School of War - Ep 89: Mick Ryan on Ukraine, Taiwan, and Future War

Episode Date: September 12, 2023

Mick Ryan, Major General (retired) in the Australian Army and author of White Sun War: The Campaign for Taiwan, joins the show to talk about the war today in Ukraine, the potential war in Taiwan, and the changing character of war itself. ▪️ Times      •    02:22 Introduction      •    05:49 China on Australia’s radar     •    11:56 Ukrainian progress      •    17:26 Timeframe      •   24:00 “We’re helping them tread water. We’re not helping them swim.”     •    27:37 What is China learning from Ukraine?     •    35:20 Can China pull off its own Operation Neptune?      •    41:12 Looking to the past     •   44:35 White Sun War      •    51:23 Everything new is old Follow along on Instagram http://schoolofwar.substack.com

Today we return to a few of our regular themes here on the program, the war in Ukraine, the prospect of a war for Taiwan, and the evolving nature of war itself. How is a major power clash of arms actually going to work? We have an ideal guest to explore these issues, McReyn, a retired Australian flag officer who has written and commented extensively on all of them. One thing, maybe only one thing, seems clear about the shape of any major power war that is going to come our way. And here I'll quote the great Dwight Eisenhower to make the point. There is only one thing I can tell you about war and almost one only, and it is this. No war ever shows the characteristics that we're expected. It is always different. Let's get into it. It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of

Hawaii. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infinite. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a We continue to face a grave situation in Iran. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender. For maps, videos, and images, follow us on Instagram, and also feel free to follow me on Twitter at Aaron B. McLean. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean.

Thanks for joining School of War. I'm delighted to be joined today by Mick Ryan, retired Major General in the Australian Army, strategist and writer. He's a distinguished graduate of Johns Hopkins Sice of the Marine Corps' Command and Staff College and School of Advanced Warfare, Sephora, published numerous articles, including over the last year a fascinating series

in a couple of different places on what China is learning by watching the war in Ukraine. He is also the author of a novel called White Sun War, the Campaign for Taiwan. Meg, thank you so much for joining the show. Thanks. It's great to be with you. So we've had Australian guests on the show. I believe you are the first Australian, I think you are the first Australian officer we've had on the show.

We've had historians and writers on the show thus far, and I will confess a sympathy up front. My mother's Australian. So I'm naturally sympathetic to Australians and the Australian cause. Tell us, if you would, about yourself. How did you grow up? How did you end up in the Army? Well, I grew up in a little mining town in central Queensland, which is a northeastern state in Australia. town with only a few thousand people and essentially grew up, went through almost schooling

there, pretty good schools, very good sporting facilities for a small town and joined the army from there. I received a scholarship to go to our Defence Academy to study civil engineering and become an army officer. Unfortunately, as a 17-year-old from a small town, I probably wasn't really mature enough to realize what a great opportunity that was and failed everything. But I was given a second chance, did my officer training and went on from there, became a combat engineer and spent a lot of my career in the combat engineer units and combined armed brigades, which was really one of my final commands was commanding a combined arms brigade in Darwin, which was a mechanised infantry brigade.

So, you know, I had a pretty good run, you know, served in all the same places. Many of your listeners would have, you know, East Timor or Iraq and Afghanistan, then a couple of tours in the East Coast of the US, two years at Quantico, and then 18 months on the joint staff in the Pentagon and the year of Johns Hopkins. And I finished, and my last two appointments were being Director General Trade Ock for the Australian Army, looking at training education doctrine. And then a four years is commander of the Australian Defence College, which included things like the War College, the Defence Academy, and a range of other institutions,

which was just superb and a good way to try. transition, you know, after 35 years, it's nice to be able to pass on what you've learned. It's even better to hang out with the next couple of generations of young leaders, and it certainly allows you to leave with great satisfaction and confidence, because they're far better than my generation ever was. I mean, the institution, by and large, is better shape than it was when I joined it, whether that's because of me or not. That's another question, but it's certainly in very good shape with its people, at least.

And, you know, I find that interaction with the next couple of generations, the mentoring, just walking around, talking and teaching, a lot of fun. So you had a front row seat as a senior officer and then as a writer and analyst upon retirement to Australia's evolving strategic attitudes, specifically with regard to China, but more generally. I mean, in the United States, obviously we have had our own evolution with some pain along the way. And I'm just curious to know from your perspective, what were the major inflection points? Well, maybe put it this way. If you went back to the middle of your career, some, you know, let's skip back a generation.

