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Ladies and gentlemen, uh-
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Can I please have your attention? Can you dig it? [crowd cheering]
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Jonah Goldberg
Greetings, dear listeners. This is Jonah Goldberg, host of the Remnant Podcast, brought to you by The Dispatch and Dispatch Media. I just want to open up with a full disclosure, apologies, mea culpa, whatever. We recorded this
Jonah Goldberg
beginning of last week, so lots has happened. So there are a couple little references that might seem dated, but since we’re talking about big sweeping things on a lot of different fronts, I don’t think anything here is obsolete. It was a very interesting conversation, um, with a really interesting guy. Which brings me to my second apology just up front.
Jonah Goldberg
There are a small number of obsessives, obsessives out there among you, you know who you are, who insist that every podcast end with the phrase, “No, you won’t. This is a podcast.” That did not happen this time. I just want to tell you now, it’s a particularly upsetting thing because today’s guest has just an absolutely fantastic Australian accent, and it would have been great to have, but just I was running late for a flight. It was recorded at six AM, you know, his time. It just didn’t happen. So my apologies. Uh, but with that, let me introduce today’s guest, Mick Ryan. He’s a retired major general in the Australian Army. He’s a graduate of the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies and the United States Marine Corps Command and Staff College. He has commanded at platoon, squadron, regiment, task force, and brigade level. And after comedi-completing thirty-five years with the Australian Army, transitioned to the Army Reserve in twenty twenty-two. He’s the author of many books, including his latest, The War for Ukraine: Strategy and Adaptation Under Fire. Um, he also has a really great substack called Futura Doctrina, which we’ll put links to in the show notes. Anyway, enough from me. Let’s get started, uh, with my conversation with Mick Ryan. All right. So Mick, I’ve wanted to have you on here for a very long time for level setting purposes. I– we’ve never really talked before or we’ve never talked before. I’m very much on the pro-Ukraine side. I am somewhat dismayed by US policy towards Ukraine, and I’m a big fan and friends with the guys who do the Ukraine podcast for the Telegraph. And so I follow this stuff fairly closely, but I wanted to get more granular. But then, of course, this– we’ve had you on the calendar forever, and we have this war in Iran, which we’re recording on April eighth. And there is allegedly a ceasefire that may or may not be holding that was declared last night on the eve of the destroy civilization through social stuff. So I feel like journalistically, we should kind of just start there for a second and just if you could give me your, if you’re okay with that, just your thirty-thousand-foot view of how this forty-day-ish war has gone. What, what– how should we think about it?
Speaker 2
Well, I think it’s always good to see a ceasefire. I mean, I’ve studied war for nearly four decades, so a ceasefire is a good thing if people aren’t killing each other. So I’ll, I’ll state that up front. But it’s also very clear that the Trump administration went into this war with just one plan, and if that plan didn’t go well, they really didn’t have a backup. And the plan was whack the heck out of them until they concede. Uh, that didn’t work, was very clear early that wasn’t going to work. Um, and they’ve been fumbling around for a theory of victory and a, and a suitable war termination approach ever since then. And making these extraordinary threats on social media on one of Christendom’s most holy days of all things, I don’t think is a very effective strategy, and it’s certainly not what we’ve come to be used to, um, from the United States of America. So there’s a temporary ceasefire. Whether it will hold or not, I’m not sure. Iran’s still attacking Gulf countries. Israel’s still attacking Lebanon. I would like to see it hold. I’d like to see a good termination agreement, but, um, I’m not going to hold my breath for it at this point in time.
Jonah Goldberg
So part of my concern is
Jonah Goldberg
I, I’m, I’m fairly bought into the argument that the missile program was a way for Iran to deter
Jonah Goldberg
any aggression towards their nuclear program. It was sort of this nuclear umbrella, as, as Rubio would put it, and all that. And I, I think that’s a perfectly legitimate argument to make. And
Jonah Goldberg
at the same time, strategically,
Jonah Goldberg
if Iran establishes
Jonah Goldberg
sovereignty, in effect, over the Strait of Hormuz,
Jonah Goldberg
it’s still a tri- it’s still a tripwire that is gonna be very — that the West or the America is gonna be very reluctant to ever
Jonah Goldberg
cross if it means Iran has established this idea that they can shut down a vast swath of the global economy. And so it doesn’t feel… Militarily, I, I don’t think it’s disputable that it was pretty successful, and we will have after action reports and all that. But strategically, it’s very hard for me to see it as nearly as successful.
Speaker 2
Yeah, I think it’s worth stating up front that the Iranian regime is odious, repulsive, and we would all like to see it gone. There’s no dispute in that, unless you’re a member of that regime. They’re disgraceful. But you don’t make them gone by making threats and just having a military plan. You need a holistic plan that looks at military, economic, um, social, a whole range of things. And really, the Trump regime, Trump administration seemed to have an idea that if you keep attacking them, the people will rise up. And, you know, um, aerial bombardments don’t work that way. Indeed, um, America was fighting a military conflict. Iran was fighting an economic one, and the two were talking past each other in, in, in many respects.But as we know from history, tactical excellence does not win wars. Tactics and strategy are two very different things, and notwithstanding the brilliance, the courage of, uh, American men in service, men and women, we, we can never deny that it didn’t seem to be linked to a coherent national strategy for producing what would look or feel like a win because we’re not there at that point.
Jonah Goldberg
We should probably switch to Ukraine. I do not like the fact that President Trump calls the Iran war essentially a special military operation, but then says he’s only calling it that because if he calls it a war, Congress will say that they have a say so in any of it. Um, he sort of says the quiet part out loud. The Iran war is a war, and so is the war in Ukraine. It’s not a special military operation either. I think it’s fair to say that the people who predicted a quick Russian victory have been fairly humiliated and embarrassed, but then there were smarter people who still predicted war of attrition, a longer term eventual Russian victory. That’s not quite an embarrassing position yet. It could still go sort of either way, but I’m kind of hoping that it becomes an embarrassing position. How does… At, at the first quarter of twenty twenty-six, where are we with the war?
