Learning from Ukraine, Preparing for Taiwan

5,000 years of history proves that humans are not smart enough to prevent war. 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.

Mick Ryan is a retired major general in the Australian Army, author of three books:

War Transformed
A near-future Taiwan war piece of fiction called The White Sun War
The War for Ukraine: Strategy and Adaptation Under Fire

He also writes the excellent Futura Doctrina Substack, which has taught me a tremendous amount over the past few years.

The way Mick is able to pull from both history and contemporary conflict, think deeply about and synthesize takes about the tactical, operational, and strategic shifts of contemporary conflicts makes it one of my few true must-read Substacks and really has inspired me to spend more time personally exploring writing and thinking about these topics.

So thanks for pushing me to up my game, Mick. We’ll be talking about what it takes to learn from history and current wars as well as China. Thanks to the Hudson Institute Center for Defense Concepts and Technology for sponsoring this podcast.

So we’re not passing up an opportunity to open a show with Andrew Marshall. You’re fond of the following quote:

“That is a mouthful and potentially a little self-serving coming from the net assessment guy.”

But I would love your take on the case for this actually being the key to fighting and winning wars.

Yeah, I mean, I think it’s a really important quote because it goes beyond the current focus or obsession with AI and drones. And I think too many people see them as the future of war, whereas I don’t. I see them as part of many different futures of war.

But there’s only one real future of war. And that’s the human being. And if you take the human out of it, it’s not war, by definition.

So I think that quote really gets to the human aspects of competition and warfare, and that regardless of how spectacular technology might be, 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 it’s humans that employ them as part of a larger national war fighting system, not just a military system.

So, you know, I think it’s a really, really important quote and really needs to continue driving how military and national security organizations think.

So kind of on the other side of the spectrum, you have a book like Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of Great Powers.

And I thought it was sort of interesting and almost ironic that he writes this book, Engineers of Victory, which are these wonderful little jewels of chapters that go into specific technological innovations and how they get deployed and scaled up to have operational and ultimately strategic impacts.

But like, at the end of the day, and I think this is what he wrote in his conclusion, it was really the broader industrial weight of what the allies could bring to bear that decided, you know, for the most part of the war.

And I think if you zoom out on a century-by-century level, that’s definitely what he argues in Rise and Fall.

So why isn’t it just the sort of like, GDP or correlation of how many factories you have that ends up deciding this stuff and actually what Andrew Marshall was getting at?

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.

I mean, in the Second World War, Germany started with massive industrial capacity, but it didn’t mobilise it until too late.

It didn’t mobilise its national workforce very well by still having servants and people working in these kinds of roles in households until the third or fourth year of the war.

Ultimately, it was about decisions made by humans, politicians, and industrial leaders to cleverly apply, prioritise, and mobilise industrial resources that won them the war.

So, yes, in the macro, it was industrial capacity that won, but it was those who most cleverly mobilised, applied, and prioritised their industrial capacity that won.

So, he has a quote at the end of Victory at Sea:

“It would be a very grave error to think that great contests are won solely by larger and larger forces moving inexorably towards victory, by global trends, or by sophisticated causation chains. To be sure, if vast ships occur in the economic substructure and productive forces, an overwhelming flood of ships, planes, and guns being sent to the battles, then it is more likely that the enemy’s battalions will be pressed. Indeed, if victory did not follow, the historian would be hard-pressed to explain that. But the deficit in all deterministic explanations is that they lack human agency.” The victors’ ships, planes, and guns need courageous men to steer them, insightful men to organise them, and clever men to give them superior battlefield performance.

When the tides of war and the Great Atlantic fight turned against the U-boats, it was because hundreds and hundreds of little ships, frigates, oar carriers, tankers, and cargo vessels, married by tens of thousands of brave crewmen, steamed back and forth from New York to Liverpool.

