Sea Control - Sea Control 258 - The Ship with Maj Gen Mick Ryan

Episode Date: June 13, 2021

Links1. The Ship by C.S. Forester, reprint of the ed. published by Sun Dial Press in 1944.2. Sea Control 247 - 2034 with Admiral James Stavridis and Elliot Ackerman3. Ghost Fleet, by Peter W. Singer and August Cole, Eamon Dolan Books, 2016. 4. Burn In, by P.W. Singer and August Cole, 2020. 5. An Eye for a Storm: Imagining the Future of Professional Military Education and Its Effect on the ADF of Tomorrow, by August Cole and PW Singer, The Forge. 6. Zero Day Code: A novel of the End of Days: a cyberwar apocalypse, by John Birmingham, Gigantic Bombs Corporation, 2021.

Hey folks, Sherrod here. I've talked about our feed. I'm going to keep talking about it. There are two existing Sea Control feeds out there. The current feed, that's the one you want to listen to, is labeled simply Sea Control. It includes the phrase Simsex Flagship Podcast in its description. We are working on a new logo, so once that's finished, we'll finally have a better differentiator for you. But for right now, Sea Control, Simsex Flagship Podcast, that's where you want to be. Please rate and review the new feed. Today I'm joined by Australian Major General Mick Ryan.

The General tweeted a while back about C.S. Forrester's classic, The Ship. When I saw that, I had to reach out and get his thoughts on it. He was gracious enough to join me on the podcast. This episode was edited and produced by David Sahida. Don't miss everything going on over at the main website, simsec.org. Final call for articles for Project Trident just went live. We are partnering with Lockheed Martin and the Naval Warfare Studies Institute at the Naval Postgraduate School for Emerging Technologies.

We've also partnered with Transcom for a series of articles on strategic sea lift. We're eagerly anticipating that, as well as an accompanying podcast in the next few weeks. For all the details on those and more, please head on over to SimSec.org. Finally, I want to take the opportunity to recommend our partners in the SimSec podcast network, The Bilge Pumps. You can find Alex, Jamie, Drack, and Apollo of Iron Brew Bottles wherever you download your podcasts. On that note, I'll turn it over to Kimbersman. You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Aloha, shipmates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control.

I'm joined today by Australian Major General Mick Ryan, and we're going to be discussing C.S. Forrester's 1943 work, The Ship. So as always, all opinions are our own and not representative of any institution with which we might be otherwise associated. General Ryan, thanks for joining me and welcome aboard. You are definitely familiar to our Australian audience and our listeners who spend a lot of time online, maybe less so though to our American audience. So would you mind introducing yourself and telling us a bit about your background, please, sir? Thanks, Jared. Firstly, thank you very much for the invitation to speak. It's absolutely wonderful to be with you and I think

it's a pretty interesting topic that we're going to talk about today. Yep, I'm an Australian Army major general, graduate of our Royal Military College, combat engineer by trade, which means I love blowing stuff up. I have done all the normal command jobs at platoon, company, battalion, task force in Afghanistan and combined arms brigade here in Australia. Over the last four years, I've been the commander of our Australian Defence College, which includes our academy for our trainee officers, our war college for our mid and senior career officers and senior public servants. But I've also had a lot of fun doing things like introducing science fiction into the curriculum, useful fiction in the terms that Peter Singer and August Cole would use, and trying to

reform learning, but also make learning fun. Thanks, and am I right in assuming then that, I don't know what you call them in Australia. Cadets, midshipmen are under your command as well there for their professional development and that you have? A third of the academy. Okay. Yep, so about a third of the academy are midshipmen, trainee officers, and they spend three years at our academy

or four years if they're an engineer. You know, we're one of the few in the world that has a joint academy for that four years of residential military training as well as getting their undergraduate tertiary qualification. Okay. And then your War College then presumably is also a joint institution. So you oversee the Navy curriculum for that as well. How does that go for you as a Major General of the Army? Well, first and foremost, we don't fight in single domains. We fight as a joint integrated force. And that's how we design the learning there. the army navy air force and our public service colleagues as well as the many foreign students we have each come with their own expertise in their domains but what we expect is that

they bring that apply it within a joint and coalition construct whilst learning about the other domains in doing so so i don't see any issues with being an army major general having Army, Navy, Air Force, and civilians working for me. We're an integrated team. That's actually the real joy of this kind of command is you get exposed to lots of different ideas from lots of different people from lots of different backgrounds. Thanks, sir. So I spoke with Colonel Kim Gilflin for an earlier podcast, and he was the Commander Amphibious Task Force. So I have a little bit of background about the way Australia generates its amphibious forces, which is kind of a unique construct.

