Gen. Mick Ryan: The War in Ukraine, 10 months In
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Episode Notes
Transcript
Putin likes to say the West is weak, but he isn’t even fighting NATO, and he’s losing. But the war in Ukraine is at a transition point — and Russia, with a new commander, will emerge from the winter still dangerous. Gen. Mick Ryan joins guest host Ben Parker today.
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This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors and omissions. Ironically, the transcription service has particular problems with the word “bulwark,” so you may see it mangled as “Bullard,” “Boulart,” or even “bull word.” Enjoy!
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Welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I am Ben Parker, Bulwark’s senior editor sitting in for the vacationing, Charlie Sykes, and I am very excited to introduce our special guests joining us from the beach in Australia, General Mick Ryan former head of the Australian Defense College author, sub stack writer, Scholar of Warfare at a very keen observer of the ongoing war in Ukraine. General Ryan, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks, Bernard. It’s great to be with you.
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We’re gonna talk about your forthcoming book at the end. I wanna start off talking about your broad view of the war in Ukraine right now. What is the image that everyone should have of the way things are going at this moment from what you can tell? Well,
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I think at the moment, we’re at a transition point. We’ve had ten months of war in which the Russian army has not performed very well. They have largely failed on the battlefield after their initial gains. But over the last couple of months, they have consolidated. They’ve got a new unified commander that began a mobilization of people and three back home.
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So they will emerge from the winter a different organization, one that has learned maybe not as much as the Ukrainians have, but learned from experiences this year, and they remain a very dangerous entity. The Ukrainians, on the other hand, after ten months have seized the initiative in this war at every level. They have demonstrated not only can they defend well, but they can go on the offensive on a couple of occasions quite stunningly around Khaki, but also in other areas including tariffs on So they have momentum. They will not want to lose that momentum over winter. And I think we could probably expect over the winter if anyone was going to undertake offensive even at small scale, it’s more likely to be the Ukrainians than the Russians.
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Finally, at the political level, I think we still see pretty good unity in the West in supporting Ukraine. I think there’s probably some interesting and an unnecessary chatter about whether Crimea is part of it or not. It is But overall, I think the strategic patience by European and American publics and their governments has surprised Putin and he certainly is not able to run out the clock that he’d like to at least at
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this
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point of the wall.
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Yeah. I’m really interested by this topic of adaptation. It’s been said that war in general is a competition of adaptation. And we saw how nimble and a droid bikranians were early on. You’ve mentioned a couple of the ways that Russia is adapting to its early failures.
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The mobilization the appointment of a unified commander rather than a whole bunch of different officers trying to run little bits of the war. My question is, what do you look at to determine what are the inputs of this adaptation versus what are the outputs. So we can see that Russia is putting more into the war, in terms of manpower, in terms of their mothballed old tanks and things like that, in terms of changing their command structure, What are you looking for in terms of how we will know what the results are? You know, Russians actually have, at the
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start of the war, an advantage in the quantity and quality of equipment on the ground and in the air. That advantage has certainly been whittled away by the Ukrainians probably we might suggest given Ukrainian gains in Western Equipment and captured Russian equipment and Russian losses that they’re probably somewhere near to parity on the ground. Air is a bit different. Clearly, the Russian air force is still a very powerful entity. When it comes to humans, I think the Ukrainians have invested far more than the Russians have for a couple of reasons.
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Firstly, It’s their ground, so they have a population of forty million people who are invested in an existential fight. But the Ukrainians have also mobilized more of their people than the Russians have for this fight. So, you know, that the imperative to adapt for the Ukrainians is far more powerful at all levels. Whereas for the Russians, the imperatives are generally tactical. It’s, you know, the old adaptor die imperative hold out for both sides.
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But For the Russians, in particular, it’s tactical adaptation where the greatest imperial is because that’s where they’ve been losing. They haven’t been able to win battles in this war. And if you can’t win battles in a war, you can’t win wars. So I think wars are made up of lots of different things beyond the military. But at heart, if you can’t win battles, you can’t win wars.