You know, what was the Australian view of security in the Pacific and the major challenges and of China? And, you know, what are the major inflection points on the way to where we are today? Because I just, I can remember being a bit startled. It would have been 2016 and I was on a junket in, and I'll just say a, um, Pacific country was taking China very seriously. And we met with the Australian ambassador there. And by this point in the United States, people were getting pretty serious about China. And I remember peppering this ambassador with questions along the lines of, are you serious about China? And in particular, are the countries of the concerns that you're in right now

important to Australia and Australians? And his answer was basically, they seem like serious concerns, but they are not primarily our concerns. And I was very taken aback. Because, as you know, listeners may not. The United States and Australia have been arm in arm in strategic. I believe Australia is the only country in the world to serve alongside the United States in every war since the Second World War. Is that accurate? In every American war, something like that? They've been very closely coordinated and there was just a striking disjunct. It's World War I actually. World War I. So every war that you've been in, we've been in. I haven't all been American wars, but I wouldn't

called World War I, World War II, American Wars. You didn't start it. You finished it, though. Yeah, no, we do have a close relationship. I mean, throughout my career, my sideline has been strategy appointments, you know, from, you know, an 05 all the way up working in joint and service strategy appointments. And when I come back from Quantico in 2003, I was working in our military strategy branch that worked to our cheaper defense and was also involved in defense policy work. and I was a different world in 03. China wasn't on the radar hardly at all. You know, the primary focus was Australia's contribution

to the global war on terror up. So in 2003, that would have been a combination of Iraq, starting, you know, Afghanistan had kind of gone off the radar a little bit by 03, but 04, 05, it started to, you know, come back. But at the same time, we had significant missions in East Timor. There's a big return to East Timor in 2005, 6, Solomon Islands and places like that as well. So there was a balancing thing, but these were all really stability missions, nation construction, nation rebuilding kind of missions.

And then, you know, I served in Iraq and 05, 0607 was in Afghanistan. So I saw it for myself and then 10 into the Pentagon, into the AFPAC, working for people like Mick Nicholson and Ben Hodges for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. So over this period, you know, China was kind of in the background, and some of us were kind of monitoring it. And, you know, when I was at Johns Hopkins, I did a major paper on China and strategic competition. And when I went back to Canberra in 2012, I was working in another strategic branch. And the assessment around those days is we don't see China as a significant player in the Pacific and won't be for some time. And that was 2012. Well, it all really changed in Australia in about 2017, 2018.

That was the real turning point for a variety of reasons. One was Chinese attempted influence in Australia became impossible to ignore with the bribery of an Australian politician. He took money, basically, by the name of Sam Dasty. That was a significant turning point. Not just for Australian politics, but for Australian citizens. more broadly. They kind of sat back and went, oh, this is interesting. There was the leasing of of Darwin Port, which was a really significant mistake by the government, by the Northern

Territory Government in particular and a very big fumbling of the assessment by the Department of the Defence in 2015. I mean, I was the Army Brigade Commander in Darwin at that time, and I knew nothing about it. I mean, it was just so abysmally handled by bureaucrats. And then there was the 5G decision in, I think, 2018, which, you know, there was a lot of back and forth over, but at the end of the day, was the right decision for us to not allow any Chinese technology in our 5G networks. And it really caused a few rule, primarily, it was the Chinese who had the temper tension, right, you know, and they still have a temper tantrum. Tenture. trim over it. They're like, you know, they're not a 3,000-year-old culture. They're a 70-year-old

one that acts like 15-year-olds at times. And what that did was say to the Chinese, we're not pushovers, and they hated us for that. But what it also did, it allowed other countries to look at their own 5G networks and say, well, if Australia can say no, so can we. And the Chinese hated us even more that we provided an example for other countries to say no to them. And then obviously COVID, the economic coercion, the 14 demands, all these kind of things have shifted public opinion against China. You know, 10 years ago, 80% of Australians had a favourable view of China and the Lowey Institute annual polls. Now it's down to 15% to 20%. I don't see that coming back. They can be as nice as they want now. We've seen them for what they really are. And any number of

visits to China by Australian politicians is not going to change that dynamic. This is purely an economic relationship. There will never be a friendship between our two countries as people hope there might be 20 years ago. Well, I just want you to know, sir, at the appropriate times, I have done my part by drinking significant quantities of Australian wine. That's been my contribution. Funnily enough, I was in Taiwan in April and got to meet with, you know, people, National Security Council, Deputy Foreign Minister, foreign minister, people like this. Think thanks.

I mean, at dinner with the Deputy Foreign Minister, and he said, did you know that since China banned Australian wine, the Foreign Ministry has a policy to only serve Australian wine? And it's, you know, it's those small things where countries show solidarity with each other, but also, you know, say to China, well, you're lost. And really, you know, the bands on Australian wines and lobsters didn't hurt Australia.

Certainly didn't hurt Australians because pretty much every Australian was having lobster for Christmas dinner instead of Chinese eating our lobsters. So they found that economic coercion wasn't working and they're the ones who've tried this rapprochement over the last 18 months. We just need to be careful about how far we go in that. I think going to Beijing and Kotoing to Jee's is probably not what we need Australian politicians to be doing in the near term. So let me shift, if you'll permit me to Europe and to Ukraine and then we'll work our way back

East and just talk about how things are going with the Ukrainian counteroffensive. We're recording this. I should sort of say for the record because things can happen quickly in war, of course. This is the afternoon of Thursday, September the 7th here in the United States. And I guess I'll just ask, you know, we've had, we've had folks on the show, everyone we've had on the show has been a supporter of the Ukrainian cause. But I would say we've had people who are optimistic about Ukrainian military prospects. And we've had people who are pessimistic about Ukrainian military prospects sort of within that category. Where are you this afternoon?

Where do you stand on Ukrainian progress and how it's going on the battlefield? Yeah, I'm an optimist. I have been all the way through. You know, I look at this from a military planner's perspective, not a news journalist or a cubicle-based commentator perspective. So, you know, I've studied the phenomenon of war for decades, and these things take time. We are not in Gulf War 19901 or 2003. We are not in some kind of Blitzkrieg operation.