Do you have any sort of naval background yourself, sir? I have zero naval background. I was brought up in a little mining town 200 kilometres from the ocean. My naval background is restricted to going having family holidays by the beach, but I have been very lucky to have worked for some really tremendous naval officers, One who may be familiar to your audience is James Goldrick, who as a one star when he was a one star was my boss. I was a very junior lieutenant colonel having just returned from two years at Quantico doing Marine Corps Command and Staff College and school events war fighting.

And he kind of put his arm around me and said, listen, young army officer, you probably need to know a bit more about Navy stuff and proceeded to give me a whole lot of books to read. starting with Robert Hughes' Naval Tactics. And no, he was right. I really, really enjoyed it. I learnt a lot. When I subsequently went to school again at Johns Hopkins University for a year as a senior colonel, I sat down with the staff and said, I don't want to do any Army stuff.

So I did subjects around technology. I looked at ship design, US Navy submarine campaign in the Pacific and World War II, these kind of things. We need to be broad as military officers and understand in all the domains, not just the one we are recruited into and the one that we develop the most expertise within. Yeah, and I would imagine as an Australian and the world's largest island nation,

it's somewhat important to have some understanding of the maritime domain. Extraordinarily important for lots of reasons. Like you said, our security comes from that big blue moat that's around our little island. Although most Australians stand on the beach and look in, they don't necessarily stand on the beach and look out. Our culture probably needs to evolve a bit like that, you know,

and we have a developing oceanic consciousness. But, you know, as a small country, we have a population and economy that's roughly the same as Texas. We're reliant on overseas trade and overseas investment into Australian industries. and we shouldn't lose the fact that you know those undersea cables that carry the internet and all forms of communication about 95 percent of all data travels through them they travel under the sea as an island it is vital we understand the ocean that it's a highway but it's full of

opportunity but full of peril for those who aren't wary or those who don't see it that way to get back to the ship would you mind summarizing the ship for our listeners Sure. It's one of C.S. Forrester's novels. I've read several of his novels about HMS Artemis, which is a Royal Navy destroyer escorting a convoy that's going to Malta during the Second World War. He wrote it in 1943, and it's before the tide had turned in the European and Mediterranean theatre where there was a fine balance, you know, the Germans and Italians on one side, the British, Americans and its allies on the other. It starts in late afternoon and they detect an Italian fleet,

which theoretically is far superior to the Royal Navy fleet. The Italian fleet has at least one battleship, has different cruisers, and it's about the ship and all the different characters on that ship. Not just the captain, but all the different appointments that make up a ship's company and how they acquit themselves in combat against the Italian fleet. Thanks, sir. Have you studied the Malta and Mediterranean campaign at all? Yeah, I mean, Australia had forces in the Mediterranean, particularly in the first couple of years of the war from, you know, 1940, 41, had multiple Australian divisions fighting in North Africa, Syria, Crete and Greece. There was an Australian squadron there, certainly in the first couple of years of the war, led by HMAS Sydney and a lot of Australian Air Force squadrons. So they're all the way through to the end of the war.

But the Battle of Malta is fascinating. this tiny little dot in the middle of the ocean that assumes such an important place not just in the operational plans of commanders but as part of the propaganda war it became you know operationally to lose Malta would have been terrible but strategically and in the minds of allied commanders and the populace it would have been a terrible disaster so there was a real back and fro uh in this battle for malta um and it was primarily a naval campaign but you know the air uh was an important part of it for lots of different reasons as well and obviously as an australian you know back to gallipoli that's uh at one end of the the mediterranean so it does

figure in the consciousness of australians and in this in consciousness of the australian military thanks sir so i think a lot of our listeners are very familiar with forrester's uh the good shepherd the book upon which the tom hanks movie greyhound was based is forrester also horatio hornblower i think i think he is yeah i'm out myself i've never actually read the uh the hornblower novel so the age of sail is a little bit less my thing than more modern subjects but so that's what forrester is mostly known for how did you discover the ship because i didn't learn about it until you actually tweeted about it. And then I immediately ordered it. Actually, the first book by Forrest I read was called The General. It's about a British

