The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Electronic Warfare Innovations and Exports || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: February 5, 2026

Let's talk about the current state of electronic warfare in the Ukraine War and how Iran is fitting into all this.Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihanFull Newsletter: https://bit.ly/3Z7bTIt

Hey all, Peter Zine here coming from Colorado. I hope everybody who is east of the Rockies is enjoying the cold front because Canada, the 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've 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 20 kilometers. And the problem with that is they can be jammed. And so both the Ukrainians and the Russians have gotten very, very good at jamming. 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, fibro 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 10. 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. They call it the Kalinka. 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. See, one of the things that the Ukrainians have been doing is taking mobile Starlink terminals and putting them on things like sea, 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 15 kilometers, and one of the Sea Baby drones, they're pretty quick. 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 Kalinkas 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

Azerbaijanis had Turkish drones that they basically used to completely obliterate the entire armed forces of Armenia in the disputed territories in Nagorno-Korabaa. 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'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 Kalinkas, and they basically just drove them around town, identified where all the Starlinks were, kicked in the door, shot 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 out classes the pre-existing systems. Iran is just a taste of what is to come on a global basis.