About this event

The Joint Special Operations University Office for Strategic Engagement hosted a live ThinkJSOU webinar with Major General Mick Ryan, Australian Army, Retired, for a discussion on his latest book War Transformed: The Future of Twenty-First Century Great Power Competition and Conflict.

War Transformed is an exploration of the changing character of warfare and how it will impact the military's most critical asset: its human capital. Ryan provides important insight into how the future of competition and conflict, replete with technological and operational reform, requires the development of an intellectual edge within the military with requisite changes across training and education. Moderated by JSOU Non-Resident Fellow Dr. Jennifer McArdle, Ryan's findings have increased salience for special operators, particularly in the "Fourth Age of SOF."

More from Mick Ryan:

War Transformed: The Future of Twenty-First-Century Great Power

White Sun War: The Campaign for Taiwan

The Intellectual Edge: A Competitive Advantage for Future War and Strategic Competition, National Defense University Press
Mick Ryan on Twitter: https://twitter.com/WarintheFuture

Further Reading Mentioned in this Webinar:

To Change an Army by General Donn A. Starry, written for Military Review in 1983

Fighting by Minutes: Time and the Art of War by Robert R. Leonhard

Chinese Tactics, ATP 7-100.3, Headquarters Department of the Army

The U.S. Chips Act, Congress.gov/Whitehouse.gov

Quotes from this Webinar:

"We really are in the realm of fighting by microseconds, and at the same time we're fighting in decades."

"With some of the autonomous systems that are coming, we won’t be tool users, we will be tool partners, and partnering with machines is not a concept that any of our training or education or organizational constructs, or even our doctrine really accounts for. It is still very much the old-style tool use rather than partnering with machines, and that is going to result in a fundamental change in how we think about war, how we think about operations, and how we think about preparing for it."

"We may be trained to use or fly or drive, and these kinds of things but it doesn’t mean you are technologically literate. We need to educate all our people on some of the fundamentals about artificial intelligence, big data, some of the flaws that are inherent in them, as well as things like autonomy in all environments not just in the aerial or ground ones."

"Technology is not a silver bullet, it never has been in warfare. It's really useful to have better technology than your adversary, but it doesn't always endow on you a war winning advantage. What does convey on you the winning advantage is the ability to have the best concepts and the best organizations and the best leadership that leverages that technology in the smartest ways, and then learn about its use and evolve and adapt its use as you go on. It's not just about knowing what the technologies are and understanding which of the right ones to invest in as an institution. It's having those doctrinal organizational and leadership frameworks that you wrap around them to ensure their used well so you you win battles and your wars."

"The art of training and education in the twenty first century is to be able to make people resilient enough, once they do get surprised they're able to fight through that shock as quickly as possible and adapt so that surprise isn't possible again."

"If I was thinking about mobilization now, I’d be bringing in the most senior industrial executives with the most experience, and saying, well, if you were the Tsar of this mobilization process, what are the first five things that you would do? What are the key technologies that are critical manufacturers that we need to prioritize the use of and then how do we prioritize our skilled workforce to the most important things around the mobilization process? Because there'll never be enough people or resources for everything we want to do. I think that's the number one lesson we get from the mobilization that countries like the United States, and even my own, undertook in WWII. Not so much converting factories and these kinds of things."

"Coalitions and alliances are vital. You can't win without them, and you go all the way back to Antiquity, the most successful organizations are those that have fought alongside friends."

"Alliances are far more than just the military dimension. There's a whole lot of other dimensions like technology, intellectual development beyond technology as well as mining and infrastructure and communications that are important."

"I think the future of special operations and conventional is more convergent to generate a strategic advantage…The future of special [operations] is about complementing and converging with conventional, whilst maintaining the very special skills and approaches that the special operations community brings, and will continue to bring in the future."

"I think the most important thing you can do is kind of let your imagination run wild. That's what the enemy's gonna do, and it's too late once you're in the thick of a fight to start imagining what the future is going to look like. You've got to be able to do that well before a conflict, and you can only do that if you let your junior and middle ranking people get out there imagine different futures wargame them, test technologies, test new organization, and test new warfighting ideas. I mean this isn't going to emerge from the Pentagon or from the highest-level military headquarters. People there are too busy answering emails. The real innovation that's required to make us effective in the future and help us win in the future is going to come from the ground up and from the middle of the organization, and that's where we need to be providing the right incentives for the right behaviors to have creative military organizations."

Speaker Biographies:

Major General Ryan spent 35 years in the Australian Army and commanded soldiers at troop, squadron, regiment, task force and brigade levels. In February 2022, Mick retired from the Australia Army. In the same month, his book War Transformed was published by USNI Books. He has a long-standing interest in military history and strategy, advanced technologies, organizational innovation, and adaptation theory. He was inaugural President of the Defence Entrepreneurs Forum (Australia) and is a member of the Military Writers Guild. He is a keen author on the interface of military strategy, innovation, and advanced technologies, as well as how institutions can develop their intellectual edge. He is an adjunct fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington DC, and a non-resident fellow of the Lowy Institute in Sydney. In January 2023 Mick was also appointed as an Adjunct Professor at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia.

Dr. Jennifer McArdle is the Senior Director for Defense Programs and the Deputy Chief Learning Officer at CAE USA, Inc, a commercial company that helps the military develop and maintain the highest levels of mission readiness. She also serves as an Adjunct Senior Fellow in the Center for a New American Security’s wargaming lab and as a Non-Resident Fellow at the Joint Special Operations University. A former professor, Dr. McArdle has served on Congressman Langevin’s cyber advisory committee and as an expert member of a NATO technical group that developed cyber effects for the military alliance’s campaign simulations. Dr. McArdle holds a Ph.D. from King’s College London in War Studies, is the recipient of the RADM Fred Lewis (I/ITSEC) doctoral scholarship in modeling and simulation, and is a certified modeling and simulation professional (CMSP) and wargamer. She is a term member with the Council on Foreign Relations and was named an official "Mad Scientist" by the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command.