School of War - Ep 233: Mick Ryan on the Ukraine War’s Urgent Lessons

Episode Date: September 23, 2025

Major General Mick Ryan, Australian Army (retired), Senior Fellow for Military Studies the Lowy Institute and author of the Futura Doctrina substack, joins the show to discuss his latest piece, Translating Ukraine Lessons for the Pacific Theatre. ▪️ Times     •      01:40 Introduction     •      02:18 Translation      •      04:03 Ground forces             •      08:40 Australian defense      •      11:25 Threats from the North              •      13:25 Chinese influence               •      16:46 The mask slips           •      19:51 What we don’t know              •      24:36 The Pacific     •      32:18 Information ops            •      37:31 Corrosive influences             •      40:15 Mass Follow along on Instagram, X @schoolofwarpod, and YouTube @SchoolofWarPodcast Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack

Repeat Offender, Major General Mick Ryan of the Australian Army, returns to school of war today. He's one of the sharpest observers of the evolution of war in Ukraine, the Western Pacific, and beyond. And our subject today is how to translate the lessons we all think we're learning in Ukraine to the very different theater of the Western Pacific. Let's get into it. It is for war. In him, the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a state. We continue to face the great situation in Iran. There's a fight on the beaches.

There's a fight on the landing ground. We'll fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I am delighted to welcome back to the show today. Major General Mick Ryan, retired from the Australian Army, in which he served for 35 years. Today he's the inaugural senior fellow for military studies at the Lowy Institute.

Did I pronounce that correctly, Mick? That sounds good to me, Lowy Institute. I need a better Australian twang with it. Author of numerous books, articles, several of which we've discussed on the show before. Mick is a repeat offender. And he has just written a paper translating Ukraine lessons for the Pacific Theater for the Australian Army Research Center, which is obviously a subject, write up our ally. Ali, though it does talk about allies. Mick, thank you so much for coming back on School of War.

That's great to be with you, Aaron. I'm proud to be a repeat offender. Let me start us off with a big picture question. Your paper seeks, as the title suggests, to translate lessons from Ukraine out to the Pacific and the area of Australia's more immediate security concerns. Pacific Ocean, a lot of islands, a lot of water, the European plane, a lot of land, a lot of fields, a lot of trees, two pretty different. places, how does one go about engaging in this act of translation when it comes to military lessons learn? Well, I think the first thing you do is you accept that Ukraine is not the future of war. I think there's too much work out there that's purporting that Ukraine is the future of war.

And I don't believe that's the case. You only have to go to Israel or somewhere like that to see that's not the case, but every trend we see out of Ukraine will influence the future of war. So I think. thought it was important to move beyond the first level of analysis, which I think is most of the articles about Ukraine and its lessons. You know, Ukrainians are a lesson from Ukraine, but what are the applicability of, say, drones or long-range strike in different theatres? And as you well put, the Pacific is very different. There's lots of blue bits, but there's also three, maybe four major continents which influence Pacific operations. It's not just about the blue bits.

There's lots of green bits in the Pacific we have to pay attention to as well. So there's certain things about the Pacific, right, that you point to in the paper. First of all, there is the presence of land, which, as you know, in the United States, I'm actually curious to know how this plays out in Australia, but in the United States, long debate with at this point some sort of entrenched cliched arguments about the primacy of air and sea versus the ongoing role of land forces and whether land forces are extremely relevant or only semi-relevant and a general prejudice, I would say a dominating prejudice, that it is the air and the sea that will dominate this conflict. How does that play out in Australia?

I mean, the way you just answered the last question suggests that you are in the camp that we should not be forgetting the role of ground forces. No, absolutely. And this is why I did this report and why I wrote my book, White, Some War, the Pacific is not all blue. I mean, most of the blue bits are what you move through and fight through, you're not going to fight for them. Everything we're fighting for, which is politics or people all live on the ground. So, you know, we absolutely can't afford to forget the role of ground forces, whether they're army or Marines. And at the end of the day, the way we do things in the military now is entirely integrated and joint. So airlines, sea, space, cyber are all going to be very important. And we can't afford to think, well, it's just going to be a

Navy fighter, it's just going to be an Air Force fight, it's going to take all of us against what is a pretty determined, technologically sophisticated and large potential adversary to overcome any future conflict. I suppose another obvious difference, which you point to in the paper, is not that these are NATO's quietest or least bumpy days. There's obviously issues in the alliance, and those issues may well grow, but there is a NATO. There is a structure of relatively unified military and indeed on some level diplomatic coordination and even commands when talking about the threat from Russia or other threats that may come the way of Europe or North America.

