School of War - Ep 249: Mick Ryan on the Ukrainian Way of War

Episode Date: November 18, 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 the current state of the Ukraine war. We cover tactical innovations, the challenges of operations and strategy, the structure of the Ukrainian military, the political landscape under Zelensky, and the industrial capabilities of both Ukraine and Russia.  ▪️ Times 00:00 State of Play 02:28 Tactical Innovations and Challenges in Ukraine 05:38 The Role of Drones 08:36 Russian Tactical Innovations and the Rubikon Units 11:45 Historical Parallels: Lessons from World War I 14:37 The Thousand Bites Approach: Russian Strategy Explained 17:46 Ukrainian Brigade Composition and Organizational Changes 23:19 Understanding the Ukrainian Military Structure 29:47 Challenges in Casualty Ratios and Manpower 37:37 Long-Range Strike Capabilities and Adaptation 40:29 Strategic Thinking in the Ukrainian Military 46:18 Industrial Base and Support Dynamics Follow along on Instagram, X @schoolofwarpod, and YouTube @SchoolofWarPodcast Find more content on our School of War Substack

Mick Ryan, fresh from a battlefield tour of Ukraine, is back on the show today. What's the latest in this grinding war of attrition? Who has the advantage? And what have we learned about the Ukrainian way of war? Let's get into it. It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of parade. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in him. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a state.

We continue to pass the rain. This is a great. We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing ground. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining the School of War.

I am delighted to welcome back to the show today. Major General Mick Ryan, Australian Army, retired. Mick's been on the show many times to discuss the evolution of modern warfare. He just spent some quality time on the ground in Ukraine. Mick, thank you so much for coming back. on the show. Good day, Aaron. It's great to be with you again. It's always good to have a long conversation with you. We've had an eventful start to our recording session here. You were dealing with wildlife in your office and we can hear the sort of deafening chorus of the Australian birds behind you.

It's always kind of a wildlife scene there in Australia is what I'm gathering from this. Yeah, I mean, I have a, where there's been a few acres. So dealing with wildlife is just part of living there. Mainly it's lots of birds and possums and water monitors. eating other birds and stuff, but I did have an incident recently where I had a snake in my pool, and in the act of getting the snake out of the pool, I fell in the pool with the snake.

It's an experience I don't recommend to your listeners. What kind of snake was it? Well, it was a brown one. We're not sure whether it was actually a common brown or even just a rat snake or something, but I wasn't really focused on determining the type of snake when I was in the pool with it. I was more focused on setting an Olympic record,

and getting out of the pool. Yeah, I think the rule of thumb on Australia, right, is that the wildlife, the snake probably will kill you. Like, you should operate on the assumption that it will kill you. That's always a good one to make, although there are a couple here who will prefer to choke you to death, but there's a few nasty ones here. One of my favorite books of all time

is the first volume of Clive James's memoirs, which if memory serves is actually called unreliable memoirs. and it's about his youth in 1940s and 50s, Sydney, but written much later in his life when he was writing for a largely English audience. He was very famous in the UK at the time as a television personality. And journalists, I remember this description

was trying to explain to British readership what it was like to interact as a child with Australian wildlife, which unlike British wildlife, like every British snake, as he put it, was sort of registered with the local police and had a sort of a licensed caller and a good relations with local government.

In Australia, the situation was much more savage, but people just sort of won about their lives with great insoucence, even in the face of it. Claude James is one of our national creative treasures, I think, and as you know, written many really interesting books. But I love Bill Bryson's exploration of Australia in his book Down Under as well. It's pretty clever, pretty funny.

To go to a place where not just the wildlife is trying to kill you, but also, and more relevantly, the Russians are. You were just in Ukraine. I think there's a lot we can cover in terms of what you learned there and the experiences you had visiting operational units, but also taking meetings in Kiev. And I'll start us at the tactical level, and we'll kind of go up from there to operational

and then ultimately strategic and political and alliance considerations. At the tactical level, I want to put to you two things that seem to me, me to be in tension that I've heard you remark on, because I think your explanation of the tension will be really interesting. On the one hand, I've heard you speak of the fact that essentially vehicle movement is extremely restricted to the point of being nearly impossible within 15 kilometers of the front line or the contact point, whatever you want to call it, in Ukraine, 15 kilometers, which is, you know, to put it in technical military terms,

a really long freaking way for something like that to be the case. At the same time, I've also seen you remark that the fact that Ukraine is somehow a drone war, or the drone war, is overstated and not quite accurate. But tell me how these two things can both be true, that you can't have vehicle movement for 15,000 meters from the front line, but also at the same time that the role of drones is overstated or at least misunderstood. Yeah, I think the two can actually coexist in the same universe, primarily because whilst drones cause a lot of the death and destruction in that immediate front line, they don't do it all.

