The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Warfare Innovations: Russia's Turtle Tanks || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: May 3, 2024

The Russians are playing dress up with their tanks and it might reveal where the future of military conflict is heading. Okay, "dress up" might not be the right term, but just google a picture of the Russian turtle tanks to get an idea of what I'm talking about. Full Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/warfare-innovations-russias-turtle-tanks

Hey everybody, Peter Zine here coming to you from Snowy, Colorado. Today we're going to talk about a military innovation on the Russian side of the Ukraine war. You guys may have seen some of the videos and the photos, but they have something that's now called a turtle tank, where they take a tank, and they put it in this turtle-like shell of armor that covers the entire thing to the point that the turret can't even rotate. The idea is to make it relatively drone-proof. It looks silly, and obviously some of the earlier iterations were destroyed quickly. But the Russians have continued to innovate it because they need it.

It's serving a very real battlefield purpose. So because of what happened with the U.S. Congress, it's been months since the Ukrainians have gotten meaningful military assistance from the United States. And in that sort of environment, they've been forced to go kind of a do-it-yourself program. And so instead of relying on more traditional things like tanks and missiles, long-range drones and artillery, they've basically been cranking out thousands, tens of thousands of anti-personnel drones that only weigh a couple pounds every month. And while one of those is probably not going to take out a tank, a couple that get to the right spot can maybe damage a tread and immobilize a vehicle and then allow other methods to go in and take it out. well in that same sort of environment if they don't have a lot of artillery then the russians can mass forces and make big pushes into ukrainian positions the turtle tank is a way for the russians of dealing

with both of those issues so if there isn't a lot of artillery then the tanks can be in clusters with infantry and get a lot closer to the ukrainian positions more or less safely And then by putting all this shell of armor on it, the anti-personnel mines can't damage the treads, no matter how many you throw at it. There still might be some gaps in the armor because you know you have to be able to see, but it's a much different situation

where the Ukrainians would have to throw two, three, four hundred things at one tank in order to stop it as opposed to just a half a dozen before. In addition, the Russians are putting protection on the bottom of the tank so they can serve as kind of slapdash mine clearing devices as well. So the idea is you take

a couple of these turtle tanks and push directly into Ukrainian positions going right through the mines that the Ukrainians have dropped, basically ignoring the anti-personnel drones that's getting thrown at them. And then behind those tanks you have vehicles that are carrying infantry. So it's designed

to basically provide direct access to the Ukrainian positions and all the while the Russians hitting those Ukrainian positions with artillery and glide bombs. So it's not a stupid strategy at all. The question is whether it is sustainable, whether it's going to be necessary in the future. A couple things to keep in mind here. We are kind of in a position like we were in the U.S. Civil War, where the whole new raft of military technologies becoming available, and we're seeing how they do and do not mesh with the technologies what we already had. So regardless of what you think

of either side of the Ukraine war, studying how both sides are adapting to this new reality is something that is going to educate us all on the nature of military conflict moving forward. So this is a big deal. And what the Russians are doing is they're basically inventing a new style of warfare. Whether or not this specific type of weapon system is going to last, probably not. The only reason that the turtle tank is viable is because the Ukrainians don't have artillery. And now that the U.S. Congress has finally acted and weapon systems are being flown in up most first and foremost, including a lot of artillery shells. You should expect things like this to just be lit up as targets very soon.

So this specific weapon system might not be the harbinger of things to come, but it's certainly represented of a whole class of weapons systems that are going to be invented from scratch during the remainder of this war.