When it comes to North America and the Pacific, there just isn't a NATO. And so that's a sort of simple point that anyone, anyone with a sort of one-on-one level understanding of the issue knows. But what does it mean? Like what will it actually mean in terms of translating lessons from one theater to the next? Yeah, I think NATO has a deep foundation of standardized processes, doctrine, equipment, those kind of things. It doesn't always work perfectly, but at least there's a process there. There's a process for consultation. As you point out, that doesn't exist in the Pacific.

But, you know, over the last decade, we've seen the creation of a mesh of security partnerships and alliances. You know, the US has deepened its relationship with Japan, the Philippines, and Australia. Australia has done the same with Japan, with the Philippines, with Singapore. You know, you see a meshing of different logistics and strategic arrangements across the Pacific. You know, all kind of the saccua for the Pacific is commander Indo-Pacom. I mean, it's a rough equivalence, but that's kind of the role he plays there. But it's more nuanced and he has to be far more diplomatic and present in a whole lot of places to pull that off. And I think, quite large, that's what does happen.

It does mean, however, that each country has a bit more agency than European nations do when it comes to their own security. That's not a bad thing. But it also means the relationships between different countries are different. We all look at the relationships between different countries and say, oh, I like a bit of that, but I don't like that. So I don't think a lack of a NATO is a bad thing. I think it just represents the structure and the cultures of our region. but we have seen, and I've loved seeing this, you know, a huge amount of exercises between military organisation.

I mean, Australia has just finished pretty large exercise in the Philippines. It's now we've normalized battle group armored deployments into places like the Philippines and Indonesia with tanks and everything else that no one ever expected this to do. So there's been a normalisation of all this military diplomatic cooperation that may not be NATO, but I think we'll help us to deter conflict, but if conflict does help us to, you know, win it. One more question about the Pacific Theater, and then I want to get into what you are trying to translate,

that is to say, what you're learning in Ukraine and how you're learning it. For an American audience, we do have some listeners in Australia, but for an American audience, or we have a fair few listeners in the UK as well, what is the basic Australian defence concept? You know, you're writing what you've written to inform that understanding and to help it evolve in light of what's going on in Ukraine in an intelligent way. But how does Australia see the defense of its sovereignty and how does that nest into, you know, the American concept of the Indo-Pacific area and the wars we plan to fight there if we have to?

Yeah, I think there's three key elements. The first one is our geography. You know, we're an island and a continent at the bottom of the world. So geography, whilst it might not infer the same advantages that it used to, it still gives us some advantages in security. I mean, we're the only continent that's one country, and we have a wonderful blue moat around our country and blessed with pretty good neighbours, to be quite frankly,

you know, the Kiwis, Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, Timor Leste. So geography plays a key role in Australian defence strategy. Now, you know, defence of Australia or forward deployment of being different approaches in the past, but geography is one of the key determinants of our national security and national defence policy. The second one is we always partner with a big and powerful friend until 1942.

That was the United Kingdom. Since 1942, it's been the United States, and that is a foundational element of how we see defense, how we structure, how we acquire intelligence and high technology items. But the third bit is what I guess some would describe as an external nervous system of our trade and diplomatic and security relationships where prosperity and security go hand and hand. And, you know, our prosperity is generated from our relationships, our trade relationships in the region and beyond our diplomatic relationships with the Commonwealth with America and other countries. and our defense relationships with the United States, Canada, New Zealand, a very close relationship

with Papua New Guinea that's about to get even closer with the integration of our militaries, Philippines, Japan, Indonesia, these kind of countries. So there's those three streams. And while strategies evolve, they are always the three core elements of how we see our defense. And on the geography point, how does the Australian government or planning processes, or however we want to talk about it, How do they prioritize? I mean, one assumes just looking at the map and given the fact that the most likely problem is going to be either with China or on the Korean Peninsula or both. That it's what in World War II we would have called the Southwest Pacific area that gets the bulk of the focus. I mean, to your south, you have Antarctica, which at least as of this moment, knock on wood, you know, does not yet pose a threat.