And beyond that, you know, it's all about longer range artillery, it's about longer range missiles, Russian glide bombs launched by man tactical aircraft. So drones do a lot of the killing. and in many respects they've covered some of the gaps that the Ukrainians have in manpower, but it doesn't fill all of them. And at the end of the day, drones are not holding the ground that's being defended in Ukraine, and they're not taking the ground that the Russians are seizing. So whilst drones have been very important,

and they have transformed many aspects of tactical operations, they are not the only critical technology or critical capabilities. that the Russians and the Ukrainians are using to fight this war, which as we know is not just military, but a national endeavor. You've said about the situation in the battlefield there that a year ago, you could argue plausibly that the Russians were learning and adapting better than they had in the past and at the sort of operational to strategic level, arguably faster than the Ukrainians. But at the tactical level, the Ukrainians still had the edge. I think you're a little bit less optimistic about that.

Now, what's going on at the tactical level that seems to you to be shifting the balance? Yeah, the view of many I spoke to in the south and in the east is that the Russians have probably just snuck ahead when it comes to innovation in drones, not just in the technology, particularly the FPV fiber optic drones, which are almost impossible to detect and have very high quality imagery for targeting other systems. It's about the use of them, but also about the systemic innovation and tactical innovation that's being overseen by the Rubicon units and their ability to share lessons across the entire front

whilst focusing now on finding and targeting Ukrainian drone operation centres. They think that's the Ukrainian Centre of which. gravity, so they're working on that. But it's not just innovation in drones where the Russians are probably just ahead. Tactical innovation is an area the Russians are constantly moving along with. They are coming up with new tactics consistently and continuously across the front line. And when they find something that works, because not every innovation works, but when they do find something that works, they're better at sharing it systemically along the entire front line than the Ukrainians often are.

So where the Ukrainians were probably ahead in tactical innovation up until recently, I think the Russians may have just moved ahead. And that is a real problem, not just for the Ukrainians, but for other European militaries as well in the future. Can you say a bit more about these Rubicon units, which I don't know if there's really wide awareness of them

yet, sort of among the more general public following this from afar? You know, I've been of the view for a while now, and we've talked on the show about different technological counter-UAS solutions that are bubbling up out there. I've been operating on the premise that someone's going to come up with something because this just can't continue. It can't be the case that ground combat in perpetuity,

mobility in perpetuity is simply snuffed out by these little buggers, these various kinds of smaller tactical purpose short-range drones, short-to-medium-range drones. But this Russian approach is sort of interesting because it's not sort of what I was envisioning, which was some sort of microwave weapon or some sort of cheap, cheap by individual use interception system that's better than a shotgun, which seems to be the weapon of choice as best as I can tell from the videos. But this is, I guess, a little bit more of an operational scale going after the drone flyers. Just tell us about the origins of this and how it actually

works. Yeah, so this is a institutional level initiative by the Russians. They form their own Unmean Systems Force on or about the May Day Parade earlier this year. They made that announcement. I know it's hit the news again that they've formed this, but it's been out there for about six months. Part of that is what's called this Centre for Advanced Unmean Systems that the Russians have formed, and that is a strategic top-to-bottom battlefield to defence industry engagement that's about learning from the battlefield, innovating with both the technology and

tactics of drones and then spinning these out into not just drones for units but specialised drone units, colloquially known as Rubicon. And these provide standardised drone tactics and operations across the entire front line as well as a method for collecting and analysing lessons to continuously improve their operations. So the Russians have systematized learning. They've learned how to learn better when it comes to drone and tactical operations. And that is now institutional knowledge in the Russian military, unfortunately, knowledge that wasn't as sophisticated or as advanced several years ago. You know, without saying too much to put people at risk,

or at least people that we like at risk, what have the Ukrainians been doing that they're now having to change that would make them vulnerable to these Rubicon tactics and these Rubicon units? Well, there's a whole bunch of layers, right? And as you know from your time in the Marines, there's no such thing as a silver bullet solution to any problem on the battlefield. So the Ukrainians have been combining, you know, better sensors to try and to detect these things. They've been getting underground. So trench lines are generally covered. Their headquarters are all underground. They've got much better with operational security and communication security, decoys,

deception, just normalised and fundamental to force preservation. So there's a whole range of things they've been doing to try and attack this problem. Then of course, there's the offence of things like going after Russian drone operation centres, after battalion headquarters, after drone manufacturers deep inside Russia, after the fibre optics manufacturers in Russia. So there's a bunch of different things that the Ukrainians are doing to try and negate the impact of Russia. systemic learning when it comes to drones. I'm going to preface this next question with a story. It's kind of a fairy tale, but it's also somewhat true.