You're in a big war against two large, populous, wealthy nations that have the will to win. I think the Ukrainians have more will. But this was never going to be simple. I think I wrote a lot of things about the forthcoming campaign. But one of them was this isn't going to be like the other ones. It's not going to be like Hearson. It's not going to be like Haqqq. It's going to be very different.

And, you know, I've looked at this through the lens of how do you measure success or failure in this? And for me, I've always looked at this, you know, success is a combination of taking back territory, destroying the enemy, putting yourself in a good position for subsequent offences, particularly against Crimea and the Donbass, but also projecting success in the West to your supporters. And I think against all those measures, I'll probably put out a new. one of my regular assessments against that today. They are making, this is a in-progress assessment, right? You know, they've taken back territory. They've destroyed a lot of Russian forces. I mean, they really have hurt the Russians in this, not just in the south, but is also in the east. And they are, you know, now that supporters in the West have reset their expectations to ones that align with reality, not some stupid sporting match, which I don't.

I still think a lot of people have in the back of their mind because they don't understand war and we'll come back to that. You know, I think we're in good shape. I think people understand we need to plan for the long term, even if they're not willing to do it. They understand the intellectual requirement to do that, which is what I wrote about my latest foreign affairs article. So I'm an optimist.

I have been all along. I mean, I think the Ukrainians are smart. I think they've adapted well throughout this war. It doesn't mean the Russians are stupid. They've been adapting too. I just think the Ukrainians have been ahead of them in this. And remember, they're fighting an existential fight. The Russians are fighting an imperial war of conquest where they don't care about the locals, right?

We know that. The number of atrocities had committed accidents. This is systemic destruction of a culture and a people by the Russians. So I'm an optimist, and I think this is really just about supporting the Ukrainians. And I'll just say one more thing on this. the amount of money the United States is spending on Ukraine each year is less than what it was spending per year in Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, it also had boots on the ground, was losing people.

And I can tell you with absolute certainty, this is a far more consequential and important fight for the United States and its allies. You're the perfect person to respond to an argument that another guest on the program made a few weeks ago. This guy named, you may know, I'm David Betts from King's College, London, who we had him on He'd written a very interesting piece in a publication called Engelsberg Ideas. Basically, I'll just summarize, you know, arguing that the slow progress of the Ukrainian counteroffensive and the nature of the Russian defense sort of indicates that, you know,

reports of the demise of static defenses and fortifications and so forth had been premature. And in fact, what the Russians had built was truly formidable and unlikely to be defeated in the kind of, you know, maneuverist, swift Blitzkrieg-like campaign that people in the West, military thinkers and planners and officers in general in the West had sort of become accustomed to thinking about in those terms. And as a consequence, I think, I mean, again, I took them to be a supporter of the Ukrainian cause. You'll get no disagreement from me on the case you just made for American aid to Ukraine, which we have obviously a big controversy right now in our Congress this month over that. But just the question of how does this play out on the

battlefield, you know, seems to me to be more challenging. And there's the, There's the of course the possibility of some we would all I think supporters of Ukraine would love to see some sort of break in the Russian system somehow. You know, there's some sort of shift in Russian politics that creates an opportunity for strategic success for Ukraine. The Russians are no doubt sitting around hoping for some sort of similar break in Ukrainian politics or for that matter, collapse of American support because of American politics, what have you.

But just looking purely at the battlefield, how, you know, help us picture what Ukrainian success could look like at the operational level. Yeah, well, it depends what time frame you're talking about, of course. But, you know, if you're talking about what does the Ukrainian situation look like at the beginning of winter? Well, firstly, I think you need to look at it not through the lens of just the southern front. I mean, once again, so many people are so focused on two axes of advance, which are

several kilometers wide on the southern front, they've missed the bigger picture. And the bigger picture is Ukraine is undertaking a series of different campaigns. I mean, the South is a ground campaign. Iran-Bakmut is another ground campaign. I mean, these are multi-divisional campaigns we're talking about here that no European country could conceive of conducting. They're also doing another large defensive ground campaign in the northeast, around Kupyank's, where the Russians are trying to advance there.

on top of this they've got a air defense campaign which has made massive advances I mean started the war ukraine and air defense had about 30 percent success rate it's up around 90 percent now which is really unprecedented and once again no country in the world could do what ukraine's doing with its air defense about my country couldn't united states couldn't not over the homeland and no european country could so that's another campaign that's another campaign They've got a maritime campaign going in the Black Sea to minimize the impact of the Russian Navy. And they've got a strategic strike campaign going in Russia, which has both political and military

objectives. And then over the top is their strategic influence campaign. So when you judge success, you've got to have a look at all these campaigns in their totality. And I'm not seeing anyone else do that, to be honest. are just, you know, the dearth of real strategic analysis. You get some people come in from the top and look at just the political area. You get them come up from the bottom.