But, you know, is that fair? And if so, how does that work? You know, how do you divvy things up? Yeah, well, I think it's fair to say for just about all of our history from when we were afraid of the Russians at the beginning of the 20th century through the Pacific War through to the current day, you know, threats come from the north. There's not a lot out west, there's not a lot out east except our, you know, friendly nations in the Pacific, and the Antarctica has penguins and a few Chinese Antarctic bases.

So we look north, and, you know, if you have a look at our basing, our force posture, even the alignment of our over the rise and radars and stuff. North, northwest is kind of the orientation of our military. And most of our operating bases are based in the north of Australia, including the one I was spent time at yesterday. So, you know, it's a strategic outlook, but it's also a force posture and force structure determinant by choosing to look north,

because that's where we think the most likely threats are likely to emanate Unfortunately for your troops, I was just saying that everything is in the north of Australia is a little bit like saying everything we care about in America is in Yuma, Arizona. You know, it's a little warmish up there. Yeah, it's warm, but it's also very pleasant, good beaches, although having spent full postings in Darwin, also lots of crocodiles on those beaches. This is literally, isn't it crocodile Dundee? Isn't he up there in the northern territory?

Sorry, this just became very stereotypical American-Australian interaction, but I am what I am. He is a native of the Northern Territory, and I spent a large part of my career up there. It's a tough place to live in, but it's a great place to soldiering. So when you're looking north and maybe slightly northwest at the southwest, again, using the old MacArthur Nimitz Division, the Southwest Pacific area, what worries you the most? I mean, you and Camber are much closer to this part of the world than we are in Washington. The Chinese, you know, you see them active in the Solomon Islands, obviously a major sub-theater of conflict in World War II.

What are the problems close in that most keep people in Canberra up at night? I think first and foremost, it's Chinese influence. Chinese influence in the South Pacific, what it's trying to do to corrupt many of those governments and shift their orientation towards China. To shift their orientation away from Taiwan is a big effort of the Chinese in the South Pacific and largely South Pacific Islands have resisted that. But, you know, influence in Australia is profound.

I mean, they have, in some respects, convinced the current Australian government that they're not a threat. There's this talk of stabilising the relationship. And there's this sense, this narrative that China's not a threat. Well, I think that's very problematic because the facts speak to that not being the case. And, you know, we've had Australian service people injured by the actions of the Chinese military just in the last couple years. So I think there's this first and foremost from the Chinese is to convince the Australian people,

the people in the South Pacific, that they're not a threat, that they're this benign influence and that they're far more reliable than the Americans are. And so that's the number one thing we need to pay attention to. But we're seeing an increased Chinese presence, Chinese military presence in our region. It's not very welcome, to be quite frank, when you have a Chinese naval task force that circumnavigates Australia and, you know, it kind of showed up the Australian governments lax approach to national security. You know, it very much tried to cover up what had happened rather than have an honest conversation with the Australian people, which doesn't reflect well on

them, to be quite frank. Now, there's an investment plane, but, you know, I think it all shows with Chinese influence, Chinese physical presence in the region, it's diplomatic efforts to realign Australia with China. I mean, it's been very open about this. I think it demonstrates why Australia needs a national security strategy. It doesn't have one. And why 2% of GDP just isn't sufficient in the current era. As somebody who spent a decent chunk of my own career trying to raise awareness about the threat from China, which, you know, in America, we really only, it only started to be taken universally seriously, near universally, about a decade ago. You know, before that, it was, it was not front of mind. But when these moments occur when you have a government or whatever, some

sector of some society somewhere saying everything's going to be okay and we can deal with these guys, I can always rely on the Chinese themselves to mess that up. They really can't help themselves. They have difficulty. And this is why, you know, I think it's their neighbors in countries like Australia or sort of the next ring out who were earlier to see the threat than countries further away because the closer you are, the more the Chinese really struggle to just take If they could take it down from like an 11 to an 8 and just pretend to be a little bit more normal, you know, they would actually, it would make life for people like me a lot harder. But they really struggle.

