School of War - Ep 175: Mick Ryan on War & Fiction

Episode Date: February 7, 2025

Mick Ryan, a retired major general in the Australian Army and author of War Transformed: The Future of Twenty-First-Century Great Power Competition and Conflict, joins the show to discuss future-war fiction and the possible futures of current wars. ▪️ Times      •      01:23 Introduction     •      02:10 Tom Clancy     •     05:40 Accessibility      •      07:14 The Battle of Dorking      •      09:57 White Sun War        •      13:39 Diplomatic failures     •      15:40 Friction      •      18:50 Israel transformed        •      23:00 Existential threats     •      25:25 Ukraine     •      32:31 Pressuring Putin        •      35:01 Taiwan and Japan Follow along on Instagram, X @schoolofwarpod, and YouTube @SchoolofWarPodcast Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack

Mick Ryan returns to the show today to talk about a mutual interest of ours, fiction designed to help us understand how wars might go in the future. Let's get into it. It is a description for war. It's a rocky invasion of Hawaii. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in history. A bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a state. We continue to face the grave situations in grand.

We can go right down the beach. We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender. For more, follow School of War on YouTube, Instagram, Substack, and Twitter. And feel free to follow me on Twitter at Aaron B. McLean. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I'm delighted to welcome back to the show.

Mick Ryan, Major General in the Australian Army, recently retired, prolific author. an excellent substack called Futura Doctrina. He's the author of numerous books, War Transformed, is one of them also relevant to today's discussion, especially relevant, is a novel or a novelistic treatment of future war called White Sun Rising about a potential fight over Taiwan. Mick, thank you so much for coming back. Yeah, thanks, Aaron. It's great to see again. So what I really wanted to ask you about today, our conversation may range further afield, is you recently had a piece in the always excellent and interesting Engelsberg ideas called Fiction for a Future War, which was a kind of survey introduction to the use of fiction,

not about war in general. You were really talking about more of a subset of war fiction, which is fiction that helps one imagine what war in the future might be like. And you began with an example that is dear to my art, and I think dear to the heart of a lot of people, I'm not sure what years you'd have to be born between. I think we're after the period now. I was born in 81, but Tom Clancy's The Hunt for Red October. So maybe we can start with that.

When did you first read The Hunt for Red October? I was born in 1969, so I read The Hunt for Red October very shortly after it came out and not long after the follow-on book that he wrote about a Third World War, which I thought was also really good. That was even more speculative about the future of war. there, Red Storm Rising. So, you know, this was for me, as a young person, it was a pretty stunning kind of book, you know, it was technologically sophisticated, it was a great story, I thought the characters were wonderful, but it also shows just how powerful fiction can be

portraying military situations, be they're historical or in the context of this conversation, future warfare. How do we imagine new technologies might be used in different and more imaginative ways? I remember, you know, my parents were big fans of thrillers and mysteries. So when I was a kid, long before I would have been able to read anything like Tom Clancy. I always saw them. I mean, every night before they went to sleep, each of them would have sort of some big, you know, piece of fiction in their hands. And that was a wonderful way to grow up and it had a big impact on me. And so as soon as I could, really, which I would have been a teenager, I read The Hunt for Red October. And then I think I read them all.

I think I read all of Tom Clancy's books as a teenager and probably the last couple as they were coming out while he was still alive. I remember being absolutely captivated by them and enjoying the movies as well. I mean, this is, he became an extraordinarily wealthy man over these books. And it launched a series of movies with Harrison Ford and Alec Baldwin playing the main character, Jack Ryan. I love the Harrison Ford ones. Yeah, that's a worthwhile discussion is, you know, I have a lot of, you know, despite other things that have happened, I have a lot of affection for Alec Baldwin because of his role on the television show 30 Rock, which I thought was just a dominating, magnificent comic performance is Jack Donegie, the restless searching executive at GE. But there's something about the Harrison Ford Jack Ryan that conveys the fish out of water quality that Alec Baldwin's a little bit too much of a movie star to really bring across. Yeah, I mean, I guess people of a certain age have a lot of affection for the Baldwin brothers, you know, have appeared in a lot of movies and, you know, a terrific family of actors.