But looking at this series of campaigns is something very few people are doing. And I think it goes to the lack of war studies that we see in universities. Like in my country, there is not a single university department in this country that has war studies at its court. And the US has fewer than it used to as well. So anyway, back to your core question after that little rabbit hole I went down. What does Ukrainian situation look like going into winter? Well, clearly, if you want to start from the south, Ukraine has fire control over the south to the sea. It doesn't need to advance to the sea, but it needs to be able to interdict all of Russia's, roads, railways,

logistic lines of communication, and be able to shell any Russian unit all the way. way to the Sea of Azul. And I think it'll be in a very good position to do that. In the east, I think being able to have fire control over Bukhmut and other regions of the east would be a good outcome. It doesn't want Bukmint back. It actually wants the Russians to keep sending soldiers there so it can kill as many of them as possible. I mean, at the end of the day, the more Russian soldiers that Ukrainians can kill them, the better off they are. Another outcome is not lose too much ground up in the northeast. That's important. I mean, that's both a military and a political imperative. And the last thing they want is more Ukrainian towns and cities to be within range

of Russian artillery. It's bad enough that the Russians are sending S-300s deliberately into marketplaces to kill their citizens. It'd be infinitely worse over Christmas if there was artillery as well, because we know the Russians would do that. So there are three key elements of what a successful campaign season would look like. So, you know, I think if they achieve that, that's a pretty good campaign season against the Russians. And as I did in my foreign affairs article, I said, you know, 18 months into the war, let's compare where we were 18 months into the Second World War. The Nazis ruled Europe. The US was going into North Africa and not doing a terribly great job in its initial operations. Singapore had fallen. All of Southeast Asia was under Japanese control.

Ukraine is in a much better position than this. They're in a better position than they were last year. and I expect this time next year, they'll be in an infinitely better position again. So this is really a question of political and strategic patience. It's about politicians being better at explaining to their people why Ukraine is important, why defending it is important, and why you can't separate European and Asian security concerns anymore. This isn't a question of Asia first or Europe first. It's Asia and Europe together. You just need to, you know, look at your priorities on a regular basis.

So there are scenarios in American politics where you could have an administration in 2025. That's not, that's somewhere on a spectrum from not as friendly to the Ukrainian cause to even hostile. It's not impossible. Absolutely. Which suggests, well, it could suggest, I'll put this in the form of the question, that while all your points are well taken. And, you know, I actually just read Officers and Gentlemen, which is the second novel of Yvlin Waus' sort of honor trilogy. I don't know if you've ever had the pleasure, but it has the defeat of the Brits on

Kreet as its central episode. It's just a searing, amazing account that, I mean, of a battle that, you know, to your point is part of these sort of years of collapse in the face of the Nazis before. By the way, it wasn't just British on Krik. There were a lot of Australians there who were captured as well. Indeed. Indeed. I am a slave to Yvlin Wah's account.

He's focused on his own service, but true enough. So all of which is say, I take your point, but, you know, the strategic conditions could change to make things even worse for Ukraine. And I sit here as somebody who's occasionally frustrated, more than occasionally frustrated by our current administrations, to me, seems like a sort of desire for exquisite care in the way in which we are supporting the Ukrainian cause militarily. A lot of consideration given to every state.

a lot of concern about escalation, all of which is having, in my opinion, the effect of prolonging things. I don't know if you agree with that. But so, you know, should we be concerned that, you know, maybe we need to get this done, get this to some point where we have an outcome that's acceptable to the Ukrainians and to some sense of, well, of justice and of a good strategic outcome? Because the clock might run out on us. No, I think it's a really good point. And at the moment, what the West is doing, we're helping Ukraine tread water.

We're not helping them swim. We're giving them just enough to defend themselves, not enough to win. They have to win decisively for any chance of an enduring and just peace, to be quite honest. You know, what I see in the US polity, at least parts of it, it is concerning. And I think there's probably a lot of people in the audience who don't want to hear this, but there's a lot of people who are looking at the US going, what does it mean that 60% of Republicans will still vote for Trump? You know, what does that really mean?

Not just about Trump, but what does that mean about the American people's aspirations? What does it mean about the American people's view of the world now? And do we need a plan B for an America that's not as engaged in the world in the next 20 or 30 years? Now, I mean, that's worst case, clearly. I'm not saying that will happen. But as a strategist, you've got to kind of think through the spectrum of potential futures, and that is a potential future that we may have to deal with out of America. Now, that's a pretty grim one for Ukraine, because over half of Ukraine's assistance,

not just military, but economic, humanitarian intelligence, probably more than half intelligence, comes from the United States. And if you have a disengaged, more isolationist United States that doesn't think its allies are pulling their weight, which, you know, it's true, you know, everyone knows that. Very few of your allies spend more than 2% of their GDP on defense, but it hasn't always acted like that. If it believes that end starts acting like that, I think we've got a lot of trouble. And I think future Americans might regret that if they go down that pathway because

there's only one other country that has an interest in being a global hegemon. And I've got to tell you, that's not a world I want to live in. Yeah, well, that's a perfect transition. I mean, we could talk for hours about the points you just raised. I mean, there's, I would say the good news about the foreign policy thinking on the American right is that in general thinking and discussion of China is more serious and is in a better place than thinking and discussion on Europe where there are still, there's still plenty of responsible folks, but it's in a more precarious position.