They really struggle. No, I think you're right. I mean, I think there's certainly the Japanese, the Taiwanese, see them for what they really are, the Vietnamese, the Filipinos. I mean, the Filipinos have really received quite concerted, coercive and, you know, military bullying by the Chinese. We see just about every day the true nature of the Chinese dictatorship and how they treat their Filipino neighbors. And, you know, I think we just can't overlook that. But their information operations are very clever. And there's that famous line from the usual suspects where

Kaiser Soze says, the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was to convince the world he didn't exist. That's what the Chinese are doing in the region. They're trying to convince the region that they're not a threat. That they're not, you know, seeking to be a hegemon that's after. tribute from all their neighbors. That's what they are. We need to see them for what they are. And, you know, as you pointed out so well, the authors in that book, while Israel slept, there was this concept here before 7 October that anything interfered with the established narrative about a threat. I wasn't listened to. And I'm starting to see that in my own country. Government has a narrative, that they're not a threat, that the relationship stabilized,

and anything that interferes with that is ignored. So to Ukraine, which was our original purpose here, you're somebody, you spent a lot of time there. You have a lot of contacts there. You're as informed about the war as any Western observer that I know. You make a really interesting point in this paper that despite in some ways the unique visibility to outsiders of the Ukrainian battlefield in the 2020s, given the social media, the proliferation of sensors that then get passed out into the open source or that may be controlled by open source mechanisms themselves, in some ways, this is the most. most visible war in human history to the casual observer. But then you point out that, you know, first of all, even so, there's just normal fog of war. Things get confused. And second of all, there's just, there are multiple realms, we might guess, where things happen that we just, if you're outside of the loop, if you're not a decision

maker in Ukraine or Russia, you probably don't know about. And I wanted to ask you to address this really interesting point and maybe speculate a bit, you know, what is, you know, what is is the equivalent of the the the world war two code breaking you know enigma and and efforts like that the bletchley park effort that you know played such a central role in allied war making world war two but which was not disclosed at all until years after the fact what kinds of things could be going on behind the scenes either sort of cool and impressive things like that or bad things on the russian side or just you know i couldn't tell you what ukrainian casualty figures are and a lot of what goes on in Ukraine. And I continue to be a supporter of the Ukrainian cause, so I don't feel

the need to disclose it, even if I did know it. But just how do you think about what we don't know? Yeah, I think it's a really important point to make when we keep hearing this narrative about transparent battlefield. I think, you know, military professionals need to resist this notion, because we know deep down, but it's not a transparent battlefield. You might be able to see a lot of it or even all of it. But seeing something doesn't mean you understand. something. It doesn't imply wisdom about what you're actually being able to deliver through a screen. So I think that's an important part of being humble as a military person or an intelligence person. But when we get to the things, well, what aren't we seeing? I think, you know, one of the

important things you don't see a lot of in war and it doesn't come out for years is the civil military interaction. You know, for me, I think this has been a fundamentally important part of this war. You know, on the Russian side, obviously a civil military interaction that did not work and led Putin to believe that he could overrun Ukraine quickly by the intelligence services who didn't do their job by military that wasn't as ready or as prepared for the war, as it said. So that civil military interaction, I think, has been interesting and important. But at the same time, you know, you've seen that interaction between Zelensky and Zillusini for the first, you know, 18 months or so of the war and now Zelensky-Seersky, you know, I think we don't know

enough about that relationship. I'm not saying we need to see it in real time, but at some point that will be a very interesting case study in civil military relations scholarship, because that determines resourcing priorities in war. It determines do you go into Kursk when you don't need to or do you go into Kursk and you really need to. It determines when 2023 counteroffensives take place and where the main effort might be is they're not purely military endeavors. So for me, that's a really interesting and largely unseen endeavor, except for those right in the middle of it. I guess the second bit is just the level of technological development that's happened, not just in Ukraine, there's been a lot of indigenous,

