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More from @WarintheFuture

Mick Ryan, AM

@WarintheFuture

Jul 3

My latest article was fun to research and write. Military history offers few case studies as informative as they are absurd. In 1932, the Australian Army deployed against an emu population in the Western Australian wheatbelt. It failed comprehensively. Big brained, well-armed soldiers were beaten by flightless birds with brains the size of a walnut. 1/5 🧵

2/ What makes this worth serious attention is the institutional context. This was the same army that, fourteen years earlier at Hamel, had run one of the most sophisticated combined arms operations of the First World War under Monash. By 1932, that institutional learning had evaporated.

3/ The Emu War showcases in a single low-stakes campaign, five failure patterns that recur in every serious military disaster: the wrong tool for the problem, no intelligence preparation, no functioning adaptation loop, the wrong success metrics, and force employed for optics rather than strategic logic.

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Mick Ryan, AM

@WarintheFuture

Jun 21

100s of drones downed over Moscow & a major oil refinery ablaze for the 2nd time in a week. Ukraine's largest strike on Moscow leads this week's update. 1/5

2/ The deep-strike campaign is now a central element of Ukraine's war to defend itself and secure a just peace. By Kyiv's own accounting it has knocked out roughly a tenth of Russia's refining capacity. On the ground, Russia's spring offensive in Donetsk looks close to culminating.

3/ In the Pacific, INDOPACOM reverts to Pacific Command as Beijing presses around Taiwan, the Philippines and Japan.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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