Speaker 2
Well, I think Putin is increasingly in trouble. He’s in his fifth year. In fact, his twelfth year of a war against a country that is supposedly weaker, is not really a country, is really just a renegade part of Russia. Sounds very much like a CCP narrative. He’s lost one point three million soldiers, uh, killed or wounded,
Speaker 2
um, and he’s taken twelve percent of Ukraine over that time. He already had nine percent before this war with Crimea and stuff. So, you know, I, I think the comparison to the US in Iraq in ’03 is, is valid. Imagine if in two thousand and eight we were talking about America’s invasion of Iraq because America had lost one point three million casualties, had only taken twelve percent of Iraq, and America was suffering nightly attacks on its petrochemical industry on the Gulf Coast in the United States. Would we be calling that a win, or would we even be describing it anything like winning? That’s where Putin’s at. The terrible tragedy of this is there have been key times in this war when we could have given more support, particularly the end of twenty twenty-two when Russia was really on the back foot, and we wanted to have stupid, pointless, strategically immature debates about, “Are tanks escalatory?” and these kind of debates. So we’ve lost a lot of opportunities in Western nations. Not just America, it’s Europe, it’s my own country. Australia’s been quite parsimonious in its support for the war. So, you know, I think we’ve lost a lot of opportunities to help the Ukrainians at key points in the war. Now is another one of those key points in the war. The Ukrainians, I think, have come a long way in their tactical and their air defense and their strategic nous. If we were to help them this year, I think we could really change Putin’s calculus, but the number one bit of help is the Trump administration stop helping Putin. I mean, at this point, that’s really what we’re seeing. Stop abusing Ukraine and being silent about Putin’s war crimes and abuses.
Jonah Goldberg
So explain something to me. I grew up good Cold War anti-communist family. We followed the fall of the Soviet Union in granular detail, and one of the narratives in American media, not just sort of liberal media, but just in media generally, it’s sort of the pop Sovietology, was that Afghanistan was essentially the Soviet Union’s Vietnam. They lost so many people. It was a failure. The troops came home. That disillusionment helped the cycle. What is your theory of the case about how Russia can sustain one point two million casualties and not face the kind of internal implosion that… You know, what was Afghanistan? Nine thousand? Seventeen thousand? I can’t remember. But it was, [chuckles] it was a fraction of a fraction of what we’re seeing here.
Speaker 2
Well, I think the reality is no country can sustain those kind of casualties and not face some kind of domestic reckoning.
Speaker 2
On the other side of that, of course, authoritarian powers have become much better at suppressing their people. New era surveillance technologies, communications, AI have m- made them much better at retaining power. And remember, Putin’s had about twenty-five years of practice of putting layers of security around his regime. That doesn’t make him invulnerable. It doesn’t make him invincible. Just makes him a little bit tougher to crack. But, you know, with one point three million casualties, I think even Trutin un- Putin understands that bringing home a losing army in Russia has always resulted in political strife, all the way back to the Russo-Japanese war, and he can’t do that. I think the real danger now is if Putin decides-
Speaker 2
… “I might just freeze Ukraine for a while and find somewhere where I can win, so I can bring home a winning army for the Russian people.” And that’s why the Baltics and, uh, the Scandinavians in particular, but also the Poles and others, are so worried about Putin doing something outside the box to retain his power and ensure there’s not some kind of internal revolt with a losing army returning home.
Jonah Goldberg
When, uh, this meat wave war of attrition style of fighting is not new in Russian history, right? A- And… But at the same time,
Jonah Goldberg
from, from a distance, it looks like Russia hasn’t learned that much. I mean, I know their drone technology’s gotten better and that kind of thing,
Jonah Goldberg
but what is the reason why they keep doubling down on this
Jonah Goldberg
doctrine when you would think it not having worked for, for four and a half yearsThe impetus would be to say, “Okay, well let’s, let’s try something else.” Is it like just trying to fix your car while you’re driving it? It’s just impossible to do?
Speaker 2
No, I think … I mean, the argument that it hasn’t worked, I don’t think is quite the way to frame it. It hasn’t been able to produce decisive operational breakthroughs. What it has been able to do is keep, uh, scratching away the thousand bites that the Ukrainian frontline brigade talk- commanders talk about, where they slowly take land and … You know, remember Russia’s got four times the population of Ukraine, so if there’s a one to three, one to four exchange rate, that’s still fine with Russia, and it i- it has worn down the Ukrainian army. You only have to go visit them on the frontline like I have to see that they’re extraordinarily courageous and creative, but they’re short of people. Drones can’t fully replace that. But at the strategic level, the message of these meat wave attacks is that, one, we can keep doing this forever. They can’t, but that’s the message Putin wants to send, and his primary target for that message is the US administration, saying, “We can keep doing this. Uh, we’re just gonna keep killing more Ukrainians unless you force the Ukrainians to stop fighting and give us what we want.” And that’s been a pretty successful strategy, you’d have to say, over the last year, in fact the last couple of years. So it’s less about tactical excellence and more about fighting in the minds of several key people the Russians are targeting, and the most important person and the most important mind that Putin is targeting is President Trump.
Jonah Goldberg
Do you have a just a … I mean, uh, uh, you’re here for your military expertise, but you follow this granularly and you talk to a lot of people. What is your theory of the case for why Trump thinks the way he does about Russia and Ukraine?
Speaker 2
Oh, boy. [laughs]
Jonah Goldberg
[laughs]
Speaker 2
I mean, I don’t wanna act … I’m sure some psych- a team of psychologists could take a decade digging i- into this particular problem, but he just seems to have an affinity for the kind of personalities that Putin is and represents. I could also suggest that he doesn’t like the kind of person that Zelenskyy is. Um, Zelenskyy,
Speaker 2
not perfect, but he showed tremendous courage, moral courage and physical courage by staying in that first week when the Russians and everyone else thought he would leave, including President Biden, who was offering him a ride. And by doing that, he hardened the position of Ukraine, he unified the nation, and become beloved in many nations, certainly his own people. These are things that Donald Trump has never done, right? And it’s a kind of moral courage and service beyond self that I think Trump probably sees and despises in other people. Um, you know, let’s not forget he called military people suckers, didn’t like people who were captured, although in the last week that view appears to have changed. I, I just think it’s a character thing. He doesn’t like people who serve others and serve a higher purpose.
Jonah Goldberg
I, I, I think there’s
Jonah Goldberg
plenty of room for that interpretation. I, I’m not [laughs]
Jonah Goldberg
… at the margins I think it’s right.