Similarly, it was not just a vast impersonal force that came ashore on the five Normandy beaches at the very same hour on the morning of June 1944. It was the best-trained, best-organized, and best-directed army that the 20th century had hitherto seen. A human factor was at hand.

Yeah, and, as someone wrote recently,

“we thought the future of war was drones, and then Bakhmut happened.”

I mean, 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, as 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, and it’s the same in the land, in the air, and in the maritime domain.

Mick, can you imagine a future where the longbow makes a comeback?

Yeah, World War IV.
I think, to paraphrase Einstein, but I hope it doesn’t.
Low signature, I don’t know, very loud, doesn’t emit anything.
Come on, there’s got to be something, right?

Well, you just never know. But I did recently attend the Chalk History Festival in England, and they did have someone there teaching all about the longbow and giving demonstrations of its efficiency.

Speaking of human beings, another book, which I want to credit you for turning me on, is On the Psychology of Military Incompetence, written by Norman Dixon, who’s a royal engineer for 10 years and then becomes a professional practicing psychologist.

And then I think 10 years into that is like, I’m going to write about all the dumb things that British generals have done over history. And this book came out in 1976.

But in the introduction, he has this great little riff where he’s like, generals, you know, I’m writing this whole book about how generals make terrible decisions.

Or actually, let me just read the quote:

“The contemplation of what is involved in generalship may well on occasion surprise that incompetence is not absolutely inevitable that anyone can do the job at all. Particularly is this 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 war to computers.”

What does that, what, what reflections does that quote prompt for you in 2025?

I think he got it partially right. I don’t think it’s the full story. You know, it was his view and notwithstanding the fact we’re both engineers. I think there’s also counter evidence.

And if you read studies, for example, Amy Fox’s wonderful study of how the British Army became a learning organisation during the First World War, I think you can imagine a universe or a history where both exist at the same time.

Every military organisation has rock stars and dunderheads. He focused and chose to focus purely on the dunderheads. But there are a lot of rock stars. There’s a lot of brilliant people who are involved in planning and the execution and the leadership of military affairs. And you need to consider both in the same kind of 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 were not there yet. I don’t know whether we want to go there. I would be deeply concerned if we went that way.

But short-term tactical engagement decisions have been made by computers in things like:

- Close-in weapon systems
- Air defence systems

for a very long time. Some of that range of tactical decision making by AI and computers will continue to be extended, I think. But I think the big questions about war, about whether to go to war, the key trajectory of war, whether to end a war, will remain human.

So let’s talk a little bit maybe about the sort of crawl up the command chain that kind of autonomous decision making could have. Because, yeah, I mean, we’ve been doing like targeting stuff since the 90s.

But there’s an aspect of it, which I guess at a surface level seems inevitable that like once systems get smart enough, you’re going to want them to take up more and more of at least the decision-making space.

And maybe there are like things on the battlefield that humans can do that machines can’t. But this sort of orchestration of it, if it is more effective and you have this, you know, competitive dynamic between two reasonably equally matched adversaries, like if there’s an advantage there, someone’s going to lean into that.

Right.

Oh, 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 the weapons and the conduct of war.

We’ve also signed up to things like the Geneva Convention. So 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, it has pretty much tortured every single POW it’s taken, it has deliberately murdered civilians, and it’s 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 that it’s in their advantage not to abide by those kind of rules. So 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.

I mean, I guess maybe like a slightly different way to get at that is like, you know, you’ve seen this increasing digitization of command and control. And right now we’re in a very interesting, you know, a sticky moment on the front in Ukraine and like, at what point are we going to have AIs making the 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?

I think is an interesting one to ponder, at least.

Yeah, I mean, there’s a lot about static front lines in Ukraine, for example, and how do you break them? But they’re not truly static. They are moving. And as we’ve seen throughout the course of the war, that surprise is possible. You can do things that generate an advantage that can result in penetration and breakthrough, at least on the ground.

