School of War - Ep 197: Mick Ryan on the Ukrainian Battlefield

Episode Date: May 13, 2025

Mick Ryan, retired major general in the Australian Army and author of  The War for Ukraine: Strategy and Adaptation Under Fire, joins the show to discuss the evolving battlefield and cycles of change and innovation going on in Ukraine.  ▪️ Times      •      01:35 Introduction     •      02:17 Touring the front      •      05:11 No place safe     •      07:01 Change       •      11:24 Wire guided drones        •      15:31 Task organization        •      20:38 Drone defense          •      22:49 Is artillery dead?     •      26:39 Rethinking procurement      •      30:34 2014          •      33:07 Putin’s objectives     •      36:05 Formula for ceasefire        •      38:02 A just solution        •      39:41 Surprise is alive and well      Follow along on Instagram, X @schoolofwarpod, and YouTube @SchoolofWarPodcast Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack

It's been a little bit of time here on School of War since we've talked about the battlefield in Ukraine. Today, we welcome back to the show, retired Major General Mick Ryan, who was recently on the ground there, to talk about how things are going. Let's get into it. It is for a war. The Iraqi invasion of late December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infantry. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a state. We continue to face. The situation is rare.

We shall fight on the beaches. It will fight on the landing ground. 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 am delighted to welcome back to the show today. Mick Ryan. He is a retired Major General in the Australian. Army. He served there for 35 years all over the world. East Timor, Iraq, Afghanistan. He is an author and analyst and strategist today. Books include most recently the war for Ukraine, strategy and adaptation under fire. There's a novel White Sun War, the campaign for Taiwan. He has a very interesting substact called Futura Doctrina, Doctrina, I suppose, sorry. And all around, just a brilliant guy on the kinds of issues that interest us here at School of War. Mick, thank you

so much for coming back to the show. Thanks, Aaron. It's great to be with you again. So I thought we would start with Ukraine. It's been a little while since we've gotten into the fighting in Ukraine here on the show. And that's where I wanted to start. You were there not long ago. It was your, I think it was your fifth trip since the most recent work at Duff? Yeah, that's right. Maybe, can I ask you to describe, you know, not that many of us, I think, have actually been to the battlefield in Ukraine, even if we've been following events closely. What What's it like just experientially, you know, if you're, if you, I presume you're in Kiev and off you go to the east, what's it like going through as you go further and further east to Ukraine

ultimately arriving at the front lines? Yeah, well, initially when you leave Kiev, it's just like driving down any other super highway. It could be like driving down, you know, expressway in Britain or Australia or the United States, at least for a couple of hours. And then it starts getting a bit quieter. And then once you really, you know, if you turn south from Kharkiv and you start getting on some of the secondary and tertiary routes, it really becomes a totally different environment. It's like Mad Max.

It's dirt roads. There's hundreds of small vehicles rushing about because the Russians target large, you know, logistics vehicles. People are moving at very high speeds. Every vehicle has antennas to jammed. drones and you know everyone's very aware of their signatures so everyone knows that at any point in time there's medium and high altitude surveillance drones above them and there's lower altitude lethal drones that can reach out and touch people with very little warnings so you know at first it's normal and then all of a sudden it's just not normal anymore and help me think through

like the structure of that front line zone So, I mean, I could, you know, if you put a gun to my head right now, I could draw a fairly plausible account, actually, of what, you know, the paradigmatic frontline system looked like in World War I. You know, I've just seen it in so many books and, you know, the primary trenches, the communication trenches, etc. The no man's land, LPOPs. I could, I could plausibly give you an account of what it more or less was like structurally. What is it like today in 2025 in Ukraine? Well, there's some of that, absolutely. You know, there's primary and secondary and tertiary positions. You know, one of the things you see when you go east is you see the construction of a lot of fallback positions. These are probably tertiary or even more by different engineer organisations. You know, you see a lot of old minefields and these kind of things.

