‘Less Arrogance and a Little More Humility’ – Mick Ryan

Maj. Gen. Mick Ryan, the retired Australian officer and military analyst, commanded at multiple levels and served as a strategist on the US Joint Chiefs of Staff. Today, he is a Senior Fellow at the Lowy Institute and an Adjunct Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). Ryan has consistently argued that the war in Ukraine is rewriting the grammar of conflict. Yet he fears Western military institutions are failing to properly translate these hard-won tactical insights into their own doctrines.

Speaking on the sidelines of the Chalke History Festival, Ryan sat down for a detailed conversation about the reality of the drone-artillery balance, why the “death of the tank” is a myth, and why allied nations must move faster to study the war, because adversaries like China already are.

Kyiv Post:: A lot has happened in the last couple of years regarding drone technology, yet we still see some reluctance in the West to adopt the same drone use we see in Ukraine. Is it really going to hinder NATO if they don’t do it?

Gen. Mick Ryan: In short, yes. It doesn’t mean individual NATO countries should adopt exactly what Ukraine does. That’s not what we’re talking about, because Ukraine has a unique problem. How Russia is fighting Ukraine is unique. Ukraine has a unique structure and a unique culture, which merges some Soviet stuff, Ukrainian history and a little bit of Western NATO stuff.

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But you need to take all the insights from Ukraine and translate them for the context of different members of NATO, whether Scandinavia, Eastern Europe or Central Europe. That’s the real hard-work piece. Not deciding whether there are lessons to learn or not. There are. That’s been answered very convincingly over four and a half years.

What they need to do is go: okay, how do we take that insight on drone operations in the Donbas and then modify it for the context we see, say, on the Finnish border? That’s what needs to be done. But we need to see a little less arrogance and a little more humility out of Western military organizations to do that.

In the first three years of the large-scale invasion, we haven’t seen a substantial increase in Western munitions production. One argument is that if we need drones now, we don’t need the shells. Is this a waiting game and a budget game?

I think they’re good excuses, but they don’t match reality, because you need drones and artillery. If you go and see any Ukrainian frontline brigade, they have one or two artillery battalions and one or two drone battalions. Any Ukrainian brigade commander will tell you that you need both. They’re complementary.

Some drones can’t fly in fog or heavy weather. Artillery can. So these excuses: “Glad we didn’t, because we’ve got drones”, are wrong. It’s bad analysis, and it’s an indication of a certain intellectual bankruptcy when thinking about the future of war.

Another aspect of analysis that has been vocalized is the role of big armor and mechanized divisions, which we saw in the Cold War but not in the same way in Ukraine. Where’s the truth there?

The truth is: go to Ukraine. The “tank is dead” narrative – we’ve seen that come up multiple times. Generally, those who put it out are either non-army people or think-tankers who don’t have experience in military affairs.

The reality is the tank’s not dead, but it is being used differently. Once again, go back to a normal Ukrainian brigade organization: every brigade has a company of tanks or even a battalion of tanks. They don’t use them as whole brigades of tanks moving across open plains, but they do use them in different ways. They protect them, and they combine them with different effects differently.

That’s also the case in the Pacific. In the Pacific, just about every military is buying more tanks, not fewer tanks, at the same time as they’re buying drones. It’s an intellectual problem of evolving methods of use rather than getting rid of the technology.

We’ve seen how Russia fights, but we haven’t really seen what China would do. Would it help Australia and the Indo-Pacific if it was to adopt this same drone approach?

Absolutely. China has studied this war, not just drone operations. It has studied how Western countries make political decisions. It has studied industrialization. They’re learning about strategic coercion and cognitive warfare, alliance management and breaking down alliances. If China is learning that, Australia must study that too.

But we need to be able to translate those insights for the Pacific. The big differences are that we have China, Russia and North Korea, not just Russia; a very different geography; very different distances; different vegetation; different weather. That does not mean the lessons from Ukraine aren’t relevant. It just means we have to filter them differently.

The drones are not just on land. We’ve seen deployment of sea drones in the Black Sea. How likely are we to see this fully utilized in Australia?

We’re seeing some work, but we’re extraordinarily slow and risk-averse in Australia. We’re seeing too many senior people say, “Well, the Black Sea isn’t the Pacific.” You don’t need to be a senior naval officer to understand that. That’s obvious.

However, the Pacific has lots of bodies of water that might be analogous to the Black Sea or to the Coral Sea, the Luzon Strait. In the littoral regions throughout the Pacific, and the Western Pacific in particular, what has happened in Ukraine with Sea Baby, Magura and all these kinds of systems is enormously relevant, not to replace every existing Western warship, but to complement them in different ways.

Ukraine and Australia have had a lot more military interaction in the last couple of years. What do you think are the most important factors that you can still develop on in terms of the relationship?

I think having a military attaché in Kyiv has been a very important step, a very welcome, positive step as a connector between the two countries. That has been crucial.

I would like to see Ukrainian training teams in Australia teaching us how to do a lot of this stuff, because otherwise we’re just going to fumble around with what we read on the internet. I think having Ukrainian trainers at our training schools would be good. I’d like to see Ukrainians at the Australian Staff College, and I think that’s probably going to happen.

These person-to-person linkages have been so vital in our relationship with England, with the United States, with Canada, with New Zealand. It’s not just a national relationship. There are all these layers of individuals who have trained together, worked together and deployed together over years or decades. That’s what really binds you together, and I hope we can do that with Ukraine.

You mentioned having Ukrainian trainers come to Australia. What about training inside Ukraine?

I’d love to see that, but I don’t know that there’s an Australian government willing to take that risk. We could set up a training center in Poland, and Australians could fly there, and Ukrainians could train Australians.

Generally, you try not to have training in a live environment; you need to have some distance there. If you get out into the west, around Lviv and these kinds of areas – absolutely. But I’m not sure you’re going to get an Australian government that thinks that.

Would there be willingness within the military itself to go?

Yes. Absolutely. Profession first. They want to learn; they want to be there. Soldiers know others have better ideas than them, and that’s where they want to be. They’re prevented from doing that [by political risk aversion].

What is the likelihood, then, of a joint exercise?

I think that would depend on how many other countries want to do it with Ukraine, it’s probably overwhelmed with it. As you know, it’s pretty hard to get release for these kinds of things as a Ukrainian officer.

But if we did a joint activity close to Ukraine, so it was easy for them to participate, the thing is, we need to make it easy for Ukraine, because Ukraine is the one fighting the war at the moment, not us. So we should be doing everything we can to make engagement easy for the Ukrainians.

As for a joint drone platoon activity? Yes. Even the land forces, I think. That would happen, absolutely.