And I think we’ve seen that in the air as well. You know, this has not really been an air war. There’s been a drone war, but there hasn’t been a large scale air war. So, you know, the future of air warfare is probably more about what we saw Israel using against Iran than what we’ve seen in Ukraine.

And the same with maritime warfare. You know, we haven’t seen a full-on maritime war. So, you know, Ukraine offers a whole lot of lessons, but not in every single dimension and every domain of warfare.

I want to come back to sort of human fallibility one more time, maybe. This was a theme in your novel. You kept emphasizing when people were tired.

And I think sort of just like, you know, it seems clear to me that the decisions are of all the things which are most legible for an AI to sort of eat and process and spit out recommendations for like these point-in-time decisions of:

- Do we do A?
- Or do we do B?
- Or do we do C?

seem to me to be like on the, you know, over a multi-decadal timeline, the things that are coming.

So, one more time on the sort of like humans lending decision making to AI, maybe because it seems to me, you know, before we’re going to have a humanoid robots that can do everything that infantry do; before we’re going to have robots make crazy material science breakthroughs, like the types of things that someone in a command post or someone managing a battalion or whatever-those sorts of decisions seem to me to be closer than, you know, AGI or what have you. So I guess maybe from another way to get at this maybe is like, what would you need, like, what would you need to see from, you know, your war games or your interactions with, you know, some automated command and control system in order for, you know, 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.

Well, we already see this happening in digital command and control platforms that the Ukrainians are using and many others are using. I mean, they offer very good situational awareness. I mean, just the recall function, you know, you don’t have to have people marking maps anymore. It’s automatically updated with locations, a friendly, an enemy. I mean, that alone is an enormous step forward from many traditional ways of warfare.

You know, the ability to understand the capacity of friendly units that you’re opposing, you know, their weapon ranges and their holdings, the ability to quickly contact neighbouring units in a way you may not have been able to do with radios and other things in certain circumstances. And then 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 and lots of different options rather than having just to do it methodologically when you’re tired, wet, hungry and under threat.

So I think they’re the kind of tactical functions that digitisation and, you know, bespoke AI offers at the moment and will continue to improve at offering. I mean, we’ve seen it really close the kill chain. There’s others who are using it to work on what they call the live chain, which is casualty evacuation operations.

So 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.

I feel like your most recent book is this like extended meditation on what this war kind of confirms about the nature of war-broadly, as well as like what are the sort of disjunctures that we may see today and tomorrow. Before we get into-we’ve kind of already covered some of the specifics-but I guess like I imagine there’s an aspect of this being kind of surreal. The fact that we have now spent three years living through a high intensity conflict that, you know, I mean, not you, but many people kind of imagined was, you know, much more farfetched than it turned out to be.

I mean, what has it been like kind of following this halfway across the world, traveling there, traveling back, meditating on it and kind of like living, breathing this sort of conflict that, you know, we hoped wouldn’t happen in the 21st century?

Yeah, I mean, the whole reason I wrote War Transformed was because these kind of wars are inevitable. I mean, humans are not smart enough to prevent war. I don’t care what any academic says about this issue.

“5,000 years of history proves that humans are not beyond fighting each other yet.”

And unless there’s some kind of 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. So that was the core reason why I wrote War Transformed and how it might look in the future. And then nine days after that was published, Putin invaded Ukraine with his brutal invasion.

So, you know, for me, the surprise was only about timing, not that it happened.

Unfortunately, politicians and citizens still now believe, or at least before 2022, believe 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 the South was enormous, yet they still went to war.

So once again, there’s all these fallacies that tend to become facts in the minds of many people about warfare. And at the end of the day, you just need one person who miscalculates for us to fall over into some massive conflagration.

And as I’ve written in White Sun War and elsewhere, that’s entirely possible in the Asia-Pacific. You know, 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.

I mean, 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. And yet we still have politicians and people, you know, going on about:

“Well, there’s no such thing as climate change,”
“Or it’s a made-up thing,”
“Or, you know, it’s a natural thing.”