You know, a lot of units hunkered down underground. You know, that's where you survive, whether it's an armored vehicle in a, in a, in a, in a AFE scrape with camouflage and netting over the top or people inside the basements of old buildings, you know, you've got to be under the ground to have the best chance of surviving. You only go up when you really have to. So, you know, it's not an invisible battlefield, but it's certainly not as transparent as a lot of people would have as believe. Yes, you can see a lot of what's above the ground, but boy, there's a lot that happens

beneath the ground and at great depth behind the front lines isn't always as obvious. And as you're making your progress towards all of this, how far out do you have to start worrying about Russian drones? You know, it really depends which bit of the front line you're in. If you're somewhere where it's a Russian main effort, they can be tens of kilometers, if not, you know, five or ten kilometers. But, you know, nowhere is really free of them within a about five or 10 kilometres of the front line. That's probably where they're at the most dense just because of the vast majority being those shorter range drones.

But clearly the Russians have longer range stuff. And, you know, these Garan, which is a Russian term for the Shahid drones, are being launched in much larger numbers now. I think it's over 4,000 a month now being used, most of those against cities. But, you know, you are seeing every month the number of drones being used continuing to increase. And, you know, one of the great stories of this war is that adaptation cycle accelerating and

continuing to accelerate in all forms of warfare, including the drone counter drone struggle. You've been a great chronicler of these cycles, sort of one of your main issues. And I want to talk about that. It's hard because they, as you just said, they cycle so quickly. that if it's not your full-time focus, you know, you look away for a few months because you're working in other things and it's just, it's cycled a bunch. Things have changed and then the changes have changed. What in here, we're recording this in early May 2025. What, what do front line commanders or just commanders in general in Ukraine know that the rest of us probably don't, even,

even serious defense types in, you know, the states or Australia or, you know, Taiwan or wherever? What do we not know about the state of warfare right now that we ought to know? Yeah, well, I think the most important thing is just how quickly it's changing. I mean, with drones, you know, software can be updated every night. The technology and tactics of drones is changing every week or two, which, you know, you can't even write a requirement in a week or two in a Western military organization, let alone do that. You're seeing very significant developments in counter-drone technology.

It's no longer just DW or seeking to take control of enemy drones, that is still used but not as prevalent. You're now seeing drone interceptors, things like the drone fall and drone four two programs that come back alive around with others, I think has been very important. You know, the air defence forces of Ukraine have developed other drone interceptors

to take down share heads. And then you're seeing the Russians adapt to these interceptors with different software, with camouflage, so it's harder for people to see them through the lenses they use for interceptions. So you're seeing a very different kind of fight now with countering drones and bringing down the cost of destroying enemy drones

has been an important achievement. Indeed, some of the drone fall interceptors bring down very expensive Russian surveillance drones at very low cost, which is kind of the holy grail of counterdron, is to impose cost on drone users rather than drone users imposing cost on others. So I think that's pretty important. Just the pace of change.

It's not just drones. You know, tactics more broadly is changing regularly. The Russians are experimenting. Some of their experiments are successful, some not so much. You know, I don't think e-scooters on the battlefield are really going to be a thing. But, you know, they have experimented and been successful with large-scale infiltration tactics, marrying them with glide bombs and these kind of things. In short, you know, if you're studying Ukraine, you've got to visit regularly because the war changes every four to six months.

And you can miss a lot by giving it a break for a month or two. Fortunately, there's lots of very good analysts out there that are studying. They're studying various dimensions of the war, not just drones, but many different aspects. And if you kind of aggregate their work and keep in touch, you can, you know, keep up with what's going on in the broad. Besides your own work, Mick, who out there, whose work is public, who publishes are you reading? Who are your best sources? Yeah, I mean, there's a bunch of different people. There's people on social media, people like Tataragami and those kind of people, I think, do a wonderful job.

I think people like Samuel Bendett in the United States is doing a really good job covering drones. he and others. Ulrika Franca from Germany also does a terrific job. Yeah, and I think think tanks that have dedicated people to this Roussey have several people, Jack Watling, Justin Brank, Samuel Cranny Evans, who look at this closely. And then in the United States, you have Carnegie Endowment with their folks there, Dara and Michael.

