How Drones Are Changing Global Naval Power

Hello, everybody. Peter Zen here from Yosemite. Never mind, because I’ve been pushed back into my tent by a couple of thunder boomers in the last hour. Anyway, I thought I’d use Wednesday as an excuse to talk about the future of navies around the world. Since World War I, or really World War II, the aircraft carrier has been the backbone of everything that matters, largely because they can project power, and more conventional ships, like battleships, have to get into combat range, which is measured in miles or tens of miles, whereas an aircraft carrier can launch fighters and fighter-bombers from hundreds of miles away without being in harm’s way. That’s why the Soviets invested so much in trying to break through the American carrier perimeter with things like anti-aircraft guns or submarines, with questionable effect, but anyway, that was the goal. Now, for the last 30 years, the United States is the only one in town. There aren’t just aircraft carriers. The United States has supercarriers. It has 10 of what most countries would consider carriers, which are the core of the Marine Expeditionary Force, and then another 10 of the Nibbitz-class carriers, which outclass everyone else. One of those carriers has more projection-based firepower than any other navy in the world, except the Japanese and British navies, which are allies anyway, so big difference. And then of course the United States is floating three Ford-class carriers, which are going to be even more powerful. So from a conventional naval perspective, the United States is in a competition with all its laws and might as well be on its own planet. The question is whether that changes. One of the things we’ve seen in the wars in Ukraine is that the Ukrainians have been able to modify speedboats and literally jet skis with remote controls and put a couple of 100-pound or 500-pound bombs on them and detonate them. And in doing so, they have essentially sunk or disabled the vast majority of the Russian Black Sea Navy. It’s actually worse than it sounds, because the Russians moved a lot of ships to the Black Sea right before the war, and they’re all gone so recently that the Russians have abandoned the port of the Sevista fleet. They basically had no naval assets left on the Crimean peninsula. They moved everything back to Novorossiysk, but the Ukrainians have already hidden Novorossiysk, so they’ll probably have to move it back to Tuapsa or maybe even Abkhazia. In effect, the Russian Black Sea Fleet is no more. It’s not a fleet anymore. It essentially no longer has the capacity to project power, and it’s essentially hiding in its supposed home waters. Say what you will about the Ukrainians. They’re creative, and they’re working with very, very little. So there’s not much to this navy that Durant is particularly advanced. We just haven’t seen them put together like this before. So to think that this technological innovation is only going to be applied in Ukraine is a bit silly. So you have to look around the world for other navies that really shouldn’t exist much longer because if they get into a shootout with a neighbor, all they need is a couple of non-dudes on jet skis and they’re gone. Well, the country that’s going to suffer the most from this is Russia. All of Russia’s maritime access points where it has naval ports are contested and, yeah, yeah, it has this really, really, really, insanely long Arctic coastline but almost nobody lives there, except for Archangel and Romansk, which are the bases for the Arctic fleet. And those are both within jet ski range of Norway, St. Petersburg, and the Baltic Sea Fleet is even more limited. Anything that wants to operate there has to go through Finland and Estonia and Latvia and Lithuania and Sweden and Denmark and Poland and Germany. So yeah, that’s not going to happen. The only other remaining base is in Vladivostok, excuse me, where the Russians are completely surrounded by the Japanese islands. So, you know, any meaningful conflict with any of these theaters and the Russians are going to lose it all very, very, very quickly to jet skis. I mean, that’s just, that’s just embarrassing. I mean, the Russians have never been an evil power because all of their naval points are limited and one fleet can’t really reinforce the other. But still, that’s just a bit of an exaggeration. They’re not alone. There are a lot of countries that are close to each other that don’t like each other, and getting a few motorboats or jet skis together to throw that off balance is a really good idea. So for example, if the Israelis and the Turks can’t figure out a way to get along, they can both pretty much decimate the navies of each other. This is a bigger problem for Turkey because it’s on the Black Sea, and that means that it has to have good relations with not only the Russians and the Georgians, but also the Romanians and the Bulgarians. And then of course there’s the Greeks. The Aegean is probably going to be a no-go zone for the Turkish navy, which actually makes it very important for the Turks to get along with Israel. Otherwise they won’t have a navy at all. So. Um, but the real fun starts in the Persian Gulf, where Iran and Kuwait and Qatar and Saudi Arabia and the UAE and OMA can basically bomb each other’s navies whenever they want. Not that any of them have navies, but it’s a commercial thing. All of these countries rely on the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz to get crude oil out of them, and now it’s going to take some really low-tech stuff to disrupt that. But the really, really crazy exciting stuff is going to happen in East Asia, because every Chinese port is on the wrong side of the first island chain. That’s the archipelago that runs south from Japan, including Taiwan and the Philippines and Indonesia. I would really use Indonesia and the Philippines to explore these technologies, because they’re not naval powers, but anyone can buy some bombs on a jet ski, and suddenly all that money that the Chinese have invested in their navy is completely useless. Now, if you’re talking about the three major navies in the world, they’re obviously the United States, Japan, and the United Kingdom. Those are the three major navies. The game can be a little bit different. One of the reasons why those three countries are the major navies in the world is because of their position, obviously, Japan and the United Kingdom. So they have to have a navy, and then the United States is basically on a continent more or less by itself, from a strategic point of view. Well, in the case of Japan, all of its ports are on the eastern side of the island, so they’re out of reach of jet skis. And for the UK, as long as they can get along with Norway, Denmark and France, there’s nothing to worry about, and that’s one of the many reasons why NATO is trying to keep an eye on all these relationships. It’s going to make the French and the British completely boneheaded. There’s a lot of bad water under the bridge there, but they’re not going to have Bond’s eye on each other, and the ladies, the Norwegians and the British, have gotten along for centuries, so that’s probably OK. But there’s still the open question of where can you operate? Just because you can get your ship out of port doesn’t mean you can do anything with it, because if you get within range of a foreign coastline, the jet skis can very well come out. And so we’re going to have to see a counter-revolution in naval technology here. And I would even go so far as to say that the age of the supercarrier is over, because those things are really hard to sink, and they’re really fast and they’re really useful. But if someone comes at you with a fleet of jet skis, you don’t have the weapons. There’s nothing on the ships, or even the ring of ships that support them, that can fire at an angle to attack these things. So we need something new. Now the Navy is working on something called the replicator initiative, which is not just going to deploy a bunch of drones, but it’s going to turn all the major surface combatants into drone production centers, so that they can produce dozens of these things in a few hours, the theory is. And when that happens, you’re going to have some serious drone-on-drone action. And while deploying a jet ski against a capital ship is a lot of bang for your buck, deploying a small drone against a large drone is an even bigger bang. So according to the Navy, the replicator should be online within the next two years, at least in prototype form. We’ll see what that looks like. Then it’s all a matter of whether the existing navies can innovate at the speed of the newcomers. I can tell you that for sure. They put a budget behind it, because I don’t want to lose those big boats. Okay, that’s it for me, until next time.