but there's been a lot of support to Ukraine that we haven't seen recent, haven't seen throughout the war that, you know, there's been a lot of American technology and money that's underpinned Ukrainian technologies that's, you know, I think, you know, the US hasn't actually taken a lot of credit for, which I think speaks a lot to the quality of the people in the US military. So they're the kind of things that I look at. I don't care about wonder weapons. There's no such thing. but it's these behind-the-scenes endeavors that I think are really interesting

and that we'll learn more about at some point in the future. All right, so I want to get into some of these lessons that you identify. In this first one, I'm going to, you list 10 in the report, and I'm going to moosh a few of them together here. You can disentangle them if you want. But related to this question of sensors and visibility, there is a kind of combination of factors, the proliferation of sensors to include commercial centers,

and the integration of those into government entities, the prevalence of drones for both reconnaissance and strike, the ability to be precise at long ranges to a greater degree than the past, all of these different things, which you discuss separately. They all kind of add together as this very visible battlefield. It's easy to be seen, and once you're seeing, it is, historically speaking, relatively easy to be killed. Or if you see someone else, it's relatively easy to kill them, all of which seems to suggest, and this is something we've discussed on the show, before, but it bears repeating because it's important. Sitting here, September 2025, it does seem like the defense has a bit of an upper hand over the offense, as we might have identified

in the Western front of the First World War a century and change ago. Provided, provided, and I was happy to see this in your report because this is a hobby horse of mine, provided you don't get surprised, which is the sort of X factor or scrambler that's in there because it happens. So, you know, first of all, feel free to, I just put sort of what I read from your report in my own words, so feel free to just address it in general.

But second of all, fine, but what does that mean for the Pacific where, you know, are the sensors as dense as they are in a land theater, primarily land theater? Like, help us understand what this means for the Western Pacific and if it's different at all. Yeah, I think there's a couple of really important points here. You know, the Pacific geographically is very different. It's a bigger and, you know, a much more disconnected kind of theater. You're working over much larger areas that aren't physically connected. You know, secondly, you do have a lot of water and you do have a lot of vegetation.

A lot of places where we'll work will have 90 to 95% vegetation cover, which just isn't the case in Ukraine. And as we found in Vietnam, you can't destroy all the vegetation, even though we tried, you know, at massive costs to our veterans over the succeeding decades. But the Pacific's also lots of cities, lots of big cities. And if anyone thinks there's a transparent battlefield, ask the Israelis in Gaza. You and I have been there. And we listen to the Israelis talk about, even after a couple years, they think that only found a certain percentage of tunnels.

It is not a transparent battlefield, even with all the technology in the world. So, you know, I looked at Israel and I looked at Ukraine and said, well, we need to dig deeper here on how many senses are going to be out there, what the senses will see, what kind of understanding they'll provide us. And my conclusion is they'll provide a level of visibility, but they will never give us full certainty or full understanding. And we should be very careful of the profits of technology who promises full understanding and full visibility, because I just don't think it's possible when you're working in that kind of environment against a very adaptive, technologically a sophisticated adversary as we are out in the Pacific.

I wonder how you rate another factor that's on my mind, which is, you know, you say in the paper that one difference is that between the theaters is that China is just a more capable adversary than Russia, which seems obviously true, at least true, to the extent that we can tell. Obviously, we haven't run the test. But in terms of just capabilities, as we might assess them, it certainly seems likely that they've got the upper hand over the Russians. Well, you know, the scenarios that we're realistically talking about here, I suppose there are scenarios where China goes after Taiwan or the Philippines

and no one intervenes except perhaps to provide support, in which case you do have something kind of comparable to Ukraine. But the scenario that's on everyone's mind really is a direct conflict between China and the United States and its allies. In which case, certainly in the opening stages, you have not one but two, two plus, given the allies like Australia, and elsewhere, extremely capable, you know, military forces or coalition of military forces on the American side. And there's going to be a war over the sensors to include in space that I have to