I'd actually be curious to know your view on how true it is. But this is the standard maneuverist tale of World War I and then what happened afterwards. In World War I, things pretty quickly got to a terrible stalemate on the Western Front. The situation became protracted. Defense had the definitive advantage. over offense, militaries, national level decision makers on down were uncreative in the face of the challenges that they were dealt leading to a tremendous amount of bloodshed. But you still saw

nascent efforts to figure out how to make progress in this terrible environment. You saw new technology like the tank being employed to this end. And by the end of the war, you did see the evolution of a kind of penetration, a body of tactics, of penetration tactics, combining things like poison gas, tanks, assaults on smaller, more targeted fronts, various kinds of infiltration, designed to penetrate, and after penetration lead to some kind of exploitation. It was still nascent. It saw some successes here and there, but really it was in the interwar period that these solutions to the problems of the machine gun and everything else from the Western Front in World War I picked up steam.

The Nazis or the Wehrmacht got first, really, to the set of solutions that become known as Litzkrieg, combination of aviation, motorization, radio communications that lead to the more rapid mobile warfare that characterizes a great deal of World War II. And so the tale sort of goes, we should always be aspiring to look for these ways to break out of stalemates, to get mobile again to avoid the tragic loss that stalemate and protraction inevitably. lead to. So that's the fairy tale. I'm curious your view on how true the fairy tale is, but then there's an obvious sort of application to the present. If on some level we see the grinding battlefield of Ukraine as having some parallels to that of the First World War, we are seeing evolution adaptation, call it what you want, on efforts to achieve progress or indeed to penetrate and exploit,

how's that actually going? What is it look? What is solutions to this? this problem of the highly immobile battlefield in 2025. What do they actually look like? Yeah, well, I think, you know, the historical lesson from World War I, the interwar period, as well as the Cold War period, is that, you know, challenging operational problems require the optimum combination of intellectual, technological, and organizational reform and sometimes revolutionary changes. A technology won't solve it.

idea won't solve it, but combining those two with new kinds of organisations and training and developing people is the historical best practice when it comes to getting around these really difficult, sticky challenges. What we've seen in Ukraine is that process play out over the last three and a half years. I mean, the Ukrainians use new technology, drones in new ways, which is new concepts, and in new units with their drone battalion. and drone forces, that has probably reached a point in its evolution where there is another leap required. It's not just more drone units. And I don't think we know what that leap might be yet. But whatever it is, to put us back in an area where we can undertake effective offensive

operations at the tactical operational and strategic levels, we need to find it. Because without being able to conduct offensive operations and at least threaten to hurt your enemy, it's very hard to maintain a strategic deterrent beyond just nuclear weapons. So I think there's a few compelling reasons why we need to get back into this game of really intensive thinking and experimenting to find new breakthroughs. And remember, the US did this really well in the Cold War with the combination of alien battle and precision technology. So once again, it wasn't just concepts or technology. the combination of the two to develop, you know, this American version of deep operational theory,

which the Russians that had originally come up with in the interwar period. The videos I often see from the front in Ukraine, at times they look like madmax. I mean, really crazy stuff of sort of small groups of straggling Russian soldiers on motorbikes and what looked to me like sort of ad hoc, jury-rigged vehicles. I'm thinking of a particular video I just saw. from this area, Pekrofsk, that's been the scene of a great deal of fighting in recent weeks. I also see reports that just seems so alien to me in terms of anything I was ever sort of prepared or trained to do that when we talk about small unit, when we talk about offense,

we're talking about teams of two to four people or even individual soldiers with these thermal, you know, heatproof blankets trying to maneuver across the battlefield, looking for gaps that can then be exploited. Is this what's, it just seems crazy that the numbers of troops involved in some of these efforts to take ground are so small. Well, ad hoc looking, again, to the professional observer. Yeah, this is battlefield experimentation at work. I mean, the Ukrainian commanders I talk to describe it as the thousand bites approach, where the Russians take lots and lots of little bites in the knowledge that most of them won't work,

sometimes it will, and where it will work they will pile on. But it's not just about lots of small infiltration teams. They choose their sites for this very carefully. They try and ascertain where units are undertaking a relief in place or where there are units that may be weaker with demonstrated leadership or capability weaknesses. And they try and combine that with bad weather because there's a certain weather conditions, fog, rain, snow,

where drones are either far less effective or don't work at all. So the Russians combine all these kind of things to try and, you know, bite and hold onto ground. And yes, I mean, you see these infiltrators, but that's followed on with successive echelons. And, you know, it's kind of how the Russians have always worked. They've always worked in multiple echelons. It's just in this war. The first echelon is small, light and hard to detect. But there is, you know, a lineage.

