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War: Lessons from Ukraine and History for Taiwan
Mick Ryan is a retired major general in the Australian army and author of three books — War Transformed: The Future of Twenty-First-Century Great Power Competition and Conflict, White Sun War, which is a piece of fiction about a near-future Taiwan war, and The War for Ukraine: Strategy and Adaptation Under Fire. He also writes the excellent Substack, which has taught me a tremendous amount over the past few years. The way Mick synthesizes history and contemporary conflict makes it one of my few true must-read Substacks.
In today’s conversation, we discuss…
Lessons from the history of warfare, and how to apply them to modern conflict,
Why superweapons don’t win wars, and how the human dimension of war will shape military applications of AI,
Why economic integration alone cannot prevent a US-China war,
The role of deception and the limits of battlefield surveillance, with case studies in Ukraine and Afghanistan,
Mick’s four filters for applying lessons from Ukraine to a Taiwan contingency, and the underappreciated role of Taiwanese public opinion in shaping CCP goals.
Thanks to the Hudson Institute’s Center for Defense Concepts and Technology for sponsoring this podcast.
Listen now on your favorite podcast app.
Why Humans Win Wars
Jordan Schneider: We’re not passing up an opportunity to open a show with Andrew Marshall. You’re fond of the following quote from him:
The most important competition is not the technological competition. The most important goal is to be the best in the intellectual task of finding the most appropriate innovations in the concepts of operation and making organizational changes to fully exploit the technologies already available and those that will be available in the next decade or so.
Is that really the key to fighting and winning wars?
Mick Ryan: There’s only one real future of war, and that’s the human being. If you take the human out of it, it’s not war by definition. That quote really gets to the human aspects of competition and warfare. Regardless of how spectacular technology might be — and it doesn’t matter whether it’s a longbow, a tank, a B-29, an atomic bomb, or AI — it’s ultimately humans who develop those technologies and humans who employ them as part of a larger national warfighting system, not just a military system.
I think it’s a really important quote and really needs to continue driving how military and national security organizations think about absorbing and integrating new technologies into their capability.
Jordan Schneider: On the other side of the spectrum, you have a book like Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of Great Powers. I thought it was interesting and almost ironic that he writes this book, Engineers of Victory, which contains these wonderful little jewels of chapters that goes into specific technological innovations and how they get deployed and scaled up to have operational and ultimately strategic impacts. But at the end of the day it was really the broader industrial weight of what the Allies could bring to bear that decided the war for the most part. If you zoom out on a century-by-century level, that’s definitely what he argues in Rise and Fall.
Why isn’t it just the GDP or correlation of how many factories you have that ends up deciding this stuff? What was Andrew Marshall actually getting at?
Mick Ryan: Well, I think they’re complementary ideas. I don’t think they exist in tension, because at the end of the day, in the wars he examined — and it’s a fabulous book — both sides had industrial capacity, but the one that’s able to leverage it cleverly is the one that wins.
In the Second World War, Germany started with massive industrial capacity, but it didn’t mobilize it until too late. It didn’t mobilize its national workforce very well by still having servants and people working in household roles well until the third or fourth year of the war. Ultimately, it was about decisions made by humans — politicians and industrial leaders — to cleverly apply, prioritize, and mobilize industrial resources that won them the war.
Yes, in the macro, it was industrial capacity that won, but it was those who most cleverly mobilized, applied, and prioritized their industrial capacity that won.
Jordan Schneider: Here’s a relevant quote from Paul Kennedy’s Victory at Sea:
“[I]t would be a very grave error to think that great contests are won solely by larger and larger forces moving inexorably toward victory, by global trends, or by sophisticated causation-chains. To be sure, if vast shifts occur in the economic substructure and productive forces (for example, if an entire American continent is mobilizing for war), and an overwhelming flood of ships, planes, and guns is being sent to the battlefields, then it is more than likely that the enemy’s battalions will be crushed; indeed, if victory did not follow, the historian would be hard-pressed to explain that. But the deficit in all deterministic explanations—the substructure alters, therefore the superstructure is changed—is that they lack human agency. The victor’s ships, planes, and guns need courageous men to steer them, insightful men to organize them, and clever men to give them superior battlefield performance.”
Mick Ryan: We thought the future of war was drones, and then Bakhmut happened. At the end of the day, there is no technology that fully replaces every other technology that’s gone before it. That just has never happened. Even the longbow, revolutionary as it was, didn’t replace every other technology that went before it.
War is what I call additive. It just adds layers of sedimentation of everything that’s gone before it, and the new technologies add something on top. Even in Ukraine, drones have not — and I’ll repeat this — they have not changed a whole lot of existing ideas and technologies. They’ve evolved some of them, certainly, but largely what drones have done is extended what military organizations have done, not totally changed them.