general during the First World War. And it's a wonderful book, looking at a senior British officer who gets promoted up through various ranks, and isn't actually a terribly clever fellow or particularly good leader. He just is an aggressive leader, and gets to a certain point where he's commanding a high-level formation. I guess I came across The Good Shepherd accidentally, read it, loved it. I thought it's a wonderful book and a wonderful examination of the mind of a commander. And then the Tom Hanks movie on Apple Plus,

watched that several times. I'm a Tom Hanks fan, so I was already biased towards loving the movie, but I did love the movie. I thought it was a wonderful piece looking at military command and the interaction of different members of a ship's company. And then I guess I just fell over the ship as well. One of my commanders at work is a Navy captain, and he said, oh, you should also read the ship.

And I said, okay, I'll do that. And I read it and really enjoyed it. Different to Good Shepherd, but, you know, similar era, similar style, similar in the way that it's very knowledgeable about our profession and you know its people and the technology of the day given he was you know writing in the 1940s about this so it was kind of accidental it was a recommendation by a navy officer and i was i'm glad i took up his advice to read it i'm pretty familiar with your thoughts on the value of fiction to the military enterprise you talked about it sort of in our introduction there as well but when i've seen

to discuss this in our other venues, you're usually talking about fictional events set in the future. We have another podcast that's going to come out with Admiral Stavridis here, who's just written 2034 about a fictional World War III, and he referred to it as cautionary fiction and how fiction can shape our approach to complex future problems. The ship is historical fiction though, so why in this instance did you choose historical fiction? I've always been attracted to historical fiction i mean i read the killer angels that series of books gods and generals and the last full measure i thought was just a wonderful series of book i mean the killer angels is totally a classic i read probably at least half a dozen of o'brien's books on jack albury

the first book is hard because you've got to get used to all the different bits of the sailing ship and all the sails and masts but once you get used to it boy you immerse yourself in that world in a way not many other books are able to do that. So I've always been attracted to it just as a different way of reading history. I love history and I love proper military history but it's a different slant on history and it's a different way for you to engage with the characters and the kind of situations that our forebears faced and learnt the hard lessons of war about that we can still learn from. Obviously I'm also a fan of science fiction whether it's the far future but even you know in the 1980s the stuff tom clancy was writing about you know red storm rising that

the hunt for red october these kind of novels are really important because they allow you to think differently about our profession and its institutions and its war fighting concepts and allow you to be creative in thinking about how you might like to do things in future and That's one of the reasons, in fact, I've just come from speaking to our staff college students about an elective called the PERI Group where we use science fiction to do just this. So there's all forms of fiction that I think you can use to do this. Probably the best known contemporary exemplars of this are Peter Singer

and August Cole. You know, Ghost Fleet is a tremendous novel and I would recommend it to any leader in the military profession. You don't have to be a naval officer to get it. um burn in as a more domestic setting but once again a very thoughtful examination of the near future technology the ethics of technology it's all footnoted so you can source what they're writing about and we've just launched a story here that peter singer and august cole wrote about future military learning looking about 15 years into the future they call it useful fiction

And it's a way to explore the future of our profession and our organisations that's not threatening to some senior people who can sometimes not always appreciate different ideas about our profession, but we need to do it nonetheless. And I think fiction is a really exciting, creative and good way to do that. Let me ask you then for your impressions of Ghostly, because I remember the first time I read it, I finished it in a day, but didn't put it down. And part of it was because it was very concerning. So what was your impression as you read it? Yeah, scary, right? you know first and foremost you know that uh this very expensive fleet of joint strike fighters was basically taken out of the game in the first hour you know i think it was the zumwalt class cruisers

that had already been laid up and part of the story is about trying to recommission them it's you know like the 1980s recommissioning the battleships in the u.s navy right old ideas sometimes come around again to make sense in the future I just thought it made us think about future conflict in a slightly different way than we might have already been I don't think everything in there was new and that wasn't what Peter and August were trying to do they were just trying to say look at it from a different perspective and that's where the real value and this is as military officers we we're kind of trained um and enculturated into looking at problems from a certain point of view and what peter and august do is say hey we accept that