back to Russian operational theory in this if we dig into it a bit deeper. So the first element of a ground offensive is, again, I mean, there's sort of intelligence preparation. They're picking areas that seem weak for whatever reason. They're looking for weather conditions that are favorable. And then the infiltrate, I mean, it's almost, it's, you can't even call it a reconnaissance in force, but it's sort of infiltration tactics by extremely small numbers. And then what does the hammer blow look like? Let's say they succeed in either confirming that there's a gap or maybe even creating a gap by calling for fire effectively or something like that. What does a company come through at that point? Like, what comes next?

Well, often what comes next or comes first is these glide bombs, which deliver enormous destructive power in, you know, 500 pound, thousand pound bombs that can be launched from Russian tactical aviation outside the current range of Ukrainian air defense. And these, these, bombs, you know, can take out almost whole city blocks, so they create gaps. But the reality is, even using this enormous destructive power and these infiltration teams, you are never going to generate the mass or the speed to make a large-scale operational breakthrough unless you can, over time, generate the collapse of entire Ukrainian units. Now, there's no evidence that that's close or that has happened in any big way in the past. So the Russians really aren't about

creating major breakthroughs I think. They're just about slowly but surely taking more ground to support the political narrative, which is even more important than tactical success and that political narrative is that look, we've continued

to take ground. We might take more or less each month, but we continue to take it. Our victory is inevitable. Europe, America, there is no point supporting Ukraine because they're going to lose. So why throw good money after bad? So that's really what Putin's after here.

This is a political fight where he's making political statements with the lives of about 1,000 Russians each day to generate this notion of inevitable victory and superior will over Western political leaders. I see. And my misunderstanding there just sort of shows my own prejudices in training that if I'm going to send forward these tiny teams on these very perilous missions

and then achieve some success, you know, create a gap, blow a bunch of stuff up because now I can see stuff that I couldn't see before and hit it accurately. My natural thought is, okay, well, now what am I following through with to make it worthwhile? And your whole point is that that is the point, that that very modest gain of position and destruction is the point of the exercise. Yep. And just do it over and over and over, which is why they call thousand bites. And, you know, the Russians have come up with some interesting ways to do that, not just guys crawling forward under thermal blankets, you know, these motorcycle troops, the Ukrainians have recognized that they're effective in certain kinds of operations.

They form their own motorcycle troops. And, you know, when you go close to the front line, it is like Mad Max. It is, it's crazy with people and vehicles racing around very high speed with drone nets and EW and all this kind of thing. And as someone who comes from the land of Mad Max and have been a devotee of that entire series, I felt immediately at home in that environment. This is why you're spending so much time in Ukraine. It all makes sense now.

So we're sort of shifting as we go here from tactical to operational. Stepping back, what is the organization of forces on the Ukrainian side? Like, how does a brigade, which I take to be sort of the main tactical unit, how does that actually composed in 2025? What does a brigade bring to the fight? Yeah, well, brigade is not quite like what we, would recognize in a Western military. We're kind of used to either, you know, square or triangular brigades with, you know, three combat arms and a few supporting entities. The Ukrainians

normally a brigade will have three to five infantry battalions, a mix of dismounted and mechanized. It'll have one or two drone battalions. It'll have a fires group that includes mortars and 152 or 155mm artillery, and then it'll have a whole lot of supporting functions. The supporting functions probably a bit lighter than what the US Army or others might be used to. Now, in many brigades, they're severely undermined in their infantry battalions in particular, but they're even having some issues with recruiting drone operators. Above the brigade, they've just gone through a fairly significant transformation where they've got rid of the ad hoc headquarters that used to command multiple gates.

These ad hoc headquarters saw staff come and go. There was a lack of consistency and continuity. They've replaced them with these army corps that have three to seven brigades in them. And then they grouped these corps under regional groupings of forces in the north, the east, the south and in the west. So it's kind of a brigade division core construct without. being given that exact kind of nomenclature that we would be used to in a standard NATO ground force. I've heard you remark that one of the mistakes that Western observers tend to make,

or Western friends of Ukraine tend to make, is they assume that the Ukrainian way of war, Ukrainian military style is NATO, is Western, because they're fighting the Russians, they're aligned with the West. But it doesn't quite work that way. bit about the challenges. I mean, anyone would face a challenge coordinating action across what is just a vast front. I mean, you probably know the number. I don't know the number of what thousands of kilometers of active front line, some, you know, more static, some hotter, but nevertheless, just a vast, vast space across varying kinds of terrain, I guess more uniform than you might get

in other parts of the world. But still, you've got big rivers. You've got, you know, you got some differences across the way. You know, what are the Ukrainians good at in terms of coordinating action and where do you see struggles? Yeah, I think there's about 1,200 kilometers of front line, which is pretty significant in any person's book. That's a major campaign. You know, every, I guess, problem that the Ukrainians face has to work its way through what I call their three-body problem, where they're pulled in three directions by different. cultural influences. Perhaps the major one is the Soviet past in the military, but also in government.