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Ukrainians have shown they can. The Russians are yet to demonstrate that and the battle of Bakmuth. Is yet another example of really confounding Russian approaches to warfare at time, almost world war two suicide. Mass tactics. So the imports, I think, are pretty clear for the Ukraine’s national survival for the Russians, it’s not as clear, but I think for them, it’s tactical.
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When it comes to outputs, it’s also, I think, very clear. There’s no mystery about what successful adaptation is you win. You can’t put it any clearer than that. That’s why you adapt because you want to win. And sometimes you win messy, sometimes you win through stunning maneuvers approaches.
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But at the end of the day, the outcome of good adaptation is you win battles
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your win campaigns and your win wars. So is that what you say you’re looking for over the next, say, three to six months you’re looking for, who wins in Botsdam, you’re looking for, sort of, who wins along the line, along the river by Hassan or along the, you know, Donetsk and Luhans. Or are there other developments that you’re looking for to see what the direction of the war is going to be as we get through the winter and immersion to spring? I think,
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you know, winning is important and we’re we’re always looking forward. But there are other elements as well. I mean, I think fourth generation is a very important strategic approach to sustaining warfare? I mean, how quickly can you recruit train both individually and the the collective level people equip them and then deploy them in units and then employ them. So the fourth generation approach from both sides will be very important to watch.
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And beyond that, you know, the industrial support that the two belligerents are receiving will have a major impact on the outcome of this war. I mean, this is a battle of industrial systems to produce equipment, to produce munitions, including artillery ammunition to produce more precision munitions of different types. And also to produce the autonomous and counter autonomy systems that are appearing more and more in this war. Finally, you know, I think the political and economic dimensions will get more and more attention. I mean, you need money to fight wars and for Ukraine to generate income needs to be able to export things like energy and grain but it also needs Western assistance
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and support, and that will take a lot of political interactions between them and others. So what’s your assessment of the level of that Western support, both in terms of baking up Ukraine’s budget deficit, in terms of military support, and in terms of force generation, as you just said, I know that there are several European and and other countries that are training Ukrainian troops outside of Ukraine and sending them back to be the new instructors to the Ukrainian military. How is that going, if you know? Is it enough? Should
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we be doing more? Where? How? Yeah. I I think that is an effort that probably kicked in several months too, like, I give kudos to those nations that are doing it.
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I think a a nato wide training approach to train more people is required. And I think there’s a few levels of training. I mean, it’s not just about training Ukrainian recruits It’s also training junior leaders, but also training planners who can plan complex campaigns that are going to be needed next year for Ukraine to secure the east and south of its country in including Crimea. You know, I think a a wider training mission across NATO is is probably required. I mean, the Ukrainians need to train a couple hundred thousand more soldiers to win this war.
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They’ve lost a lot. They will lose more in the future. And, you know, mass still matters in modern warfare. It’s not just about high-tech, mass still matters. So I think that will be an area of growth, but I also think that we need to give the Ukrainians more weapons systems for offensive operations beyond just artillery.
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I think Western armored systems beyond the m one one threes that we’ve given them so far, what we require to think m one’s are the
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solution. You mean the American main battle tank the Abrams.
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Absolutely. It is the only solution, frankly. The leopards have not been produced in the quantity that’s required. And frankly, I don’t buy into all this logistic expertise, and a lot of it’s not from experts who say they’re very difficult logistically. I know that I commanded a brigade with them in Australia.
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And Australia’s strategic logistic plan for m one’s was almost nonexistent, but we’re still able to run them. So, you know, it is possible. You can get multi fuel engines for these things. There are thousands and thousands of them existing right now. That just don’t exist in any other kind of tank inventory.
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And they are a superb tank, absolutely superb tank. So, you know, the Ukrainians have demonstrated the ability to absorb advanced technologies quickly. I think we give it a go, send them the first two hundred and fifty M1s and then promise them another five hundred after that if they seem to work it out? I think
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that’s an excellent point. Yeah. The M1 was designed in the seventies and eighties to do battle with the Russian army in Europe. This is exactly what it’s intended to do. Yep.
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And it just so happens that the United States Marine Corps decided to get rid of all of theirs recently. I don’t know exactly what they did with all of those tanks they had, but I know someone who could use them.