Speaker 2
Absolutely I think there is.
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah.
Jonah Goldberg
But, um, I, I, I would add, I mean, my own theory of the case is that, I mean, putting aside he just thinks Putin is impressive and he wants to … He likes being associated with strongmen and all sorts of things, that
Jonah Goldberg
one of the things I do appreciate about the Trump era is that
Jonah Goldberg
it has clarified a- that a lot of,
Jonah Goldberg
I would say, very bad international relations theory and political science doesn’t need the theory to be appealing. And what I mean by that, you know, you can do Carl Schmitt and zones of influence and Monroe Doctrine and all these kinds of things, but I think that Donald Trump sees the world essentially like he’s a mob boss and he’s got territory,
Jonah Goldberg
and our allies, our historic allies, are like underbosses that have to be … He can treat them with disrespect because they’re beneath him and they need to kick up and they need to pay more and they need to show more respect. But Xi and Putin, they’re heads of other crime families, they have their own territory, and they’re of equal stature, and so he shows them respect that he won’t show to the Australian, [laughs] you know, leadership, to the British leadership, and it explains a big chunk of his view of South America and this neo-Monroe Doctrine stuff is, is that this is our turf and we should be able to do whatever we want. We can go to Venezuela and take the oil and all of that kind of thing. And I think there are a lot of smart people around Trump that try to gloss that into some very sophisticated theory of international relations. But that’s how Trump himself sees the world, I think.
Speaker 2
Oh, I think there’s a lot in that. Remember, he was brought up in New York City, you know, ’80s, ’90s, which was in many respects a high point for when the big five crime families were in charge of, of crime in the city. And now that was eventually broken down, but that was the construct that existed in the city where he was brought up and it was something he would’ve had to deal with every day. So I think it would make sense that that has influenced his worldview.
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah, I mean, the, the political scientists, they call it a personalist, you know, where like everything’s about him. You know, so if the … My favorite example of this is when the … He said the prime minister of Switzerland spoke to him nastily, so he raised the tariffs on Switzerland by 10%. Never mind that Switzerland doesn’t have a prime minister. [laughs] Um, but the whole point is that the policy stems from
Jonah Goldberg
being rude to him rather than any geostrategic economic theory of the case, and I think Putin figured that out a long time ago and knows how to flatter him, and it’s worked. And unfortunately, Zelenskyy took a while to figure that out, and probably too late. Um-All right, so on the Ukraine side, I hear a lot these days about the gamification of the drone warfare and, and all of that. First of all, can you just explain how it works? Like, how does the gamification system work?
Speaker 2
Yeah, so what, what… This occurred probably about 16, 17 months ago. So Brave1, which is the defense incubator, Babel Fish between defense and industry, came up with a, a, um, concept called E-points, where kills of equipment or humans or, or damage would be allocated a certain amount of points on the basis that it could be fully verified. And when it was fully verified, those points were allocated to units. And then with those points that units were given, they could then procure additional drones, uh, off a central web system, and then use them to continue gaining E-points. Now, they’ve had to revise it several times to reprioritize what they’re hitting and these kind of things, and now it’s clearly about killing as many Russians as possible, everyone from Madyar Command with Unmanned Systems Force through to Minister Fedorov to the prime minister … Uh, sorry, the president, have said, “This is the year we need to kill even more Russians than we ever have before.” And the E-point system does that. Now, gamification is partly that. Gamification’s also the posting of a lot of, uh, short videos showing the last five seconds of life of a Russian soldier. I think the first thing, you know, when I was first briefed about it, about E-points, I went, “Is this like Vietnam? [laughs] Is this body count all over again?” And so as someone who’s taught leadership, um, and ethical leadership, I was not against it, but kind of on the fence ’cause it’s like-
Jonah Goldberg
Mm-hmm
Speaker 2
… ethically this could be problematic, but I also understand when you’re under, when you’re under an existential threat, you have no good choices.
Jonah Goldberg
Right.
Speaker 2
You only have bad and worse, which is kind of like, you know, bombing Japanese cities in the Second World War. We really didn’t wanna do it, but we didn’t have any option if we wanted to save our own soldiers. And this is where the Ukrainians are, is we don’t have good choices. We only have terrible and awful, and this is a terrible thing. And you talk to Ukrainians, and they do think it’s terrible, but they also recognize that we don’t have any choice but to do this if we want to change the calculus of the Russian leadership.
Jonah Goldberg
Is the primary reason for the video for the verification, or is the primary reason for the video as a morale-sapping thing on Telegram, you know, to, to s- to scare the crap out of the Russians, which I, I think is perfectly defensible once you’ve made the decision that you’re gonna do this?
Speaker 2
Yeah, it’s bit, it’s a bit of both. Uh, you know, the verification piece is important. Um, it’s also aimed at Russian soldiers to degrade their morale, but it’s also aimed at the Russian people to say, “This is what we’re gonna do if you keep sending us your children.” It’s also aimed at those who might be thinking of taking the big bonuses for signing up to the Russian military, saying, “Don’t listen to what they promise you. This is what’s going to happen to you if you come to Ukraine.” So it has, it has a range of different uses, but I think ultimately this is an expression, a pure expression of Ukrainian will. This is them saying, “We are gonna kill everyone you send until you stop sending them.” It’s kind of like that scene at the start of We Were Soldiers, right? Kill all they send, and they will stop sending them, and that’s kind of the theory you’ve seen out of the Defense Minister Madyar and the president this year.
Jonah Goldberg
I was reading recently that there was some robot that essentially killed 70 Russians or something.
Jonah Goldberg
I- I- I… Uh, are we starting to actually see robotics as a real thing, or was this sort of a one-off case?
Speaker 2
No, we’ve seen the use of, uh, unmanned ground vehicles, UGVs, to use a, a- an acronym [laughs] sorry, used for some time now, probably for at least 18 months on the front line. Indeed, December 2024, we saw a company of robotic ground vehicles capture a Russian position by themselves. It was the first time we’d seen in history a, a unit of robots capture a Russian position on the ground. Now, this is a much more difficult technology than aerial drones to perfect, so it’s taken some time. But you’re seeing these used for logistic resupply on the front line. Um, there’s some great examples of quite heroic rescues of wounded Ukrainian servicemen in, in armored ground robotics. You know, one medic I help support, you know, her team took 11 attempts to get a person out with this robot, but they do it. Uh, and you’re now seeing thousands and thousands every month of these armed ground robots being delivered to the front line, being used as sentinels, sometimes also used in, uh, attack functions. But the reality is they’re not taking over. At the end of the day, war is a human thing. These robots extend the capacity of humans, but they can’t go forever. They have to be recharged even more than humans do in some respects. The real secret is what is the right ratio of humans to these robots, and what are the new organizations and tactics required to really exploit them alongside, uh, human beings on the battlefield?
