The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - The Future of Drone Tech: Naval Launch Platforms || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: June 9, 2026

Naval drone warfare is nothing new, but the Ukrainians are now finding ways to spice up the Sea Babies and MAGURA drones.Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihanFull Newsletter: https://bit.ly/4g482W9

Hey everybody. Good morning from Rome, where the building that I'm staying in is, if you can see this curve here, the converted interior of a 2,200-year-old Roman bathhouse. The bathhouse is gone, but they recycle everything here over the years. Anyway, today we're continuing on with the drone series, nude military technologies that are in the process of being unveiled and used right now. And today we're going to talk about naval drones. Naval drones aren't new. The Ukrainians have been using them against the Russians really since the start of the war, especially the second year.

The sea baby is the primary variant. There's also something called the Magura that has a pretty good track record. The idea is you basically take a small boat or a jet ski or something like that, hook it up to an automated system, and pilot it remotely. The advantage of a sea drone, of course, is weight.

You can put a bomb that weighs several hundred pounds in it and then send it on its way. And because most vessels don't have the ability to shoot down at things that are in the water, they're designed to shoot at other ships. Really, all they can do is put some people on the deck with machine guns or RPGs or something like that and try to take shots as they come in. And so the Ukrainians have had immense success with these. The problem is simply range. And you can solve that with more fuel tanks to a certain degree, so we've seen a number of attacks that have gone quite a distance, even going as far as Noverosysk, which is the major Russian port on the Black Sea, and has made the Russian Navy's position

at places like Steverpool completely untenable, and so the Russian Navy has actually had to evacuate from Crimea. That's all old stuff. What's new, what's happened in just the last month, is that the Ukrainians have now regularized the installment of aerial drones on naval drones. See, one of the fun things about naval drones is because they're on the water, they're really hard to interrupt with electronic warfare and jamming. So you can basically get right up to your target, whether it's a port or a ship, before there's any danger of it being interrupted. Whereas an aerial drone, if it's flying in, sometimes it gets within a kilometer or a couple hundred meters of a target.

and the ECM that the Russians use will then interrupt the signal and the thing will crash. That's one of the reasons why these new memory drones are so important because they get around that by giving decision-making to the drone in the terminal phase. With naval drones, there's really no chance of them being intercepted along the way. So what the Ukrainians have done is have built canisters that are incorporated into these sea drones, and when they get to a certain point, maybe 10, 20 kilometers away, They then eject aerial drones that are technically first person drones controlled by a pilot, and those fly in to target things, which means that if you put it on a fiber optic tether,

which they are, you get somewhere between a 10 and a 50 kilometer range where you can send smaller drones out by about a half a dozen at a time. A couple of things that have already happened. Number one, they've got these canisters to launch them, so this isn't an experimental technology already. It's already in full deployment. The Ukraine's just kind of sprung it on everybody just a few weeks ago, which is causing a lot of havoc. Number two, you're limited in terms of payload because those FPV drones typically can only carry a payload of 10 pounds or less. So they're great for antipersonal or maybe even anti-vehicle, but you're not going to use them to blow up, say, a battleship.

But if you know what you're doing, you can target strategic pieces of ship, strategic pieces of refineries or ports and cause a lot of havoc. way that the Russians haven't yet to invent a technology to cope with, except for maybe a net. That only gets you so far. Third, and for the war at the moment, most importantly, there's a lot of naval frontage in play. If you remember from the early phases of the war, the Russians invaded from the east and the south with about 100,000 people, moving north from Crimea to the Kyrson area, and east from the territories that the Russians had captured in the last war back in 2014. all the way to the Neeper River and that whole southern and eastern front is in play to a certain degree.

Well, with these naval drones, the Ukrainian can now do whatever they want around Crimea and can go up the Neeper River and hit the Russians in any number of spots without having to first pre-position forces, much less drone pilots. They can use long-range transmission or even satellite communications to control the naval drone and then tether that through the existing telemetons. out through the fibroctic cables to the first-person drones. So the degree to which the Ukrainians just surprise assault, really anything, at this point, is only limited by the number of drones that they can have in the water.

Now, this does change the nature of the sea babies and things like them, because now they're becoming drone carriers as opposed to just suicide drones that will probably trigger a new evolution in the manufacture, because right now they're designed to be one way and that's it. But from an engineering point of view, that is actually a very, very, very... simple problem, taking a suicide drone, taking the explosive off of it, giving it more fuel, more range capacity, and then ultimately more of these canisters. That's something we're probably going to see within a month or two. I could almost do that in my garage and I'm kind of a

technical invalid when it comes to things like that. Anyway, big shifts in that space. That's it for now.