imagine is going to be much more intense than anything we saw in 2022. And indeed, probably the dominant war for the first few days, I would imagine. And I have to imagine that one likely outcome. I mean, there could be political considerations that intervene here. And we don't strike stuff on the Chinese mainland or maybe we all stay out of space or they stay off of sovereign American territory like Hawaii. Maybe, you know, your guess is going to fine. Exactly, maybe. I wouldn't plan on it, but maybe. I'm more worried that we'll decide to stay out of their territory and they won't decide to stay out of ours. That's a scenario that worried me. In any event, I just see a lot of stuff going dark. And I do worry that we've gotten used to practicing with all the stuff that might go

dark. So I don't know how you rate that in the sequence or in the prioritization of factors to think about. No, I think that's right up the top, to be quite frank. There's a whole range of things that come out of Ukraine, and it's been obvious to me that there's some profound operational problems we need to solve in the Pacific. The first one is this translation of lessons, but the second one is how do you degrade enemy awareness whilst sustaining your own? And it is going to be a battle of senses. I mean, humans are going to pay an enormous role as well. We shouldn't forget that. But even that's hard in China.

So this battle of senses is going to be extraordinarily intense. It's going to be all domains. And to be quite honest, it's not just going to happen in the Western Pacific. It is going to be a global undertaking by both people. This is one area where both will seek to ensure that they have the capacity to sustain or replace their global situational awareness. Because remember, they don't want this to tip over into a nuclear war. and one of the ways you do that is sustain awareness of your capabilities and theirs.

But I think this will be an intense global situation awareness fight, not just a Western Pacific fight in the first few days. And it will have a major impact on the homelands. This isn't just going to be a military thing. Our people are going to be either cut off or saturated in corrosive material designed to even further break down the bonds of our societies that are so important in war. Now, I think, you know, if the Chinese are going to do that in a conflict with the United States,

they really should study history because traditionally when you attack the American people and the American homeland does not go well for you. So, I mean, the Chinese really need to exercise some great caution because they might have to deal with America and America they're not seeing at the moment. It might be a very different America. And historically, that very different America is, being very good at taking down entire countries. And China should be very where, and that should be part of our alliance deterrence framework. Because we've taken down countries before, we'll do

it again, even if it's really hard. Yeah. American attitudes towards foreign policy and war are a bit like the weather in England. You can just expect that it's going to change. Yeah. But I let me, so that's the beauty of a democracy. Yeah. Yeah. Well, anyone who relies on the American people being focused and hawkish and, you know, willing to deal seriously with foreign threats, well, just, you know, give it a few months or a few years. The focus will fade. People will get tired. People will get cranky.

And anyone who thinks America is an isolationist nation, you kill a few Americans and see how it goes. I mean, that's, in fact, the current president seems to have internalized this ethic. He sort of elevates that the cycle that I just described almost to a principle of policy. I've seen that play. You know, we saw it play out in the Middle East with Iran. There were a lot of provocations in 2019 that directly impacted American interests. But it wasn't until the Iranians killed an American in December of 2019 that Trump really swung back with Soleimani.

And you see this phenomenon sort of play out. So yes, no, all to agree. Well, let's go to this subject of cognitive warfare or information warfare, whatever we want to call it. It's sort of a, it's a sensitive subject in the United States because, of course, become fraught politically. And, you know, I can explain what I mean by that, but I suspect you in all. of our listeners know. What does it actually look like in Ukraine and Russia? Like, how does it look like in the ground there? Because I can kind of muse about, you know, Chinese, Russian efforts to mess, or Qatari efforts, for that matter, to mess with the American information space. What does it,

what does it actually look like as part of the war where the war is being fought? Yeah, I guess it's most basic. You know, it looks like a president of Ukraine, putting out a video that, you know, and talking about we're all here, you know, I don't need a riot, I need ammunition. That's, that's the base kind of level of information operations and strategic communications and the impact of those early talks he gave, those early videos were very profound in bringing, you know, NATO on board, in getting support and defeating the, you know, the Russian march on Kiev. But at the same time, you know, the Russians are very clever at putting out very correct. And, you know, the Russian march on, of misinformation, you know, in Ukraine about draft dodgers and people going AWOL, the kind of