But you can't go past Harrison Ford. I mean, one of the greatest actors of the 80s, 90s and, you know, 2000s, to be quite frank. And for me, he was the quintessential Jack Ryan, although the latest Amazon series, I think, has also given a pretty good nudge. and even though he started in the office as Jim, I think he's done a pretty superb job as Jack Ryan as well. Yeah. So let me, you go through a bunch of other examples in the piece and we can talk about them, but let me ask you a general question,

which is why does this genre exist? Why does it have the appeal that it has? War is pretty serious business. And, you know, I think maybe people would concede that there's a role for sort of serious fiction about war, or, you know, like, Hemingway, you know, for whom the bell toll, sort of books about what war really means and about the human experience of war, but that's not really what these books are about.

These books are about the fighting and how the fighting works. Why does one need a novel? How does a novel help one, either as a writer or a reader, in understanding war? Well, I think it makes it accessible to large parts of the population that either have never served or don't have any connection to the military, And I think that's a really good thing because, you know, militaries and societies need to be closely connected. As David Hackett once wrote, you know, when the military looks in the mirror, it should see society and vice versa. They need to be reflections of each other.

And for that to occur, there needs to be an understanding. And these books help in that understanding. They're not the whole piece, of course, but they're part of it. But the more speculative stuff has a deep history. Back to the Battle of Dorking written in the late 1800s. And essentially these stories, these narratives, attempts to come to grips with changing world and changing technology. And the second Industrial Revolution,

which is probably the most intense period of technological innovation and disruption in human history, was when military fiction like this was born because people in Britain, in the United States, Germany, Japan, France, were trying to come to grips with these new technologies. radios, airplanes, combustion engines, and these kind of technologies and trying to say, well, the world's changing. What's it going to mean for societies and military organizations?

And thus, military fiction was born. Would you tell us a bit more about the battle for Dorking? I'm going to make a confession that I hadn't heard of this book until you made reference to it in the Engelsberg piece. It sounds like a lot of fun. What's its deal? Well, the origins of it were a bunch of letters written to part. parliamentarians in the 1870s by a British Army Royal Engineer Colonel by the name of George Chesney.

He was concerned that the army was being underfunded and he wasn't getting any response to these letters. So what he did, he wrote a series, a serialised story about an invasion of England called the Battle of Dorking. Now, the enemy is actually never named. Curiously, the enemy does speak German though, so it probably narrows it down. a little. And this was really the first blockbuster fictional novel of its time. I mean, he was the Tom Clancy of his era. It, I guess, engaged the public, engaged Parliament and others in funding, defence, understanding defence issues. And really from here, you saw the genre explode, not just in England, but in Germany with Bernardi, in France, with Albaerabita.

And Frank Stockton's great book written in America called The Great War Syndicate, which is about Congress going to 28 industrialists giving them a contract to fight a war against England for them. I'm sure there's a little bit in there that Eisenhower might have warned about it once. But these, I think, are really important books because they try and deal with change in the environment and experiment with ways in our minds that we might deal with them. Yeah. So it seems a lot of them have a sort of explicitly political purpose and perhaps policy purpose is the better word for it in the sense that as in the dorking example, you have an author Chesney who is trying to make the case for policy outcomes or policy changes and fiction

becomes the way to rally popular support. Yeah, absolutely. Most of them are totally political, I think, one way or the other, and that's fine. I mean, in democracies, there's no problem with that. Interestingly, as a post script on George Chesney's career, he wrote this as a colonel. He retired as a four-star general. There should be something in there with contemporary military leaders about writing. It's like, you know, writing doesn't always have to kill your career. Maybe it can help it. And maybe it can help your organization, and maybe it can help your society more broadly. When you wrote White Sun, sorry, I keep wanting to say White Sun Rising because I've got Tom Clancy on the brain now. White Sun War. When you wrote