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And in the Marine Corps tank, one of the things that Marine Corps did, and we did was put the back the old tank infantry telephone on the back of the tank. You still need those kind of simple coordination measures between infantry on the ground and tanks if you’re doing dismounted mounted combined arms activities. And it’s not just tanks, you need IFEs, you need under armor breaching capability that are going to have to do large scale ops difficult breaches, unfortunately, but that’s just the reality of warfare. So I think, you know, there’s a lot more that we can do. And, frankly, you know, people talk about the cost.
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The cost is for the west is almost nothing here. You’re talking about a few tens of billions of dollars. You’re not spending the lives of Western soldiers. Or civilians in this war. So the reality is the west is still got off pretty cheaply in this war compared to the huge sacrifices of the Ukrainian people.
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Amen. You wrote a whole book called Moore Transformed about the technological demographic and climatic trends that
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are transformed warfare in the twenty first century. I highly recommend that anyone is interested in the topic. What trends are you seeing in the war in Ukraine that are thing. You talked about some high-tech. You talked about autonomous systems.
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You talked about drones and remotely piloted remotely controlled systems. What are you seeing that is a new innovation? Think there’s
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a couple areas that are really interesting out of this wall. The first one is the interplay of civilian and military intelligence collection analysis, dissemination, and usage. I mean, we’ve seen social media ever since Israelis went into Lebanon we’ve seen it a bit in Iraq and Afghanistan, but I think we’re seeing what I call a Cambrian explosion in the use of social media and civilian intelligence capacity to monitor, to analyze, to disseminate information about the wall, whether it’s mapping, whether it’s providing targeting information on apps for the Ukrainian military. I think this is a fascinating area, the open source approach that we call officially. And I think military and other government intelligence agencies are really going to have to think carefully about how they mesh military and government intelligence with open source intelligence in a way that we just haven’t done before.
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I I think that’s a real area that we need to look at moving forward. I think a second one is the next generation of cheap precision. There’s a lot of precision munitions out there, a lot of being used in this war. I think something like forty percent of all javelins ever made were used in the first few months of this war. I don’t think that is a sustainable approach.
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I think we need to collectively invest in developing the next generation of precision munitions that are cheaper to make, easier to make for unskilled workforces and able to be held in large stock without degradation. That I think is a really important lesson, and that’ll obviously need the expansion of Western Industrial Systems. A third area that I find really interesting is civil military interaction, whether it is civil military relations between a civilian president and you know, a very powerful commander in chief in Ukraine. Or whether it’s the interplay of civil defense authorities in Ukraine, and the military in the response to drone and missile attacks or the interplay of military and civilians in protecting their cyber and telecommunications industry, which has been fundamental to both the defense and strategic influence campaigns of the Ukraine’s have undertaken. So there are three areas that really interest me.
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Your final one, I guess, that overlays all this, is the Ukrainians as a learning system. I mean, someone, you know, colloquially described to me the Russians as a top down culture and the Ukrainians as a bottom up culture. A lot more people out there who who understand anthropology better than me. But it appears to me that while both the Russians and the Ukrainians are learning in this world, the Ukrainians doing it across more endeavors and doing it better and quicker than the Russians are. I mean, I we really need to look at how learning systems emerge before wars.
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So when we go into war, we can utilize them better and adapt better and quicker. Than the adversary. I mean, the adaptation battle, as I discussed in the book, and and have another forum, is a really important and core military capacity. And do you think that comes from some of the work that the
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Ukrainian military has done with the American military and others since twenty fourteen, you know, training their non commissioned officer corps and things like that. I mean, there’s been a lot
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of discussion about this notion that, you know, the Ukrainians have a non commissioned officer corps and the Russians don’t. That’s not quite accurate. I mean, some Ukraine organizations have non commissioned officers. I mean, they’re they’re an organization that’s kind of transitioning from a Soviet to a kind of western approach. But the reality is seniority in the vast majority of the Ukrainian units is based on seniority, not so much whether they have rank.
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If you’re a more senior soldier, you have seniority. So there there’s still a military that’s in transition I mean, they did learn a lot from countries. You know, Canadians are massive unsung heroes in this twenty fourteen to twenty twenty two training period. There’s a lot more recognition for the efforts they’ve made. But, you know, the British and the Americans and others have played a role, the NATO Training schools have played a role in exposing Ukrainian middle and senior ranking officers to different IDs around airline integration, which clearly the Russians don’t do well, and other ideas that we’ve become used to in the west.
