The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Ask Peter Zeihan: Has the US Overcommitted Itself to the Ukraine War?

Episode Date: July 11, 2023

More than a few countries out there couldn't walk and chew gum at the same time...but the US isn't one of them. Today's question in the 'Ask Peter Series' looks at whether or not the US has stretched itself too thin in Ukraine to deal with another major conflict. Full Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/ask-peter-has-the-us-overcommitted-itself-to-the-ukraine-war

Hey everyone, Peter Zine here, coming to you from an incredibly green Colorado. We've gotten double our annual precipitation before we even hit April and it hasn't stopped yet. Today, as part of the Ask Periodier series, we're going to talk about chewing gum and walking at the same time. The concern is that in supplying weapons to the Ukrainians, the United States might be stressing its bandwidth to be able to deal with a major conflict, like, say, with China. The punchline is, no, this is not something I'm worried about at all. For the simple reason, that the people would be. doing the gum chewing and the walking are different people. Any sort of military

conflict that the Americans are going to get involved with with the Russians is going to be primarily on land, first and foremost in Ukraine itself. That's an army job. And any conflict that's going to involve the Chinese is going to be on the high seas. That's in navies and to a lesser degree Marines job. So the United States is perfectly capable of fighting two wars if they're very different sorts of wars. So I'm not worried there. Number one. Number two. Nothing has happened with the Ukraine war yet that has really hit American military preparedness. So let's hit this first from the weapons point of view what's already been given. Most of the weapon system, almost all the weapon systems,

that the United States has provided to the Ukrainians are things that the United States you, uh, ha, that the stuff that the America provided to the Ukrainians are things that the U.S. military hasn't used itself since at least the 1990s and in most cases further back. This is army surplus that is generated two technologically behind the military uses. And so really the Ukrainians are just going through our hand-me-downs. Now, we would have given these things to the Allies. That's what we did at the end of the Cold War, for example. But most of the militaries in Europe have been downsizing

or skipping a generation of technology. Just left all this stuff like Himars, around in warehouses. So with a couple of notable exceptions, these are not things that the U.S. uses at all, the notable exceptions. There are currently two Patriot batteries operating Ukraine. That is very close to the top of the aircraft

that the United States has right now. I would argue that even though taking those out of American service might hit the strategic issue for the U.S. a little bit, it's worth it because we're getting real-time experience with U.S. technology in third-party hands against top-of-the-line Russian equipment, most notably the Kinsel cruise missiles. And we now know for certain that even without American personnel operating them, the Patriots down things that the Russians have. That was a great bit of information. that we didn't have before.

The other thing is artillery shells. Now, the United States has not been engaged in a massive war. It's Vietnam. Even when you look at the Gulf Wars, they were very short, let's events. And so we haven't had to use artillery in volume for a very long period of time in the United States, which means that our production of artillery cells has been paired to the bone.

And we are going through, the Ukrainians, going through more artillery shells in a month than the United States can produce in a year, and Europe is even further behind when it comes to munitions. So that has prompted the United States to get Ukrainian weapons systems that we are in the process of phasing out. And most notably, that is the cluster munitions that you may have seen in the news recently. Now, a cluster munition is one single piece of explosive. There are dozens or hundreds of little box spread over an area. The Ukrainians have been on the receiving end of these weapons since the beginning of the war. Russians have

preferred to use the cluster munitions whenever they're targeting a city. They'll use their city. It's when they're going against things like tanks. And so there's already hundreds of thousands, if not tens of millions, of these little bomblets, some of which haven't exploded, scattered across all of eastern and southern Ukraine. Armed intellectual advocates

aren't thrilled. But from the Ukraine, they're like, give me, give me, give me, give me, because they need what they can get. And obviously, they're going to use cluster munitions on their opulation centers. That's the job for the Russians. Anyway, these are weapons that are for a little distasteful, and the United States Army was in the process of eating them out anyway. So again, this kind of falls into the category of surplus stuff, even if it's not quite kind of there.

Anyway, bottom line, U.S. military preparedness really hasn't been affected by this war to this point. If anything, it's proving to be a useful proof of concept for how the U.S. is likely to fight wars in the future. In the aftermath of the war in terror in Iraq and Afghanistan, there is no political. support in the United States for a mass deployment for anything except for top-level national defense. That's not seen as an issue right now. No one's dumb enough to attack the United States directly. At least I don't think that's going to happen, which means that U.S. strategic policy is going to be operating through third parties and or using special forces. And so with the Ukraine war, we have a motivated third party who is very willing to be an

ally, except our equipment, and we're finding out how well that works and getting some expertise in figuring out what to do better the next time around. So all at all, in a weird sort of way, you can kind of thank the Russians for getting to the United States to where it needs to go, both getting rid of its op weapon and learning how to fight for the next century. All right, that's it. Bye.