And, you know, there's a bunch of others on social media. I try and pick up every now and then. There's the folks from Pism in Poland who will. I think are well worth studying. The ICDS think tank in Estonia, I think does some really excellent work, well worth covering. So there's a bunch of people both close and far from the war who are doing good work. And then, of course, there's a lot of Ukrainians, National Institute of Strategic Studies, Kiev's School of Economics, and, you know, come back alive and others are also doing, I think,

some important work in not just helping their own country, but helping the rest of us understand the complexities of modern war and just how quickly it's evolving. So as you gave your overview of adaptation on the battlefield, there was a lot there, and I want to try and take it piece by piece and just start by sticking with drones, because that's sort of what's on everyone's mind, and it does seem like the most notably science fictiony, genuinely new thing compared to what, you know, our generation of veterans certainly experienced. What is the state of the art on, let's just talk about air defense, dealing

with Russian drones for the Ukrainians? What are the different categories of Russian threats and what are the main tools that have evolved and how are they integrated with each other? Just give us a bit of an overview of Ukrainian low altitude air defense. Yeah, I think the biggest threat at the moment is drones that are controlled with fiber optic wire. I mean, that is a really important development over the last year or so. Not so much because they can't be jammed, but because they're much, much harder to detect. They don't emit anything.

So they're much more difficult to detect and therefore make them much more problematic to bring down before they cause damage or send back the imagery that they're out there to collect. You know, there are ways that the Ukrainians have found to detect them and also detect the... The operator stations, more importantly, I mean, it's important to bring down drones, but it's far more important to destroy the operator stations and kill the operators,

if you can possibly do that. You know, at the end of the day, there's been developments in short-range radars. You know, the Ukrainians now deploy hundreds of these things. I think they were gifted a few of at the start of the war by Estonia, and they've used them extensively now in drone detection, drone engagement, these kind of things. I think some of the air defence systems that they've deployed, the mobile teams, which are originally just guys with Dushkas on the back of pickups have become far more sophisticated, but they've developed dense networks of reporting systems connected to interceptors using AI to both target drones but also do after-action reviews and learn lessons from every single engagement. So there's a bunch of different things that are involved in this air defense regime that I think we really need to learn from.

And it's a mix of capabilities at different levels. There's not one silver bullet. It's going to take lots of different layers. And I think the key thing both the Russians and the Ukrainians do is they shift their air defense systems regularly. They're never static because they don't want to be predictable and they don't want to be targetable. Here's kind of a dumb question. And I probably could look this up on YouTube and just find some videos. But I'm a bit perplexed.

I mean, this sort of wire-guided drone thing does seem, I mean, it's obviously the case that it would be a huge problem. And of course, you know, I'm familiar in my own time with, you know, anti-tank weapons that are wire-guided. But, you know, you're shooting those things over in relative terms, short distances, just a few kilometers on clear lines of sight, you know, on a plane or a desert. You know, you need to see, you need to see the target. Whereas here I'm picturing these things maneuvering for many kilometers, tree lines, you know, there's there's a little bit of terrain here and there. How does that actually work? That's a stupid question, but like, how is the, how does it actually work? Yeah, I mean, the foliage cover in a lot of parts of eastern Ukraine isn't that dense anymore.

I think it's, you know, if you check the satellite imagery in a lot of places, it's 10 to 20% coverage. but you can imagine somewhere like the Pacific, on islands where you've got 100% jungle canopy plus rain and fog, it's going to be a very different kettle of fish, I think. But, you know, they've developed very sophisticated ways of spilling out these wire for tens of kilometres. The problem is, obviously, that you are sacrificing payload to have the fibroquic wire,

because, you know, it's obviously easier to spool it out from the drone than it is from the operator. So there are problems with it, but boy, the return on investment, if it does work, is certainly there just because of the detectability issues with them. So talk a bit about task organization here. You mentioned these mobile teams, but this has now become the counter drone mission and the drone mission for that matter, actually. I suppose it's both. These have become, there are units assigned to do this work, both at the very tactical level like these mobile teams you describe. But now there's a service level component.