Jonah Goldberg
So when you, when you talk about in 2022, there was the stupid debate about whether tanks are escalatory, and there was a similar debate about F-16s or, uh, what … I think it was F-16s. And, and then we saw basically the Russian tanks just taken out by drones, and then I … then there was this wave of talking in like 2023 about tanks are now obsolete, the era of the tank is over, it’s the era of drones and all that. I guess the question is I, I feel like sometimes when I follow the military side of this, that people are extrapolating from a very specific context of Ukrainian terrain, which is big and open, and thinking that there are lessons for every w- every other future war, and that’s probably not the case. So, like, what-What are the actual lessons about things like tank warfare? Are drones the future of everything? How should we actually think about this?
Speaker 2
Yeah, well, I mean, one of the presentations I give when I t-teach at war colleges is that Ukraine is not the future of war. It is part of the future of war, but context is very important, and the terrain, climate, politics, enemy in the Ukraine war are very different to, say, the Middle East, and extraordinarily different, uh, to out here in the Pacific Theater. In fact, I wrote a report last few years, how do you tran-translate the lessons from one to the other? Um, so you really have to, as, as you say, understand those contextual issues before you make big judgments. And the, the tanks are dead crowd, you know, there’s a bunch of people who run round saying, you know, drones will rule the battlefield ’cause a five thousand dollar drone will kill a five million dollar tank. Sometimes,
Speaker 2
sometimes 50 drones attack a tank, and the tank wins, as we’re seeing right now in Ukraine. Um, sometimes you just need to use the tank different. But also, you are starting to see the counter-drone technologies take off in a way that will, in many respects, level the playing field for the defender, which it didn’t do for the first three years of this war. And I think the drone counter-drone battle in future will be very similar to air operations where, you know, uh, you’ve had fighters, manned fighters trying to get air supremacy, air superiority, and often it’s about parity. Sometimes you can dominate, other times you can’t. Drones will be the same. Tanks are not dead. Aircraft carriers are not dead. Manned fighter aircraft are not dead, but we are going to use them in different way. The people we train to operate these equipment are gonna be trained and led in different ways, and they’re gonna be used in different combinations with uncrewed systems into the future. So whenever I hear the tanks are dead argument, it’s like, yeah, that’s the third time in the last fifty years this argument’s been rolled out. The equipment will survive, how it’s used, how it’s crewed, and what kind of organizations, what kind of war fighting concepts it’s employed in will continue to evolve.
Jonah Goldberg
So I can’t remember what the operation was called, I’m sure you remember, where the Ukrainians had that amazing drone attack on various Russian air bases, you know, where they launched from trucks.
Speaker 2
Operation Spider Web.
Jonah Goldberg
That’s right, Operation Spider Web. There’s been some chatter in the States ’cause there was a recently a drone hassling of a US base, and when that– when Spider Web happened, I, I remember talking to someone e-ex military saying, any planner anywhere in the world has to be freaking out about
Jonah Goldberg
all this doctrine going out the window. So if tanks are here to stay, maybe in different contexts, different uses, if fighter jets are here, aircraft carriers are here,
Jonah Goldberg
what’s going away? What doctrine, what technology do you think we’re kinda done with?
Speaker 2
Nothing. I mean, this is-
Jonah Goldberg
[laughs]
Speaker 2
The, the horror of war is no idea ever goes away forever. They might go out of fashion for a while, but war is kind of like layers and layers of bricks when you build a house. It all builds on each other, but you’d never take out a brick. Um, it just might, you know, uh, lay fallow for a while. It’s kinda like counterinsurgency warfare. If you talk to people about it now, they go, “Ah, we’ll never do that again.” Well, that’s exactly what we said in 1978, uh, and look where we were with Iraq, Afghanistan, and other places. So nothing’s really going away, it’s just other stuff will be more prominent. And what has prominence in the Pacific Theater, if we fight China, will be very different. What we do need to get better at is learning and adaptation and, you know, we have demonstrated what I’ve called a syste-systemic learning deficit from Ukraine. We’ve lacked humility to learn from the Ukrainians at times, I think. Too many senior military and government people said, “Ah, well, that’s– the context is so different, you know, we never have to learn from that,” which is rubbish. Same with the Middle East. And you know, the example you used just then about attacking a Russian airborne surveillance aircraft on a base happened exactly the same in Saudi Arabia last month. The only difference was the US, United States Air Force had four years to learn from that attack on the Russian aircraft and did not. In fact, I think someone did a survey of hundreds of different reports over the last fifty years about hardening air bases, which have been ignored. But if I was to look at all the lessons we have ignored from Ukraine, and there’s, there’s a list, the big one that was ignored in the lead up to the war in Ukraine is sometimes weaker countries have agencies, agency, and they can make you hurt.
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah, I mean, I, I will defend the Pentagon on some of this. I mean, you know, obviously you know this orders of magnitude better than I do, but they had lots of plans for, like, the Strait of Hormuz [laughs].
Speaker 2
This isn’t a criticism of the Pentagon.
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah.
Speaker 2
I mean, the Pentagon has done everything it’s asked. I think the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Commander at Central Command, and everyone who’s worked for them have performed magnificently, in fact, performed in a way that’s outstripped e-expectations of military effectiveness for this kind of contingency. So this isn’t a critique of them. It’s a critique of high level war fighting. Militaries fight military campaigns, nations fight wars, and this is a critique of the war strategy, not the military strategy.