At the end of the day, on the ground, you have to fight and take ground. That has not changed. Drones help with that; they help with holding ground. But if you talk with any Ukrainian soldier, they will tell you drones alone are insufficient. There’s a whole lot of other things that are required. It’s the same in the land, in the air, and in the maritime domain.
Jordan Schneider: Mick, can you imagine a future where the longbow makes a comeback?
Mick Ryan: Yeah, World War IV, I think, to paraphrase Einstein — but I hope it doesn’t come to that.
Jordan Schneider: Low signature, very quiet, doesn’t emit anything. Come on, it’s gotta be something, right?
Mick Ryan: Well, you just never know. But I did recently attend the Chalke History Festival in England, and they did have someone there teaching all about the longbow and giving demonstrations of its efficiency.
Jordan Schneider: Speaking of human beings, another book which I’m going to credit you for turning me onto is On the Psychology of Military Incompetence, written by Norman Dixon. He was a Royal Engineer for ten years, then became a professional practicing psychologist, and ten years into that decided to write about all the poor decisions that British generals have made throughout history.
The book came out in 1976, but in the introduction, he has this great little riff where he writes about generals.
“The contemplation of what is involved in generalship may well, on occasion, suggest that incompetence is not absolutely inevitable — that anyone can do the job at all. This is particularly so when one considers that military decisions are often made under conditions of enormous stress, where actual noise, fatigue, lack of sleep, poor food, grinding responsibility add their quotas to the ever-present threat of total annihilation. Indeed, the foregoing analysis of generalship prompts the thought that it might be better to scrap generals and leave decision-making of war to computers.”
What reflections does that quote prompt for you in 2025?
Mick Ryan: I think he got it partially right, but it’s not the full story. That was his view, and notwithstanding the fact we’re both engineers, there’s also counter-evidence. If you read studies — for example, Aimée Fox’s Learning to Fight is a wonderful study of how the British Army became a learning organization during the First World War — you can imagine a universe or history where both exist at the same time.
Every military organization has rock stars and incompetents. He focused and chose to focus purely on the incompetents, but there are also many rock stars — brilliant people involved in planning, execution, and leadership of military affairs. You need to consider both in the same context.
Having war taken over by computers — “taken over” is the wrong term — but guided more by computers is already here. We’ve seen that since 1991 in the First Gulf War. But computers making key decisions about strategy and operations? We’re not there yet, and I don’t know whether we want to go there. I would be deeply concerned if we went that way.
However, short-term tactical engagement decisions have been made by computers in systems like close-in weapons systems and air defense systems for a very long time. The range of tactical decision-making by AI and computers will continue to be extended. But the big questions about war — whether to go to war, the key trajectory of war, whether to end a war — will remain human.
Jordan Schneider: Let’s talk about the crawl up the command chain that autonomous decision-making could have. We’ve been doing targeting since the 1990s, but there’s an aspect that seems inevitable at a surface level: once systems get smart enough, you’re going to want them to take up more and more of at least the decision-making space.
Maybe there are things on the battlefield that humans can do that machines can’t, but this orchestration — if it is more effective and you have this competitive dynamic between two reasonably equally matched adversaries — if there’s an advantage there, someone’s going to lean into that, right?
Mick Ryan: Absolutely, and for the most part we’d be crazy not to. But there are still limits to seeking advantage. We’ve accepted that through the Biological and Chemical Weapons Convention, so it’s not a 100% free-for-all — it’s about a 90% free-for-all when it comes to weapons and the conduct of war. We’ve also signed up to things like the Geneva Convention.
Even though war is the most awful thing that can occur to human beings, we’ve still accepted that there must be some limitations on it. Now whether those limitations continue to hold is an open question. Russia has clearly decided that it will no longer abide by the Geneva Conventions. It has rarely done so in the war in Ukraine — it has executed POWs, tortured virtually every single POW it’s taken, deliberately murdered civilians, and used chemical weapons on the battlefield in hundreds of recorded incidents.
China will be learning from that, and we might surmise that they might decide it’s in their advantage not to abide by those rules. Whether the norms about limitations on warfare hold, or whether we find ourselves falling into total war — and I mean real total war — remains to be seen.
Jordan Schneider: You’ve seen this increasing digitization of command and control. Right now we’re in a very interesting, sticky moment on the front in Ukraine. At what point are we going to have AIs making recommendations which humans are going to follow because they trust the AIs more than their own intuition about how to deal with a front where there’s some tactical breakthrough? That’s an interesting one to ponder at least.
Mick Ryan: There’s a lot of talk about static front lines in Ukraine and how to break them, but they’re not truly static — they are moving. As we’ve seen throughout the course of the war, surprises are possible and you can do things that generate an advantage resulting in penetration and breakthrough, at least on the ground. We’ve seen that in the air as well.