Talk about that. Yeah, so, I mean, traditional brigades now generally, if they don't already have a battalion, they're forming a battalion for drone operations, which is a mix of ISR and strike. They generally, you know, in a brigade, you're looking out to about 50 kilometers, different levels, out to 20, out to 50,

and then they're generally integrated with special operations, regiments that can hit out to 250, 300 kilometers. So there's a closer integration of conventional and special operations forces there that we didn't. You and I did not see a lot of in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. That's something we can look at just from a command and control perspective. But this unmean systems force is really interesting. I had the opportunity to spend an afternoon with the commander of the USF

and we talk through command and control. And, you know, it has a very broad remit. It's from the front line where it looks at standardisation of drone and EW, the collection of lessons, development of TTPs and the evolution of them quickly, but also supporting headquarters above the brigade level to ensure they're able to cover gaps with additional drone units. And then they're involved in the long-range strikes. They have multiple regiments and brigades of these long-range drones that can reach out

up to a couple of thousand kilometres, you know, 14th UAV regin is just one of their units. So, you know, the USF has a range of different capabilities, but I guess I'd describe it as they're becoming the central nervous system for drone operations in the Ukrainian armed forces. And it's not just operations, it's learning, it's training, it's best practice, all the way through to informing industry about what is the best technology that they require for future missions. Did I ever tell you my own personal soft convention?

international integration story from Afghanistan. Not yours, but there's a few way up there. It's a funny one. So I can do this in 60 seconds, I think. There I was in the middle of Helmand Province, just doing my thing. And I get a phone call that there's a high value target. It's a high value target, you know, a kilometer or so, very close to my position. And that night, there's going to be, you know, a raid.

And I'm going to go out and set the cordon for this raid. This is very exciting. You know, this is before bin Laden has been caught. For all I know, Osama bin Laden's hiding out in Marjah somewhere. And I'm going to watch, you know, Seal Team 6 come in. in and get him. It's pretty cool. But as you know, the Marine Corps has a way of rendering things that are supposed to be fun, not so fun. And as the night goes on, I'll just say, I have information to the effect of this is probably not Osama bin Laden. And I also come to realize that far from being the

Naval Special Warfare Development Group that is coming in, this is a platoon of rangers who live, you know, a few kilometers away and are controlled by the local Marine regiment who are going to fly in and do this fancy thing. Meanwhile, I can go up to the roof of my position and look at this house that is the target house. And I call the battalion and I'm a little agitated. Also, I should point out, there's an Army Special Forces team with me, just doing stuff with me every day. So I call and I say, you know, sir, at a fraction of the cost to the taxpayer, I can walk to this house right now and arrest anyone you want. This is what we do every day. This request was obviously denied. We went out. The thing happened. It was in the middle of the night. Thing happened.

You're using way too much common sense there, Aaron. Suffice it, nothing terrible happened, but it was just like this sort of, it was like obviously ridiculous. It was obviously ridiculous. And who knows who was in that house. In the end, I don't really know. It was, I'm quite confident, not a senior Al-Qaeda figure. And frankly, it had been.

Probably someone spotted wearing a black turban, mate. Anyway, that's my, that's my story. That's my soft integration story. I love the Rangers. Love the Rangers. But I'm pretty sure my Marines would have done fun. Back to, back to drone. So, you know, you watch these videos and the kind of horrifying videos.

honestly, whoever's getting killed, whether it's a Russian getting killed or Ukrainian killed, of these, you know, watching the last seconds of people's lives as the drone, you know, essentially assassinates people, these FPV drones assassinate people on a one-off basis. And you just get this sense of a sort of disjointed, attritional, kind of scary, you know, inhuman battlefield. And, you know, sitting here as, as somebody who thinks a lot about these things, I try to think of myself as a maneuver commander trying to ask. actually conduct operations and how I would want to do it. And I would want, you know, these videos don't give you any impression of mass. They don't give you any impression of swarming. Whereas if I were conducting, if I were a Russian conducting an assault for that matter, I would want mass. I would want to coordinate the strikes of the FPV drones with my own maneuver. And I'd actually want to make progress on this battlefield.