When all the science disproves that and we’ve failed to act. So ultimately, humans are pretty good at ignoring facts and data if it’s in their economic or their ideological interests. And 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.

So, you want to do a U.S. Civil War detour? How does, do we have lessons from that conflict for Ukraine or Taiwan? Well, every war has lessons.

I mean, many of the lessons from the U.S. Civil War apply to Ukraine. There’s lessons about mobilising industrial production. I mean, clearly, the North was able to mobilise its industry. It had more industry to start with, but it was able to mobilise it.

You know, 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.

So, there’s lessons there about integration of new technologies, particularly operational and the strategic level.

There’s good lessons about civil-military relations. I mean, both the North and South have issues with this, but there’s some amazing and wonderful case studies about the interaction between Lincoln and the many commanders of the Northern Armies throughout the war. And then the relationship he had with Grant, which found its right level.

So, there’s that. And then there’s great lessons about, you know, keeping citizens informed about good national strategy.

So, all these lessons from the Civil War, just among some, you know, there’s great lessons about training, leadership, and these kinds of things as well. They’re every bit as applicable today, notwithstanding the different technological era, because these are human things. And the human element of war is its enduring part, which Clausewitz wrote, and is yet to be disproven.

So, another thing you point out in, I think, The War Transformed is this idea of the sort of, like, future shock moment of, you know, the 1900s and 1910s being perhaps the one which is most applicable to today, just in terms of, like, 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 want to get a better sense of? Are there others on your time travel list that you’d be excited about, sort of cholera notwithstanding?

You know, 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. And 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. And Lawrence Friedman’s actually written a tremendous book that looks at this, but I also look at it in War Transformed as well.

So, 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 15 years that led up to the beginning of World War I and examines societal, technological, industrial issues that emerged and how the world in 1914 ceased to exist by 1918.

And we could kind of 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.

So, you know, there’s lots of parallels there, lots of rhymes, as Mark Twain might tell us. And I think that’s a really important period for study, probably one of the most important periods to study.

But, you know, I think there’s 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.

Maybe to put a finer point on it, like, what is this, you know, if you could spend one year as a fly on the wall, and like, which bureaucracy over the course of, I don’t know, the past, let’s say, 300 years.

Are there, do you have a, do you have a top three? I guess the first one for me would be 1939 in the Australian military, and then see how they work with government to industrialise and prepare for the Second World War. Probably the next one would be 1942, same place, to look at how the entry of Japan into the war fundamentally shifted.

I mean, I think those two periods for me would be really, really interesting. And then probably, you know, the United States in 1940-41. I mean, there’s not a great literature on that period, but just to see how the United States planned to mobilise for the Second World War, and the strategic and political decision-making that was involved and the political leadership that was required by the president to kind of drag the American people into an understanding that they couldn’t avoid this forever, I think was very, very interesting and very relevant to the contemporary world.

So maybe that’s a good transition to kind of talk about how the strategic level often completely wipes out whatever creative stuff you could do at the technical or operational level. And, you know, it’s the way you avoid wars in the first place.

We’ve seen a lot, like 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?

Yeah, I think first I’d start with the Russian side of things. Before he decided on this invasion, Putin had a series of assumptions, strategic assumptions. And I think this speaks to the importance of getting your assumptions as right as possible.

He, at the start of the war, had three big assumptions:

One, that the Ukrainian government would run away and he could insert his own government.
Two, that the Ukrainian military was analogous to the 2014 military and it wouldn’t last very long.
Three, that NATO would act like it had for the preceding 10 years over Russia’s invasion and illegal takeover of Crimea and parts of the Donbass.

He got all of those assumptions wrong. We’re still in this war because he got those assumptions wrong.

From a European perspective, they assumed 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.

Well, once again, Russia proved Europe wrong and that it wasn’t a reliable energy provider.

Then I think 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 also 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.

“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.”

And that’s what I think happened at the end of 2022 with European and American decision-making in this war.