White Sun War, did you have policy changes or policy calls to action in mind? Just tell us a bit about the book and about that. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it really started with the previous book War Transform where I looked at the trends that were driving contemporary competition and conflict and I thought, well, what does this look like in the real world? You know, what might, what form might this take? And I thought, well, the obvious example at the moment is a future conflict over Taiwan. And I chose key characters in there based around some more innovative concepts in warfare or newer organisations, you know, the Marine Corps Marine Latorial Regiment, Space Force, Him and Machine teaming in ground forces. And I did that very specifically because

these are the kind of organisations that often need a leg up from external actors, be it Congress or society more broadly, to really prove their worth. So, you know, I chose them deliberately because I thought they were innovative and they were supporting. But they also gave insights into how war is so, how it's changing constantly and change isn't new in warfare. But some of the new technologies we're seeing herald some fairly profound impacts in just how wars are fought tactically, but also how we do strategy and how we mobilize societies and industry more broadly. What worries you the most in terms of a potential war in the Pacific that you might have addressed in the book? That is to say, what is it most urgent

for governments, whether the Australian government or the American government, to do that the book draws attention to through fiction? Well, the most important thing to do is to, to this first and foremost, and you don't deter wars by acceding to the demands of dictators. For 20 years now, we've led the Chinese really have their own way in the Western Pacific. You know, the Japanese certainly have woken up to this and doubled their GDP. Deterrence is not cheap. It's very expensive, but it's a bargain compared to what might happen if we don't deter a war. So this book, if you wanted to, you can even call it an anti-war book.

Grossoe, let's invest in deterrence because, you know, a dollar in deterrence saves a million dollars in fighting a war down the trunk. And that's the way I would hope politicians read the book, how they think about military spending. It's always cheaper to deter a war than to fight one. Yeah. I've had the pleasure and honor of helping out with a program that does World War Two staff rides in Europe. It follows the route of the U.S. Army from... You, you know, you Usually the itinerary is London to Normandy to Luxembourg and Belgium for the Bulge and then finish in Germany. And, you know, we study strategy. It's like Patton's path.

That's right. You know, yeah, sort of the straight line U.S. Army path, the median U.S. Army soldiers routes. And, you know, we study strategy. We study operations. But I think it's important. And we always do try to make the point that all this is just downstream of vast diplomatic failure, epic failure and grand strategic failure. that all of this is a tragedy.

And, you know, it's easy to sit here and say it was avoidable. I mean, politically, it was pretty hard to be against appeasement in 1935 in the UK. Nevertheless, there were numerous junctures where war could have been avoided. Or, again, also easy to say now, but in retrospect, quite clear, fought at a much lower cost, fought at a much lower cost earlier in the 30s than what ultimately came about. And it's always worth, I think that's an important point. worth keeping in mind. Yeah, and these diplomatic failures don't manifest over weeks or months or even years. They manifest over decades in many respects. I mean, these are about baked in ideas in

publics or diplomatic organizations that play out over decades. I think, you know, what we're seeing in the Pacific has played out over probably 30 years. The lead up to Ukraine was at least two decades. So, you know, you don't wake up one morning and pick up a coffee cup and go, oh, wow, we're we might be a war tomorrow. These things happen over multiple administration or multiple governments, and that's the problem, right, is very few administrations or governments want to look beyond their current term, and therefore deterring something that might happen in five or ten years is far less attractive than addressing a problem that will have an immediate impact on the electorate for the next election.

Yeah. One other point you make in your piece that I thought was really interesting was that future war fiction does a great job of depicting friction on the battlefield. And it sort of inspired a thought in me that I'm curious to know what your response to it is, which is the value of this stuff, it seems to me, to the warfighter or essential part of the value, is, you know, you can read as many doctrinal publications to include smart and well-written ones as you want. You can, you know, play war games as many times as you want, and you can sort of simulate friction and contingency in those to an extent,

but it's still a pretty sterile environment. the only way to really appreciate the role of just raw chance and just how difficult and confusing things are is really to use your imagination. And that's a role played by fiction. Also, I would say history. History is a big tool here to read historical accounts of, and well-written historical accounts of actions past. Because otherwise, it's just too sterile. And if it's too sterile, it's hard to psychologically prepare yourself. for the kind of environment that you're going to be making decisions in. Yeah, at the end of the day, these stories have to be engaging.

