War Transformed. The Future of Twenty-First Century Great Power Competition and Conflict. By Mick Ryan. Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, Maryland, 2022.
Reviewed by Dr John Reeve
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Since the outbreak of war in Ukraine, Mick Ryan has become a well-known public commentator on military strategy and operations. A retired Australian major general with extensive operational and planning experience, as well as an interest in professional military education, he has acquired an international reputation as a military thinker. This book is informed by an appreciation that war is both highly transformable and fundamentally unchangeable as a tragically enduring and above all human endeavour.
The first rule for an author is to write about the subject he knows best. Here Ryan is well placed. A product of the post-Cold War and 9/11 eras, and of the associated energizing of military intellectual discourse, he can draw on personal experience within wider context. He focuses mainly on the world with which he is most familiar, that of Western military culture. The second rule is of course to know one’s audience. Ryan writes principally for military leaders and national security professionals, and for all who are, and will be, involved in the development of military power. But there is much that will inform the general reader concerned with the future of conflict and war.
Ryan outlines how a new era of great power competition and potential conflict is dawning within a landscape of geopolitical, technological, demographic, climatic and pathogenic change. Military organizations which have fallen behind in such transitions in the past have suffered defeat. Ryan eschews mono-causality and this is the intellectual strength of the book. Technology is no unique driver and hence no sole solution to the problems created by the new circumstances. His subject is people, institutions and ideas. The central argument of the book is that despite massive technological changes ‘it will be the combination of new ideas, new institutions, and well-trained and educated people that will prove decisive for military organizations in twenty-first century competition and war’. The book’s aim is to stimulate thinking about how to prepare for the discontinuity which will be involved.
The book is not a narrative but proceeds as an investigation and is structured thematically. Four chapters carry the argument. Ryan is aware that history is a treasure house of case studies from which to learn. He is versed in the military classics, military history, and current strategic discourse including that of the Chinese, as well as being aware of the directions of major technological changes.
The first chapter considers previous industrial revolutions, how they have changed war and how they can therefore shed light on ‘the emerging fourth Industrial Revolution’ revolving around global connectivity, AI, biotechnology, robotics, and transforming cognitive capacities. Early modern historians might fly the flag for earlier antecedents in the form of the gunpowder and military revolutions on land and sea. But Ryan’s valid point is that current developments, combined with disruptive trends including a pandemic, are changing society and require adaptation to them.
The second chapter focuses on warfare as an enduring activity and the key continuities, changes and trends likely to characterize conflict in the future. He sides with such luminaries as Sir Michael Howard against those of the ‘decline of war’ school. Competition is the norm, and competing nations must understand their operational contexts including other actors’ strategic cultures, the domains of competition, and their own conceptions of victory. Ryan outlines possible trends in future war including new relationships between time, thought, action, human beings, and machines such as autonomous systems. Information warfare will cause integration of violent and non-violent means and the Western way of kinetic warfare must evolve.
The third chapter considers the consequences for military institutions and ideas. Future warfare will be very different, more integrated within national strategies, requiring organizational change and continually evolving. Military institutions must therefore place educated bets on future scenarios. This involves, inter alia, winning an intellectual competition with adversaries. Ryan foreshadows military cultural requirements as significant as the changes of the seventeenth century which led to Western success. Twenty-first century militaries have to be excellent professionals, but also learning organizations, nurturing the intellectual diversity and individual creativity needed to out-think opponents in a host of evolving competitive domains. This will place a premium, one might add, on quality military education, and those delivering it must face the challenges of discontinuities.
The fourth chapter considers the military profession as a human endeavour, as well as the human capacities likely to be essential in the future. These include mental agility amidst ambiguity, the seizure of opportunity, continuous learning, adaptation to change, and the ability to partner with machines in human-algorithmic cognition and human-robotic teams. Hence Ryan argues that the accumulated historical lessons of the profession of arms must be combined with new attributes. He also explores the need for institutional learning in the form of educational think tanks and cites the role of the US Naval War College between the Wars (a pertinent example as the US Navy was probably the only military service during the Second World War which fought and won the war it expected to fight).