This has not really been an air war — it’s been a drone war, but there hasn’t been a large-scale air war. The future of air warfare is probably more about what we saw Israel using against Iran than what we’ve seen in Ukraine. The same applies to maritime warfare — we haven’t seen a full-on maritime war. Ukraine offers us many lessons, but not in every single dimension and domain of warfare.
Jordan Schneider: I want to come back to human fallibility one more time. Maybe this was a theme in your novel — you kept emphasizing when people were tired. It seems clear to me that of all the things most legible for an AI to process and spit out recommendations for, these point-in-time decisions of “do we do A or B or C” seem to be on the multi-decadal timeline of things that are coming.
Before we’re going to have humanoid robots that can do everything infantry do, before we’re going to have robots make crazy material science breakthroughs, the types of things that someone in a command post or someone managing a battalion does — those decisions seem closer than AGI or what have you.
From another angle: what would you need to see from your war games or your interactions with some automated command and control system in order for you as a commanding officer to start handing more and more of the reins over — up from the super tactical stuff towards the more operational decisions?
Mick Ryan: We already see this happening in digital command and control platforms that the Ukrainians and many others are using. They offer very good situational awareness. Just the recall function alone — you don’t have to have people marking maps anymore. It’s automatically updated with friendly and enemy locations. That alone is an enormous step forward from many traditional ways of warfare.
The ability to understand the capacity of friendly units and those you’re opposing — their weapon ranges and holdings. The ability to quickly contact neighboring units in ways you may not have been able to do with radios in certain circumstances. Then there’s the ability to support planning and decision-making with data that you’ve either forgotten or wouldn’t traditionally access. The ability to quickly war-game lots of different options rather than having to do it manually when you’re tired, wet, hungry, and under threat.
These are the kinds of tactical functions that digitization and bespoke AI offer at the moment and will continue to improve. We’ve seen it really close the kill chain. Others are using it to work on what they call the “live chain” — casualty evacuation operations. AI is not just about improving the speed and capacity to kill people. It’s also improving the speed and capacity to treat, evacuate, and save people’s lives on the battlefield as well.
Learning from History
Jordan Schneider: Your most recent book is this extended meditation on what the war in Ukraine confirms about the nature of war broadly, as well as what disjunctures we may see today and tomorrow. I imagine there’s an aspect of this being surreal. The fact that we have now spent three years living through a high-intensity conflict that many people imagined was much more far-fetched than it turned out to be.
What has it been like following this halfway across the world, traveling there, traveling back, meditating on it, and living and breathing the conflict that we hoped wouldn’t happen in the 21st century?
Mick Ryan: The whole reason I wrote War Transformed is because these kinds of wars are inevitable. Humans are not smart enough to prevent war. I don’t care what any academic says about this issue — 5,000 years of history prove that humans are not beyond fighting each other yet. Unless there’s some change in the fundamental nature of humans, and there hasn’t been for a long time, we will, through calculation or miscalculation, continue to fight and kill each other. That was the core reason why I wrote War Transformed and how it might look in the future. Then nine days after that was published, Putin invaded Ukraine.
For me, the surprise was only about timing, not that it happened. Unfortunately, politicians and citizens still believe, or at least before 2022 believed, that this kind of thing was impossible — that conventional war wouldn’t take place because of economic integration. Well, once again, that’s a very old idea that’s been proven wrong in the lead-up to the First World War, even the US Civil War. If you look at that, the economic integration between the North and South was enormous, yet they still went to war.
Once again, there are all these fallacies that tend to become facts in the minds of many people about warfare. At the end of the day, you just need one person who miscalculates for us to fall into some massive conflagration. As I’ve written in White Sun War and elsewhere, that’s entirely possible in the Asia-Pacific. It’s very imaginable that America and China could find themselves at war regardless of any economic interest they have in not going to war.
It’s a little bit like climate change. The science is all there to say that things are clearly going to get worse over the course of this century, yet we still have politicians and people going on about how there’s no such thing as climate change, or it’s a made-up thing, or it’s a natural thing when all the science disproves that — and we’ve failed to act. Ultimately, humans are pretty good at ignoring facts and data if it’s in their economic or ideological interests. Because of that, we’ll continue to do things like go to war, just as we have in Ukraine and just as we may in other places in the future.
Jordan Schneider: Do you want to do a US Civil War detour? Do we have lessons from that conflict for Ukraine or Taiwan?
Mick Ryan: Well, every war has lessons. Many of the lessons from the US Civil War apply to Ukraine. There are lessons about mobilizing industrial production — clearly the North was able to mobilize its industry. It had more industry to start with, but it was able to mobilize it. It was clearly able to look at new technologies and absorb them into the military: telegraph, steam train, steamboats along the coast and along the Mississippi. There are lessons there about integration of new technologies, particularly at the operational and strategic level.