Let’s turn to Taiwan for a bit. You’ve obviously 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?

Well, the first thing is to understand:

What does China want?
What does the CCP want?
What does Xi want?

That’s the start for any investigation of Taiwan, I think.

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, head of the Chinese Military Commission, and every other appointment he’s got, you don’t understand the overall situation.

So, that’s a good start point.

Then you need to understand the aspirations of Taiwan, and have a look at:

Different literature that relates to that.
The speeches by this president and his predecessors over many years.
How the Taiwanese democracy has developed.
The polls that look at Taiwanese views of themselves - are they Chinese, are they Taiwanese, these kinds of things. So that’s the necessary foundation for any exploration of the ongoing tension and competition between Taiwan and China.

And, well, of course, you need to understand regional dynamics. There’s no regional NATO; there are some alliances that are very important. You know, INDOPACOM in Hawaii is central to all those, I think. So they’re the kind of 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 and unifying it with China.

I think you have an aging Chinese leader who’s looking at his legacy. He is looking at how he gets himself a fourth term in office, and all these things kind of 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.”

So you lay out this framework of four filters for interpreting-for screening-what you’re seeing in Ukraine and applying it to Taiwan. You have:

Geography and distance
Terrain
Vegetation (underappreciated)
Weather
Political environment
Capability of potential adversaries

Pick your two favorites.

Well, I think the first one is always, you’ve got to focus on the enemy and you can never take your eye off the adversary. This is very important in the Pacific region because, unlike Europe, where they’ve only got to deal with Russia, in the Pacific they have to deal with:

China
North Korea
Russia

So you’ve got three very different but connected adversaries that have formed a sort of learning and adaptation block-not in all lights, but a series of interactions where they’re learning from each other in ways they haven’t 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
Accommodation

Or will it eventually and ultimately lead to some kind of showdown over who is the top dog in the world?

And that’s the really scary part of a future conflict. If it does occur between the U.S. 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. So we need to understand that dimension.

My other favorite, I guess, is terrain and vegetation, primarily because so many people think that the Pacific War is a maritime war. I think that is not the full truth. It’s partially true 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 a destination. The Western Pacific is where the real competition is. And that’s a mix of:

Air
Land
Sea
Space
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 who ultimately make the big decisions about war and about ending war-who need to be influenced.

I like that because we absolutely have to push back on this being a naval war or a maritime war.

“It’s a multi-domain war, and the area of decision will be that strip of land within a thousand kilometers of the Eurasian heartland that runs from Vladivostok to Tasmania.”

Foreign tripwires in Taiwan is something that features 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?

Well, I think it’s still the way we do business. I think 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. So I think that’s still a valid theory.

It can be dangerous and provocative at times, but it’s also a good way of signaling will and your determination to support friends, security partners, and indeed allies. I mean, 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 kind of things it did in Europe.

So, you know, I think forward-basing by America and others is still a valid part of national strategy and probably will be for some time to come.

This idea of surprise is somehow still underappreciated. Even though we’ve had a number of wild surprises just over the past three years, why is pricing in the idea that you can be surprised such a hard thing? There are lots of reasons for this.

Humility
Lack of understanding of the enemy

If you look back 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.”

And it wasn’t. The Chinese achieved massive surprise and were able to launch a six-month offensive that spread out across the Pacific.

You see that kind of arrogance in Western military organizations today. Particularly in the first 18 months of the war in Ukraine, many said,

“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 kinds of 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. Humans have not changed.

Now there has been a lot of talk recently about the transparent battlefield. I think that is a fallacious view. It’s wrong. It’s not transparent, it’s highly visible.

There is no doubt about that; it’s better visible than ever before, but that hasn’t stopped Ukraine and Russia from surprising each other-even down to the latest 20-kilometer penetration of the Ukrainian front line just to the north of Pokhropst.

There have been lots of examples of surprise in this war, in what was supposed to be a transparent battlefield.