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So I don’t think we can describe the Ukrainians as a Western style military, but we can’t describe them as a Soviet style. And I think they have their own unique Ukrainian mix of both. And, you know, it works for them. You know, the best system for a military organization is one that’s based on your own national culture. And I think the
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Ukrainians have done that extraordinarily well. So I really wanna ask you about one of what I think is a startling innovation in the war. For several reasons. And that is the the partnership between Russia and Iran that we should develop over the last few months. Not only the widespread use of these Shahid drones, these remotely piloted munitions, which are exactly the kind of sort of precision, but very cheap, very simple kinds of weapons that can be mass produced even in a not wealthy country like Iran.
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And I also it seems to me that this is a political adaptation from the Russians. They’ve gone from having basically no allies apart from Belarus, even, you know, a cold reception from China to having a pretty significant partnership with Iran that is supplying them with the weapons they need. Am I being too apocalyptic about this? Is there more to expect? I
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don’t think we have to be apocalyptic about it. It’s certainly an interesting development. Although, if you have to partner with a repulsive regime like the Iranians. It just is an indication of how desperate you are is is what I take away from this. The Iranians have mastered a large scale production of cheap weapons.
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I mean, clearly, most of them are designed to use to attack Israel. I mean, you know, this is a country that, you know, wants to extinguish Israel and has designed a lot of its weapons systems around that these drones aren’t defensive in any way. They are offensive weapons. You know, I think it’s a measure of Russian desperation and possibly the lack of industrial innovation in Russia for them to go to Iran. Be that as it may.
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It’s it’s the first time in the war we have seen the mass use of autonomous system. I mean, we’ve seen the widespread use of them. We’ve seen lots and lots of different kinds of drones used by lots of different kinds of units in a wide variety of missions. But until these Iranian drones arrive, we didn’t see large scale used for single mission of mass autonomous systems. So I think, you know, there’s a lot we can learn here.
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They’re not swarms. They don’t behave like swarms. They’re just masked drones. So I think there’s a lot we can learn here about countering mass use of autonomous systems. And if there’s an area that’s kind of lagged in this fight is candor autonomy.
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I mean, there’s been a lot of work done in autonomous system, particularly aerial ones in the last thirty years. Counter autonomy has lagged. That is going to be an area that requires a lot more work in the future. And, you know, my proposition on this is that the next generation of counter autonomy systems must be cheaper to buy and use than the autonomous systems they’re countering. And we should be using counter autonomy as a cost imposition strategy against those who wanna use mass autonomous systems across all the domains.
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Okay.
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Yeah. I wanna I wanna dwell on this point for just a second. First, could you explain for our listeners what you mean by mass versus swarms? And what the difference is there? Yeah.
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Sure. Mass is just a whole bunch of things being thrown at a single
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objective in large quantities. And that’s what
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the Russians have done targeting Ukrainian infrastructure. Right? It’s just There are a whole bunch of
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drugs. That’s pretty much what they do. Swarms are different, swarms are semi intelligent machines that are able to collaborate with each other in the achievement of a single mission or multiple missions to which a swarm is assigned and they’re able to adapt how they do that. So, you know, we’re not seeing those kind of semi intelligent behaviors from these drones and missiles. We’re seeing them programmed to take different routes and make lots of turns and avoid air defenses and stuff, but they don’t collaborate to cover for strengths and weaknesses of of each other.
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And they’re not interacting in a way that a semi intelligent small mind. Okay. Yeah.
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That’d be a whole other development. So you’ve been watching the war. You have correct me if I’m wrong. You have traveled to Ukraine. Right?
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In the fall, you were there? Yeah. And
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I’m hoping to go back again. In the near future. That would be great, and
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we’d love to hear your thoughts about that. So you’ve been following this very closely. For those who don’t follow you on Twitter at war in the future, you post really interesting threads about the war and how to understand what’s going on. If president Biden were to call you into his office, and say based on not only your observations of this war but on your whole career and your research, what are three things I should do either for the United States or for this war, three things I should change about procurement or policy or anything. What were the three things you were given?
