The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Russia’s Ukraine War Lessons Are Hitting the Gulf || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: March 20, 2026

Russia is taking what they've learned on the battlefield in the Ukraine War and sharing that with Iran. This is not a new strategy for the Russians, but it is already spelling trouble for the US. Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihan Full Newsletter:

Okay, today we're going to talk about drone targeting specifically in the context of Iran and the Shaheeds. So last week we learned, no shock to anyone who's been paying attention, that the Russians have been providing the Iranians with targeting information since the beginning of the war. The Russians have been providing all of America's foes with targeting information going back to the early days of the war on terror. That's not a surprise. But what's come out in the last 24 hours, roughly, is the degree to which the Russians are sharing their war lessons. that they've learned at the expense of the Ukrainians in the Ukraine war. So the weapon system in play is an Iranian Shaheed. It's a really stupid drone where you have a small NAND chip.

That's a slow memory chip that doesn't necessarily require power to hold onto its memory. You program in a preset parameter, pre-sent flight route, and it flies from A to B following the course you've identified. And then if it's a really advanced Shahid and most of them aren't, it then can execute a very limited decision tree. Like, is this a car? Is that a boat? Is that a tree? What do I want to hit? And it'll try to hit one of those things. Otherwise, it just kind of angles down and crashes into something.

Well, what the Russians have learned is that if they take their shaheds and fly them in groups and batches, that not only ensures that one of them will get through air defense, it makes it actually harder for the air defense to pick out an individual target. So oftentimes you have to fire more interceptors than you would. if they just came at you one at a time. The additional thing that the Russians are sharing is kind of a weave strategy. Because you can pre-program in the route, what you do is you pre-program in a slightly different route for each head, so they kind of weave in and out of formation, up down, left, right, whatever it happens to be. That makes it much harder for air defense to kind of get a lock, and you have to use even more interceptors. And we now know that that specific strategy that they developed for

dealing with the Ukrainians has now been applied to Iranian shaheds that are being used against American and allied targets in the Persian Gulf. The issue here, of course, is pretty straightforward and short term. The Western Gulf is running out of interceptors and anything that forces the defenders to use more and more of them while the shaheds just keep coming. It means that the time where they actually run out of anti-drone weaponry is coming upon us very, very quickly, perhaps as little as a week or two. We don't know the specific number because the Western Gulfies are considered the number of interceptors they have used and the number they have left to be National Security Secret, so it's kind of just a guessing game. But there were only about 2,000

of them total. At the beginning of the war, the war's been going on for two weeks and we know that the Iranians have fired at least 2,000 sheheads at this point probably closer to 3,000, and they just keep coming. So we're very close to the point where the Western Gulf is going to run out of defensive firepower and courtesy of the Russians, they're going to have pretty good targeting information to just come on in and hit whatever they want.