you've got to do that but sometimes you need to step over to the right or to the left and just look at it from a different perspective uh whole new insights might become available to you around joint war fighting integrated integrating the domains the use of technology the integration of ideas institutions to make technology work well it's a bit of a it's almost i don't know whether it's a cultural phenomenon there but certainly when the u.s navy's using the term ghost fleet as part of its unmanned or uncrewed naval vessel programs you know that it's had impact and i think that's great i think it's wonderful that peter and august have been able to do that. Yeah, I think that without overstating the impact of the book, I think that book has had

a large impact on our organizational mindset. I don't know, you're seeing a lot of things being written about now, possible solutions for the Zumwalt class that I don't think may have been considered had Ghost Fleet not been published and sort of captured the imagination in that way. but to get back to the ship what was your main takeaways from the ship there were there are a few i think whilst the ship was different from good shepherd where the ship looked at the whole ship's company people uh in the crew of hms artemis added into the whole but at heart it was about good leadership you know about the centrality of good leadership it doesn't matter to what domain, what service, what nation you're in,

effective military institutions are those that are led well and with leaders that are able to build cohesive, unified organisations that act with purpose and understand purpose. I guess that's the first one. The second one was the ship's crew was one that was brilliant at the basics. everyone was excellent at their job which you know says to me and reinforces once again

training education so important that's the differential between winners and losers those who drill who think who learn who adapt and it was a crew that was clearly clearly well trained that was able to work together people knew their place in the overall system of the ship and part of that too is they were good tacticians they understood tactics as a ship and as an escort fleet as a as a convoy because then that allowed them by being brilliant at the best basics and being good tacticians to be audacious and to take risk these were little destroyers going up against an italian battle fleet led by a battleship destroyers versus battleships i'm not a naval strategist but generally that's not the kind of match-up that you want to have but they went at

it partially it was because they didn't have much choice but they did and it just shows that if you understand risk if you take risk you know audacity wins and you know so i guess they're the key takeaways uh that i took from the actual story uh of the ship i just thought it really was a wonderful a very short story right and it covers a very short period of time in the novel i mean less than a day really but they're the you know good leadership i'd be brilliant at the basics and good at tactics and be audacious in leading and pursuing your mission their time proven ways of being a successful military organization thanks sir i was going to share some of the ones i had since we're kind of doing a book club here and you can push back

on me if you think i'm if you think i'm out to lunch but um the one i would offer though it was a artemis is a light cruiser not a destroyer sorry like they make me they make me turn in my swope in if I don't correct an army guy on a ship classification I stay corrected but also like cruiser versus a battleship is also not a matchup that you want even that even though I'm not a you know a gunship sailor I'm a missile age sailor so I thought it was interesting there was an exercise I used to do when I was teaching PME where we talk about what are the different services think of when they use the word teamwork. You're not assigning value to that word necessarily and saying that one service is superior. It's just that each service and sometimes different

communities within each service will have like a slightly different idea of what that means to them. You know, for an Air Force pilot, it may mean that teamwork of pilots in the air and the wingman supporting one another if they're dogfighting or working with their airborne early warning to guide them onto a target safely or they may be thinking about their ground crew back at the base who's prepared the aircraft for them to send them off into combat and i'm sure you have like your own thoughts about that from your institutional knowledge as a as an army person you know maybe it means hey the person on my left and the person on my right we're all going to go on this 20 mile march together we're all going to arrive together everybody's going to

carry their weight and when we get there we're all going to dig in and fight together but for me the what this book really brought out and they brought out using the individual characters was the importance of the individual to make the ship function as an entire weapon system and they went Forrester went all over the ship with just these individuals who are absolutely critical for the rounds to impact on the Italian battleship there were probably 40 different people who were responsible for that happening along the way and there are redundancies built into that system but those individuals are important if you remove the individual you're going to start to lose something very quickly and then the training which was what you brought out too is like those

individuals have to be properly trained to do what they want to do the second was the important of doctrine and sort of common understanding of what they want to do it made me think of the Nelson touch the way they uh the captain assesses the wind at the beginning of the engagement and he's kind of looking over he's got this junior officer who's uh finding himself along the way right he's you know he thinks he's a coward before and then during the battle he rises to the occasion stiff up for lip and all extremely british but the captain knows immediately what the commodore is going to call for because they discussed previously if this situation presents itself this is how we're going to behave. And I thought immediately of the Nelson touch in that one.

