The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Ukrainian Drones: A New Issue for Russia and China || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: September 1, 2023

The super moon (or blue moon or whatever it was) didn't have just the animals stirring last night...and since I couldn't sleep, I figured we should talk about Ukraine's recent drone attack and its ramifications.Full Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/ukrainian-drone-attack

Hey everyone, Peter Zion here coming to you from Colorado. It is early in the morning on August 31. It's the supermoon and the woods are kind of crazy with the animals and I couldn't sleep. Whenever I can't sleep, I just kind of let my mind wander and see where it goes. So I'll let you to be the judge of whether this makes any sense or not. Yesterday, my time, on the 30th, the Ukrainians launched their largest ever drone assault on Russian positions across the length and the breadth of Western Russia, at least a half a dozen different locations, some of which were several hundred miles from the Ukrainian border, doing a moderate amount of damage to a few things and taking out some long-range aircraft, specifically the IL-76 long-range transport

aircraft that the Russians used to transport paratroopers. They've been building in terms of their drone attacks doing more and more further and further, and a couple weeks ago they took out a couple backfire bombers, which are long-range bombers, which launch long-range cruise missiles, which were designed to shoot at American carrier battle groups and military convoys in the North Atlantic, you know, all very long-range aircraft, strategic aircraft. And it occurs to me as I was lying there in bed that we may have hit a turning point in the war, not on the Ukraine front, but on every other front that matters. Let me kind of dial that back and explain what I mean. Russia is not a normal country. It's not a unitary republic like France or a federated country like the United States.

Instead, it's a multi-ethnic empire. The Russians have never really had territory that is, from their point of view, secure. So what they do is they expand through the flats of Western Eurasia, absorbing ethnic group after ethnic group, until they reach a series of geographic barriers that you can't push through easily, like the Carpathians. So this is one of the reasons why I've always thought that this war in Ukraine, was inevitable because the Russians are trying to rebuild that outer crustal defense that they had during the Cold War. And with their own demographic decline, if they don't do this while they still are

able to feel the large army, they are looking at collapse over the course of the next 10 to 30 years. This is all about buying time for them. So from a strategic point of view, the war makes sense, a lot of sense. That logic works both ways, however. In order to maintain control of a multi-ethnic empire, you have to have a really deep intelligence system that, that monitors the population for any sign of dissent, and then you rapidly rush troops to any areas where there is a rebellion in order to quash them, which means that the Russians don't simply need long-range power projection capability in order to fight NATO or China or Japan or anyone else. They need it simply to hold their country together.

And over the course of the last month, especially on the 30th, the Ukrainians have demonstrated that the strategic deployment assets, those IL-76s, those backfires, that the Russians needs simply to maintain their national coherence are now being threatened. So everything that I've said about the Ukraine war to this point, I think still stands. But we now need to consider that an aspect of the Ukraine war is that Ukraine is demonstrating that Russia proper might not be sustainable even if they win the war in Ukraine. And that is something that has got to have a lot of people and a lot of capitals stroking their chins thoughtfully, because the Ukrainian didn't do this with NATO weaponry. The United States, NATO, everyone else, they're refusing to provide

the Ukrainians with weapons that could be used for deep strike capability within Russia because they don't want to risk any sort of nuclear exchange. This Ukraine did this by themselves, and Ukraine did not start this war with a drone fleet, much less a long range one. This is stuff that they built with off-the-shelf commercial components primarily from China, you know, irony of ironies. And if you can do that by basically shopping at Walmart, then the stability, the very existence of the Russian state is all of a sudden called into very serious question just from an internal coherence point of view. And there's issues about this that carry over outside of the theater of the Ukraine War of Russia. And I'm talking here about China because over the course of the last couple days, there's been a lot of noise out of the American Pentagon, specifically from Admiral Hicks, about something called the replicator initiative, which is to take off the shelf inexpensive. commercial-grade drone technology and make literally thousands, if not tens of thousands of attack

drones that can be used to basically sink the entire Chinese Navy. They've seen in Ukraine how effective this strategy can be. Supposedly, they've already built the technical specs for what they want, and they hope to have the entire fleet deployed in under two years. Now, a couple things to remember about the Chinese side of things. Yes, the Chinese have a very large Navy in terms of number of ships, about twice the size of the American Navy. Now, the American Navy still classes it. We have much larger ships with much larger ranges, and most of them are centered around the aircraft carrier battle groups. China has nothing like that. But the biggest restriction the Chinese face is the ability to operate far from shore. About 90% of the ships can't operate

more than a thousand miles. So you're talking about most of them operating within the first island chain of Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, and so on. The East China Seas, the South China Seas. Well, if the United States has these long-range legacy ships that can operate over a thousand miles from their adversaries and just poke at them, first with fighter craft, then with bombers, and now apparently with drones, then you've basically turned the entire East Asian littoral into a graveyard for the entire Chinese Navy. The biggest problem, as Admiral Hicks point out, is that the Chinese have mass, a lot of ships, a lot of people. But if you throw a thousand drones at it, all of a sudden, that's not so much of a problem. problem. And the irony of ironies, the Americans are going to be using off-the-shelf commercially

available drone tech for this. Most of that comes from China. So the U.S. military is going to be mass sourcing from China the very systems that are necessary to end China. And the only way that China could stop that is by stopping exporting drone parts, which would mean, you know, destroying a section of their economy right now, which we would probably be fine with if that is the retaliation. The United States gets a lot of crap sometimes, for good reason, for investing in weapons systems that maybe were designed to fight the previous war. But the Chinese have done that too. And they now have a very large fleet of vessels that is simply incapable of dealing with the American military as it is now,

much less one that might have additional backbone because of something like the replicator initiative. Okay. I'm going to go try to sleep again now. I hope everybody has a great night. Take care. Thank you.