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More from @WarintheFuture

Mick Ryan, AM

@WarintheFuture

Jun 11

Ukraine has just struck a Russian defence plant with its new long-range FP-5 missiles and damaged a key bridge to Crimea. Things keep getting worse for Putin and Gerasimov. My Part 2 assessment of Russia's losing war, and how Putin might reverse things. 1/5 🧵

2/ Russia is losing its war on Ukraine. But a losing trajectory is not a settled outcome. Part 2 of Losing on Every Dimension examines the five "reversal conditions" that could still rescue Putin, and what the West must do to lock in his defeat.

3/ The most revealing point about these five reversal conditions. With one exception, none lies within Russia's own control: a US settlement, the oil price, China's treasury, North Korean manpower, and Western fatigue. Russia's escape from defeat depends on the decisions of others.

Read 5 tweets

Mick Ryan, AM

@WarintheFuture

Jun 8

For the first time since the invasion, Russia is losing more troops than it can recruit. Net territorial movement over the past three months has favoured Ukraine. Part 1 of my new assessment, I explore how Russia is "Losing on Every Dimension" - military, cognitive, moral, industrial and economic. 1/7 🧵

2/ MILITARY. In 2025 Russia paid roughly 200 casualties per square mile taken. In the first five months of 2026, with a net gain of 17 square miles, it paid over 9,600 per square mile. The meat grinder is grinding through Russian men faster than Russia can produce them. Tactical operations are now unified with mid-range and long-range strikes.

3/ COGNITIVE. Russia's narratives are decoupling from a battlefield made visible by open-source reporting. When Putin has to ask Ukrainian permission to hold parades, and cannot hold an international forum without a Ukrainian attack, his narrative about inevitable war crashes.

Read 7 tweets

Mick Ryan, AM

@WarintheFuture

May 28

Our darker angels have returned. For a decade, influential scholars argued that major war was on an irreversible decline. Pinker's 'Better Angels' thesis became almost orthodoxy in parts of the security studies world. But, as @lawdavf has written, war has a future. 1/4 🧵

2/ Fast forward to 2024. PRIO records 61 state-based conflicts — the highest since World War II. 129,000 battle deaths. The fourth most violent year since the Cold War. The 2024 data from SIPRI and PRIO is unambiguous: a historic peak in state-based conflicts, the fourth most violent year since the Cold War, and a Russo-Ukrainian war that has now consumed an estimated 500,000 lives.

3/ The analytical failure wasn't just academic. Governments that accepted the 'war is fading' narrative underinvested in defence, deterrence and industrial capacity. Ukraine paid some of the price. But most Western nations are still underinvested in force structure, defence industry, war stocks and most importantly, national will to resist authoritarian aggression.

Read 4 tweets

Mick Ryan, AM

@WarintheFuture

May 11

China fields a military where 70-80% of soldiers are only children. Every battlefield death risks extinguishing a family line. This demographic reality shapes Xi's strategic calculus in ways Western analysis should pay more attention to. My new piece explores this. 1/5 🧵mickryan.substack.com/p/one-child-on…

2/ China's one-child policy ended in 2015. Its military consequences are only beginning. By 2015, ~70% of PLA soldiers and 80% of combat troops came from one-child households. There is almost no historical precedent for a major military force comprised almost entirely of only children.

3/ The research is sobering. Only children are measurably less trusting, less resilient, less risk-tolerant, and less competitive than those with siblings. These are not ideal traits for combat. They are increasingly the defining traits of the PLA's human capital.

Read 5 tweets

Mick Ryan, AM

@WarintheFuture

Apr 16

Some initial thoughts on the new Australian National Defence Strategy released today in Canberra. Overall, the focus and trajectory of Australia's defence strategy remains consistent with the 2024 version. There are some notable things worth highlighting. 1/15 🧵🇦🇺

2/ The new NDS shifts more towards a true 'defence' strategy rather than just a 'military' strategy that was described in the 2024 version. There is stronger language around national civil preparedness, fuel security, and economic security. This is good. But these are also topics that should be in a National Security Strategy - if Australia had one!

3/ Spending. There is an uptick in spending. This is a positive. There is a claim that we might get 3% of GDP on defence at some point in the future. The reality is that because we are well short of this now, trying to fund both AUKUS and the ADF at the same time with current spending is challenging (nice word for not possible), and conventional military capabilities are degrading - and not modernising fast enough.

Read 15 tweets

Mick Ryan, AM

@WarintheFuture

Mar 22

“The advantages of threatening an American ground intervention are real. The advantages of actually committing boots on the ground are also real but more limited. The disadvantages could be numerous.” My weekly update on Iran, Ukraine and the Pacific. 1/6 🧵

2/ Ukraine has achieved something significant in the south. Ukrainian attacks there have disrupted Russian offensive planning, consumed Russian reserve forces, and demonstrated that Ukrainian combined arms operations can impose genuine operational costs. But there is also a trade-off in these southern operations. Gains in the south have come at some cost to northern Donetsk, and Russian forces retain the initiative on what is Russia’s main effort on the ground: the envelopment of Ukraine’s fortress belt and the remainder of Donetsk.

3/ In Iran, the oldest lesson in strategy keeps surfacing: military success in the air and at sea does not automatically translate into political outcomes on the ground. Iran has not been beaten. The question being probably being considered in the Pentagon, Congress and the White House is whether ground forces would ensure that the military campaign achieves a decisive political outcome - or whether it would lead to a larger and more difficult American military commitment to the Middle East with uncertain results.

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