There are good lessons about civil-military relations. Both the North and South had issues with this, but there are some amazing and wonderful case studies about the interaction between Lincoln and the commanding generals of the Northern armies throughout the war, and then the relationship he had with Grant, which found its right level. Then there are great lessons about keeping citizens informed about good national strategy.
All these lessons from the Civil War — and there are great lessons about training, leadership, and these kinds of things as well — are every bit as applicable today, notwithstanding the different technological era, because these are human things. The human element of war is its enduring part, which Clausewitz wrote and is yet to be disproven.
Jordan Schneider: Another thing you point out in War Transformed is this idea of the future shock moment of the 1900s and 1910s being perhaps the one most applicable to today, just in terms of all this new stuff making your head spin perspective. If you could go back and be a war correspondent or work on a general staff, is that the time period you’re picking to get a better sense of, or are there others on your time travel list that you’d be excited about? Cholera notwithstanding.
Mick Ryan: It was an interesting period because the Second Industrial Revolution threw up all these new technologies that really disrupted the conduct of warfare in all the domains. There was a lot of thinking before the First World War about how these might impact. There was a lot of fiction written — hundreds of books literally sought to understand the impact of these new technologies on strategic competition and warfare. Lawrence Freedman has actually written a tremendous book that looks at this, but I look at it in War Transformed as well. Fiction has been a very powerful way of looking at the future of war.
I think that’s a very important period. Philipp Blom’s book, The Vertigo Years, looks at each year in the fifteen years that led up to the beginning of World War I, and looks at societal, technological, and industrial issues that emerged and how the world in 1914 ceased to exist by 1918. We could lay that over the top of 2022 and 2025. The world that existed in 2022 doesn’t exist anymore. The security architecture of Europe doesn’t exist like it did three years ago. The security situation in the Pacific doesn’t exist like it did three years ago. There are lots of parallels there, lots of rhymes, as Mark Twain might tell us.
I think that’s a really important period for study, probably one of the most important periods to study. But there are lots of other periods of human history that are equally worthy of study, from the ancient Greeks and the Peloponnesian War to Rome’s rise, its heyday, and its eventual fall. All of these offer profound insights into how humans think about governance, about war, and about competing with their adversaries.
Jordan Schneider: If you could spend one year as a fly on the wall in which bureaucracy over the course of the past 300 years, do you have a top three?
Mick Ryan: The first one for me would be 1939 in the Australian military, to see how they worked with government to industrialize and prepare for the Second World War. Probably the next one would be 1942 in the same place, to look at how the entry of Japan into the war fundamentally shifted everything. Those two periods for me would be really interesting.
Then probably the United States in 1940-41. There’s a lot of great literature on that period, but just to see how the United States planned to mobilize for the Second World War — the strategic and political decision-making that was involved and the political leadership that was required by the President to drag the American people into an understanding that they couldn’t avoid this forever. That was very interesting and very relevant to the contemporary world.
Jordan Schneider: Maybe that’s a good transition to talk about how the strategic level often completely wipes out whatever creative stuff you could do at the tactical or operational level. It’s the way you avoid wars in the first place. We’ve seen a lot — your most recent book on Ukraine as well as the subsequent year have cataloged an enormous amount of creative and awe-inspiringly horrific strategic decisions. What have the past few years made you reflect upon most about how the strategic level relates to other levels of war?
Mick Ryan: First, I’d start with the Russian side of things. Before he decided on this invasion, Putin had a series of strategic assumptions. This speaks to the importance of getting your assumptions as right as possible. At the start of the war, he had three big assumptions.
That the Ukrainian government would run away and he could insert his own government,
That the Ukrainian military was analogous to the 2014 military and wouldn’t last very long,
That NATO would act like it had for the preceding ten years over Russia’s invasion and illegal takeover of Crimea and parts of the Donbas.
He got all of those assumptions wrong, and we’re still in this war because he got those assumptions wrong.
From a European perspective, they assumed that they could continue being economically integrated with Russia and that would condition their behavior towards its neighbors. Very much the old Norman Angell “won’t go to war because we’re economically integrated” model. Once again, Russia proved Europe wrong and that it wasn’t a reliable energy provider.
The US Administrations made some assumptions about Ukrainian capacity up front. They didn’t think they’d last very long. The Ukrainians proved them wrong, thank goodness. They made assumptions about how much risk they were willing to assume in dealing with Russia in the first year. Because of the risk aversion in the Biden administration in the first year of the war and the very slow pace at which they made decisions about support — I remember when towed artillery was considered escalatory — well, it’s impossible to escalate when you provide a piece of equipment to a friend that’s being used against them the whole time. The Russians used everything in their inventory against the Ukrainians, so none of this was escalatory. But it was used by the peaceniks and the risk-averse in the Biden administration to slow down aid.