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I
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think the first one would be the possession of a national standing mobilization system that’s able to be stood up very quickly. Which involves not just military force and the production of weapons but also, you know, an expansion of civil defense of cyber and telecommunications and all those kind of things. I think, you know, a standing mobilization approach and capacity is a really important part of conventional deterrence. It ups the cost of anniversaries thinking around aggression. So I think that would be the first one.
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I think a second one would be the capacity for governments to better communicate with their people about future threats. So I don’t think that is done very well. A lot of it is either Historically, China did this or, you know, it’s subsumed in the day to day of politics. So I think a bit of internal strategic communications, capability of governments being able to have honest, plain English conversations with their people, by the way, who are paying their taxes and paying their wages is a really important capability to have. And third, you know, strategic influence the US, in particular, has a whole lot of latent influence capability beyond its military power that I don’t know that it always uses well.
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I mean, the power of Hollywood is just there’s nothing else like it on the planet. The power of McDonald’s and BlueJeans and and things like this that Americans forget the whole world wants. You know, should be sold as something that can only emerge out of a nation that merges freedom of speech, freedom of religion, protection of intellectual rights and and these kind of things. So, you know, the strategic influence capacity in the United States protect the idea of democracy In whatever format is, there’s lots of different forms of it, and we need to remember that. But I think that would be the third capability that is really important.
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Yeah, this is an idea that I find very interesting. And I’d love to hear your thoughts on what relationship there is, if any, between that kind of soft power of the Golden Arches and BlueJeans, and the requirements or lack of requirements for using military force. Because you consistently hear from people who are some for very good reasons, critics of the size of the American defense budget or of American extensions abroad that we should rely more on soft power, but it’s hard to say what that means. What does you know, what does it mean to use soft power when it’s in the hands of the Board of Directors and CEO of McDonald’s or of the movie studios or of the Levi Strauss Company. Yeah.
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Unfortunately,
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you know, a lot of people characterize this as either either. I mean, you’ve got to have both. You can’t exercise soft power. As a superpower without the stick. I mean, that just doesn’t make sense.
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You need the capacity that if soft power doesn’t work, you can follow through on your threat. At the end of the day, that’s what Soft Power’s about right. It’s about convincing somebody to either do something or not do something with the carrot whilst they also understand that if the current doesn’t work, there’s a pretty big stick that might come after him as well. I don’t think this is an either either violence and influence are two sides of the same coin when it comes to military or national security operations. You have to invest in both.
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And frankly, the percentage of the US GDP that’s been on defense at the moment is low compared to what it was all the way through the Cold War. So, you know, the American taxpayers are not asked to, you know, show a a huge amount percentage of their taxes for the defense. It’s it’s low historically as it is in many other countries. But the reality is it’s probably going to have to increase if we’re going to deter China from making what might be some very catastrophic mistakes in the Western Pacific. Okay.
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So you’ve anticipated by next question, which is an even more unlikely
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hypothetical, and it is that Same question. You get brought into the office and ask, what are the three things I should learn from the war and you created from your
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experience? But instead of Joe Biden asking if Xi Jinping, what’s your answer? Firstly, don’t make assumptions about the west’s incapacity to fight or sustained long wars, that would be a terrible mistake. Yeah. We’ve seen these great inventive rants from Putin about the west is weak because it has, you know, a dozen genders and there’s so woke that, you know, it’s weakened and stuff when the evidence of the last ten months shows, well, is it weak?
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I mean, you haven’t even had to fight NATO yet. And you’re losing. Xi Jinping should keep in mind that the West’s economy and its military power is very, very significant. And if he was to give them cause to mobilize, I think it would be very difficult if not impossible for China to overcome that. So firstly, don’t underestimate Western resolve.
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Secondly, I think he needs to ensure that he doesn’t overestimate his own capacity. Clearly, this was a trap that Putin fell into whether it’s because of his own arrogance or because he was given wrong information, it’s probably a bit of both. But, you know, Xi Jinping is to be very careful that he doesn’t start believing his own propaganda. You know, Xi Jinping thought and all these books and publications. Can, you know, a decade or two of that can lead you to places where you think you’re almost invincible.