That exerts a gravitational pull on military cultures, how government works. The second influence is Ukrainian history and culture. They're very proud of their history and culture, as they should be. They're very proud of their achievements in the last three years. And the third influence that exerts a pull on any solution and on the culture in military and government there is not. NATO and the West, you know, whether it's NATO for military, whether it's EU for government. You have these three different gravitational influences, this Ukrainian three-body problem, I guess

you could describe it as, that exerts an influence on every single solution that they seek to come up with on the battlefield, at the strategic level, and in government. Now, there's some things that model can help with. I mean, I think battlefield, innovation largely, the Ukrainians are very good at it. They've demonstrated that they're very strong at it. But what they haven't always demonstrated is linking that into strategic and institutional reform across the entire front line. Sometimes innovation is isolated, although they are getting much, much better at sharing innovation. The Ukrainians also lucky geographically they're fighting on interior lines. That helps them a lot as the defender. If they were not doing that as a

offender, they would have a very different kind of operational and strategic challenge. I think the other thing the Ukrainians are good at is building unit cohesion and looking after their people. Now, not every leader is a good one, and they've had some issues with leaders making poor decisions. We have to be very open about that. But by and large, the quality of the average Ukrainian soldier and the average Ukrainian leader is better than that of the Russians, and that stood them in good stead. The problem, is they're still not generating the casualty ratios against the Russians that they need. At the moment, it's two, two and a half to one. They really need to be at the four or five to one

to hurt the Russians and to slow down any Russian advances. So to go from two to one, two point five to one up to four and five, I'm going to assume there's not obvious money left on the table. If there were easy solutions, they would be taking them. What is the, I don't know how you want to field this, but is there less obvious money that could be taken off the table? What's the thinking on this? If we're going to accept that this is attritional and protracted and it really is a numbers game, what is the path to that happier ratio? Yeah, I think you and I both know, having been in the military, that all the easy solutions are taken by junior and middle-ranking officers. and by the time problems get to a commander-in-chief or a president,

there is only bad or worse solutions left. And I think that's where General Searski and President Zelensky are at at the moment. There are no easy solutions left for them to drive the kind of just and fair war termination agreement that Ukraine has fought for and deserves. I think the most important decision they need to make now is about conscription. This is about access to manpower. They still don't conscript people under 25. That is historically not precedented in large countries defending themselves,

your country, my country, when we've sent people off to war of if you're over 18, you're going. I think the Ukrainians really need to rethink about this decision. And I understand the demography is not great, but you've got to have a country to have a demographic problem. And I think at the moment, they really need to revisit potentially this mobilisation of people in the 18 to 25-year-old age bracket. There's also a lot of exemptions that you can take if you're being educated. You might want to have a look at, say, well, do we need to reduce the amount of exemptions? And then there's this huge pool of manpower that's sitting overseas at the moment in places like Poland,

where Ukraine might have to work with them, say, listen, we probably want those people back. None of these are easy. None of them are nice. But at the end of the day, Ukraine is fighting for its survival. And sometimes when you're fighting for survival, you have to do things that you prefer not to do. Both our countries have done that in wars before. We've done things that have made us a little uncomfortable. but we've done them in the knowledge that they were better options

than losing or other options that might have been available. Ukraine, I think, is at that point. Let's step back from the ground and up into the skies, and actually pretty far up into the skies, because we'll leave behind. I've heard it described as a sort of near-ground littoral where these smaller drones operate in. Take us up to the deep strike campaigns that are underway,

the Russian one that has been a feature of this war, you know, virtually from the start. But then the Ukrainian development of similar capabilities, which has led to a number of, I think, impressive operations over the course of the last year, some of which have given real heart to Ukraine's supporters out in the broader world in which it seems like the United States is now back in the business of providing intelligence foreign and real active assistance with, which I think is welcome. Just give an assessment of this campaign. both directions. Yeah, from the start of the war, from day one, the Russians have been using long-range

strike capabilities against Ukraine, certainly to take down air defense networks and hit military facilities and government infrastructure. What we've seen over the last three and a half, nearly four years, has been a shift from an emphasis on expensive, exquisite crews and ballistic missiles to a larger proportion of their strike force being comprised of Shahe type drones, Garan 2 and others. So you see now that even though the Russians will still use cruise missiles and ballistic missiles, there are much, much smaller proportion of the overall aerial striking force that they'll use on a nightly basis. I think that alone is an interesting lesson from this war about the balance of exquisite and cheap long-range strike weapons.

