The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Ukraine (And Everyone Else) Develops Glide Bombs || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: September 24, 2025

Ukraine has added glide bombs to its list of military ordnance, enabling Ukraine to send modified dumb bombs up to 100km away.Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihanFull Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/ukraine-and-everyone-else-develops-glide-bombs

Hey all, Peter Zine here, coming to you from Colorado. And today we're going to talk about a change in military tech that just happened in Ukraine. Specifically, there are factions of the Ukrainian military industrial complex that are now putting together glide bombs. A glide bomb is basically when you've got an old dumb bomb that you put a guidance kit on that has kind of wings on it. And so instead of dropping it, it kind of glides to the target. And the Ukrainian prototypes that are being tested right now indicate that they can go upwards of 100 kilometers,

about 60 miles, which is well beyond the front lines. Why this matters. The Ukrainians have been on the receiving end of glide bombs these last couple of years. The Russians have converted several of their old Soviet bombs, which are typically much larger than the ones the U.S. uses. We use 500-pound bombs. Sometimes they use 500-kilob bombs. Sometimes there's even 1,000 kilo bombs.

Anyway, they drop them from outside of air defense capability. They drop them from within their air superiority envelope. So they just have basically, modified dumb bombs coming in that can't be intercepted, and some of the bigger ones when they hit have a blast radius that's more than a quarter of a mile. And so you drop a dozen or so of these in the general vicinity of a fortification, and then Russian forces can then move in. That's how they've been used to this point.

The Ukrainians probably won't be using them the same way because they don't have the manpower that's necessary to penetrate the Russian lines, and there's multiple layers of minefields as well, making that more difficult. So they use it against things like supply depots and convoys. but the Ukrainian is already doing that with first-person drones. So the ability to change the battlefield in Ukraine by Ukraine having some of these is probably pretty limited. The targeting sequences are probably just not going to be as robust

as it might be for the other side for a country that is more likely to be on the attack. The Ukrainians are typically on the defense. So it's not that there's no utility. It's just not a game changer. Also, there's just the amount of effort that it takes to build one and test it because every prototype is destroyed

as opposed to like a first-person drone where you can fly it back and forth without actually having it blow up to make sure it works and you can get new iterations every month. This one will probably take a little bit longer. But it still has a huge impact, just not in Ukraine and everywhere else. The issue here is that the United States

has had a de facto monopoly on this sort of technology for decades. Here we call them J-DAMS, joint direct attack munitions. We took our old Cold War bombs, Put a GPS kit and some vins on it and do precision targeting. And through the 1990s, the U.S. had a total monopoly. These were first debuted during the first Iraq War, Desert Storm back in 1992, and then have been incrementally upgraded since then.

But really, it wasn't until as recently as five years ago that any other country in the world had their own. Well, the Russians developed their own last year, and now Ukraine, a country that is much smaller, with a much smaller technical base and industrial base, has them as well. And if Russia and Ukraine can have them, you know that it's just a matter of choice before countries like Korea, both of them. Japan, Taiwan, China, Thailand, Vietnam, Singapore, Malaysia, Australia, Canada, pretty much every country in NATO, Brazil, Argentina, Algeria, Israel, obviously.

I don't know if Iran could do it, but the United Arab Emirates could. Anyway, the point is, there is a long list of countries where this is no longer. technical barrier. And the technology that the United States has had a complete monopoly on this last generation, which has allowed it to shape strategic environments around the world, is now gone. And it's only a matter of time, probably months, not even years, before we see copycat versions of the Russian and now the Ukrainian versions popping up in a half a dozen different countries, and within five years they will be everywhere. Which means if the United States is going to maintain its military posture of having a global position without really any meaningful pushback,

it's going to need new technological tricks to do that. Most likely, combined with the Trump administration's backing away from every alliance we have, this means that the United States is going to vacate militarily large portions of the planet and just let the chips fall where they may. Now, for those of you who have been following my work for the last decade, you will know that this was in some version probably going to happen because of American political considerations anyway, but we're now set up that technologically U.S. cannot just leave because it wants to, it's going to be technologically pushed out from certain areas. And the question now is where first,

and it's too soon to have an answer to that question. There's too many decisions that have to be made up at the White House that color where the map is going to go blue and where it's going to go red. But bottom line, the era of American strategic primacy with global reach, that is now over. And it's now a question about managing the withdrawal and dealing with the consequences of that.