And just the superficial impression one gets without really being serious about it like you have is that not much of that is happening. How does offense work right now? How integrated our drones and is there is there mass effects being sought? Yeah, I mean the mass effect is drones at the end of the day. It's very difficult for conventional forces, particularly mounted forces, to be able to concentrate even in a, you know, before getting to an assembly area, let alone cross a line of departure and survivably cross that tactical space before. the breaking battle. You know, that's all but impossible at the moment just because of the visibility that both sides have of the battle space and in the ability to bring in lots of drones for high-value targets. I mean, it's, you know, it's been explained to me, and I've had this conversation a few times that every time an armoured vehicle appears, it's like flies around an

elephant, you know, dozens of drones suddenly appear all wanting to get the kill. So, It is a different environment where we have to think through the challenges of crossing tactical spaces survivably. I mean, we have to be able to get back on the offensive. I think it's one of the great challenges that have arisen in the last three years. Obviously, both sides are working on it. The Russians, a lot. Got up with some really wacky innovations. The way they've come up with it is a mix of infiltration tactics and long-range glide bombs and a few other bits and pieces.

Now, that's clearly going to be difficult in somewhere like the Pacific, but we do need to come up with new operating concepts that allow us to cross both tactical and operational distances survivably before we even engage with the enemy. Now, part of that is going to be the counter-drone fight. You know, if we can deploy at-scale drone defenses that every individual and every vehicle has, kind of like, remember what we did with the counter ID fight in Iraq and Afghanistan,

and we've been there before. If we're able to do that, we might be able to get back on the offensive. And that's really important because there's no strategic deterrence regime for a country that can't do offensive operations. So we've stuck pretty closely to the actual battlefield contact zone, call it what you want. Let's talk about deep strike in either direction where, well, you know, actually, sorry, one more thing. Is artillery dead?

Yeah, I heard tanks were dead a few years ago. Now I'm hearing artillery. They're not dead either. Yeah, so tell me how it's staying alive, given the potency of everything we've just talked about. Yeah, I mean, the thing with artillery is that, firstly, it remains a cheap way to bring firepower and weight of fires onto the battlefield. Remember, it's 24-7 service where there is lots of circumstances in which drones can't fly. Heavy fog, heavy rain, those kind of thing, which will be a problem in the Pacific. They're complementary.

with each other. They're not competitive. And if you talk to any Ukrainian brigade commander, he'll tell you drones don't replace any part of the combined arms team. They complement it and enhance what the combined arms team can do. So I think that's a really important point. We just need to think of different ways to use artillery and tanks in survivable ways, given the changes in technology, tactics and the environment that we see mass use of uncrued systems. So there's this deep stress. question as well, where there, and there is a rocket, you know, cruise missile component to that for really deep targets, much more expensive weapons and, and I presume, more expensive means of intercept.

But between that, on the one hand, and the smaller stuff that's close to the battlefield, there are these Shaheed or Shahid drones that are Iranian models. And I don't know how much appreciation there is, you know, in the United States of just how these things, you know, are terrorizing, essentially. people and are used, you know, they're going after civilian targets. And I've heard you say in another context as well that even the smaller drones in some areas are being used just to, just for sort of psychological impact in areas near the battlefield that still have civilians nearby them. Talk about the objectives of the Russian campaign and talk about the layers of defense

for that kind of stuff. Yeah, certainly, as well known, the Russians are conducting what's called the Hearson drone safari. They're using it as a training area for their drone operators to go out and hunt. down civilians in the street, buses, ambulances, these kind of things. Yeah, it's a very powerful psychological impact on civilians, not just those who are subject to it, but others who feel that they might be. I mean, jammers are a key part.

