right, and that really doesn’t resonate with a whole lot of people. And so we’re starting to see this combination mindset starting to bubble up in a lot of places, most notably Europe.

That Elon Musk personally and his companies in general have become both a cultural threat, a safety threat, and on the other side, a security threat because of what’s going on in the Ukraine war. I don’t have a good solution for this, but I think it’s worth pointing out that live in an era where the nation state was basically the determiner about what happened with things like physical security and media.

We now have this person, Elon Musk, in his company, Starlink X, and the rest that have built this alternate constellation of power that doesn’t just control information, but now can control military munitions. That’s not something we’ve really seen since the early days of the telegraph and industrialized warfare, but this time it’s much more personal and precise with its application where this is going to go, I don’t know, but I can guarantee you that Elon Musk will not be the only one.

He won’t be the last one. And we will see things like this picked up by nation states in the years to come, so that we have not just conflicting and deliberately clashing narratives, but conflicting and clashing security systems in a way that most countries can’t even pretend to deal with. Starlink already has thousands of satellites up there. How do you combat that?

So bottom line from all of this, it’s a brave new world already. And we’re going to see nation states like the European start to see what they can do to rein in or redirect institutions like the one that Musk is building, which of course, will lead to some sort of at least indirect clash with the administration on this side of the ocean.

We’re only the very beginning of this sort of overhaul of how the world works, and I have no idea what it’s going to look like five years from now, much less on the other side.