I served in Afghanistan up until recently. Ukraine and Afghanistan were the most densely surveilled battle spaces in the history of human conflict-and we are still surprised regularly.

So, 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 in a detailed report with P.W. Singer, published through an American think tank in June this year. It pointed out that this will continue into the future and may get more sophisticated because AI will help us not just see more, but also help us deceive more.

Regarding how the Pentagon talked about bombing Iran and how proud they were about sending bombers to Guam-so people looked left and then the bombers went right-made me really pessimistic about the ability of the U.S. military to do this.

If they really feel like they have to wiggle their tail feather around something like this, I’m worried we don’t have too many more moves like that up our sleeve.

I guess maybe a broader question is this: no spoilers, but at the conclusion of your novel there is a super weapon that gets unveiled.

I’m curious, because at other points in time, and I think one of the big lessons of the Ukraine war is that

there isn’t really one thing that you can sort of cook up at home that is going to drastically change everything for you. So what was your thinking behind kind of concluding your book with something that was cooked up under a mountain that has this big strategic effect?

Yeah. I mean, just on the deception for Operation Midnight Hammer, I would add that it worked at the end of the day. It might’ve been a simple deception measure, but it worked.

Did it though?

I don’t know if Poly Market had like 85% chance of bombing in the next four days. But that’s different to projecting exactly how you’re going to do that. And I think the deception measure worked. You saw a huge commentary around those bombers that headed over to the West and no one picked up that this was being done another way.

So, you know, I think we probably need to give them some credit there that it actually worked, and every aircraft got in and out safely. And I think that’s a great achievement, even if the Israelis had taken down most of the air defense network.

You know, I think that the ending of the book wasn’t just about the super weapon. There were five different elements. It was just one of the elements, and 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 stuff like that.”

That all added up to that culminating point.

So super weapons don’t win wars, but they’re going to be part of our desire to help end wars in the future, I think.

So I asked Jeff Allstar at RAND, who spent time at AR, point blank on the mic, whether or not he’s been working on some weather manipulation stuff. He gave me a very confident note, but maybe he’s just deceiving us, setting us up for that big reveal one day.

Well, 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.

And that’s a simpler undertaking, as complex as that might be.

This idea of mobilizing intellectual capacity is, I think, a really powerful idea. And, you know, it’s an interesting one to think of as a civilian, as someone who just sits at home and writes stuff.

Like, what is the right way for folks in the broader thinking 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?

Well, I think 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 - and this is my foundational work - the study of war, its past, present, and future. And 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.

But 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

These kinds of things.

So, it’s reinforced old lessons rather than introduced new things.

Now, there are some new things, whether it’s the use of drones and things like this. But we cannot afford to see Ukraine as the future of war, though it will be very influential on all forms of future war.

I know that’s a fine line, but I think it’s a very important point to make - that you 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.

So, I’m going to link some posts that you’ve made that have these broader syllabus and kind of dozens of books that people can dive into. But maybe, I’m curious, Mick, there’s a lot in, I think, the Bay and also in Washington, 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, like, I wouldn’t want to say entry-level, but maybe starting points for folks who haven’t already read 15 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. Yeah, I think some of the stuff about the interwar period, the debate about tanks and cavalry, and the debate about battleships versus aircraft carriers were important debates about an old and a 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.

So I think those past debates on new technologies offer some really important insights into how individuals and institutions respond and debate the impact and the absorption ability of organisations for these new technologies, how they influence the development of entirely new organisations.

I mean, 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. So, there are a lot of historical analogies, because ultimately the technology doesn’t matter. It’s how humans react to the technology, how humans debate its impact, how humans develop the organisational and conceptual constructs within which those technologies will be used-that are the most vital parts.

I think there are lots of examples over the last hundred years that can inform current debates over AI, quantum technology, future space, and cyber capabilities, which I wish more of the technologists would read.

Because I think there’s 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.

Great. Well, let’s throw in some titles. Where should we start?

