The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - The Revolution in Military Affairs: Series Intro || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: June 18, 2025

Today, we're launching into our new series on the future of military affairs. Before we get into what is coming, let's first discuss what past revolutions in warfare have looked like.Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihanFull Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/the-revolution-in-military-affairs-series-intro

Hey all, Peter Zine here coming to you from Nashville, Tennessee, right outside the Country Music Hall of Fame. Today we're launching a fresh series on the future of military technology and specifically how it's going to change strategic efforts by various countries and the policy that goes along with it. And before we can go forward, we need to take a big step back and understand the last couple of major revolutions in military affairs. The first one really begins with the dawn of the industrial era and how the advancement of things like gunpowder and steel electricity started to interface with the way we ran the military. And the conflicts in question are the Crimean War of the 1850s and the American Civil War of the 1860s. In both of these conflicts, we saw technologies that had been percolating for decades suddenly

come into their own in a very real way where they could be mass produced as opposed to individually crafted. And it changed the nature of war ever since. This includes things like rifling muskets to give them better range and faster reloads and lower a breach chance. This includes the early efforts with the telegraph for mass communication and sending information to and for very quickly, the railroads for the rapid distribution of troops, field hospitals to prevent casualties from turning into fatalities, and of course things like the ironclad which gave rise to modern navies. In all of these cases, if you were using a pre-industrial military force and you came up against these forces, you were pretty much wiped out. The ratios were absolutely horrific and the more militarized

of the countries did better. So this is not just having a little technological edge. This is operating the fundamentally different technological era. Stone Age versus Bronze Age versus Iron Age versus sedentary agriculture versus industrialization. It was one of those kind of seminal jumps that redefined what was possible. The Crimean War I think is particularly instructive because you saw the early industrial powers, most notably the Brits and the French, going against a completely unindustrialized power, primarily Russia. And they laid a few miles of rail track and set up a couple of field hospitals, and that alone was enough to absolutely gut the Russians.

The Russians simply could not maneuver fast enough to keep up with what the Brits could do via rail on the Crimean Peninsula. That's phase one. The phase two of the Revolution of Military Affairs happened much more recently in the 1980. and then into the early 1990s, which digitization, basically taking the computer and applying it to military technology. This started out in the Gulf War in a very big way with things that we call J-DAMs now, joint direct attack munitions where you take a relatively dumb bomb, put a fin kit on it, and a GPS locator can hit within about 10 meters of its target. We've obviously gotten better since that. That against the Iraqi army, the Iraqis had no chance. Then you throw in things like not just

satellite reconnaissance, but satellite communications and you get cruise missiles and all the fun things that come from that direction. And that is now kind of the leading edge of what is possible with the U.S. military today. And again, when we hit this point at the end of the Cold War, there was no competitor. And so every country that the United States came across was two, maybe even three generations of weapons behind. And there really hasn't been a fair fight since, unless the United States is in a situation where its advantages are denied it, like, say, in a long-term occupation in a place like Iraq or Afghanistan. We are now at the verge of something new.

In the last five years, we've had ever-mounting breakthroughs in a number of sectors that are not related to military technology, most notably digitization, energy transfer, and material science. And those three building revolutions are combining to generate an entirely new form of warfare, of which drones are only the very leading edge. We don't know where this is going to go. We don't know what the military technologies are going to look like in 10, 20, 40 years. But we do know from previous periods that when the old technology comes up against the new technology,

things get really exciting really quickly because either the new stuff crashes and burns because it's inappropriate or not ready or the old stuff has destroyed and everyone has to rip up the playbook. It appears at this moment that it's going to be some version of the latter. In the Ukraine war to this point, about two-thirds of the fatalities that the Russians have suffered have been because of first-person drones, which is not even a particularly sophisticated technology that combines digitization, material science, and energy transfer. It hasn't gone into the second generation of technology yet. We're still basically mass-producing cheap things with a small explosives on it. Once the kinks get worked out, it is difficult to see any conventional military,

notably infantry and armor, surviving in the new environment unless they can develop their own countermeasures, which will mean an additional technological evolution. So we're nearing the point now where we need to start having the conversation as a country, as a culture, as a military, as to what it is that we want, what we're willing to pay to get it, and how big of a technological jump we're willing to take to try. Now, in this, the United States has a couple of advantages, number one, cash, number two, a existing military industrial complex that can always be retooled. But third and most importantly, at the moment we are not in a hot conflict, and the countries that we are most likely to be facing down, Russia, China, Iran are already in this technological shift.

So we get to watch what they do and learn a few things. In this, the Ukraine war is going to be most instructive because the Ukrainians have been at the vanguard of this entire transition process and are coming up against a much larger conventional military being supplied by the Ucranians. Chinese who are providing it bulk, and yet they're still there. And that should tell us a lot of what we need to know about the technological changes that are going to be sticking with us for the years to come. Bottom line, human race is about to experience a higher form of war. That means, of course, new weapons, but from that comes new everything else.