A Shahed costs about $50,000 to $75,000 to produce. The decoy version is a bit cheaper than that, but if you compare that to, say, half a million to a million or more for ballistic and cruise missiles, you're starting to get some serious bang for your buck. The Russians have innovated constantly in how they mix and match those weapons and use them against different targets,

how they use different routes, different speeds, different jamming and other capabilities to support men. penetration of Ukrainian airspace. Obviously, the Ukrainians have been responding on the ground with ground-based air defence, and there's been an adaptation spiral and that that I've written about, but it's been very impressive, and once again, we need to learn from. But importantly, the Ukrainians have developed their own long-range strike capability from almost nothing in 2022. They had a few old Russian or Soviet era target drones that they repurposed. They now have

a pretty robust and sophisticated long-range strike capability, which includes the intelligence, which is generated by their own forces, as well as NATO in the United States, the planning capability, which uses NATO joint targeting processes, the weapons, which are some exquisite ones from the West, some not some exquisite ones from the West, as well as a whole bunch of different indigenous weapon systems in the air and at sea. So you've seen the evolution of both sides long-range strike systems and their ability to penetrate defended airspace.

I have to tell you, it is very hard to penetrate airspace at the moment. Both Russia and Ukraine are very good at it. They are constantly adapting and seeking new ways to deny penetration of their airspace. And whilst a certain proportion of weapons do get through on both sides, Russia and Ukraine probably have at least an 80% success rate in intercepting drones and missiles. I would pose the question, could America and could any NATO country achieve a similar level of success against an enemy wanting to penetrate their airspace target critical infrastructure or military targets right to date? Let me ask you one last question about operational level war fighting before we move into the realm of politics.

I've heard it said, in fact, I've heard it said relatively frequently here in Washington, that there's some things to be learned from the Ukrainian experience of war, but we're just not going to fight like that. First of all, no one's really got air superiority or even air dominance in this situation. We're going to make a bid for that in any war that we fight in. Same, by the way, is true, or something similar is true, of the Israeli experience of war recently where, obviously, the Israelis certainly were able to achieve air dominance, but it was really quite one-sided.

So neither condition really applies to the scenario we're going to face, which is going to be a competition for dominance in the Pacific. We're going to be more precise. We're not going to sort of need some of the approaches, some of the mass, some of the stuff that you see in Ukraine. So actually, you could waste your time by paying too much attention to what these guys are up to or by over-indexing on the Ukrainian experience of war as somehow an insight into the universal experience. of war for the next few years. The way I've just framed that, it sort of makes it undeniable. Like, yes, obviously, if you over-index on something, you will go too far. So it's a bit tautological. But help us, Mick, draw the line.

What should we be focusing on in terms of the things that you're seeing out there? And where does this argument actually have some weight that maybe there are things that really won't apply? Yeah, I think it's a really interesting issue because it's true that no country will ever fight like Ukraine. Ukraine because how each country fights is an entirely unique combination of its history, its culture, its military capabilities, its adversary and societal expectations. And that is different in every single country on earth. So, you know, it is a fact that no one will fight exactly like Ukraine, just as no one will fight exactly like America or England or Japan.

That said, there's still an enormous amount we can learn. from the Ukrainians. It's not just the obvious things like drone or the application of AI. They're new lessons that we should be learning, but there are an enormous array of old lessons that we've either forgotten or underestimated or under-emphasized in the last 30 years of the long piece. Those lessons extend from, you know, long-range strike, we've just talked about and how that might be done differently about logistics and battlefield logistics and strategic logistics, defense industry, training, and leadership. These are all lessons, many of them thousands of years old,

but it doesn't hurt to watch Ukraine to see what might have changed or what kind of emphasis in Western military institutions might need to change. I think it's worth looking at, well, okay, Eastern Europe in Ukraine, you know, Poland might be a bit the same, the Baltics might be a little bit the same, but Scandinavia is certainly different. How do you translate lessons from the environment in Ukraine to say Scandinavia? You need to look at geography, you need to look at how the Russians might fight differently,

you need to look at the technologies that might be available to you and the alliances might be available to you. So there's a need to have filters or translation mechanisms to take Ukraine lessons and make them fit for purpose in the theatre that they'll be applied, be that the North Atlantic or the Pacific, or the Pacific Theatre. And I think we've discussed before my recent report that looks at this exact topic.