Wow. There’s a huge amount in there. I really loved the part about how an organisation learns how to learn better.

Amy Fox’s book, Learning to Fight, which is about the British Army in the First World War, really challenges some existing paradigms about stupid British generals in the First World War. She does it in a really good way and says:

“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. So I think that’s important.

I also think Murray and Millett’s book that looks at innovation in the interwar period is important. 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
a good study of how institutions have learned and adapted across the three different domains that were the principal concerns in those wars

I think Trent Hone’s book, Learning War, is absolutely fabulous about how the US Navy developed a learning culture leading 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.

So I think 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, how it has learned and adapted-or not learned and adapted-based on those.

I think Dima Adamski’s work on military innovation is extraordinarily important.

And finally, Maya Finkel’s two books, which I think are terrific on flexibility. His second one, On Agility, is very important because it’s one of the few books that look at adaptation:

Not in war
Not in peace
But the third really important part of adaptation: adapting from peace to war, and how institutions and individuals need to do that

I’ve covered this in a new report that will come out in September for the Special Competitive Studies Project. So watch for that one.

But I think 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 I think that’s a pretty good start for anyone interested in this topic.

Awesome. I’ll throw in two more.

Andrew Krepinevich, Origins of Victory. These are sort of like chapter-length, not really anecdotes, but they almost feel reported—like they have characters, and they develop over time.

Especially in the first half, 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.”

And all of the little iterations you need that lead you all the way to Midway. It’s, it, it, it, it shows kind of the personalities that you need to have in these systems in order to sort of feel your way through the darkness.

And then The Wizard War by R.V. Jones. It’s written by, written by an engineer. It’s a memoir. It’s, like, got a lot of color, a lot of characters. And I think sort of does the, does a really good job of, of illustrating just how dynamic these sort of technological competitions can be, where you have engineers on both sides trying to sort of outdo each other.

And something that maybe worked for you, works for you in January by April is going to be obsolete and actually making your, you know, and actually might get you killed. And so that kind of dance that you saw in the battles, in the Battle of the Beams and all of this other, you know, crazy, like, electronic signals stuff that happened over the course of World War II, that, like, a 27-year-old was able to do because, I don’t know, physics was cool at the time, is, made for, makes for some fantastic summer read.

Yeah, no, I agree. I’d just throw in one final book there. And it’s 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. I mean, he has a whole lot of case studies, but importantly, he offers a really important four-part model into how do you build this institutional learning capacity. And I think it’s a really important contribution to this literature.

Mick, how are you trying to improve?

Yeah, improve me?

Yeah. I’m constantly trying to do it. I mean, obviously, I read a lot. My reading, my writing, my interaction with a bunch of different people is important. But also, you know, I’m completing a PhD in creative writing to learn how to write better, to communicate better. Because I think, you know, there’s always room for improvement.

But I think ultimately, it’s, you know, if you want to develop what I’ve called this intellectual head, you need to have humility. You need to understand that you don’t know everything. And that’s the start point for all learning. So I think humility is vital.

And I think 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.

And, you know, there are, fortunately, a lot of people that there who are, who do possess that humility and have demonstrated the capacity to learn new things and recontextualize some elements of warfare. So, you know, I think this is an important part of learning.

You want to assign me and maybe the audience some paper topics? Like, what have you not seen covered to the degree it should be?

Well, I mean, I really think, you know, one of the reasons I’ve focused on adaptation is, you know, we need to focus more on how organizations learn how to learn better. I think that’s a core, that’s a macro skill for every organization.

And, you know, 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.

Awesome.

Well, I just want to say for my part, like, I don’t know, I moved to China when I was 26. And I already felt, like, behind the ball from the kids who started learning Chinese in high school.

And now, as I start to spend more time at 35 thinking and learning and writing about all these sort of military history and applications of technology, it’s, like, both, like, exciting and also deeply humbling to kind of be at the bottom of a sort of new knowledge mountain.

