The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - The New Face of Military Technology || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: March 26, 2024

The new face of military technology is here...and no its not some Master Chief type suit running around the battlefield. We're talking about the democratization of tech applications and the empowerment of individual soldiers to make strategic decisions. Full Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/the-new-face-of-military-technology

Hey, everybody, Peter Zine here coming to you from Colorado. We're in the calm between the snowstorms. Got 40 inches last week. What we're going to get this weekend is four to six inches, almost seems like a rounding error in comparison. Anyway, 60 degrees, because Colorado. Today we're going to talk about the Revolution and Military Affairs that is now going through a second phase. So the first Revolution of Military Affairs happened in the 1990s and 2000s, when the United States started to marry information technologies to its military. It's a combination of sensors and targeting information, whether it's on the method of delivering the ordinance or in satellite or attached to the weapon itself. So, for example, joint direct attack emissions fall into that category, as do cruise missiles like the Tomahawk. Important stuff. And it basically took whatever explosive ordinance that you had and allowed you to deliver it to a target with a very high degree of accuracy.

So instead of having to carpet bomb things like we used to in Vietnam, in ages before. Now you just send one or two weapons out and hit the specific target that you're at. There was hawk for a good long time that if you marry precision weapons with hypersonics, that all of a sudden all of the rules of warfare go away and you can just have a handful of hypersonics to defend everything. And then we discovered things like jamming and the fact that people don't have one tank. They have 100,000 people in infantry and the math never just worked out. Hypersonics are just way too expensive. It's not. that they don't have a role to play. It's just that it's not the determining rule.

So, uh, that was kind of phase one. We're going through phase two now, which is the democratization of the application of these technologies. And so instead of it being controlled from the White House or from a general's chair, uh, individual soldiers are now getting command of this sort of information can use it to make targets on an autonomous basis. And we're seeing this, of course, most aggressively in Ukraine, mostly with drones. The Ukrainians are following a four-part strategy at the moment. I'm sure this is going to evolve quite a bit. Phase one is applying these drone technologies to things like jet skis

and loading them up with a couple hundred pounds of explosives and sending them out to target Russian naval vessels. That process has been so effective, as I've noted it, in earlier videos, that basically the western half of the Black Sea is now, completely no go for the Russian fleet. And most of their ships, especially the larger ones, simply can't shoot back

because anything that's installed on the deck of the ship is designed to hit the horizon or higher and it can't angle down to target these small boats in the water. So that's number one. Number two is actually something that's much more recent that has come up as a result of the problems with the American Congress getting conventional aid to Ukraine. The Ukrainians have had to find a way

to hold the line against the front. Russians when they're running out of artillery shells. And so what they've started doing is mass producing these very small drones that only have a payload of about a pound, which is about the size of a small grenade. And when the Russians do their human wave tactics, you just send a swarm of them out to go after anything that moves. And it's basically dropping grenades at range into massed infantry. They've done this to the point that in the Battle of Avodica, which the Ukrainians

technically lost, they were inflicting regularly eight and ten. 10 to 1 casualty ratios on the Russians, despite not having much artillery. So, anti-personnel. Number three is mid-range infrastructure strikes. The Ukrainians developed up a pair of drones called the Sithe and the Beaver. Of the two, the Beaver is far more technologically competent and has a much longer range and better aviotics, whereas the Sithe is basically a garage project that's practically made out of plywood.

It's a fugly little thing. carries a decent warhead, but less range. And they've been sending these out against any pieces of infrastructure in kind of the nearer broad, if you will, within a few hundred kilometers of the front line, and they've used it to target any number of things like refineries in the Russian space, but also fuel depots. And then finally, something where the Americans are getting in on the job

was something called the Phoenix Ghost. Now, the Phoenix Ghost only carries a fairly small warhead, typically five to 15 pounds. The advantage of the Phoenix Ghost is it's modular, and you can put it together on the fly, and it's light enough that one soldier can carry it. Now, originally, when the Phoenix Ghost started coming in, they were going after armored vehicles and supply trucks.

But the Ukrainians very, very quickly realized that because they were available in such small volume, and because they were so accurate, because unlike a lot of drones, these have a live visual feedback to the controller, they could basically put them in a backpack, send someone hiking or driving into Russia and a thousand miles from the front line take it out, put it together and send it against an unprotected target.

And most of the refinery attacks we have seen in Ukraine in recent, the recent two weeks maybe, are probably Ukrainian special forces operating with American-made Phoenix Ghost deep within the Russian interior. And this is getting pretty robust because at present, you know, we're talking about regularly a half a million to a million. million barrels per day of Russian refining capacity is taken offline. The issue is that these things are accurate enough that they can strike within just a couple of feet of what you're at because you can see where you're going.

And that allows the operators to target the sensitive spots in a refinery like the distillation tower where the parts that are really exploding get separated. And so if you target that bit, the parts that are really exploding get really exploding. And repairing this is very difficult for the Russians because they stopped training engineers in large number over 30 years. years ago. Anyway, bottom line is that you're talking about interrupting an income flow for the Russians that is typically about 8% of government revenues, which is more than what, say, the U.S. federal government as a percentage of the budget, collects in terms of corporate taxes.

So big line item. And if you destroy the ability of the Russians to process crude, that means there's no place for the crude to go because the pipeline system is already filled to maximum. And then you talk about pressure building back up the pipes and then having problems, everything, through their midstream right up to the point of production and they might even have to shut some in. And since they don't have the engineers to turn it back on, that would be that. Anyway, so we're getting a combination of strategic warfare,

naval warfare, infantry warfare, economic warfare, that didn't seem possible as little as three months ago and now they're all very much in play with most of these drones, 100% Ukrainian-born specials. Now, this, in my mind, evokes something very similar

to what happened in the American Civil War and in the Crimean campaign of the 1850s, when you had Europeans engaging in early industrial warfare and then sending observers to watch the Americans duke it out where they were watching the Americans engage in early to mid-industrial warfare. There's a lot of reasons for a lot of countries to now send observers into Ukraine, even if they're not providing a lot of aid,

because this is a fundamentally new technological breakthrough. We understand today that the first phase of the revolution in military affairs took what was a relatively lumbering Cold War defense industry that the United States had and turned it into something with extreme range and extreme precision. We're now keeping that precision and marrying it to individual decision making with not tens, not hundreds, but tens of thousands of, of individual weapons platforms that can be launched in a relatively short period of time, and they're decentralized.

Now, there are pros and cons to that, but being able to have individuals target enemy formations at scale over a thousand mile front, and then hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of miles away from the front, that is something we have never seen ever in any warfare, in any age, and we are only at the very beginning of understanding just how transformative that is going to be. Thank you.