And then the last one was something that you also talked on is kind of like the differences in the operational functions when you apply them to the naval domain is that function protection. If I'm thinking about it from a ground combat perspective, I'm usually talking about there's a piece of ground that I want to hold. But in the naval realm, if you are protecting a convoy, that usually means that you are attacking something else to prevent that convoy from being attacked. So in this case, the light cruiser is surging off towards the battleship. Despite the fact that that is not a good matchup for the light cruiser,

that's what he has to do because operational function protection is his priority right now. So those were my takeaways, sir. I don't know if you have anything. I was going to say, if you're escorting, you've still got to fight. Yes, sir. Were there things that reminded you of any of your experiences in ground combat that you thought might be useful in the joint classroom to help Army comrades better understand Navy counterparts or vice versa? I think the first thing I'd say is we've got to understand each other better than we ever have before.

Joint is being taken to a whole nother level now. And, you know, I've served in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, spent a lot of time with the U.S. Army in Baghdad. And it was kind of joint, but where we're going in the next couple of decades, there's no discretion there. And military success in the next few decades is about those who can integrate all the different domains into a more unified and cohesive approach at every single level, whilst ensuring our enemy can't do that integration. How do you break down their joint or building up our joint? And to do that, you've got to understand each other, you've got to respect each other, but you've got to invest the time in learning about each other.

Some of our schools do that, but frankly, it's a personal discipline. You need to do the relationship building and have those conversations with people from different services and just get to know who they are, develop a level of empathy for their service, their domain, their traditions, and why those things exist, just because you don't understand them. You know, if I'm an Army guy, you can't go, well, that's Navy salute differently, what a dumb tradition.

Well, no, it's not. You know, there's a very, very long history about why Navy salutes, why it does, which is different to Army. And it's every bit as justified, as important, as how Army does things. and you need to understand that, build that empathy. Military organisations are human organisations and we as humans, regardless of what colour uniform you wear

or what country you're from, need to better understand each other and integration is about humans working together. It's not just about networked radios and combat engagement systems and missiles and planes and tanks. And if we can understand each other as humans, well, we can work together. yes sir i forgot to ask this earlier we had discussed it a little bit greyhound what lessons did you take from greyhound that were maybe different from this ship

the ship was about the whole crew wasn't it it was about how they all came together in that complex orchestration that is all the different crew members of a ship being led by a captain on a mechanical floating beast in combat with the enemy. Greyhound was about an individual and how he would lead his people, how he thought, you know, he was thinking about his personal circumstances, about his wife at the same time, so he's dealing with his personal demons. At the same time, he was an individual who was clearly a religious, thoughtful human who did not take lightly but taking of human lives particularly not just his

own sailors but those of the enemy greyhound was very much a look inside a command style but a look inside the soul of an individual leading and commanding a ship whereas the ship was all about an entire company and a look inside how that system works and i think they both work they both look at it look at the same thing from very different perspectives but are equally valuable thanks sir unfortunately that's all the time that we have for today i'd like to thank my guest major general mcryan of the australian army um sir where can we find you online what are you reading next and what's your next writing project because you are a prolific writer as well uh you can find me My Twitter handle is warinthefuture, all one word.

I'm currently editing a book that will be published by US Naval Institute Press at the end of this year, beginning of next year, about the future of warfare, as well as completing a series on the history of our profession with Modern War Institute. What am I reading? I'm reading a book called Editing Humanity at the Moment, which is all about CRISPR and what that means

for human beings in the future and the potential for augmentation. And I've just finished a good novel by an Australian author called John Birmingham, which is about two years old, but looks at a war between China and the United States. But it's all about how the adversary seeks to break down American society

and supply chains and food chains. it's called zero day code and i'd really recommend it if you like ghost fleet this is the societal look at warfare that um frankly if ghost fleet scared you this is even scarier no i mean that actually sounds like uh my worst nightmare i mean the military on military stuff is concerning but uh the way society would be affected and how society would react uh is even more concerning, especially as we've lived through the last year. But thank you again for

joining us, sir. For our listeners, thanks for tuning in, and we'll see you next time. Thank you. BODY DEADLY BODY DADDY SHIT BODY

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