It manifested in the Ukrainians not being able to exploit the defeat of the Russians at the end of 2022. The great strategic lesson from the end of 2022 is: if you have your boot on the neck of your enemy, don’t take the boot off. That’s what happened at the end of 2022 with European and American decision-making in this war.
Surprise, Deception, and Taiwan Tripwires
Jordan Schneider: Let’s turn to Taiwan for a bit. Obviously you’ve been thinking about what is and isn’t applicable from the past three years and have a new piece coming out in the next few weeks. What’s the right framework to start taking and applying lessons?
Mick Ryan: The first thing is to understand what China wants. What does the CCP want? What does Xi want? That’s the start for any investigation of Taiwan. If you don’t understand that — if you haven’t read all of Xi’s speeches over his term as president and chief of the Chinese Communist Party and head of the Chinese Military Commission and every other appointment he’s got — you don’t understand the overall situation. That’s a good starting point.
Then you need to understand the aspirations of Taiwan and look at different literature that relates to that — the speeches by this president and his predecessors over many years, and how the Taiwanese democracy has developed. The polls that look at Taiwanese views of themselves — are they Chinese, are they Taiwanese? These are the necessary foundation for any exploration of the ongoing tension and competition between Taiwan and China.
Then of course, you need to understand regional dynamics. There’s no regional NATO. There are some alliances that are very important, and INDOPACOM in Hawaii is central to all those. Those are the essential ingredients of any understanding of the situation in the western Pacific.
Then it’s just about continuously tracking Chinese military aggression and where countries are pushing back against that, and the level of deterrence that might be achieved against a Chinese Communist Party that is hell-bent on taking Taiwan — on unifying it with China. You have an aging Chinese leader who’s looking at his legacy. He is looking at how does he get himself a fourth term in office. All these things come together in the second half of the 2020s in ways that don’t augur well if we’re not decisive and determined in standing up for not just Taiwan, but all democracies in the western Pacific and pushing back against coercion, subversion, and aggression.
Jordan Schneider: You lay out this framework of four filters for interpreting what you’re seeing in Ukraine and applying it to Taiwan. You have geography/distance, terrain/vegetation (underappreciated), weather, and political environment/adversary capabilities. Pick your two favorites.
Mick Ryan: The first one is always you’ve got to focus on the enemy, and you can never take your eye off the adversary. That one is very important in the Pacific region because, unlike Europe, where they’ve only got to deal with Russia, in the Pacific, they’ve got to deal with China, North Korea, and Russia. You’ve got three very different but connected adversaries that have formed a learning and adaptation bloc — not an alliance, but a series of interactions where they’re learning from each other in a way that they haven’t done before, more quickly and more substantively.
You also have a significant potential adversary in China who’s bigger, richer, and more technologically advanced than any other adversary that Western democracies have ever come up against. Ultimately, this is an ideological war. You have two very different ideologies rubbing up against each other, potentially causing even more conflict and war down the track. We need to understand the dimensions of that ideological conflict. Is there room for agreement or accommodation, or will it eventually and ultimately lead to some kind of showdown over who is the top dog in the world? That’s the really scary part of a future conflict. If it does occur between the US and China, it will be about who is number one in the world. Traditionally, the number one doesn’t like to give up that spot, and they can fight pretty hard and ruthlessly. We need to understand that dimension.
My other favorite is terrain and vegetation, primarily because so many people think Pacific war is a maritime war. That is not the full truth. It’s partially the truth because yes, there’s lots of water, but a lot of that water is just in parts of the Pacific that we’ll be traveling or fighting through, not fighting for. There’s nothing in the middle of the Pacific worth fighting for. It’s an area you go through, not an area you go to. The western Pacific is where the real competition is, and that’s a mix of air, land, sea, space, and cyber conditions. There are lots of green bits where there is potential to fight. Those green bits might be jungle, those green bits might be cities. But we really need to understand them because that’s where people are and, importantly, that’s where the politicians are that ultimately make the big decisions about war and about ending war — who need to be influenced.
I emphasize that because we absolutely have to push back on this being a naval war or a maritime war. It’s a multi-domain war. The area of decision will be that strip of land within 1,000 kilometers of the Eurasian heartland that runs from Vladivostok to Tasmania.
Jordan Schneider: Foreign tripwires in Taiwan feature prominently in your novel. Where are you today on the idea of sending bodies in harm’s way as a way to signal commitment to Taiwan?
Mick Ryan: I think it’s still the way we do business. You’ve seen a step-up in foreign assistance to Taiwan even though not all of it will be declared. But it is a way of signaling that you are taking a big risk of targeting Taiwan because if you hit these people of ours, regardless of which country they’re from, you will have to answer to us. That’s still a valid theory. It can be dangerous and it can be provocative at times, but it’s also a good way of signaling will and your determination to support friends and security partners and indeed allies.