But, you know, things like deception and camouflage are coming back into their own. Not everything can be seen, particularly if you take efforts to hide it, not just physically but electromagnetically heat these kind of things. But also decoys have made a huge comeback on the battlefield over the last couple years. There's whole Ukrainian companies. All they do is build decoys of artillery and trucks and high mars and fake radio networks and different heat sources to kind of flood the zone with targets, which is, you know, when we talk about deep strike is also part of the tactic,

is try to overwhelm sensors and interceptors with too many targets and get people to expend their valuable resources and valuable weapons on lower value decoys and lower value targets. You've mentioned industry a couple of times, and you've mentioned the rapid adaptation of things. You know, I think about the American defense acquisition system. It's hard to find too many defenders of it in its current form. And I think of the years and years it takes for us.

to conceive, you know, buy, deploy, build, deploy, et cetera, weapons, you know, in a battlefield that's changing week to week, month to month at most, how has Ukrainian industry adapted? How are they managing that? If you have, you know, a drone that was decisive, you know, operation, let's say, or at least tactically decisive for a few weeks, and then all of a sudden one day you wake up and that's just not true anymore, I mean, you need something else. How does that even work? What's going on? Yeah, one of the things I've been trying to do every time I go back is, you know,

focus on these strategic systems that allow for that kind of adaptation. So talking to the heads of procurement, talking to organizations like Brave One and others. And really, this is about networks to facilitate both formal and informal procurement and adaptation. You know, the informal is units going direct to their friends in industry and to crowd funders, to quickly turn around technologies and drones. But since the beginning the war, the Ukrainians have got much better at large-scale development and procurement.

And there's organisations like Brave One, which kind of act as an incubator. They meet with the general staff every week, make sure they understand requirements, go out and test the market for what they need, do force options testing, come back and give the procurement people options, but also list all the approved drones

on a website so military units can go out and buy them if they want to crowd fund them as well. So it's all about that connectivity. I mean, after every long-range strike mission, for example, there's feedback provided to industry who quite often, at the flight line or at the front line with brigades collecting lessons and feeding it direct back just to speed up that adaptation cycle. Now, I'm not sure about America, but in Australia, the probity folks involved in defence procurement would prevent all of that. They really don't like defence people talking to industry people because of perceived and perhaps some real probity concerns. The Ukrainians have worked

their way through that. Doesn't mean there aren't hiccups, doesn't mean there aren't still areas where it's overly bureaucratic. But I think when you have an existential threat, it allows you to fight through at least more layers of the red tape than we appear to be in Australia or or the United States or other companies. Yeah, no, I mean, it's certainly the case in America that there is, you know, in the eternal sort of philosophical question of what are you going to, what do you care most about in defense acquisitions? Is it saving a penny, which is a slightly pejorative?

I mean, the prevention of corruption, you know, making sure the taxpayer is getting value. That's one side of the question, the other side of the question. Which we want to do. No one's against that. No. And then the other side of it is, you know, speed, efficiency. the kind of competition that produces those things, you know, it seems like a perpetual question which way you're going to lean. We certainly lean in the former here, and that leads to, it leads to

what we have, which I fear, you know, it means already, it seems to me contributing to problems with deterrence. And I fear that in the kind of ongoing attritional, you know, protracted contact scenarios that we're seeing around the world, it just wouldn't be sustainable. Yeah, well, somewhere in there also is giving our soldiers, Marines, sailors, airmen and women the best possible weapons and tools to keep them alive and ensuring the enemy isn't. And sometimes I think we forget that. It's easy to forget that in a national capital when you're doing procurement, but the person using this is a really, really important person. Every single one of them is special and we should be giving them the best tools, giving the best chance of seeing this through and denying that to our enemy. You know, when the

Ukrainians look back on the period 2014 to 2022. So after 2014, there's just sort of no, I would argue, after 2008, but from the Ukrainian contact specifically, there's just no denying after 2014, you've got a huge problem on your hands and it's going to try to eat you for lunch one day. What do they regret about those years? What do they wish they had done more of? I obviously asked that from a self-interested perspective because I kind of wonder if we're in a similar period in the United States or maybe Australia as well. Well, I think there's obviously a lot of political problems in those days. The Russians were clearly working very hard to subvert Ukrainian politics.