Jonah Goldberg
Talk about this a little bit. Uh, you know, the–
Jonah Goldberg
I, I’ve been saying for a while now, America hasn’t lost a war militarily
Jonah Goldberg
in a really long time. I mean, I, I’m, I’m hard-pressed to find an example. We’ve lost some battles, b-but we haven’t lost a war on the battlefield forever. We’ve lost lot– We’ve lost wars though because the way you lose a war in America is you lose the will to continue fighting it, you know, for good reasons or bad, right? Like, we, you, you can argue about whether we were right or wrong to bug out of Vietnam.But we bugged out of Vietnam, and that’s why we lost.
Jonah Goldberg
It wasn’t because we couldn’t… And it seems to me that if I’m gonna criticize the Pentagon for anything, it’s for not communicating that point better
Jonah Goldberg
of, you know, there’s these … New York Times report came out yesterday that General Caine basically made it pretty clear that he, he didn’t love this idea, but he’ll do what, what’s asked of him, and the problem seems to boil down to that Trump just sort of like foreign policy mirroring thought, “Well, this will just be a replay of Venezuela. We’ll whack them around for three or four days, and then they’ll give up. They’ll never go after the Strait of Hormuz.” It’s just wrong. That’s a lesson that I, it feels like America has a really hard time internalizing. Should it be more incumbent upon the military to sort of communicate that? I mean, Colin Powell used to try to communicate some of that kind of thing, but it’s been a while.
Speaker 2
Yeah, I think, you know, that was a really interesting report from New York Times. I-
Jonah Goldberg
Yes, it was
Speaker 2
… read it forensically like a lot of people did.
Jonah Goldberg
[laughs]
Speaker 2
But we also need to recall this isn’t 100% re- recounting of everything that happened. It’s a selective storytelling of certain things informed by people who are trying to get out their side of the story. [laughs] I mean, that’s always the case in these kind of things.
Jonah Goldberg
A big chunk of it, I mean, I, I … This is something I do know something about. Big chunk of it in Washington, it’s assumed that this was largely as told to by JD Vance. But-
Speaker 2
That was my assumption, but I try not to delve into the politics of a country that’s not my own too much.
Jonah Goldberg
[laughs]
Speaker 2
But I need to understand it. I … Now, I don’t know General Caine. I’ve never met him. What I will say is this:
Speaker 2
he is under an extraordinary amount of stress, probably more than anyone can understand unless you’ve been in that job because he is that interface between the political and the military systems in the most powerful nation on earth at a time when politics are very difficult in the United States. So he has a very careful path to walk. He’s seen what’s happened to his predecessors when they’ve spoken out too much publicly. It doesn’t mean you can’t speak out one to one, uh, and The New York Times isn’t reporting on private conversations between Trump and Caine that might have occurred in the Oval Office. So it’s not a full recounting. We don’t have a full view of what, uh, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs will have told the president. From what I can see and what I understand of the many, many senior military officers up to and including chairmans of the Joint Chief that I’ve worked for in the Pentagon, without, um, exception, these are people who will be very frank and very open in their views and their advice to the president, but also only up to a point because the law is that the final say is the president, and the law is the military, as long as they’re given lawful orders, must do what they’re told. That’s the theory of civil military relations. Elliot Cohen, Kori Schake, Risa Brooks have all written, uh, about this. So it’s an extraordinary challenging and difficult job he’s got. Uh, from my perspective, from what I can see, he’s handled it probably better than you can imagine anyone doing it. So I have a lot of sympathy for where he’s at, and I have a lot of respect for what he’s trying to balance between the political and, and the military spheres.
Jonah Goldberg
Back to the Ukraine, let’s, let’s do something that is probably not productive, but I wanna do it anyway. Let’s play the clock backwards and say
Jonah Goldberg
Joe Biden’s president, he’s fully compos mentis, he’s fully willing to do whatever he take, whatever it takes. I, I, I’m an idealist about ends in foreign policy, but I’m a realist about means, and so I can make a very good realist case that it’s not my only case. But when I argue with realists about this, I think the realist position is to degrade Russia’s military capability, and so helping Ukraine,
Jonah Goldberg
bleeding out Russia makes sense to me, even though what I really want is for Ukraine to be independent and democratic and join the community of nations, but that’s an idealistic goal. There’s a much more practical real politic way of thinking about it. So without the idealism in it, what would’ve been, in your view, ’cause you’ve been following this from the beginning, what would’ve been the right policy for the US to follow from day one?
Speaker 2
Largely, the instincts of the Biden administration in the early days were right: support Ukraine, call out Russia. All those, all those things were right. Where they had a real problem is they had what I’ve described as escalation terror. They were terrified that even the smallest decision might have outsized consequences for President Putin, and I think that- that’s a real problem. Y- you know, it was a hypothesis that was never proven, and I think going bigger earlier with more support to Ukraine … I’m not saying, you know, flight combat missions over Ukraine by USAF aircraft. I’m not, not suggesting that. But more support earlier and leveraging more countries into supporting Ukraine earlier, you know, would’ve been the way to go. More weapons more quickly, more training more quickly, more intelligence more quickly, more long-range strike weapons more quickly. Those things, those four things, if they’d been done in the first six months, um, I think would’ve made a very significant difference because the Russian military was not prepared for this war,
Speaker 2
and that was a critical strategic vulnerability that could have and should have been exploited and really wasn’t. We really didn’t step up pressure until 2023, and even then, we trained 12 Ukrainian brigades and used them in a way that didn’t surprise the Russians, as many have also written about. So I think going bigger earlier is a better way of winning a war rather than going big later, which has been more the case unfortunately. To give the US its due-To be very fair, you know, the US was fifty percent of Ukrainian aid for the first few years of this war. There are a lot of other countries that should have and could have done a lot more, and I include my own country in that.
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah. So this is one of these– This is a perfect segue, ’cause I’m normally very critical of
Jonah Goldberg
our European allies for not spending enough on defense and not taking their defense seriously, and I think there’s a, there’s a very serious argument going back to the nineteen seventies on the American right that I’m part of that says that we have,
Jonah Goldberg
in effect, subsidized European welfare states by taking care of their defense for them, and that’s, that’s been bad for us and bad for them. At the same time, I cannot stand the, the, the attacks on NATO as an institution and the belittling of our alliances. I think that’s incredibly shortsighted and, and, and dishonorable, frankly. But in Europe, it’s– it feels to me like the, the countries that take
Jonah Goldberg
the lessons of Ukraine the most seriously are obviously the Baltics and then Finland, Scandinavia, the obvious reasons that they have actual, particularly, you know, Finland and the Baltics have real cultural memory of what occupation by Russia is like, and they’ve taken the threat very seriously. So beyond them, what countries do you think in, in Europe are even coming close to learning the right lessons from all of this? I mean, there was this big talk about Germany having this big awakening, and it’s kind of gone nowhere. Um, I hear nice things from my friends on the Telegraph podcast about the UK, but, like,
Jonah Goldberg
they think they’re not doing enough. Who’s learning the right lessons, or is this
Jonah Goldberg
a problem for– still a huge problem for Europe?
