The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Underwater Drones and the Future of Naval Warfare || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: May 1, 2026

Drones have been all the rage in the Ukraine War, and they will continue to be one of the primary topics of warfare in the near future, but do underwater drones have any place in this conversation? Note: This video was recorded last year during one of Peter's backpacking trips. Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihan Full Newsletter: https://bit.ly/4cIBvlr

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And because you're a listener, you get 20% off your first order. Just head to mood.com. That's M-O-O-D.com to get started. Hey, all, Peter Zion here coming to you from Lost Canyon. Got a little interesting stuff I'm going to have to climb through tomorrow, but you know that's tomorrow's problem. Today we are taking a question from the Patreon page and it's specifically about drones, specifically underwater drones.

And the question is, as de-globalization really kicks in, do I expect underwater drones to play a role in some of the major things that are coming like the disincooperation of China or perhaps Korean unification? Probably not. Unlike airborne drones, underwater drones are missing a couple key factors and its range and detection radius. The technologies that have allowed airborne drones to do their thing, better optics, better power management, lighter materials really don't change the math

for an underwater weapons platform. They can't see any further than they did before. The range is limited by the fuel type. It's having a little bit bigger battery isn't going to do all that much of a difference and being able to get things to where they need to go, probably not a very big play. The only way that underwater drones might, might see bigger plays are as if they were dropped off by submarines closer to their targets, but you know what we call those normally? Torpedoes. We already have that technology, so we're not really doing much here. We're just kind of reinventing the wheel. Now, that's underwater drones. That doesn't mean that maritime drones aren't moving forward and don't have a role to play, but it'll probably be surface drones.

One of the things that the Ukrainians have shown us is they can take a jet ski or a small motorboat, pack it with explosives, basically strap a control system to the steering column, and off it goes with five, six, seven hundred pounds of boom boom. And when it hits a ship, that ship has a big problem. And using water drones, maritime drones, surface drones, Ukrainians have done an immense amount of damage to the Russian Navy because pretty much all of the weapon systems that are on traditional naval vessels are designed to shoot up at things like planes. They are not designed to shoot down at things that are in the water. And so we've seen the Russians basically have to defend their vessels with dudes on the deck with machine guns and RPGs and it's not a very effective

thing. So if you take maritime drones and introduce them into constrained waters like say the Taiwan straight or the Japan straight. All of a sudden you do have a very different sort of system because these sorts of drones do have ranges of a few hundred miles already and that's just by retrofitting platforms like jet skis that already exist. As soon as you start taking the technologies that the Ukrainians have built and use them on a completely new chassis you can have a lot more range and they were talking about a fundamentally different system. And if you're talking about defending a civilian vessel in that sort of environment, that's going to get a lot harder. At least naval vessels have the possibilities of having jamming and having things like a ready

supply of RPGs. Now, this does bring us to another topic that we're going to have to find out the hard way, and that's the general militarization of cargo ships, because it's coming soon. There are not, not, not, not, not enough military vessels on the planet to be able to patrol the sea lanes to a degree that would be necessary for the type of security breakdown that we're facing. So the only way we're going to be able to maintain even a modicum of globalized trade is if cargo ships, whether they're container ships or bulkers or tankers themselves, are able to mount their own weapons systems. And that will also most likely be airborne drones because it's the only thing that can be the radius

and maybe the strike capacity to take out something like a surface drone before it gets to you.