America has forward-based ever since the end of the Second World War. It’s done it in Europe as a statement of commitment and will and as part of its signaling to an adversary that if you invade West Germany, you’re not just coming up against us, you’re coming up against an entire alliance. The United States has done it in Japan since the end of the Second World War to signal other countries, whether it’s North Korea or Russia or others, the same kinds of things it did in Europe. Forward basing by America and others is still a valid part of national strategy and probably will be for some time to come.
Jordan Schneider: This idea of surprise is somehow still underappreciated, even though we’ve had a number of wild surprises just over the past three years. What is that? People just get too confident? Why is pricing in the idea that you can be surprised such a hard thing?
Mick Ryan: There are lots of reasons for this. Lack of humility is a really important contributor to this. A lack of understanding of the enemy is another one. If you look at 1941, most Western allies really discounted the capacity of the Japanese to fight. They said, “Well yes, they’ve been fighting the Chinese for X years, but when they fight us it’ll be totally different.” It wasn’t. The Japanese achieved massive surprise and were able to launch this six-month offensive that spread out across the Pacific.
You see that kind of arrogance in Western military organizations today. You’ve seen many, particularly in the first eighteen months of the war in Ukraine, going, “Yeah, well, I don’t think there are lessons for us because it’s different and we’re far smarter.” We should call bullshit on those assumptions. Never underestimate the enemy because they will surprise you and they will hurt you. Once again, we have 5,000 years of case law to support that case. Humans have not changed.
There’s been a lot of talk recently about the transparent battlefield. That is a fallacious view. It’s wrong — it’s not transparent. It’s highly visible, there’s no doubt about that, and better visible than ever before. But that hasn’t stopped Ukraine and Russia from surprising each other, even down to this latest twenty-kilometer penetration of the Ukrainian front line just to the north of Pokrovsk. There have been lots of examples of surprise in this war in what was supposed to be a transparent battlefield.
I served in Afghanistan, and up until Ukraine, Afghanistan was the most densely surveilled battle space in the history of human warfare. We were still surprised regularly. This notion of transparency is a terrible fallacy. It’s one we should not encourage because humans are still able to deceive. This was a subject I wrote about with Peter Singer, and we published a detailed report through an American think tank in June this year. This will continue into the future and indeed may get more sophisticated because AI will help us not just with seeing more, but it will help us with deceiving more. You’re going to have this constant perception battle in warfare.
Jordan Schneider: The way the Pentagon talked about how they bombed Iran and how proud they were about sending some bombers to Guam so people looked left and then the bombers went right made me really pessimistic about the ability of the US military to do this. If they really feel like they have to wiggle their tail feathers around something this simple, I’m worried we don’t have too many more moves up our sleeve.
But maybe a broader question: at the conclusion of your novel — no spoilers — there is a super weapon that gets unveiled. I’m curious because at other points in time, and one of the big lessons of the Ukraine war is the fact that there isn’t really one thing that you can cook up at home that is going to drastically change everything for you. What was your thinking behind concluding your book with something that was cooked up under a mountain that has this big strategic effect?
Mick Ryan: Just on the deception for Operation Midnight Hammer, I would add that it worked. At the end of the day, it might have been a simple deception measure, but it worked.
Jordan Schneider: Did it, though? I don’t know. Plenty of people on Polymarket were predicting military action the day before the bombing.
Mick Ryan: But that’s different from projecting exactly how that’s going to happen. The deception measure worked. You saw huge commentary around those bombers that headed over to the west, and no one picked up that this was being done another way. We probably need to give them some credit there — it actually worked and every aircraft got in and out safely. That’s a great achievement. Even if the Israelis had taken down most of the air defense network, that’s still significant.
The ending of the book wasn’t just about the super weapon. There were five different elements — it was just one of the elements. The message there was yes, we are still going to develop exquisite technologies, but there was a whole range of things, including cyber operations, ground warfare, aerial warfare, drones, and other systems that all added up to that culminating point. Super weapons don’t win wars, but they’re going to be part of our desire to help end wars in the future.
Jordan Schneider: I asked Jeff Alstott at RAND, who spent time at ARPA, point blank on the mic whether or not he’s been working on weather manipulation. He gave me a very confident no, but maybe he’s just deceiving us, setting us up for that big reveal one day.
Mick Ryan: Once again, it wasn’t so much about manipulating the weather. You can’t do that, but you can manipulate how people see the weather and give them a different picture that’s not the same as reality. That’s a simpler undertaking, as complex as that might be.
Jordan Schneider: This idea of mobilizing intellectual capacity is a really powerful idea and an interesting one to think of as a civilian, as someone who just sits at home and writes stuff. What is the right way for folks in the broader commentary and think tank community to try to do work that plugs in to help answer some of these big intellectual challenges and questions that Andrew Marshall posed at the beginning of the show?