And there is, look, I mean, there is a tradition of isolationism on the American right. And I think something that we have to confront in 2023 is that the multiple generations we have had of an internationalist Republican Party that may never have been the natural resting place of the right ideologically. That's a controversial claim in a complicated conversation. Well, I mean, the basic argument is, you know, is one of the generational pillars for American national security, which is do everything you can to have a stable Europe? still a foundational pillar. I mean, after the Second World War, you know, U.S. polity kind of went, hey, we've had to get over there and drag them out of these awful wars twice in half a century. What are we got to do to make sure we don't have to do it a third time?

You know, if the U.S. looks only to Asia, you can't guarantee you mightn't have to turn around and do it all over again. So, you know, as Churchill said, bit of jaw, jaws, better than a bit of war war. I'll just ask you the broad question. You've been writing about this in a number of different venues over the course of the last year and a half or so. What is China learning from watching the war in Ukraine? I think it's learning.

Sorry, I think it's observing a lot of lessons at a lot of different levels. I'll talk about learning them in a minute. But at the political level, I think Xi has been watching the cohesion of the Western Alliance. I think that's a really important lesson to them, but they misjudged NATO. and the capacity of so many Western nations to come together to do something that's pretty hard, has been traditionally hard for them in the last generation or so. So I think that's a really important one because the last thing China wants is a coalition of nations in the Western Pacific against it.

They know they can't win if they don't break down the cohesion of a US alliance framework. It's just not possible for them to do that. They don't have the economic or the technological weight to do that regardless of what their propaganda. says. So that's an important one. Within that, they've been observing how do Western leaders make decisions? And I think some of their decisions about how they've been deterred by Russian nuclear sabbatling, and it has had a deterrent effect. We have to be honest. There's no boots on the ground. There's no no fly zone over Ukraine. So I think, you know, they've looked at that and, you know, it's not a mystery that they've upped the production of their nuclear weapons over the last couple

years. The Pentagon's report to Congress over the last three years has been discussing that issue in particular. But they've also looked at how slow decision-making is in the West. You know, it is extraordinarily slow. If you have a look at the tank decision, I mean, it was just painful to see Ukraine suffering whilst politicians wrung their hands about what red line would sending a few tanks to Ukraine cross. So, you know, Xi is looking. at those kind of things to say, how can I leverage that? And then clearly you need to put the, you know, the Asian cultures layer over the top of that because clearly Asian policies aren't the same as European policies. There is no Asian NATO and those kind of things. So at the

political level, you know, I think they will continue to want to engage country by country, not with multilateral organisations. They want to use systems, destruction, more fear to break down alliances first and foremost. And they want to influence opinion against the United States in every country in Asia. These are the kind of things they're seeing work that Russia's doing. I mean, Russian information operations are working. And if anyone thinks Russian information operations aren't stoking the anti-Ukraine feelings amongst American people, they've got their blinders on. It is happening. It is working. It worked in the 2016 election. It's probably working now. So I think Xi's learning that. Then you next have the military layer, the PLA, what are they

learning? I think they're learning a myriad of lessons, sorry, making a myriad of observations. I think the further you go down in the Chinese polity, the less capacity they have for learning because they can observe, but the risk conversion and the centralisation of decision making makes changes difficult sometimes. But at the PLA level, I think, the importance of logistics, the importance of integration, not just joint integration, but also the integration of combat and influence operations, and the integration of political objectives with military capacity. I mean, all these lessons, I think, were pretty stark in the first few months of the war. The Russians bit off more they can do their big political objectives,

but they didn't have the military capacity to realise it. And I think that's a really important lesson for the PLA and the Central Military Committee to digest, and they definitely will be doing that. You know, strategic influence operations are important. The ability to conduct expeditionary operations and support them over time is an important one. I mean, Russia's next door and has had logistics problem. Taiwan and other countries are much further than that, and they're all across the water, except for places like Vietnam or Thailand, places like this. So you see all these lessons, I think in the PLA, I think they'll be internalizing them, you know, the lessons of autonomous systems linked to sensor networks that are both civil and military through digitized

command and control frameworks, which has closed the detection to destruction time to very minimal time. So these are the kind of observations they make. I think technologically they'll adapt because of that. The interesting thing is will they able to adopt their adapt their doctrine, their training, and their leadership models for what is required now, because at the end of the day, leadership models now require delegation to the lowest possible levels. You cannot fight large-scale operations consistently without being detected and destroyed, so you need to delegate to the lowest levels. But as we've seen from the Ukrainians, you need to democratise battle space information, not just the receipt of it, but the input of it

interdigitized command and control systems. That's not something we've really done anywhere before. In the West, it's still what battalion and brigade command posts. Not every soldier has the digital C2 and can put in data. So, you know, we're learning that. I think the Chinese are watching it, whether they're capable of doing that is another question. I think one final thing, too, we need to address is this thought out there

that, well, the Chinese haven't fought a big war for decades. they probably won't be good at it. Well, the reality is every time you go to war, it's a new kind of war. There's lots of old things, but there's always some new things. And you win by adapting quickly, not by being an expert at it, because you just can't predict what the next war is going to look like. So I think we should be very, very careful in making assumptions about Chinese warfighting prowess.