And ultimately, they're about human beings in different situations. And it's through their actions, their challenges, their problems that you portray friction, that you portray, you know, how some things just don't change, whether it's surprise, whether it's the need for good leadership, the impact of bad leadership, and this fog and friction of war. and good stories, be they military science fiction or historical military fiction, I think that's what they're best at is portraying the human aspect of war fee. At the end of the day, aircraft carriers, spaceships, lasers are all really cool,

but you can't write a story about them. You can only write a story about humans, and those technologies are the context for why they act, how they act, where they act. So the best military fiction is about human beings and the situations they find themselves in. And ultimately, the reason we write this fiction is, you know, what is the best trajectory could humans enter the future? What is the best way for humans as individuals and institutions to act and defend their nation? I do think Clancy Cam as close as you can to having fiction about technology and toys. I think there's a whole chapter of Redstorm Rising, if I'm not mistaken,

that is literally just how a nuclear bomb explodes. Like it's a chapter length, there's thousands of words, just walking you through what happens in the millisecond between ignition or between, you know, the detonator going, you know, clicking and the bomb actually going off. And I remember, you know, being 16 years old or whatever and being confused and bemused and kind of fascinated by this whole thing. Yeah. I mean, I think those kind of interludes could be very powerful. But once again, it's still a bit of a sidetrack for the book, right? You know, the main story continues on. And it just explains one element. It goes down a bit of a rabbit hole and pulls back out.

And that can be a really powerful tool in fiction. But even the best science fiction stories don't overly focus on the technology. They really focus on the people. You know, John Scorsey's old-mean book stories, Martha Wells Murderbox. I love Michael Mamet's series, Planet Side Series. And, you know, Holderman's great book, The Forever War, He's a story of a thousand-year war that neither side knows why it began, but a great story of a soldier in the venter's journey. So even with those interludes, you know, I still think you've got to have compelling characters that people can either relate to or at least understand.

You and I just had some time in Israel. I released an episode here on School of War recently with my thoughts. It's what I thought, you know, Americans ought to learn from the Israeli experience of the last year. You've published some accounts of your thoughts on the IDF and the war at both the war fighting level, but also the strategic level at your substack. What's your, what's your takeaway? You know, we're recording that I'll say because things change quickly. So we're talking here on December the 12th. Syria has fallen epically, quickly, spectacularly, in some ways as a direct consequence of the IDF's success over Hezbollah in Lebanon.

But Mick, what were your takeaways from your time in Israel talking to the IDF? Yeah, I mean, it was a great trip, and it was a privilege to go with you and Elliot and Seth and Ruffy and Kenneth and the rest of the team. I was the second trip in 11 months I'd been on there. There was a huge difference just between the two. We'd been there just after the Hamas Massacres of 7 October. But I guess the big takeaways for me is firstly, Israel appears to be a society that's been fundamentally transformed by. the events of 7 October and what's come afterwards. You know, elements of those transformation include

better understanding of the theories of victory and the hatred their enemies feel for them, a better understanding of the depths of their failures in collecting intelligence before the war, the schism that emerged between the civil and military parts of society in the wake of 7 October because of the profound failure that many in the military felt and society felt, but also, you know, a reawakening in that society of the need for all members

of society to contribute to their defence, not just some parts of it. And I think you're seeing that between the ultra-Orthodox and other parts of their community at the moment. So for me, you know, the really important and interesting lessons are societal out of this war. Ultimately, countries are made up of people. And you're seeing, I think, potentially a very different Israel emerge out of this period. And I guess the final observation is, you know, there was almost a sad acceptance that they're in a long-term war here against a bunch of different adversaries that surround their countries, which is not really what the IDF was set up for. It was set up to really provide a large deterrent and fight short sharp wars. They're having to transform into something

that's capable of enduring operations, and that will take not just a different concept from the military, but from society that must support it more generally. Yeah, one thing that I noticed on both the trips, the one in December 23, and then just last month, is I've never seen the United States and Israel occupying more divergent mental universes than in this past year. Maybe it was a little bit more dramatic in December, because I think, this past November, sort of set in in America that the Israelis are not just going to, they're not just going to accept a ceasefire that doesn't fully satisfy their concerns. They're going to keep going.

