The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Ukraine's New Drone Killer: The Octopus || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: November 25, 2025

Yet another innovation has come from the Ukraine War. We're talking drone-on-drone warfare. Codename: Octopus.Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihanFull Newsletter: https://bit.ly/4nXW8gV

Hey Al, Peter Zine here, coming to you from Colorado. Today, we're going to talk about a new drone technology that you're probably going to be hearing about pretty soon. It's called the octopus. It's a Ukrainian design, and unique among drones to this point, it is designed to hunt drones. So the situation that Ukrainians are in is they basically face three kinds of threats from the Russians when it comes to the air. Threat number one are missiles, primarily a mix of hypersonic. ballistic, which can be and are intercepted by a variety of air defense systems up to and including the American Patriots. And it's not that the Russians don't know how to make good missiles or

anything, but what we've seen in the last three years, even their best ones, even their supersonic ones, can be taken down by a patriot pretty reliably. Doesn't mean that anyone should rest on their laurels or anything, but that threat has, to a degree, been addressed. The second category are something called glide bombs. And that are just what they sound like. A Russian jet drops the bomb from over here. It has a thin kid on it, and the bomb glides upwards of 15 to 20 miles so that you can't really intercept it.

It doesn't have a lot of guidance, if any, on it, aside from the thins. And the only way you can stop those is to push back the envelope where the jets are dropping from. In this, the Ukrainians have had some degree of success. They've got their own jets. They're getting F-16s from a number of NATO countries, and every once in a while, they regularly put their patriots on the front line to shoot down jets that come too close.

It's not a perfect system, but it is something that has been partially addressed. And the third and the most problematic category are cheap mass-produced drones, specifically the Shaheds that are designed in Iran. Used to all be made in Iran and shipped to Russia. Now, the Russians have their own assembly and manufacturing capacity out further east away from the front.

Shaheds cost somewhere between, oh, based on the model and the number that they're making $20,000 to $90,000 for the most part. And the problem with shaheds, well, pros and cons. First, the cons of the shahed. They're so cheap that they really don't have much for optics or sensors or compute power at all. So what happens is the Russians program in specific coordinates, and the shahed flies there and crashes at those coordinates. So whenever you see that the Russians have hit a school or a mall or a hospital or an apartment complex, they actually programmed in those specific coordinates. So every strike is a war crime.

Second, because they're so cheap, the Russians can field at first a few, then a few dozen, and now more recently a few hundred. And the understanding is that by the end of this year, the Russians will be producing these things in the thousands of units per month. And so very soon the Ukrainians are going to be dealing with thousands of these at a time in a single assault. And defending against that is almost impossible with all the technologies we have right now. Because if you're going to use an anti-missile missile, that is expensive. Each missile costs significantly more than the Shahed does. And you now need hundreds, if not thousands of them. And most countries don't even have that kind of volume in their arsenal. So that leaves you with things like machine guns. And why,

While there are a couple things out there that work great, they're point defense, and they can't roam and hunt. So what the Ukrainians are doing with the octopus drones is an attempt to build a small, cheap drone that can go out as the shaheds are on their way in and basically work through their way through formation, pick them off one at a time. And the idea is that the shaheds cost more than the defensive drones than the octopus. That's the theory. Well, at work, we'll see. The Ukrainians, because this is an operational weapon system, are not providing really much of anything in terms of details as to the range and the cost and all that good stuff. But a few things that we know have to be true.

Number one, unlike the shot heads, which don't have really a processing memory at all, you're going to need both a GPU and a microprocessor in the octopus drones because they have to be able to perceive and hunt. You need the GPU for decision-making capacity. You need the microcontroller for low latency. see, those two chips together probably cost, call it 40 bucks for the GPU and probably another 20 bucks for the microprocessor. These are things that shaheds don't have because they're stupid drugs.

That's still not very expensive. And if you're talking about something with a relatively limited reach that can hunt something that's flying 100, 120 miles an hour, it's theoretically possible that you could drop the cost of that to below the shahed because a shahed has to fly several hundred miles

before it gets to its target. So a very different profile for the type of weapon system it has. Also, if you have a decent-ish, we're talking 14 nanobiner, don't get crazy, decent-ish GPU along with some dram memory. Probably NAND memory. Ukraine's, yeah, let's go with NAND. Quick difference. Dram is faster and can store more, but it loses all of its memory when it's powered down. NAND doesn't store nearly as much. It's not nearly as quick, but you can like leave it on the shelf for a couple of months and nothing's going to happen to the date on it. Anyway,

you throws a bunch of these against a fleet of incoming shaheds, and if they miss the first one, they just go for the second one and so on. Anyway, according to the Ukrainians, these are already in mass production producing over a thousand units a month. And if this is true and if it works, it is going to change the face of warfare in the drone age. At this point, drones fall into two categories. Those that can self-target kind of like the shaheds, but because GPUs are very subject to vibration and heat and moisture. They're not hard and you can't get a good GPU in it to do any real decision-making. Just basically they get to the point of arrival. They look around. The first thing that they see that hits their target set,

they go for that. That's it. That's as smart as it gets. Or you have a live link back to a controller or a data center and someone else is making the decision and programming it step by step. In the first one, you don't get a lot of accuracy. In the first one, you don't get a lot of accuracy. The second one, you might get great accuracy, but it's very easy to jam. So to this point, aside from shooting it down, the only defenses that the Ukrainians or anyone has is to be really good with jammers, and the Ukrainian jammers are now the best in the world. Far better than American jammers. If you can have a counter-dron drone that's inexpensive, that changes the math again.

It provides an entirely new type of defense that countries can use to protect against drone onslaughts and probably changes the math of these cheap mass-produced drones that the Russian and the Iranians are doing. Anyway, we're going to know before the end of the year whether this thing works or not, and then we start an entirely new sort of drone race with a fundamentally new type of defense.