Ukraine is relevant, but we need to translate the lessons to make sure they're very applicable for each country and each service for each mission in each theatre. So you've walked us through the unforgiving math of the casualty rates on the front

and the kind of proportions that are going to be needed versus the kind of proportions that are actually being achieved. We've talked about these deep strike campaigns as well. The Ukrainian effort, incredibly impressive, and like I observed, setting any number of individual successes over the course of the last year that have been impressive and heartening. That said, with the Russians churning out something like 35,000 Shah had drones a year,

the action in the other direction also is not without its successes. What I'm trying to say is it doesn't seem like either element of the war, the ground war, the deep strike war, is trending in the direction of some quick Ukrainian victory. and so the situation remains one of grind, stalemate, etc. That all said, you were just on the ground for a while talking to lots of different people. How would you evaluate Ukrainian national resolve? As strong as ever at the moment. In fact, I thought morale was probably slightly better on this visit than I've seen on a couple of previous visits.

But resolve and will are different to capacity. I think it's fair to say that both Russia and Ukraine, demonstrating profound will to succeed in this war, that there's no stepping back from that, and that's extraordinarily important. But the reality is at the moment is that whilst Ukraine can prevent Russia from winning the war, and it is doing that and will continue to do that, it's not demonstrating the capacity to achieve a war termination that's favourable to Ukraine because it just doesn't have the manpower or the physical wherewithal at this point in time

to hurt Russia more than what it is at the moment. So, you know, it's still dynamic. There's a certain dynamism to this war, whether it's on the battlefield or in adaptation and long-range strike, but we're no closer to a resolution in this war now than we have been at any time of the war, unfortunately. The decisive player in this remains the United States. its impact, its ability to convince Putin to step back,

its ability to provide a huge amount of support to Ukraine is the decisive element in the trajectory of this war. And until we see any changes there or potentially any change in Chinese posture, it's hard to see a different pathway forward for this war in the short or medium term. We've talked a lot about tactics, a lot about innovation at the tactical level, and we've talked about operational challenges.

We've talked about how this broader situation is one of stalemate. What does the strategic thinking process look like at the upper echelons of whether it's the Ukrainian military and the general staff or the political level itself? It's a little easy, of course, to sit here very comfortably on the sidelines across a whole continent in ocean from this war and say, well, why can't these guys, just to come up with a better theory of victory. I recognize that's quite ridiculous. That said, what does the effort to do so look like? Does such an effort exist? What is the Ukrainian way of strategy as opposed to just war fighting more directly? Well, I think Ukraine is still,

in some respects, finding its own feet when it comes to strategy development. I mean, for many decades, Ukraine's strategy was given to it by the Russians. So since 1991, it's which is a very short period of time, really. It's had to develop its own systems, its own people, its own way of thinking about a strategy, not just military strategy, but larger national strategy. So it's still working its way through that. I mean, my country, Australia, is in a very similar position.

For a very long time, we were a strategy taker, not a strategy maker, as Jim Mullen used to say. And I think the Ukrainians are still kind of working through that process. That's it. the last four years have accelerated their development of strategic thinking. I think there's a few elements of it that are worth drawing it. I think there's a reasonably good alignment of civil military interaction. It's a bit rough and tumble at times,

and you've seen the president remove the commander-in-chief once during this war, but that demonstrates civil primacy, and I think that's important to the people of Ukraine, important to Ukraine's legitimacy to outside observers. I think a second part of their strategy approaches the power of the general staff. It's an extraordinarily powerful organisation. It takes its orders from the commander-in-chief, but really he's an answerable to anyone else. So that's a critical part of Ukrainian strategy.

If you've got a good general staff, things can go well, but if you find yourself with one that's not performing well, you might have some challenges there. So I think, you know, Ukraine is still working its way through the right strategy process, developing the right people for it. And I think it's been good enough so far in this war. It's been good enough to survive. The problem is it hasn't been good enough to win just yet, and that's something that will have to evolve.

And Zelensky himself, how is he doing as Commander-in-Chief? What is the level of respect or lack thereof that he commands among Ukrainians broadly, and just say a bit about the political context in which he operates. You mentioned this war effort commander that he fired. Who are some of the major players out there floating as political opposition, which is something the Russians have to give a lot of thought to or would give a lot of thought to if there seem to be fissures to exploit there. But I'm curious if at this moment there really is anything like that.