I think we need to have a measure of humility. I think there's a surfeit of arrogance and certain military. institutions about their capacity and prudence dictates that we respect their potential capacity, even if we don't respect their political system or how it treats their people. You know, I'm sort of schizophrenic in my own thinking about Taiwan. I've not done the sort of serious extended analysis that you have, but I keep an eye on it as part of my broader work. And there are days when I think about our own political liabilities here in the United States,

the way in which our industrial base, defense industrial base is atrophied and so forth. I'm very pessimistic about it. And then there are days when there's this wonderful graphic that circulates. There's this guy who makes these maps, and there's this wonderful map of Taiwan flipped so that west is north and you have the coast of China looming above it. Then they have the overlay of Operation Neptune on the map. And it just shows you that actually sort of amazingly the scale of Neptune and the scale of what some sort of amphibious operation targeting Taiwan would look like are basically identical,

except, of course, then you start thinking, okay, well, on June 6th, 1944, you know, the Allies had something approaching air superiority. They had something approaching total dominance of the channel. You know, the Chinese can't expect to have anything like that, probably, on D-Day. And so you start thinking like that and you start being optimistic. Sort of same question I asked you about Ukraine, and I want to get into your book, White Sun War, because you've sort of explored all of this through this creative fictional technique. Are you an optimist or a pessimist on invasion scenarios of Taiwan? I'm an optimist for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, you know, an invasion of Taiwan, and I'm not saying it's the most likely scenario, it's certainly a potential scenario, but it's one you need to think about. It's a mathematical problem, right? This is all about maths. It's about distance. it's about number of weapons, number of troops, number of amphibs versus the enemy. I mean, really, it's an ultimate mathematical problem. Even the Chinese realize that.

And they've been thinking about this since 1949. I don't see a correlation of forces that would allow the Chinese to do that at the moment, even though they've had this massive buildup. They just don't have the lift to achieve it. So they'd have to achieve some level of dominance of the spright and the airspace. and the information sphere before they do anything. And I don't know that they're there yet. Secondly, I think a bigger deterrent for the Chinese is they know,

or at least the president of China knows, he has to guarantee success for his own survival and possibly the survival of the CCP. I mean, the CCP have put such a focus on taking back Taiwan that they can't afford to fail out. like they couldn't hide it i mean you can hide lots of things you can't hide that and if they failed you know jie probably would be out of a job most likely out of a life and the CCP would not be looking good so i think that's as bigger deterrent as any military capacity and we should be stoking

that deterrent you know we should can constantly be doing things to deter their aspirations for this because I think, well, we can't win this and therefore, you know, we shouldn't be trying this and just keep pushing that day off. And, you know, that's how the Taiwanese think. The status quo is what they want to sustain. They're not interested in declaring independence and they're not interested in being a Chinese providence. The status quo works for them, although, you know, they should have better access to international organizations and the UN and things like that. You know, the deterrence framework, investing in deterrence now will pay off for us in that political and military sphere. I think, too, you know, there's a bit of doomserism about the US Navy's capacity and these kind of things.

And I look at the US Navy and I look at the Chinese Navy and go, you know, I don't care how many corvets and frigates the Chinese have. What I care about is how many missiles the US Navy can throw down at the Chinese Navy and its ports and its supply bases and its fuel installations. And I see a positive correlation there, to be quite frank. Too many people are counting holes and not missiles. And too many people, I think, forget just what a ruthless, experienced organization the US Navy is. So, you know, I'm not saying this is all about being arrogant and triumphalist or anything like this, but you've got to have some faith in your own institution to think through the problem. But at the same time, like you, the industrial side of things does worry me.

You know, I think we've led atropy over three decades. It takes time to rebuild that. I mean, in the Second World War, it took the US about two years to mobilize, three years to mobilize. The problem with that is what do you do in the moment? meantime. I mean, that's a challenge, right? You can't just say the diversity, stop. We'll be back in three years. Okay, just hold your thought. We'll be back in three years for this war. You don't get to do that. So what's the gap filler for that mobilization period? There's another dimension to this, just sticking with the industrial-based question for a second, that I genuinely don't know

how to think about it. And you are literally the man whose Twitter handle is future of war. So you're the perfect person to ask questions like this. But we, When you talk about World War II mobilization, what do we start producing at scale? You know, we've already been obviously supplying allies even before Pearl Harbor with lots of material. Well, you know, jeeps, planes, you know, all kinds of different manufactured items. Trucks. And we're going to lose a lot of this stuff. And that's okay because we're going to make a lot more of it.

And we can just keep making it. And, you know, in like these planes, a lot of them are going to get shot down and we know that and we're prepared for that. Well, there is no scenario in which we're churning out, say, F-35s, you know, at the kind of scales we're talking about here, nor do we plan to, nor do we, you know, that's not how they work. That's not how we think of using them. Nevertheless, in a shooting war with People's Republic of China, we will lose F-35s. We're going to lose some of this expensive, exquisite material that we have. And so my question is, you know, how do we think about how this plays out? You know, there's a way in which in Ukraine right now, sort of to my question from earlier in our conversation, you know, things look sort of old-fashioned and positional and slow in a way that certainly in the West and in the Marine Corps we had gotten out of the habit of thinking of war in that way.

And yet you have this sort of image of two like quite tired boxers sort of hanging off of each other. you know, even a nation with as powerful a military as the United States, you could see a scenario in which either we lose a lot of stuff quickly and then things slow down rapidly, or we don't want to use it. You have sort of this 18th century scenario where you have these really expensive militaries that the generals and politicians don't want to use because once you lose them, like, there's no getting it back on any reasonable time horizon. So I just don't, it's like it is hard to picture what it's going to look like.

Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, once again, you look to the past because every war is an aggregation of what's gone before. There's no such thing as a new kind of war. There are new elements of war, but every war takes ideas from previous conflicts and adds a few new ones. And that's exactly what we've seen. And this, you know, you said at the start, you didn't expect to see people fighting in trenches in Ukraine. It's like, well, why not? They've been fighting in trenches in Ukraine since 2014. Why wouldn't they keep doing that? So, you know, I think war has been. Big wars goes through pulses and pauses. That's just the nature of it. You can only sustain high tempo, high loss operations for so long. But also, you don't want to give up. So the pause is about recocking and then looking at your adversary saying, where are the other weaknesses we might be able to exploit? I think the other thing, you know, and I explored this in War Transform,

was we're in a new era of mass. Now, when I wrote this a couple years ago, people thought I had some kind of magical dust that, you know, I'd been putting on the keyboard because they didn't agree with me. They said, no, we're not in a era of mass warfare. I said, yeah, we are. But the mass looks different to the 1991 Gulf War. We might still do that, and we have, right?

But it's complemented with massed autonomous systems, which is played out in Ukraine, and it's continuing to explode. Frankly, there's a Cambrian explosion, this really concentrated period of innovation in autonomous systems and digital systems. to support them. So mass has been generated through autonomous systems, whether they're semi-autonomous, remote-controlled, FPVs, loitering munitions, these kind of things. And you're seeing that's where we see

mass, but the other part of mass too is mass influence operations. You know, we think of masses in the physical domain. Mass also takes place in the non-physical domains and mass influence is something we've seen from the Ukrainians and the Russians throughout this war, and it is part of the calculus when you're thinking about mass operations. So, you know, we're capable of doing that. The other thing I would say to, you talk about this exquisite bespoke equipment. The other thing we have is exquisite bespoke people. You know, one of the amazing things the United States Army did in the wake of Vietnam was transform, not just change, but transform recruiting, training, education, And when I talk about training, everything from recruit training to high-level,

divisional, core-level collective training, I mean, it was that, you know, that was almost a revolution in military affairs itself, to be quite frank. But what it's actually done now, and we saw this during the wars spawned by 9-11, is it takes a long time to bring someone in, to train them to what we think a soldier looks like now and to retain them. I don't think that model is going to work if we have to mobilize. This exquisite training regime with these exquisite soldiers, but we have to keep sending back because citizens generally don't want to serve or can't serve because of medical condition. That is not survivable. We're going to have to think about shortened training,

lowering the medical standards for service and just throw people at the problem whilst we build up the industrial base. And, you know, I talked about this mobilization gap. Honestly, commercial systems and people are the only two things you can fill that gap with. And that is not a solution that people want to hear, but it is the only ones that really are out there. Can I, can I ask just about the novel? Why? Yeah, we haven't looked at that yet, have we? I know. It's the whole purpose of the interview. And we probably, you probably don't want to tell everyone what happens in it, because there should be some degree of suspense, but. China invades tolerance. I'll give you that.

Very good. Why, you know, there are some other books out there like this. You got, you know, Ghost Fleet in 2034. And I was raised when other kids were reading, you know, Batman comics. I was reading Tom Clancy. Me too. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Why did you go in for this for yourself?

Why a novel? Well, you know, I've been a fan of fiction, my whole life, science fiction, military fiction. Yeah, like you read Tom Clancy, Harold Coyle, these great writers, you know, who I deeply admire. And I love 2034. I love Ghost Fleet. I think the superb explorations of potential futures. I mean, one thing that they all have in common,

and whether it's these or whether it's Red Storm Rising or Third World War by Hackett, is they actually build on a very long legacy of military analysts and military officers trying to think about the future of warfare through narrative. I started with the Battle of Dorking in the 1870s and has gone all the way through. And at their most rich,

when there are periods of great technological and social up evil, in particular before World War I, there was like 400 of these novels produced from different countries, including the US. So I looked at all that and thought, well, I've just written a book on the future of war. It says, you know, looks at tech, looks at people,

and says, well, how would that play out? So I looked around, there's a lot of different scenarios you can imagine. And I thought, well, Taiwan's probably the most relevant one. And then when I looked at Taiwan, said, well, there's lots of doomsterism with, you know, the naval battle and the missile battle. I said, well, I want to look at a different bit of that. And I want to look at the ground fight because no one's looking at that. Everyone kind of does the naval battle and then stops there. It's like, well, that's kind of like invading Iraq and not having a plan.

And we'd never do that, would we? So, you know, if you do have a naval battle, what if you win, but the Chinese still get forces ashore? What does that look like? So it really is a small subset of a wider scenario. And, you know, I'm not saying this is what will happen. It's just a thought experiment. The other reason I used the format I did, I love The Killer Angel. So the book is actually written by a historian 10 years after the war finishes.

And it's written through the eyes of its participants. And I wanted the participants to be representative of what the military actually looks like now. The military isn't some heroic ideal full of six-foot-tall-blokes that are bronzed and muscled and brilliant all at the same time. They're not all Navy SEALs and this kind of archetype. It's pretty representative. It's full of men and women who are pretty normal who want to serve their country. And when I was a brigade commander, the top tank troop leader in the brigade was a young female tank troop leader. The top combat engineer leader in the brigade was a young female leader.