Mick Ryan: The first thing is you can’t just study one war. You can’t study Ukraine and think you understand war. If you study Ukraine, you understand the Ukraine war and nothing else. You need as a foundation the study of war — its past, present, and future. Then you look at the Middle East, Ukraine, and others as case studies that either prove or disprove hypotheses about the trajectory of warfare.
Ukraine, I’ll be very clear, is not the future of war. It is not the future, but many elements that have emerged from the war in Ukraine will influence all future wars. We should remember that many of the lessons from Ukraine — probably 90% — are not new lessons. They’re lessons relearned about the importance of leadership, industrialization, organization, training, and these kinds of things. It’s reinforced old lessons rather than introduced new things. Now there are some new things, whether it’s the use of drones and similar technologies, but we cannot afford to see Ukraine as the future of war. But it will be very influential on all forms of future war.
I know that’s a fine line, but it’s a very important point to makeou have to study war in all its dimensions, not just the war in one place at one time, to really understand the trajectory of warfare.
Self-Improvement and Recommended Reading
Jordan Schneider: I’m going to link your posts with syllabi of dozens of books that people can dive into. But maybe I’m curious, Mick — there’s a lot in the Bay Area and also in Washington of this idea of AI as this millenarian solution that’s going to answer all the questions. I’m curious if there are a handful of books that come to mind that are maybe starting points for folks who haven’t already read fifteen books of military history to give folks a sense of just how messy the introduction of new technology to warfare ends up playing out in practice.
Mick Ryan: Some of the material about the interwar period — the debate about tanks and cavalry, the debate about battleships versus aircraft carriers — those were important debates about old and new technology and their potential impact on war. Institutions had to make some pretty big bets before war about these technologies in the hope that they were right, because ultimately you don’t know whether you’re right until you actually go to war.
Those past debates on new technologies offer some really important insights into how individuals and institutions respond and debate the impact and absorption ability of organizations for these new technologies, how they influence the development of entirely new organizations. In 1900, there was no such thing as an air force — it didn’t exist. In 2000, there was no such thing as a space force — it didn’t exist.
There are lots of historical analogies because ultimately the technology doesn’t matter. It’s how humans react to the technology. It’s how humans debate its impact, how humans develop the organizational and conceptual constructs within which those technologies will be used that are the most vital part. There are lots of examples of that over the last hundred years that can inform current debates over AI, over quantum technology, over future space and cyber capabilities.
I wish more of the technologists would read these examples, because there are too many people who are purely focused on the technology and don’t understand the foundational ideas behind war and human conflict that will ultimately decide how these things might be used.
Jordan Schneider: Great. Let’s throw them some titles. Where should we start them?
Mick Ryan: There’s a huge amount in there. I really loved Aimée Fox’s book Learning to Fight, which is about the British Army in the First World War, and how an organization learns how to learn better. It really challenges some existing paradigms about stupid British generals in the First World War — they weren’t all stupid because at the end of the day they won. Now, they didn’t do it by themselves — there were lots of other countries that helped — but part of winning was learning how to learn better.
Murray and Millett’s book Military Innovation in the Interwar Period is important, but also their three-part series on military effectiveness in World War I, the interwar period, and World War II across multiple countries provides a really good analytical framework and a good study of how institutions have learned and adapted across three different domains that were the principal concerns in those wars.
Trent Hone’s book Learning War is absolutely fabulous about how the US Navy developed a learning culture in the lead-up to the Second World War. Not perfect, but good enough to win, because war is not about being perfect — it’s about being better than the other person. Those are probably a good start.
There’s a recent book I’ve been reading, Brent Sterling’s Other People’s Wars, about how the US learns from foreign wars and how it has learned and adapted, or not learned and adapted, based on those. Dima Adamsky’s work on military innovation is extraordinarily important. Finally, Meir Finkel’s two books are terrific — On Flexibility and Military Agility. Military Agility is very important because it’s one of the few books that looks at adaptation not in war, not in peace, but the third really important part of adaptation, which is adapting from peace to war and how institutions and individuals need to do that.
I’ve covered this in a new report that’ll come out in September for the Special Competitive Studies Project, so watch for that one. But that’s a selection of very useful books. There are many, many others out there. I probably need to update my recommended adaptation reading list. I might do that in the next couple of weeks to include the full gamut of books. But that’s a pretty good start for anyone who’s interested in this topic.
Jordan Schneider: Awesome. I’ll throw in two more. Andrew Krepinevich’s The Origins of Victory — these are chapter-length pieces that aren’t really anecdotes but almost feel reported — they have characters in them and they develop over time. You really get the sense of, “Oh wow, it’s 1931, planes are just starting to be a thing — can we land them on boats? Not sure yet. Maybe if we make longer boats it’ll be easier.” It shows all of the little iterations you need to get to Midway. It shows the kind of personalities that you need to have in these systems in order to feel your way through the darkness.