Speaker 2
Yeah, I think, you know, your original proposition that,
Speaker 2
um, eighty years of American presence in Europe has led to a welfare state, but I mean, that’s a defensible position. Although remember the original design was America was there so they wouldn’t fight each other and provide a security guarantee. So we need to remember the original context of how that’s happened. I’m not defending, you know, the fact that, uh, we’ve all become welfare states. Um, so I think that’s a defensible position, but then so is, you know, this despicable, um, approach towards NATO that we’ve seen from some administrations. So I think both sides of that are, are defensible. When I– I don’t see Europe as a single entity. I think too many people see Europe as just one big blob, and it’s not. You know, Eastern Europe, as you point out, is extraordinarily different to Central and Western Europe, uh, in mindset, in the orientation towards national security and those kind of things. When it comes to learning from the war, I think the polls have come a long way. You know, they’re at four point three percent of GDP in defense, and as a friend of mine who headed a Polish think tank said, we know what Russian, uh, what Russia in our country would be like. It would be Poles in rail cars again, and we’re not gonna let that happen. You know, I’ve been to Latvia. In Baltic countries,
Speaker 2
uh, they know what Russian occupation’s like. They’ve been learning. They’ve been learning not just for their own defense, but defense is a common undertaking, is a big lesson that’s been reinforced over the last four years. You can’t go it alone. I mean, Sweden and Finland stayed outside the NATO alliance for the entirety of the Cold War, but the invasion of Ukraine forced them to reassess that and have now come in. So that sense of a common defense, I think, is now more palpable, uh, between them. But you, you see the Finns and the Swedes re-embracing national service, which I think in many democracies is un– is not controversial, but in English-speaking democracies, it’s become untouchable, which I think has to be reassessed. Uh, uh, we have to, we have to have a former national service to join our eighteen-year-olds to our society. It doesn’t have to be military, but the Europeans have re-understood that, that this is about joining young people to their community, giving them purpose beyond, uh, TikTok. So I think that’s a really powerful lesson that we’re seeing. I, I think we’re seeing really powerful lessons in rebalancing forces, you know, between crewed and uncrewed. We’re seeing lessons about the use of artificial intelligence, not just compressing the kill chain, but also in how you use it for logistics, personnel, and, and things like that. But if I was to list the most important lesson that’s come out of the last four years that the Europeans have learnt or relearned is that war is possible in Europe. Large scale conventional war remains possible in the twenty-first century, which is not what the consensus was in twenty twenty-one. That is now a consensus there, and it’s something I keep trying to tell the Australian people is war is very possible in the Pacific in the twenty-first century, and if you don’t start with that proposition, you can’t do effective national security planning. The Europeans have woken up, even though they’re not moving as fast as we’d like them to or spending as much as we’d like them to. I think in the Pacific Theater, Japan, the Philippines, and Taiwan have woken up, but too many other countries are still asleep like Europe was in twenty twenty-one.
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah. And, and just to be clear, my point was I wasn’t fully embracing the subsidizing the European welfare states. I just think there’s a real argument there.
Jonah Goldberg
And, and, and look, I mean, I, I, I think if you told anybody
Jonah Goldberg
in nineteen forty-five, we’re gonna create this alliance, and it is going to maintain the peace in Europe for eighty years, where we are basically gonna do what, you know, Charlemagne and Napoleon [laughs] never have done, you know, is create this alliance of free nations that, um, come to each other’s aids and have mutual security, but it’s gonna come at the expense of some expensive bases in a couple places and, and the, the Royal Navy is gonna shrink a little bit. A-a-a-and the, and the German army is not gonna be a problem.Nobody would refuse that deal, right? I mean, so like I, I think the, the overturning of this whole hostility to NATO thing, I think is one of the most self-destructive, spiteful, ahistorical, you know, impulses.
Jonah Goldberg
It’s just that every now and then they hang it there’s these like these kernels of good arguments. So like I can’t really begrudge Trump in f- his first term for saying you guys need to, to spend more. But beyond that, I, I have no defense of, of how they’ve oriented themselves towards the alliances.
Speaker 2
It’s not just the Trump administration who said this. I mean, Robert Gates said this, and he wasn’t working for Trump. So the idea that we need to spend more on our collective defense is not a new one, and I don’t think it’s a controversial one. It’s just been stated differently, I guess, by this administration.
Jonah Goldberg
Who in Europe, though,
Jonah Goldberg
can actually project power? And it’s one thing to have a national defense for national defense to fight off an invasion. It’s another thing to be able to send power somewhere, you know, uh, France has some special operations. The British have a little bit, but it seems to me that there’s just not a lot more there. Is there something I’m missing?
Speaker 2
No, no, I mean, the Big Three, uh, the UK, France, and Germany are still capable of it. I mean, they practice it at different scales. I mean, the last couple of years, I’ve spent time up in Northern Territory in the north of Australia, and both times I was there, there was either a Italian or a British aircraft carrier in port. So it’s still in their institutional memory to do long-range expeditionary operations outside of Europe. I mean, doing it in Europe, it’s hard. Doing it to the Pacific is really hard, as, you know-
Jonah Goldberg
Mm-hmm
Speaker 2
… chief of the German Navy said to me when I was on a visit there a couple years ago, he said, “It’s really hard going down and working in the Pacific.”
Jonah Goldberg
[laughs]
Speaker 2
I says, “No kidding”, [laughs] you know? So it’s in their institutional DNA. I, I think it’s, it’s part of their, uh, national security postures to be able to do this. So the will, I think, is there. It’s really now about investing in the right capabilities where they can not only do it but do it over time. It’s, it’s one thing to send a squadron of fighter jets for a three-month exercise in Australia. It’s another thing to deploy on a multi-year campaign in the Pacific. And that kind of investment, that kind of personnel posture is not something that really any of the European countries have. And, you know, as we found when they sent troops to Europe — or sorry, to Afghanistan, uh, they had to relearn expeditionary operations and sustaining them over, over years.