things that are designed to split elements of society. But at the same time, a very clever at having different messaging throughout Europe, whether it's, you know, you help Ukraine and we're going to beat the heck out of you, which seems to be the current approach. Other times they're a little bit more sophisticated. And then there's the messaging that, you know, they try and use in democracies like, you know, the United States or Britain or Australia. It's like, well, come on, it's, come on, guys, this is really none of your concern. You know, this is just a local thing, you know, by a former Russian province that's not a real country. Come on, what are you doing here? So this is what Russian influence operations looks like. And unfortunately, many of our people

are smart enough to see that. Unfortunately, not all our people, all politicians are smart enough to see through it. But that's what influence operations, cognitive warfare looks like right now in Russia's war against Ukraine. It's different in the Pacific just because of the political, the cultural, the ethnic makeup of the region. But I think we can fully expect to see the same kind of things out here in a conflict. And certainly the first thing China will be trying to ensure does not happen is that there's not a Taiwanese Zelensky. I mean, that is, it would be task number one for their militaries, take out the leadership. One, it denies them a strategic communications narrative or a unified, unified national command and control system.

So it's kind of a two for one. So the Chinese have watched and learned, and I think most agree that, you know, decapitation will be an important part of denying strategic influence in the future. I do worry about how seriously we are taking this in the United States. And I say that as somebody who, you know, I have rolled my eyes and continue to roll my eyes at some of the use of the problem of disinformation in American politics to delegitimize domestic political enemies who were not successful because of foreign misinformation. They're just politically successful. And one side can't accept that sometimes. That said, you know, we're recording this here on Tuesday, September the 16th. It looks like we are moving towards some sort of deal in the United States to save TikTok.

That looks like it's going to preserve some degree of Chinese control over the algorithm. I hope that's not true if there was a deal that actually abided by the law that Congress passed and really severed the relationship. And it was just one more toxic social media app. But by God, it was an American toxic social media app. You know, that would be another question. But, you know, the notion that the Chinese are going to have this powerful tool available. to them back during the big congressional debate I guess it was last year I remember someone making the point that in the event of a war in the western Pacific one of the things

you'll see quickly is a significant increase in teen suicides in the Washington DC area I had to think about that for a second about what that what that meant but of course you know the the algorithm can be manipulated to push all this toxic content to different demographics when it lures you know in particular young vulnerable people down these rabbit holes of you know content about, you know, drugs and alcohol and stuff. So the information more may not just be, you know, suddenly your phone is full of pro-Shi Jinping messaging. It might just up the intensity substantially, but sort of deniably on all these various toxic approaches. I thought that was interesting and scary. And I just don't know the extent to which we're taking seriously

the fact that the same digital revolution that has affected the battlefield so dramatically and has created the sophisticated sensor strike complex that, you know, all, I mean, even the Houthis have it now, but like, you know, that any military worth, worth anything in 2025 has access to. It's also completely transformed the information space, which means that it's much more easy for our foreign adversaries to get to everyone in our countries. You're carrying their propaganda in your, or their efforts to mess with you in your pocket. And what we do about that is a society concerned about national security without really intruding on civil liberties and how we strike that balance is.

It's a question that I'm not sure we have seriously answered for ourselves. If anything, we seem like we're going in the wrong direction. No, I think, you know, it's a really important question. The Chinese would never allow an American company to own social media, let alone put content on Chinese social media because they value cohesion and unity above all else. And they know that social media in Western countries is not a unifying influence. It's a corrosive influence. I mean, the amount of studies on where the algorithms prioritize content that's not puppies,

but, you know, fairly destructive and corrosive. And we've seen that in the wake of, you know, recent events in the United States with multiple killings and targeted attacks on politicians and relations to politicians and important national figures up and two including candidate Trump last year on at least one occasion, probably two. You know, social media is not subject to the laws that normal media are subject to about, content. And I think we really need to look at that. I don't know how we've allowed it to be a freefall, how we've allowed social media to do what no society in the West has ever allowed, ever allowed, at least for the last couple hundred years in its newspapers and its public