I also recommend The Wizard War by R.V. Jones. It’s written by an engineer, it’s a memoir, it’s got a lot of color and characters, and does a really good job of illustrating just how dynamic these technological competitions can be where you have engineers on both sides trying to outdo each other. Something that maybe worked for you in January will be obsolete by April and actually might get you killed. That kind of dance that you saw in the Battle of the Beams and all of this other crazy electronic signals stuff that happened over the course of World War II — where a 27-year-old was able to do incredible things because physics was cool at the time — makes for some fantastic summer reading.
Mick Ryan: No, I agree. I’ll just throw in one final book there: a terrific book called Mars Adapting by Frank Hoffman. He looks at just how do you build an institution that is adaptive, that is learning and is able to adapt. He has a whole lot of case studies, but importantly offers a really important four-part model for how do you build this institutional learning capacity. It’s a really important contribution to this literature.
Jordan Schneider: Mick, how are you trying to improve?
Mick Ryan: I’m constantly trying to improve. Obviously I read a lot. My reading, my writing, my interaction with a bunch of different people is important. But also, I’m completing a PhD in creative writing to learn how to write better, to communicate better, because there’s always room for improvement.
But ultimately, if you want to develop what I’ve called this intellectual edge, you need to have humility. You need to understand that you don’t know everything, and that’s the starting point for all learning. Humility is vital, and we’ve all had to be pretty humble over the last four years with the Ukraine war. We’ve had to learn new things, had to relearn some old things. There are fortunately a lot of people out there who do possess that humility and have demonstrated the capacity to learn new things and recontextualize some elements of warfare. That’s an important part of learning.
Jordan Schneider: Do you want to assign me and maybe the audience some paper topics? Where have you not seen coverage to the degree there should be?
Mick Ryan: One of the reasons I’ve focused on adaptation is we need to focus more on how organizations learn how to learn better. That’s a core macro skill for every organization. This is a topic I’ll cover in my September report, which will be released at a conference in Austin at the end of September.
Jordan Schneider: Awesome. Well, I just want to say, for my part, I moved to China when I was 26, and I already felt behind the ball from the kids who started learning Chinese in high school. Now as I start to spend more time at 35 thinking and learning and writing about all these military history and technology applications, it’s both exciting and also deeply humbling to be at the bottom of a new knowledge mountain.
There are aspects of what I’ve learned over the past ten years when it comes to China and technology which are applicable. Then there’s this whole other universe of things and organizations and institutions to start understanding, and weapon systems to start to wrap your head around in order to be able to make a contribution and say something useful.
Preemptive apologies to my audience for all the war stuff you’re going to get in the feed over the next few months and years. But this stuff is really intellectually fascinating — as important as it gets. There’s just an endless amount to be explored and turned over in a way that, over the past ten years of writing about Xi and the CCP, I mean, I’m not at 100%, but we’ve covered a lot of bases when it comes to those types of dynamics here at ChinaTalk.
I appreciate you all bearing with me as we mix more defense and defense technology stuff into the content mix, and I hope you all come along for the ride.
Mick, I want to close on funerals. This was the most powerful part of your novel to me — this little moment where you have one of the officers note that all of the deaths in Afghanistan could be acknowledged individually because they would happen spaced out enough to give people time to grieve individually. Whereas in your future Taiwan war, they’re happening by the dozens and by the hundreds on a daily basis, which just changes the “battle rhythm” for grief care. Reflect on that little moment.
Mick Ryan: It’s an important part of military service — acknowledging those we lose. Military organizations are ultimately designed to lose people. That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t acknowledge and recognize those people and their families and those who love them. It is a core part of military service. When people die, they don’t just disappear — they live on in the units they served, in the friendships they had, in the families that are left behind. There’s a reason why we have that saying: “Never leave someone behind.” Whether they’re alive or dead, we continue searching for them for as long as we possibly can.
I wanted to project that maybe in the future we may be losing people at a rate that we may not be able to do that individual recognition that’s essential, at least not during the war. It was an attempt just to say the wars we’ve just finished are not the ones we’ll be fighting in the future. We can’t prepare for those ones. We really need to make sure we’re preparing for the future of war, not the past of war. It was all wrapped up with those ideas.
But at heart it was about one of the most famous bits of writing — the funeral oration in the Peloponnesian War. It’s a very powerful piece, and while I could never replicate that, just acknowledging that this is a part of military service was important.
Jordan Schneider: We’re going to be doing a series on AI and how it applies to different technological futures and different domains of warfare. But it’s important to recognize the stakes of all of this and ultimately that it’s life and death — it’s the fate of nations. Being too distracted and too perversely into how fast your missile can go or how autonomous your command and control can get, sometimes you can get too abstracted away from why we care about this stuff in the first place.
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