Well, certainly Zelensky retains majority support among Ukrainians, whilst the war is still on. That will probably change. Once the war is over, as polls have indicated, I think that Zelensky has worked very hard to retain a unified country and retain a reasonably unified government, although he's reset it a couple of times, including a couple of months ago where he appointed you prime minister. I think we're on our third defence minister at the moment, and there's been a few other changes. So his approach, you know, has been to try and keep things cohesive and unified and not let problems surface too much because that gives the Russians a propaganda opportunity. Unfortunately, I think we're now in a second corruption scandal. This has an obvious impact on the legitimacy and the power of Zelensky internally and with Ukraine supporters, but gives the Russians an exploitable opportunity when it comes to global propaganda

and influencing the views of politicians and influences around the world, including in Western countries in Europe and the United States. A final question for you, and this is going to be about industrial-based issues. This war consumes a tremendous amount of stuff. The Russians make a lot of their own stuff. They're also dependent on, you know, we know the North Koreans, they're dependent on China for resources and other. other elements of the war effort.

There is a way, I've kind of come around to the view, Mick. I don't know if you adopt quite this extreme of a statement of the question, but that in some ways this is China's proxy war against the West. Just the argument I would make for that is if China decided today that it was done and it didn't want this war to continue, the Russians would be really up a creek. It would be really hard for them to proceed at that point. But that said, war requires a lot of stuff. The Russians make a lot of stuff.

I've been struck by the fact that they appear to be moving, a lot of their production facilities away from Ukraine, which I know, as you've pointed out, is an echo of the Second World War, moving things east of the Ural's. So this is not a light exercise for the Russians by any means. Meanwhile, the Ukrainians, I mean, they're bringing a lot of stuff in from the Europeans and the Americans, but they're also making a lot of stuff. There's this huge diversity of production, to include drones, for example, which they're cranking out enormous numbers of.

And real diversity in the defense ecosystem and the sort of, innovation ecosystem. I say it that way with sort of buzzwords like diversity and innovation. It all sounds good, but it's not clear to me that everything about what I've just described is good. Could you tell us what the relative advantages of disadvantages here of defense industrial-based issues for the Ukrainians versus the Russians? Yeah, I think from the Russian side, they have a huge amount of support for China. I mean, NATO's acknowledged this, and it's in several summits calling China the key enabler of Russia's war effort through a whole range of technology, through trade and dual use items that it

provides to Ukraine. And, you know, I think it's true that China's been in a confrontation and a competition with the West for decades. We ignored it for too long by thinking that, you know, if we help them to develop economically, they'll liberalize and look like us. The reality is we help them to develop economically and they built a military and intelligence complex that's designed to take us on. That theory. of victory from the 1990s was totally intellectually wrong and probably a bit bankrupt, to be quite frankly. You know, Russia also gets a huge amount of support from North Korea, somewhere around a third of Russian munitions fired come from North Korea now. That's allowed them to

free up resources and workforce for drone factories and things like that, which the Chinese have also helped the Russians streamline make more effective. And what the Russians do is they pick a couple of winners and then just build trillions of them, which is not dissimilar to what the Americans did in the First World War. The Sherman tank wasn't the best tank of the war, but America built tens of thousands of them. They built them in a quantity no one could match, and that's kind of what the Russians are doing. The Ukrainians, on the other hand, of, you know, dispersed, disaggregated their industry. They now have several hundred drone makers. And whilst that results in some very innovative solutions, it means that, you know,

that there are logistic challenges. It means that it doesn't have the systemic capacity that, say, the Russians have in their industry to just pick a few winners and outproduce the adversary. So that's a challenge for the Ukrainians. I think European support is kicking in. I mean, they've started to achieve their 155mm artillery goals, finally, just when it's probably not as important as it was two years ago.

But there are a whole range of defence manufacturers that Europe needs to step. up with. But the big determinant here really is the United States. What will its posture be towards Ukraine in the future? How much support will it provide? How much can it provide, given its requirement to prepare for war in the Pacific and its stockpiling policies? In fact, my friend Seth Jones has just released a really good book that looks at this exact issue on defense industry called the American Edge, which I recommend to your readers. But defense industry is one of the key pillars of victory and war. And without attention to it, without the right government policy,

without the right incentives and investments, it's very hard to get that right. The Ukrainians are still working their way through those kind of challenges. Mick Ryan, I'm struck by, despite how much ground we've covered, and we've really covered a lot that in some ways we're really only scratching the surface. So as ever, I hope you'll be willing to come back sometime and let us know how things continue to progress in this war, not to mention with other conflict zones the world. It's always a pleasure to have you. Thanks for joining the show. Aaron, it's always a great pleasure to talk with you. And I hope you and your listeners, have a great week.