In December, nope, I mean, I don't think anybody in the United States appreciated that we spoke with, you know, very senior American diplomats in Israel at the time who didn't seem to appreciate it. And they were on the ground there in Israel. The Israelis told us on several occasions in different meetings that they saw themselves as fighting in an early stage of World War III. And the way that, you know, you could say the Spanish Civil War or, the, you know, the Japanese invasion of Manchuria were early stages of World War II that just

hadn't coalesced into a world war yet. So this war between Israel and its enemies is an early stage and what will one day coalesce into something much bigger and that their Iranian threat is connected to our Iranian threat, which, by the way, is related to the Russian threat and to the Chinese threat and to the North Korean threat and so on. And I just, I don't detect in the United States a great deal of enthusiasm. And it's not a, it's not a, it's a bipartisan lack of enthusiasm foreseeing the situation in that way. And the Israelis, you know, just, I mean, at kind of at every level, like the notion that they would stop fighting without having satisfied the conditions to return their population to southern and northern Israel, which were essentially

evacuated after the 7th of October, to them was politically impossible. They just weren't going to stop fighting before those conditions could be fulfilled. And no one in the United States seemed to, to me, to recognize that. It was really striking how, you know, in an era in the 21st century when, you can pick up the phone and talk to somebody any time and be from one country to the next in, you know, 10 hours or so, how fundamental the breakdown in mutual understanding was. No, I think that is right on the money. I think Ukraine and Israel occupy different worlds from us at the moment, totally different worlds. They are both fighting existential wars. These aren't wars a choice. These aren't the Iraqs or the Afghanistan that you and I served in

that didn't really have existential stakes for our people or our nations, these are wars that if they lose, they don't exist anymore. And when you're under an existential threat as a nation, you think differently and it allows you to take different risks and to do different things. We've seen this from the Ukrainians over the last three years. We've seen this from the Israelis, you know, pretty much from their history, but they've really stepped up over the last year. And when I see testimony from, say, the director of the CIA in the past week who said, you know, there's no grand agreement or alliance between Iran, Russia, China, and North Korea, it's like no one's talking about a grand alliance, but we're talking about a shared approach and shared values and a shared aspiration to take down the U.S. as the global arbiter of things that are good.

Our countries don't get it yet. Our society certainly have not gone on the journey. And I think that's largely because our political leaders have. and take them on a journey. I don't think enough of our political leaders have the knowledge or the moral courage to talk about these very, very difficult issues. Now, I get it. Inflation is a big problem and people want it addressed. But, you know, if you think inflation's bad now, wait until we have to fight a war with China because we didn't deter it. So I think there's a political challenge in having tough conversations. This is a bipartisan challenge, right?

This is a red or blue. This is all political parties have this issue. And in the US, in Australia, in Britain, across Europe in particular. And unless we get a different class of politicians who understand not just contemporary issues, but understand the price of failure if we don't get this right. I think we're in for some pretty tough years at Ed. Yeah. You've spent a lot of time in Ukraine over the last few years.

You follow the situation there closely. You've got a lot of contacts, well-positioned. contacts there. What is the state of play? What are your thoughts on the coming months? I mean, I could give my own summary, but I leave it to you to kind of tell us what's happening. I think what we're seeing is Putin is sprinting to the finish. So you've seen Putin accelerate, you know, over the last six months in particular, the number of offenses they've undertaken. He's accelerated the relationship with countries like Iran and North Korea by inserting more of their weapons and their people into the war. You've seen him accelerate in the last couple of

months missile and drone attacks compared to the same time last year and the year before. You know, all the data is there. So Ukraine is obviously trying to defeat that plane on the battlefield in the air, but also in the minds of Western politicians. But it's having a very, very tough time doing that. Things are pretty grim. It's going to be a tough winter for the Ukrainian people it already is a tough winter. But I think this winning the story of the war is critical to how the first six months of next year will play up, because essentially both sides want to convince the people and the politicians of the United States and Europe about their side of the story, about whose prospects for success are better. And I think that is an active fight still,

even though things look grim for Ukraine. You can never write them off. They're tough, they're wily, They're clever. They surprise us. President Trump has appointed Keith Kellogg as his special envoy for Ukraine. Kellogg's a serious guy. And, you know, though there are certainly voices in the coalition that supports President Trump that are not super friendly to Ukraine. Trump himself, you know, he met with Zelensky in Paris just a few days ago at the reopening of Notre Dame.

You know, he's expressed repeatedly a desire to end the war. to come up with a kind of deal. You know, what would your advice to someone like Keith Kellogg be? What is, given that you're starting with the premise that we want this to end, which everyone on some level would like it to end, the question is, what do you mean by that? What's your counsel? Well, firstly, you're right.