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I mean, look at some social media entrepreneurs at the moment doing crazy things. So, you know, I think that would be the second thing is don’t believe your your own hype. The third piece would be you know, maybe you’ve got some profound societal problems at the moment that you need to fix because China is not looking good for the future. I mean, demographically, it is facing a catastrophe. It’s probably gonna lose half its population before the end of this century.
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It has profound economic and pollution challenges. So as he looks out when he stands on the beach, maybe he needs to turn around and look in at his own country and fix some of the problems that might cause him issues down the track. Yeah. I think
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that’s right. General Ryan, I’m gonna ask you if I can to respond to some breaking news here. It hasn’t been confirmed yet, but it looks like Ukrainian president, Vladimir Zelensky, will be visiting Congress on Wednesday. I think this is the first time he’s left Ukraine since the full scale Russian invasion in February What does this say to you? For me, that says he is very keen
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to get reassurance from the United States as it transitions to a Republican controlled Congress that it will continue supporting Ukraine. I think, you know, that would concern him given some of the narratives that have come out of some parts of the Republican Party in the last twelve months. But also here we’ll be saying, listen, we need to step up support. I think, you know, his request is what you’ve done so far has been great to defend our nation and preserve it as it is. But we need to step up to the next level of support, which is, you know, more armored vehicles, you know, greater munitions, production, those kind of things, so we can actually take it back.
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That is a different phase of the war. And it needs a different kind and a different quantity of support. So I guess they would be the the kinds of things that he would be having talks about openly and and behind closed doors, you know, his inclination to travel overseas has to be kind of moderated with the requirement to be at
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home, and, you know, he can influence Publix around the world from home. Yeah. I agree. It seems to me like this is a statement of tremendous confidence that he does feel like he can afford to leave the country for a few days and come to visit with with allies and supporters. I think that that demonstrates that the first time since February, things are manageable to the degree that they don’t require his presence every day.
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Oh, I think you’re right. I mean, that that is an important takeaway. You know, Putin’s just traveled to Belarus, you know, maybe Zilinx speeds, realize just needs to loosen step back half a step from the range for a little bit. And, frankly, even someone like Zelensky needs a break, and and maybe it might give him that physical and mental break for a few days that will reinvigorating. Although, to be quite frank when I saw him in September, he was looking pretty healthy.
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He looked fit. He was energetic and all those things, so he clearly has a good management regime for his own sleep and health, which shows once again what a good leader is. Yeah. That’s
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excellent to hear, and I hope it’s still the case. So I wanna ask you now what the view of the war in Ukraine is from Australia. We’re used to thinking about it in terms of Europe and certainly in terms of the United States and our relationships, our ongoing competitions with near peer competitors like Russia and China. But from Australia, what are the implications of this war? What does it mean for for those of you who have spent your careers dealing with Australian national security?
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No. I think, I
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mean, it’s being watched here. You know, there’s a couple of strains here. There’s those who are watching it very closely and think there’s a lot of relevant lessons and then there’s the strains mainly Air Force and Navy who think, well, it’s not very relevant because it’s just a lean war, and that won’t happen in the future in our region, which I think is a historical and ignorant. But, you know, at the end of the day, there are a lot of people watching it. The our army has produced some series of reports on it, which are available I’ve just tweeted about them.
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So people are watching it, but, you know, when you observe these wars from afar, you know, you really need to make an assessment of what lessons are relevant only to that war and what lessons are more broadly relevant about future warfare I think that’s the really important conversation and the other kind of comments that, you know, you and I have been talking about in this this discussion. And
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in terms of sort of at the political level of what the the conflict between NATO and Russia means, and what that it can mean for the balance of the United States to Europe versus the specific, and what that could mean for Australia’s national security? Are there those kinds of conversations going on as well? Oh, no.
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Absolutely. You know, August out of the context of the most recent discussions that occurred in the, you know, first week of December in Washington, DC just after the Ozmen discussions was, you know, the outcomes of Ukraine, Australia is part of group of nation that meets in Germany every few months to talk about supporting Ukraine. So, you know, this is a war that has attention at the highest levels. Our capacity to learn from it remains to be seen. We have a big defense strategic review that underway at the moment, it’s due to go to the government in February and hopefully be at least some elements of it be publicly released in March.