I mean, I think they spent that eight years doing a lot of that work. And 2022 was their recognition that it hadn't succeeded and they had to intervene in other ways. Yeah, I think probably defence spending on industry is an area they probably wish they'd done more of in the 2014 to 2022. But I think they also made some pretty wise decisions with NATO doing some NATO standardisation. I mean, they're not a standard NATO military. They've got a long way to go. But they certainly in 2014 got enough of a shock to speed that up, bring in trainers, those kind of things.

But I think the 2014 to 2022 period, you saw a lot of their military get very important experience, particularly out in the Donbass, you know, Zilluzny on downwinds. They've all had combat experience against the Russians. They've learnt what their enemy is like from fighting them, from going to their schools and studying them. So I think they did use that time wisely to understand the Russians better, but I think they were probably let down politically. And, you know, as we saw, despite the amazing achievements of President Zelensky, He really resisted accepting that the Russians might invade right up until there was intervention from pretty much the head of the CIA having to fly to Kiev to brief him personally.

So once again, all war is about political objectives and preparations for war is exactly the same. If your politics aren't working, your military is not going to be prepared. Well, let's talk about political objectives. We've been on the battlefield, but let's zoom out before we talk about other things. So I guess I feel like I could give a pretty good account of Russian objectives, which is to get as much of Ukraine as they possibly can before being compelled for whatever reason, maybe by the Americans to stop. But if possible to, you know, manipulate the Americans to get even more, you know, basically to keep going.

The Russian objective is this is unfinished business and they would like to finish as finish as much of it as possible. That's how it seems to me just observing from a great distance. One, curious if you agree with that. And then two, what's your account of Ukrainian objectives here at what seems like a perilous moment? Yeah, I think from the Russian point of view, you know, the media, it's all about how much territory's been taken, whereas Putin's objectives are not territorial. They're political. They're about ensuring Ukraine is not a sovereign state that is aligned with EU, NATO, and the West. That's his number one objective.

of territory is just part of how he gets there. So in all the discussions about territory, everything I hear is about what territory they'll be allowed to keep and this kind of thing. It's like, that is not what this is about. It's about negotiating an end to his overall objective, which is to destroy the Ukrainian state and its culture. From a Ukrainian perspective, it's all about the opposite.

It's about preserving Ukrainian nationhood, sovereignty, and its ability to choose who it associates with, who it trades with, who it has military relationships with. So the sovereignty piece is obviously the number one part. A subset of that is clearly about not recognizing Russian ownership of any of the territory. It's illegally occupied, even if it doesn't have the wherewithal to take it back at this point in time, it will never accept that, just as it didn't with Crimea in 2014. You know, another objective is clearly to ensure that it continues to get support from,

on countries around the world, whether it's military, economic, intelligence, diplomatic, these kind of things. That's a very important objective to meet the first one, which is preserve Ukraine's sovereignty and culture. And then the third one is try and get the kind of guarantees to prevent further Russian aggression if there is to be a ceasefire. So, you know, I think they're pretty important. But, you know, I still think Zelensky and his government,

adhere to the objectives they laid out for the G20. I think it was in 2022, the 10 points that encompass those, but also things like justice, return of kidnap children and POWs, these kind of things as well. That's really helpful as a way of framing it, and it makes me skeptical, just hearing you say that, that there is an available formula here in the spring of 2025 that both sides could agree to.

I mean, that's obviously American policy right now is to find such a formula. And if it were just about territory, which in my somewhat muddle-headed account a few minutes ago, that's sort of how I laid it out. And then you quite rightly corrected me. Well, you could find territorial formulas. But if it's, I mean, obnoxious and unfortunate ones, but you could. But if a core Russian objective is the destabilization of Ukrainian sovereignty and they don't back off from that, well, how do you, you know, the Ukrainians can't back off from that, right?

I mean, that's a survival question. So, you know, they would have to somehow be destabilized in the process of the negotiation. It would be the only way you could get there. So I guess that's one possible outcome. But, you know, what are the formula out there that you could get a ceasefire right now? I don't think there's a single Big Bang solution here. It's not like the Sai or the end of Second World War when one side was literally on its knees. That's not the case here.