And that wasn't seen as unusual. That was the norm. But there's a lot of people out there with these idiotic discussions about being too woke and putting holds on promotions because of that because people are writing poems. And I said, well, actually, you don't understand your military. The military is always linked forward into embracing bits of its society that sometimes white a society hasn't. And I think we're a better military for it in my country and yours.

And that was another theme in the book. It's like, you know, get to know the military as it is, not as you'd like, you'd like, like it to be historically. And what's the reception of the book been like? And I guess in particular, I'm interested in what's the reception been like in Taiwan? I mean, I think it's been okay. I mean, Admiral Lisa Minn has certainly read it. I've been up there, you know, I've spoken to some people.

You know, and in many respects, I think the Taiwanese are just happy to have people looking at the problem. I know the Taiwanese ambassador here has read it, both the new one and in the previous one. You know, I think the Taiwanese are happy to have people looking at the problem and anyone who can support them, given the very narrowing number of countries that will have formal diplomatic ties with them. They're keen to work with people to explain their problems, explain why they're worth defending. And as I say to audiences in Australia, there's two island democracies of 25 million people in the Western Pacific. Both of them are

worth defending. One of them's Australia, the other one's Taiwan. Last question for you. This is sort of a version of a question I've already asked, but coming at it from a different direction. You know, if you think to the period before the First World War and you have, you know, a lot of industrialization, a lot of social change, you have just, you know, the world is changing rapidly. And you have these writers like Mahan and Corbett, say, in the naval context who are having these extraordinarily productive debates that really do end up, I think, sort of clarifying a lot about what's to come and helping planners and, and, and, you know, politicians think about what's to come and what their nations need to do. And in some ways, your project, obviously, whether it's war transformed or this novel, the things you're writing, is a bit like that. But I'm just going to make the observation. I don't know if you agree with it. It just seems like everything's a lot harder now to think about because the nature and the nature

of change and the pace of change, the nature of change is just much more complicated and the pace is so much faster. It's not just that, you know, we've got, you know, we don't have to rely on the age of sale anymore. And by the way, there are these things that called airplanes that might play a role. And, you know, it's like, no, I mean, everywhere you look, there's some new human activity that's going to play a role if there's, if the balloon goes up between major powers, you know, cyber, AI, war in space and unmanned systems, not to mention all the change that's happening sort of within existing kind of domains or forms of war. You know, it's almost, it's a bit like,

I don't know if you follow the work of Walter Mead at all, but he's been writing these, in addition to his great foreign policy writing in the Wall Street Journal, he's been writing a series of columns on American domestic policy and a tablet magazine. And he has a great essay about how we're sort of at this moment as a society where it's a bit like you're looking at a singularity.

It's just like the pace of change is so fast. It's hard to see through it to the other side. You just can't know what it's going to look like. So, you know, how are you thinking about thinking about that problem, you know, in your own work, given just the challenges built in? And what are you looking at? You know, what are you, you know, who are you reading, I guess, you know, out there as all of us sort of struggle to think about what the, you know, the next 20 years, which may end up being quite dangerous, are going to look like. Yeah, I think, you know, this is why history is so valuable. Every generation thinks they're

utterly unique, that they're much smarter than their predecessors and won't make the same mistakes, and every generation's wrong. You know, this pace of change hypothesis is true, but it's true for every generation. If you look in the 70s, people were talking about this massive pace of technological change. But for me, I think the most valuable period is that period of the Second Industrial Revolution, you know, the 1890s through to the beginning of the First World War. And author Philip Lombe wrote a great book. on this called the Vertico years. And I think it's 14 chapters, and each chapter is a year from 1900, which I think was the French, the Paris exposition, all the way through to the

beginning of the First World War. And it looks at all the different technological and societal changes that were going on. And that's why he calls it the Vertico years. It was a whirlwind. There was a sense of vertico that you couldn't keep up with the pace of change, with all of a sudden humans could fly. I mean, you know, all of a sudden there were the these things called automobiles that went at speed so far beyond what locomotives or horses could do, that industry could mass produce things at very low costs, that people were continuing to move into cities and now are able to flush toilets and have electricity and educate their children in smaller families. I mean, I think that book, The Vertico is, is one that is well worth

reading for those who are trying to come to grips with what's going on now. And the reality, I think, of the whole situation is no individual can keep pace. Now individual can keep track of what's going on. You can only do it in teams. And I think this proves out that while social media nurtures individualistic approaches, dealing with change can't be done as an individual. It can only be done as teams, and whether those teams is corporations, governments, countries, communities. And I think that's the real danger of social media, even though a wide

user of it. It's counter to what we actually need to do to deal with a pace of change effectively. Mick Ryan, author of White Sun War, the campaign for Taiwan. Also, war transformed and any number of fascinating articles on strategy on the war in Ukraine that you can find at Sydney Morning Harold at your substack. This has been a truly fascinating conversation. ABC Australia. ABC Australia. ABC Australia. They're free. Excellent.

Truly fascinating conversations quite early where you are. Thank you for coming on. Thank you for making the time. It's great to be with you, mate. Thanks for the chat. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.