discourse. And if you've got teenage kids, you see just how corrosive social media can be. So I do think we need to look at this because I'm not sure it's an effective part of a well-functioning democracy at this point, which I think has to be the priority, a well-functioning democracy where all views are heard and they're heard in a way where people can have a conversation where they listen to each other rather than decide to shoot at each other because they disagree with each other. That's a real risk. And I think in a future war, the Chinese will weaponize that even further. Here's another big package of lessons that I'm curious how you think we should translate them from Ukraine over to the Western Pacific. This question of, well, you've heard

to it is mass and mobilization. And then you have a separate observation about the quality of people or personnel, or is Lenin, I think put it, I'm not sure apocryphly or actually, quantity has a quality all its own. So on the one hand, you have these grinding protracted wars that seem to require mass, and that mass that in turn requires some level of mobilization. And then you have the question of how good do you need people to be or how good do you need the equipment to be? You know, this obviously means something about human beings in the Ukraine context. Does it have the same applicability to personnel? Is it more of an equipment question in the Pacific? We have these big open spaces over water. Help us understand this, Mick. Yeah, I think it's very applicable in the

Pacific theater. I mean, it's Chinese is, China's a big country, Japan's a big country, the U.S. is a big country, but none of them really had the standing forward. for a sustained conflict, we'll find that as big as the US military is, it's already under pressure around the globe and a sustained conflict, as you and I saw in Iraq and Afghanistan, required a limited mobilisation of reserves, national guards and others, expansion of the US Army, expansion of the US Marine Corps for what was a regional conflict undertaken largely by the professional full-time military. A conflict in the Pacific. will be very different. It will be much broader over a much larger geographic scope, a much larger

array of military capabilities will be required across all domains, not just primarily in the land and air domain that we saw in Iraq and Afghanistan. And historically, wars between big, wealthy countries normally last a long time. And the thing to remember in any conflict between America and the US, and I certainly hope this doesn't happen because it'd be catastrophic. But the winner rules the world. We shouldn't forget this, that whoever wins a conflict between China in America rules the world. And whoever doesn't will be a strategic backwater for 100 years.

These are pretty big stakes. These are very big stakes, which is why we need to invest so much in deterring it happening in the first place. But if it does happen, it will require full national mobilization in democracies once it happens to make sure we don't lose. that would be even worse. What is the state of the debate on the defense budget in Australia? You alluded to the fact that 2% is not enough.

You also mentioned that the current government may not take the PLA and the PRC quite as seriously as you would like them to. Where does all of that stand? It's pretty much, yeah, let's not talk about the defense budget, really. You know, their preferences to focus on domestic issues, and many of us have been calling for a defense budget that's significantly increased because the Yorkers submarine has put so much pressure. I mean, it's very simple mathematics.

Australia cannot afford the Yorkist submarines and a Australian Defence Force with its current budget. It's not possible. In 10 years on the current track, the Australian Defence Force will be two aircraft, three dogs and a rowboat, the way we're going, the way that money's being stripped out of the services

to pay for these submarines. A 3 or 3.5% budget would be very different, however. So we're going to have to make some tough calls because at the moment you're seeing the size and the capability of the conventional military slowly degrading in a time when we need to build it to pay for what are extraordinarily capable submarines, but also extraordinarily expensive submarines. And, you know, my view is at 2%, the opportunity cost of Orcus is greater than the return on investment. but at three, three and a half percent, that's a different, that's a different conversation. And this is why many of us have been calling for a debate.

There's no debate on it in Australia. But it's also why the US government's been saying, why aren't you spending more? They can do maths as good as anyone else. And, you know, as people say, well, why should we do what the Americans do? It's like, it's not about doing what the Americans say. This is what many of us have been saying. Pete Higgseth is just on the long, at the end of a long line of Australians who've been saying the same thing for some time.

Mick Ryan, retired Major General in the Australian Army, author very recently of a paper we've just been discussing translating Ukraine lessons for the Pacific Theater from the Australian Army Research Center

also of several good books you should read, War Transformed White Sun War, the War for Ukraine. Thank you so much, as always, for coming on the show. Thanks, Aaron. It's always a pleasure to speak with you.

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