It's going to have to be something we kind of work our way through over time. and different elements of what war termination looks like. It's going to be comprised of many different negotiations, everything from territorial through to exchange of prisoners, through to future security guarantees, to reparations and all these kind of things. One side of the other has brought up all these issues. They're going to have to be worked through in turn,

but there is no Big Bang put out a tweet, all done, solution for the war. You know, the objectives of both sides are so far apart that bringing them together in some kind of war termination agreement is just going to take time. We know this from history. You know, whether, how long did it take to negotiate the end of the Korean War?

Years. The Vietnam War? Years. The Iraq War. Years. You know, these things are difficult because humans are complex, have different objectives. There is no overnight or single Big Bang solution that will end a war in Ukraine.

I think just at a deep level, it's hard for people who are not fighting a war. You know, their family, you know, they haven't lost family. They haven't spent the cost. They haven't developed the kind of anger and fury that one does in a deep way in those circumstances. It's hard for them to appreciate that the people who are in those circumstances may not prioritize peace for whatever reason. some noble, some less noble. I would argue that the Russian reason for not prioritizing peace is less noble, but nevertheless, it is what it is.

And that seems, I'm not sure Americans have properly wrapped their minds around that. No, I think that's fair. You know, the conversation we just had on war termination was entirely rational. But as we both know, war gets the emotions up. I mean, Clarezwitz describes this, and we've seen it personally, it is a fact. But once a war gets going and the killing starts, particularly when there's massacres of civilians, as the Russians have done multiple times, people are emotionally invested in a solution that's just. And I think it's entirely fair that we support the Ukrainians to get a just solution when it comes to war termination.

There have been so many war crimes committed by the Russians that there must be accounting for this in some way. We've got a few minutes left, and I wanted to ask you about the issue of surprise, deception, surprise, this whole network of issues. It's something we've talked a lot about here on the show. It was one of the things that most interested me in 2024 about the Israel, Hamas, Israel, Hezbollah, Israel, sort of Iranian network, etc. War was the way in which surprise still played an enormous role on, you know, the high-tech battlefield. The Hamas of all groups pulled it off successfully in October of 2023. And then the Israelis somewhat spectacularly used deception and ambiguity in the fall of 24 against Hezbollah. So it's alive and well in some way or in some ways.

But we have a battlefield, of course, that is much more surveilled, much more visible. You know, we have highly sophisticated signals, intelligence. We have all these things that would make you think that, you know, like tanks, like artillery, maybe surprise is in bad shape as well. McRane, how is surprise doing on the battlefield of 2025? I think surprise is in surprisingly rude health. You know, I've written about this multiple occasions, as you know. We both served in Afghanistan, which was probably the most until 2022.

Afghanistan was the most densely surveilled battle space in the history of human warfare. I think it would be fair to say. We still got surprised by an enemy who generally would, using tactics centuries old. That is still the case. We have seen surprise multiple times in the Middle East and through the war in Ukraine right up until recently. And it puts, I think, the sword through this notion

of battle space transparency. It's not transparent. Clearly, if we're still able as humans to surprise each other, it is not transparent by definition. It might be more visible. No one is denying that. There's a very strong case for that. But it is not transparent because you cannot see into the hearts and minds of men on the battlefield.

Mick Ryan, this has been a fascinating conversation, as always. I'm always happy to have you here on the show. It's unfortunate that it's always about this grim subject. I guess this is the work. Have you ever considered, you know, a substack on barbecue or something like that? You know, it crosses my mind from time to time. Well, as a lover of American barbecue and knowing how different it is across different regions and different states and having personally tested it in many, many different states,

that sounds like a pretty good substack to me, although I would be an amateur, not an expert. Well, that's what's great about the new media, Mick, is, I mean, you're doing this all wrong. You know, you invested your whole life, your whole life's work in becoming a genuine expert. Whereas, you know, you've got a lot of competition out there that's doing just fine that didn't put any kind of work in there like that. So you should just return the favor and just get in there on the barbecue. you seen. I would sign up today. I'm thinking about it. Thank you so much for coming back. I really appreciate it. Thanks, Aaron. It's always a great pleasure to talk with you. This is a nebulous

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