Everyone does want this to end. No one more so than the Ukrainians. Obviously, they're suffering hugely as a nation. but they don't want it to end at any price. And I think that's a key idea. Yes, we want it to end, but not at any price. Secondly, go to Ukraine, talk to people, see the situation. Don't just talk to military leaders, talk to the prosecutor who's looking into war crimes,

talk to the civil defence people, the air defenders, talk to a range of different people. Don't make any decisions in the first week. When you take over a new job in the military, they say, don't make any big decisions in the first 30 days, get to know your command. And that's what I'd propose for the new administration. Take some time, not months, but just a couple of weeks to get out, get as many people in, see the situation and do an assessment of what would happen if you did force Ukraine into accommodation now. It might be comfortable to end the war because you don't have to watch it on TV anymore. But what are the long-term impacts for the security, not just of Eastern

Europe, but to the United States itself? Who else might be watching that and looking at that decision thinking, I have an opportunity here. It could well be that the incoming president comes in and despite what he said, looks at it and go, you know what, Pritin's not a very nice man and he's not listening to me and he's pretty dangerous for the Western Europe, which may not be good for American prosperity, so maybe we need to do something different here. So, you know, I'm hopeful that the incoming administration will just take it me for a few days, have a look at the situation, move beyond some of the more outrageous statements we've seen during the election campaign, not so much from Trump but from others.

And, you know, think about not just the era now, but what does an accommodation mean for the long-term security and prosperity for the American people, not just for those in Europe? We had the very brilliant Stephen Kotkin on the show a few months ago, and he outlined a vision for coming to a deal or an armistice or call it what you want. on Ukraine that struck me as both extremely aggressive, but also it's hard to sort of hear things that are fresh in this conversation since we've all kind of been having it for three years. But his basic view, and this was recently, Andrew Lambert just had a piece in Anglesburg ideas

on Russia's long war with, sort of Cold War with Britain and Russia versus the maritime powers in the 19th century. Lambert, he's also been on the show. Brilliant, brilliant naval historian. It's a very good place. It really enjoyed it. Yeah. And so there's overlap.

McCockham was proposing in Lambert's historical observations, but Cockham was proposing was, look, this probably, you know, formally speaking, there's only three ways this ends. Russia wins, Ukraine wins, or there's some kind of deal. It's hard to imagine Ukraine winning outright under the circumstances. It's just hard, it's hard to picture. Nothing's impossible, but it's hard. It's easier, though, you know, in my view, catastrophic to picture Russia winning outright. It's more possible than Ukraine winning outright, but it's still hard to picture in catastrophic, I think,

on a number of levels. So that kind of leaves you with some version of deal and what do you, what do you mean? And in Cochkin's view was you just have to, you have to place at risk things Putin cares about. You, namely regime security. And that doesn't mean, you know, you start saying that people sort of immediately start picturing Iraq in 2003. It obviously doesn't mean that. It means looking for mechanisms and levers to put pressure on the Russian state and put pressure, put pressure on Putin's control of Russia, a kind of political warfare escalate to de-escalate that injects a seriousness into the conversation on the Russian side. Suddenly they want to end it, too, because it's getting uncomfortable for them. So it was an interesting proposal. It was obviously

an extremely aggressive proposal. It sort of squares with Lambert's points in that piece, which I really do commend to people. It's pretty short. You can easily digest it. And it basically makes the point there's this long British Russian competition throughout the 19th century. It gets hot, you know, in the Crimean War. In the Crimean War, despite its name, and despite the fact there's a lot of fighting in Crimea, ultimately is really won by economic means. Just as Britain wins all of its wars with continental powers with the, I think the exception of World War II, really, though you could make a case there too, by economic means. That is to say, the Russian economy is simply very, is dependent on maritime access. The Brits historically, and certainly throughout

the 19th century, controlled maritime axis. And that was just a hand that the Russians couldn't overcome. They could make all the trouble they wanted, but in the long run, the clock always ran out on them. And so I see Lambert and Kotkin kind of merging on this view, that you have to kind of take your eyes off the actual Ukrainian battlefield and look at the broader strategic situation. There are ways to put pressure on the Russians such that you might be able at some point, it might not take forever, to sit down at the table and say, all right, well, now we all mutually want this to stop. Why don't we actually come up with something reasonable and not lopsided? Yeah, I mean, I don't disagree with that. There's obviously a fourth option, and that is the war just continues to drag on.