And, you know, there are aspects of what I’ve spent learning over the past 10 years when it comes to China and technology, which are applicable. And then there’s this whole other universe of things and organizations and institutions to start, you know, weapon systems to start to wrap your head around in order to be able to make a contribution and say something useful.

So, 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 I think this stuff is really, I mean, intellectually fascinating, like, as important as it gets.

And, you know, there’s just an endless amount to be explored and kind of turned over in a way in which I feel like the past 10 years of sort of writing about Xi and the CCP, like, I mean, I’m not at 100%, but, like, we’ve covered a lot of bases when it comes to those types of dynamics here at China Talk.

So, appreciate you all bearing with me as we sort of 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 is this little moment where you have one of the officers kind of just note that:

“All of the deaths in Afghanistan could be acknowledged individually.” Because they would happen sort of spaced out enough to have people to give people time to grieve individually, whereas, in our future Taiwan war, they’re happening by the dozens and by the hundreds on a daily basis, which just changes like the quote unquote battle rhythm for grief.

Care to reflect on that little moment?

Yeah, I think it’s an important part of military service is acknowledging those we lose. I mean, 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.

And 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. And 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. And so I wanted to do that.

I mean, and I wanted to kind of project that maybe in future wars, we may be losing people at a rate that we may not be able to do that individual kind of recognition that’s essential, at least not during the wars. And I guess it was an attempt just to say, you know, the wars we’ve just finished are not the ones we’ll be fighting in 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.

So it was all kind of wrapped in with those kinds of ideas. But, you know, 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.

And we’re going to be doing a series on sort of 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, it’s life and death. It’s kind of the fate of nations and being too distracted and perversely focused on how fast your missile can go or how autonomous your command and control can get, sometimes you can get too abstracted away from why care about this stuff in the first place.

All right. Well, I guess we’re ending on a somewhat somber note.

But, Mick Ryan, thank you so much for being a part of China Talk. Excited to read your future output and hopefully have you back sooner rather than later.

Mick Ryan: Thanks, Jordan. It’s been a great conversation. Look forward to coming back again sometime.

Jordan: Oh, what was your plan a while ago, Carl?

Did you play on A a while ago?

Well, I’m gonna lay my burden down by the riverside. Down by the riverside. Down by the riverside. Down by the riverside. Down by the riverside. I’m gonna lay my burden down by the riverside. Study water no more.

Well, I ain’t gonna study water no more. I ain’t gonna study water no more. I ain’t gonna study water no more. No more, no more, no more, no more.

Well, I ain’t gonna study water no more. I ain’t gonna study water no more.

Well, I’m gonna put on my long white robe. Well, I’m gonna put on my long white robe. Well, I’m gonna put on my long white robe down by the riverside. Down by the riverside. Uh-huh. Down by the riverside. Yeah. Down by the riverside. I’m gonna put on my long white robe.

Well, I ain’t gonna study water no more. Well, I ain’t gonna study water no more. Well, I ain’t gonna study water no more. I ain’t gonna study water no more.

Well, I ain’t gonna study water no more. Well, I ain’t gonna study water no more. Well, I ain’t gonna study water no more. Well, I ain’t gonna study water no more. Well, I ain’t gonna study water no more. Well, I ain’t gonna study water no more. Well, I ain’t gonna study water no more. Well, I ain’t gonna study water no more.

Well, I ain’t gonna study water no more. Well, I ain’t gonna study water no more. Well, I ain’t gonna study water no more. Well, I ain’t gonna study water no more.

Well, I ain’t gonna study water no more. Well, I ain’t gonna study water no more. Well, I ain’t gonna study water no more. Well, I ain’t gonna study water no more. Well, I ain’t gonna study water no more. Well, I ain’t gonna study water no more.

Well, I ain’t gonna study water no more. Well, I ain’t gonna study water no more.

Josherich's Blog

Learning from Ukraine, Preparing for Taiwan