Mick Ryan

And in some ways, that's already here and now.

Mick Ryan is a retired Australian Army Major General and author of Futura Doctrina on Substack.

Yeah, I think we've seen that already over the last couple of decades.

We've seen media cycles, first with the internet and then with social media.

There's a huge amount going on in those companies that I've just named as strategic defense companies.

We kind of started our conversation about doing this podcast after I had spoken to Mick Ryan, the retired general who's a commentator, I guess, these days on strategic circumstances.

He's an author, all of those kinds of things.

And We talked a lot about Ukraine.

I'm kind of interested to know, obviously, we know the tech that's coming out.

What does it mean in the Australian context?

Firstly, following Major General Mick Ryan, I think is telling.

Mick and I actually joined the Australian Defence Force Academy as 17-year-olds in 1987.

So one of the things the Americans have discovered is that obviously in a world where most shipping is not owned by US or Western firms, it's owned by sort of flags of convenience and so forth, you simply can't persuade people to run the gamut of an attack, even if they're most likely to get through in one piece if they regard there as being unacceptable risk

Mick Ryan is a retired Australian Army major general.

He commanded the Australian Defense College from 2018 to 2022.

He's a leading expert on the future of warfare and has analyzed how developments in the Ukraine war have implications for defense strategists all over the world

They, um, they're not getting the number of Patriot missiles they want.

They are developing their own much cheaper interceptor weapons that will probably be an order of magnitude cheaper than Patriot missiles are

[explosion] [gunfire] As Mick Ryan and others have noted several times in this series, the lessons from Ukraine, a smaller country resisting for years an invasion by a massive and bullying neighbor, are being examined all over the world.

In episode one, we met Ilya Sikhyrin, a Ukrainian military advisor on drone strategy and tactics.

NAFO claims to have in excess of 85,000 members worldwide, including an Asia-Pacific division.

The group has attracted support from political and media figures, including Australians, such as General, retired Mick Ryan and ex-Australian ambassador to Ukraine, Bruce Edwards, and has also been acknowledged by the official Ukrainian government accounts.

NAFO accounts have at times attracted direct replies from official Russian government accounts.

NAFO's strength lies in its decentralisation, which makes it extremely resilient and able to respond rapidly to emerging Russian disinformation.

I think he's an Australian – I don't know, like a military influencer.

His name is Mick Ryan.

He has a blog called Futura Doctrina.

Doctrina? Mick Ryan? I don't know how you say that.

Basically, the future of war, the future of doctrine.

I jumped behind a paywall and read his Substack article about the EMU war, a case study in how not to fight a learning army.

It's not like they're razor sharp or anything, but they're sharp enough to do significant damage.

The guy you mentioned, the major general.

Never occurred to me.

The Ukrainians have built, Major General Mick Ryan, who's a retired Australian Army and an author, who's really forward thinking on this, says he was in Ukraine and they've created an unmanned force.

The unmanned force has created the drone wall, which is 1,100 kilometer front, 40 kilometers deep.

It always has drones over it.

doing

in a family circus in 1890? What was his story? And that led me down to the Wathaurong Centre down in Geelong there, and I met with a guy called Mick Ryan, And I met with a guy called Uncle Dave Tournier, who's now unfortunately passed.

But he told me the story of the kill parties and of what the settlers, my family, what my family were, you know, Samuel Holden in 1852 landed at Indented Head and he broke out those farms there and his sons broke out the farms.

So they were the original dispossessors of the First Nations people, the Wadawurrung people down there.

As a result, military planners and national security experts worldwide are rewriting their defense strategies, and here in Britain, the government has rewritten its entire defense investment plan.

Mick Ryan is a senior fellow at the Lowy Institute in Australia.

He's a former Australian Army major general and author of The War for Ukraine: Strategy and Adaptation Under Fire and Futura Doctrina on Substack.

I asked Mick to describe what has changed fundamentally in 21st century warfare and what has not.

Most significantly, for the first time in history, Russia's enormous size, something that defeated Napoleon and Hitler, turned out to be a modern military weakness.

The idea of front lines suddenly seemed out of date.

Here's Major General Mick Ryan again.

Yeah, absolutely.

Newstalk ZB.

Looking forward to catch up with Mick Ryan after eight.

Retired major general, of course, these days, academic strategist.

So Iran, yes, but also Russia, as in Ukraine, but Russia as in a major trader with Iran, with Besant telling us he's squeezing the global economy.

They're also tied because Russia is a strategic trading partner with Iran, of course, which the US is now trying to clamp down on sanctions-wise.

Zelenskyy, meantime, being one, attacked in major centers, but two, also begging for air defense support, given Patriots have become a major problem.

So let's work through some of the fraught detail with our old mate, retired Australian Major General, now academic and strategist Mick Ryan, who's back with us.

Mick, morning to you.