And there's lots of historical precedence that, I mean, Vietnam fought a 20-year war for its independence against the French and the Americans and the Australians and the rest of us. And that is a option that the Ukrainians might go down. Now, it would be enormously expensive for them and destructive and catastrophic to their nation. But it's still an option that might be pursued. On the economic piece, absolutely. You've got to twist their arm economically, but the problem with Russia is it has sanctuary in China. It's kind of like the insurgent that can pop back over the border

from Afghanistan into Pakistan for sanctuary. Russia can do the same with China. China is funding its war effort largely. And frankly, that's because the longer this war goes on, the more it is in China's interests. So we have to make it not just in Russia's interest to come to the table and stop the war, We've got to make it in China's interest.

I mean, anyone who thinks that the North Korean troops went to Russia without some kind of acquiescence from the Chinese Communist Party is kidding themselves. So the war at the moment is something that Xi is very comfortable with continuing. It's in their interest. It keeps America in Europe, obsessed in Eastern Europe and not in the Western Pacific, despite the best efforts of Indo-Bacon. They are learning every day from what the Westerners are doing,

how they're making decisions. So I think the economic argument is right to a degree, but you have to bring China into that. And as long as it's in China's interest for the war to continue, it's going to be hard to economically coerce Russia to some kind of negotiation or settlement. Yeah. Well, maybe let's finish with China and security concerns in the Pacific. You're in Australia. These are obviously at the forefront of your mind. And increasingly in the United States, I think that's been true for years now, that Washington, D.C. is focused on on the Pacific, and rightly so. We've talked about the Israelis. We've talked about the Ukrainians. We can all find things to criticize, but the fact is they've both fought for themselves and stood

up for their countries on the battlefield against existential threats. I kind of feel like the Taiwanese thing to spend some time in Israel and in Ukraine, perhaps to inject some seriousness into their own planning. But you've spent a lot of time in that part of the world. What, What are your thoughts on that and on the situation in general? Yeah, well, certainly the Taiwanese have learned from Ukraine. They've learned a lot from it, particularly at a societal level when it comes to national will, civil defense, and these kind of things. I think the problem with Taiwan is they've been, in some respects, militarily isolated for many decades. Their military hasn't been able to undertake the kind of exchanges or large-scale military exercises where we all learn from each other.

I mean, Talisman Saber, over the last 30 years or so for Australia, has just been an enormous learning opportunity. You know, Yama Sakura, which is going on as we speak between the US Japan and Australia core and above-level exercise. The Taiwanese haven't had the benefit of this. So we need to bring the Taiwanese into some of these large-scale activities just to really expose them to the realities of modern war, modern command and control, modern civil-military interfaces

and these kind of things. But at the end of the day, it takes political will to step up defense spending to firstly deter war and secondly build a military that can fight and win one. I think the Taiwanese are still on that journey. I think certainly Admiral Lisa Min back in 2017 tried to get them on that journey, but tradition is very powerful in some military organizations and certainly powerful in Taiwan. So I think, you know, the Taiwanese are on a journey. I think, you know, they like Australia and a couple other countries probably need to

go on it more quickly than we currently are. I think the Japanese is one country I look to as a bright shining ray of hope when it comes to thinking about deterring and preparing for a fight with the Chinese. I mean, they double their GDP, which is, I don't know any other country that's double their GDP on defence spending. And, you know, if you read their annual white paper, these are really good documents that explain how they see the threat, what they've learned from Ukraine, and how they intend to address it with new technologies, new organizations, new ideas. So, you know, the Taiwanese, I'm sure, are reading all this stuff, but, you know, the Japanese, I think, are a very interesting case study in reform and transformation. I mean, they're actually increasing the size of their submarine fleet.

They're building a very capable, strategic strike capability. I think there's a lot we can learn from how the Japanese are thinking about the problem and how they're reacting to it. Mick Ryan, Major General in the Australian Army, retired, author of War Transformed, White Sun Rising, the Substack Futura Doctrina. White Sun War. White Sun War. I'm so sorry. I keep doing it. I keep doing it. It's Tom Clancy on the Brain. Thank you, Mick. And thank you for coming on the show again. It's always a pleasure to have you.

No, it's always a pleasure to talk with you, Aaron, and happy to do it any time in the future. This is a Nebulous Media Production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.