Jonah Goldberg
So speaking of the Pacific, so, uh, China …
Jonah Goldberg
So one of the arguments which I think has some
Jonah Goldberg
superficial plausibility to me is that one of the benefits of the Iran operation and also the Venezuela operation
Jonah Goldberg
is that it has shown how much superior our technol– American technology is to Chinese technology, to Russian technology. We got — American forces got past Russian or Chinese-made radar systems. There have been these reports out of China about, you know, first of all, he’s doing all these purges of generals. The guy who designed one of the Chinese, I think Chinese planes was recently had an accident, let’s say. Do you think the Iran war and the demonstration effect of both Venezuela and Iran is accelerating Xi’s plan for Taiwan or delaying it, or is it just impossible to know?
Speaker 2
I’ll do a Peter Quill and say a bit of both. Um, in some respects, uh, I think it’s pushing it back because Xi and the PLA will have looked at the American and Israeli campaign and gone, “Well, we don’t know we could do that. Um, that’s very impressive.” And it is. It’s extraordinarily impressive, and it’s — what’s most impressive is the tempo. Because once you generate tempo, your enemy can never catch up, and I don’t know that PLA are confident they, they could do that. So in some respects, it might push their planes to the right. That’s a good thing. Every day we push it back to the right is, is a good thing. But also, they will be looking at American logistics, um, the status of naval vessels after this, you know, having had a couple of aircraft carriers there for a long time, the consumption of munitions. Now, I’m not sure that’s the big deal. It is a big deal, but there’s also been a huge amount of work done in stepping up production in the last year. So it’s kind of a bit of both. I think what Xi will look for is opportunities. Um, he’ll be firstly, uh, trying to gauge Trump at their summit when it happens in the coming month or two about will Trump throw Taiwan under the bus? Is he up for a mega deal with China that allows China to eventually take back Taiwan? That will be, I think, the key thing that Xi will wanna take out of the summit. We can talk economics and all that, but Xi is committed to taking Taiwan, and I think that will be a key, uh, information thing that he’ll wanna take away from the summit. And then I think the Chinese will just look where there are opportunities, and I think the next opportunity is your midterm election period, where there will be an extraordinarily extraordinary inwards focus by the administration, I think, uh, by the American people in the wake of a large war where the American people really don’t wanna have another one again, which is generally the case in every democracy.
Speaker 2
There could be an opportunity in the October to December period this year where Xi goes, “You know what? Maybe now might be the time.” I’m not saying that’s gonna happen, but, you know,
Speaker 2
they’re opportunistic. They’ve been rehearsing short-notice exercises and these kind of things. So I, I look at their deliberate planning and the lessons from the war, but also where are the opportunities that we need to step up our deterrence regime to make sure they can’t exploit them.
Jonah Goldberg
So how much does it matter? I mean, I know this is not quantifiable in, in a mathematical way. But how much does it matter that China just simply hasn’t-Fought a large scale war. I mean, like, uh, experience matters, right? I mean, like battle-tested, learning best practices, experience just for the non-commissioned offi- I mean, that stuff just matters, right? How much of a factor do you think that is?
Speaker 2
It really matters. But to counter that, if you have a look at a lot of the US Army soldiers who crossed the border into Kuwait in nineteen ninety-one, the vast majority of them had never been to war.
Jonah Goldberg
Mm-hmm.
Speaker 2
Some of their senior leaders had, there were Vietnam veterans, but most of them hadn’t. What they had done, they’d been to simulated war through the very effective collective training and combat training center regime that the US Army had set up in the wake of Vietnam to get them almost to the point of being war veterans. That’s what the US Army had done. That’s actually what the PLA is trying to do with its training regime, to replicate that extraordinary training revolution that the US military went through post-Vietnam, so that it can close the gap between war experience and, and training as, as much as it possibly can. But experience matters. You can never deny that.
Jonah Goldberg
So one of the points that, um,
Jonah Goldberg
some of the
Jonah Goldberg
restrainers, I don’t know what the right word is, ’cause talking about isolationists is sort of silly given [laughs] the last year. But some of the people who, the sort of spheres of influence types who say, “Is it really in our interest to try to go to war with Taiwan?” Which at the end of the day, I can’t, I can’t begrudge people saying, “Wait, why are, why are we sending our boys to go fight there?” I mean, I, I, I… It’s, it is not a completely unreasonable question to ask. And but one of the points that the people who are most skeptical about whether it’s in our national interest will make, that I ha- think has some weight, is they’re like, “Look,
Jonah Goldberg
we can’t
Jonah Goldberg
fight a war for Taiwan when Taiwan isn’t willing
Jonah Goldberg
to fight it for itself.” And they’ll point to the lack of seriousness and preparation to Taiwan. Now, I haven’t followed– This is an argument I had a few years ago. I have not followed it that closely. Is Taiwan taking the threat sufficiently seriously these days?
Speaker 2
Yeah, I think your original question about asking why, I mean, that’s the most important question any citizen can ask and should ask. We should always ask, “Why are we doing this?” Um, and governments should be able to give a really good answer. They should have a, a dialogue with the people about why we’re doing this, why it’s important. Purpose really matters. When it comes to Taiwan, I’m about to head back there again. Um, I, I think, you know, my last visit was in the wake of, uh, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and I got to pe- speak to some pretty senior people. They, they were watching it closely. They’ve learnt a lot. You’ve seen a rebalancing in their forces, a very significant step up in the use of drones, long-range missiles. I think, you know, it’s not advertised a lot, but there’s a huge amount of interaction with the US military to try and bring the Taiwanese, um, along in a lot of the modern developments in war fighting theories, integration of war fighting capability. You see very frequent drills, uh, with the Taiwanese military. They’re recapitalizing. Now, there’s an argument to be made, are they buying too much conventional stuff and not enough unconventional stuff? You can make that argument, but that’s, that’s a balancing thing that every military is currently going through. It’s not just the Taiwanese. What people tend to focus on is the budget debates in their parliament where, you know, the KMT doesn’t want to approve the full budget, and that’s, that, that’s an issue, and you had four American, uh, congressmen there recently discussing that. But I think we have seen a stepping up. We’ve seen the new president commit to going to five percent of GDP, if not higher. You’ve seen a, a doubling down in national mobilization and the draft by the Taiwanese. That’s a very big step in every democracy, as you know, as we all know in democracies that don’t do it. So I think they are taking the threat seriously and, you know, as a, a Taiwanese minister said to me in my last visit, “The most important lesson we took from Ukraine is no country will defend someone who won’t defend themselves. It’s about will, and not only do we have to have it, but we’ve got to demonstrate it.” So I think there’s been a lot of work and a lot of effort go on, um, but I look forward to my visit in the very short term to test that hypothesis.