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That we’ll look at our posture, our infrastructure, technology, and a whole range of things to deal with China in the Western Pacific. Well, I hope
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they’re asking you for your input in all of that. Because as I said earlier, your book from twenty twenty one, I believe, war transformed was really an excellent look into the future, not trying to predict individual events, but looking at broad trends in technology, demographics, climate, other things like that and explaining what would change about future warfare, and also perhaps more importantly, what would stay the same. Just briefly for our listeners who might wanna check out the book, what are the top things that people should be aware of in terms of what war might look like in the twenty first century?
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Yeah. I mean, the the book was actually published nine days before the Russians invaded Ukraine. We released it in Washington, D. C. On on fifteen February, we had some events there.
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So I guess there’s some a couple of important things in the book. The first one is that don’t get distracted by all the technological change because we’re in the future has just as many continuities as it does change. I mean, we see changes in the kind of organizations and technologies. That are used in war. But, you know, there’s a lot of continuity.
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Things like surprise. Regardless of their technological advancements, surprise will be an enduring theme, and that has a whole lot of implications. Yeah. There’s still going to be wars. The decline of violence theories that we’ve seen put out there in the last decade aren’t really useful and they’ve rolled us into a sense of security.
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There will always be people out there who think wars are the best ways of getting what they want and we can’t forget that. And I guess another, you know, finally important continuity is good leadership. It matters. It really, really matters. And I think Zelensky has shown that this year.
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Although, you know, the leadership of people like Boris Johnson and president Biden have also been really important. But Zelensky, you know, we haven’t seen a leader like him in in many decades. So continuity is really important. Clearly, technology is an important part of future warfare. But, you know, the theme here is that Without clever people coming up with new ideas and different organizational constructs, technology will never be an optimal solution.
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So, you know, this other trinity of technology ideas and organizations is very important for military organizations to get right. And I guess the third big theme is it’s it’s people. People are the heart of every military capability. Doesn’t matter what domain. Doesn’t matter what more competition you’re in developing your people with the right skills, the right knowledge is, the right linkages, the right leaders is a very important part of modern war.
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It always has been and it always will be technology, workplace, good leadership and the provision of purpose to people. Yeah. That’s the part of that book
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that I thought was most generally applicable to any organization, to any field. You do a great job of explaining that, you know, the technology will change certain things, but the real business is people and getting the right people to harness the technology or to invent the technology And I think if your if your business is the profession of arms or or any other, that is a great lesson to keep in mind. So you also have another book coming out, The
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White Sun War. What’s that about? Okay. So White Sun War is a fictional account of a future war over Taiwan. I’ve kind of done it.
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If you’ve ever read the killer angels, it’s in that style, it’s from the perspective of a future historian looking back on the wall, and it looks at a war over to Taiwan through the eyes of several different protagonist. There’s, you know, a US Marine colonel in charge of one of the new marine littoral regiments. There’s a young US Army cavalry troop leader. She’s in charge of a human machine teaming organization. There’s a space command person who leads orbital warfare organization.
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There’s a Chinese marine colonel, a young Taiwanese soldier. And I looked at a campaign through their eyes. And, you know, there’s technology, but, you know, there’s some climate change stuff in there as well. And if anything, this is designed to make people think about just how difficult and probably how catastrophic a war over Taiwan would be. Is it being translated into Chinese by any chance?
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Well, I’m not sure. I’m sure someone will probably won’t be done legally from from what I understand of Chinese intellectual property rights. But, no, it’s being published by Kasimov in April next year. Alright. Well, we will look
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forward to that coming out. Major General, Nick Ryan, at war in the future on Twitter, also on Substack. Thank you so much for joining us. This has been a great conversation. And if you do make it to Ukraine again in the future, please let us know.
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We’d love to have you back. Yeah.
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Thanks, Ben. I’m also on Post and Mastodon for those who’ve become Twitter refugees just to ensure that people can read my stuff wherever they are on social media. Okay.
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Well, I am also on post, and I’ll follow you there. In the meantime, for the vacationing, Charlie Sykes, I’m Ben Parker. Come back next time and Charlie will do it all over again.