The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - The Marines Made Some New Toys: Tomahawks on Trucks || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: August 28, 2023

Today, we're talking about a bunch of marines in trucks, with four Tomahawks strapped to each truck. I agree if that sounds like a random G.I. Joe creation to you. But this is a relatively new capability for the US, so let me explain how we got here. Full Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/marines-get-tomahawks-on-trucks

Hey everybody, Peter Zine here coming to you from Colorado, and today we're going to talk about another way that China might die and some other things. Now, for those of you who are familiar with my position on China, no surprise, demographics are in advanced stages of collapse. We're looking at the final decade of any economic model that humans have ever invented being able to work in a system where they're simply running out of people. That's before you consider that China is the country most dependent upon the U.S. Navy to keep the sea lanes open, and it's completely dependent upon important. of raw materials from a world away and markets for their products that are also a world away. So there's nothing about this as a stable. But I'm talking about a much sharper, shorter end. I have never been shy about my respect for the U.S. Navy and its ability to shut down and destroy the Chinese system in a very short period of time measured in days to weeks,

simply because the Chinese don't have reach or range. There are other countries that fall to that general category. Japan has a blue water fleet with more range than China. allowing the Japanese to shut down the Chinese system with the got anywhere close to them. India sits astride all of the trade lanes between Europe and Asia and the Persian Gulf and Asia, so they can easily shut off the energy connection.

And with the new security deal between the Americans, the Brits and the Australians, the Australians now have mid-range cruise missiles air-launched that can shut down the Strait of Malacca. So the Australians can do it too. But things have changed now to that even a small group of Marines out of the United States can do it.

it. Now, the brains are some terrifying folks. You definitely don't want them to be on the other side. But one of the things I love about them is because they don't have their own independent research budget to develop ships or tanks or planes or whatever that, they tend to use hand-me-downs from the other services and then they innovate and do a little bit of a redesign and repurposing and find fundamentally new ways to use the technology. And basically, what seems to have happened in Washington is some high up in the military said, you know, we've seen what the Marines

can do with a rifle or a tank or a ship. Let's see what they can do with a Tomahawk missile. Now, a Tomahawk missile is a typically a sea-launched cruise missile, either from a surface ship or from a submarine that has a range of about a thousand miles as GPS

guided with a thousand pound conventional bomb. They made their first big splashy debut in the wars in Iraq and the early part of... No, not the early part of... In the 1990s, sorry. Loss a decade there.

And have proven to be a reliable tool ever since because, you know, you put them on a ship, ship goes wherever it wants to, and then it has a thousand mile range, and then it hits within a couple of meters of what it's aiming at. You know, it's just phenomenal accuracy. Well, the Marines have figured out

how to put it on a truck. And the first battery, It's a truck that carries four of these things was commissioned just in the last week and it typically is followed by a quad of additional trucks that have four each. So basically batteries of four, 20 missiles total per unit.

So now all the Marines have to do is get dropped off somewhere with some roads. And they've got 20 trucks they can use to attack whatever they want anywhere. On sea, on land, whatever, it is arguably the single most important military evolution that I have seen in the U.S. military in the last 40 years. I mean, supertankers are cool. Don't get me wrong. The new F-35 is an impressive piece of hardware. But allowing a few dozen dudes to have five trucks and shut down an international waterway or hit hardened facilities hundreds of miles away, that is a fundamentally new piece of versatility in the American military arsenal.

And it is, of course, like everyone in the Marines will tell you, whenever we come up with a good idea, the army steals it and produces it at scale. And the army has already started doing that. So we're going to take one of the more longer-reach weapon systems that the Americans have and basically apply it in mass across the services. Now, if you're looking for someone to blame for this, blame the Russians. the United States has specifically refrained from doing this

because of something called the intermediate missile forces treaty, which was signed with the Soviets back in the 80s. And it basically said that the United States and the Russians would refrain from developing land-based intermediate ranged missiles as part of confidence building. But over the last 15 years, the Russians a bit by bit backed away from that treaty before basically abrogating it altogether a few years ago.

And that freed the United States. to follow in their footsteps. Here's the thing, though. When this first went down, everyone was talking about the weakness of the United States that we had specifically hobbled ourselves on a specific technology, which was true. The Russians' research budget is less than 1% the size of the U.S.

Now, the Russians going into this didn't have a very good intermediate missile technology force in the first place, and as we've seen in the Ukraine war, it's not performing to snuff. The Chinese, of course, were not bound by this treaty, and so they were researching a lot of things in this area. But now here we are less than five years later, and the United States is in the process of mass expanding

a well-known, well-functioning, very high-performing weapon system in mass across the Marines first and then the army. This isn't a contest, folks, and we've already demonstrated that we can produce these things at scale, and now we're deploying them at scale too. So I guess the lesson here is if you want to, Get out of a restriction that the Americans have put you in via treaty.

Just keep in mind that the Americans will also be removing those restrictions from themselves. They have a larger military. They've got more money. They've got more technology. And ultimately, they can research and implement solutions a lot faster than anyone else. And so we have. All right. That's it. Take care.