The conclusion offers ideas about how nations might build future military power. Such power will not be just military, but a product of integrated capabilities incorporating all the new domains of conflict. Ryan points out that the long wars since 9/11 have shown the importance of non-kinetic and influence operations (an important lesson implying the need to not simply move on from the axioms of counter-insurgency). He stresses how Western nations must better understand how other cultures – potential allies as well as adversaries – understand conflict. In an epilogue he rejects the view that robotics and AI will change the fundamental nature of war as opposed to its temporary character. One is tempted to agree with him, and with Clausewitz.
Engaging with such a book, with its bold agenda, of course prompts caveats. Ryan believes in the existence of military revolutions, predicated on new tools used in novel ways, a credible view. But such revolutions, one might argue, do not always rest upon new technologies but sometimes the application of existing technologies in innovatory ways. The Napoleonic revolution in warfare, and at sea arguably a Nelsonian one as well, utilized tools at hand.
Ryan is explicit in believing that military people are special and, by implication, that the warrior’s life is a calling. Here he is in good company. Sir John Keegan wrote that the lesson of his professional life was that warriors are different from other people. Ryan’s exploration of twenty-first century warfare seems predicated on this assumption and not the existence of massed citizen forces. He may be right, and the latter may have seen their day by the mid-twentieth century. The future could be more complex however, with citizens as players on the battlefield and as participants in non-kinetic conflict – formulations which Ryan’s landscape admittedly allows.
The book is not specifically naval or maritime, apart from references to vessels in relation to autonomous systems, for example, and generally assumes that naval capabilities fall within the scope of its discussion. But are Ryan’s theories applicable to maritime warfare? On the general level, yes. But maritime operations are of course different from those on land, highly technological and placing a premium upon finding and striking in a fully mobile environment. It may be that Ryan’s approaches are even more dynamically relevant to such an environment. This is a subject for navalists to ponder. In another sense, the book is highly relevant to navies, whose capabilities have always been the outcome of a human-technological interface, and new emphasis on the development of the human dimension is welcome.
Ryan concludes on the limitations of Clausewitz in the new era: war remains an extension of politics, but will not be pursued almost exclusively by the military. Students of maritime warfare might appreciate an irony here. Clausewitz was a soldier, not a sailor, and his model of warfare was Napoleonic. As Sir Julian Corbett observed, Napoleon was defeated. Warfare has always been about more than continents, and seapower has always been about more than navies. Clausewitz, for all his genius, has always had his limitations.
Ryan has a clear belief in the future of the sovereign nation state as a key actor in future conflict. This is an historically and politically well-founded view, but one which might be contested, to some degree, by other pundits. It may also be complicated by a key geopolitical player in China which does not traditionally conceive of itself as a state in the Western sense at all.
Ryan is good on the powerful drivers of conservatism in military organizations and the need for them to adapt (he cites the survival of horse-mounted cavalry in the US Army until 1942). It has always been the case, even for deeply tribal and traditional institutions such as militaries, that institutional survival means the willingness to change. The perennial question is: in what ways? In strategy, said Frederick the Great, he who seeks to defend everything defends nothing. Strategy involves choice and choice involves risk. The same can be said about the development of military capabilities. The point is to hedge against risk with choices informed by history, context, and consideration of the interplay of change and continuity. Ryan’s book is really an argument for a contextual and informed grand strategy. This is a longstanding gap in Australian nation building. As an effective and loyal ally but a traditionally satellite power, Australia has always had experienced partners on whom to rely for it. Australians are still developing the art of grand strategy and studies such as this are grist to the mill.
In the operational context, Ryan as a man of experience knows its value, and how a commander’s professional instinct is actually the internal processing of previous events, accumulated knowledge, habits of mind, intellectual principles, current circumstances, and likely solutions. This activity has been called many things over the centuries: the coup d’oeil, the eye for ground, sea sense, strategic sensibility, the inner eye or light, and decisive response to friction. Ryan is, in effect, arguing for the fusion of this ancient wisdom with addressing the changes now rushing in upon the strategic environment in a time of rising stakes.
The book is scholarly and stimulating, while being accessible and unafraid to look at the big picture. It is supported by footnotes and an extensive bibliography. It is not for the military history buff, but can be approached by the serious reader interested in its themes. One of its useful aspects is concise outlines of various current debates in strategic issues. Ryan writes clearly, and his calling out of the faddish buzzwords and abstractions pervading security discourse, creating an exclusive language, is well suited to the need for public understanding and buy-in. There is no shortage of futurological studies of warfare, but this is a worthy addition to the genre, a valuable and timely book, handsomely produced, and definitely recommended.