Jonah Goldberg
I think it helps buck up the Taiwanese a bit that Hong Kong
Jonah Goldberg
has been treated so shabbily by the Chine- by Beijing that they’re like, “Well, this, we can’t take promises of one country, two systems seriously.”
Jonah Goldberg
That’s, the demonstration-
Jonah Goldberg
… effect of that is y- I mean, I, I, I, I, I weep for Hong Kong, but it’s a useful lesson for, for Taiwan, right? Where they go, “We’ll cut a s- you know, a separate piece.” “No, you won’t, you know. You’re gonna be part of China, and that’s it.”
Speaker 2
No, that’s right. I mean, you, you… It’s just like Xi telling Obama, “Oh, we’ll never militarize those islands in the c- I mean-
Jonah Goldberg
[laughs]
Speaker 2
… that would never happen. I mean, I, I think we’re kind of onto that scheme.
Jonah Goldberg
All right, so I, I could do this all day, but a- as I warned you, I have a hard out, so I have to get going soon. But one last question.
Jonah Goldberg
I’m very torn about it, ’cause on the one hand, I think we need to spend more on defense. On the other hand,
Jonah Goldberg
I’m torn about it because I don’t necessarily trust the priorities of this administration. But they’re asking for a one point two trillion dollar
Jonah Goldberg
budget for the Pentagon in twenty twenty-seven, which would be, I believe, a forty percent increase and the biggest
Jonah Goldberg
annual increase since, I guess, the Korean War. Deficit and taxes and all that stuff aside, let’s just assume that it’s a massive increase. How would you divide that up? What would you wanna spend it on?
Speaker 2
Well, I think the first thing is replace and build the current, uh, stockpile of munitions, uh, both cheap and expensive. But, you know, magazine depth is, is critical.Uh, second, build out defense industries’ capacity to build more munitions. Sometimes it’s not a case of building stuff, it’s building the factories to build more stuff, and that was the dilemma the US had at the start of the Second World War, and they invested in factories, uh, and then built lots of stuff by ’43. I think, you know, the balance of crewed and uncrewed systems at sea, in the air, and on land, that needs to accelerate. It– there’s stuff going on, there’s, there’s no doubt, and I think the Lucas drone in Iran was an e-example of that. But it’s not moving fast enough. It needs to move at a speed that we in democracies and our heavy defense bureaucracies aren’t used to moving at. We need to speed that up. And I think we in Western military systems need to reform our promotion systems, and this isn’t expensive monet-monetary-wise, but we need to have more rat catchers and less regulators, in the words of Andrew Gordon in, in Rules of the Game. We need more people who are focused on getting out there and being excellent at fighting wars and winning battles, you know, at the strategic and tactical level, not winning bureaucratic debates around conference tables in national capitals. And that balance is out of whack. So it’s not just about investing in things, it’s about the people. But I, I’ll be honest with you, Jane, I’ve worked with the US military for three decades. There is still no military on Earth that not only is as capable, but I think that has the, the moral core and the ethos of the US military. Your people care about what they do, and they have purpose, and that’s something that we must protect because that’s what I think is one of the core strengths of the US military. This isn’t some rah-rah thing. This is a genuine thing I’ve seen in working with US military people in East Timor, Iraq, Afghanistan, the Pentagon, and that’s something that must be protected at all costs.
Jonah Goldberg
I, and so then I have to ask just la… I promise, last question. Does the rhetoric out of, uh, Pete Hegseth bother you then? I mean, uh, I, I gotta say, I found one of the creepiest things of this, of this administration was when he called all those general officers, which I’m, I’m fine with, you wanna have a meeting with a bunch of generals, it’s expensive, but go ahead, and he tells them, “We’re all about lethality now. That’s what we do.” I don’t– honestly, I don’t think the US military had a lethality problem, but okay. Um, like, we’re all about lethality now. And then the commander in chief comes out and says, “Oh, and by the way, we’re gonna use your, the military in American cities.” That was rhetorically crossing a, a bad line for me. And during the, during this war in Iran, Pete Hegseth has fired the army chief of staff
Jonah Goldberg
apparently weird DEI gripes and that kind of thing. Are you, are you– do you think that the depth of that core purpose and that m-moral commitment is threatened, or do you think it’s sufficiently deep it can weather all this fairly well?
Speaker 2
I, I think it’s pretty deep. It’s generational. I’m a product of the US Military War College system. I went to Command and Staff College at Quantico, did the second-year course there, still have close links with very good friends. You know, and I looked at that photo of everyone sitting in that hall with Hegseth, and I knew exactly what ninety-nine percent of them are thinking. There would’ve been one percent thinking, “Yeah, this is great,” but the other ninety-nine percent, I think, would’ve just been looking at it going, “What is going on here?” Um-
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah.
Speaker 2
The US military does not have a problem with lethality, as I’ve just shown in I- in Iraq. It doesn’t have to talk about it the way the Secretary of Defense does. It needs to talk about it in a professional war-fighting way, not
Speaker 2
that. So I do think there’s a professional ethos that’s deep, as long as the purges of senior military are kept to a manageable level, and I think it’s still at a manageable level. The lack of the, the getting rid of legal advice I think is concerning. Legal advice in a de- in the military of a democracy isn’t– does provide bounds because there’s no such thing as unbounded military action, particularly in democracies, ’cause we still gotta live by the expectations and values of the people we serve.
Jonah Goldberg
All right. Mick, thank you so much for doing this again. I could do this all day long. I hope I can have you back when under fewer time constraints and, um, and thank you again, really.
Speaker 2
Thank you. It’s been great to talk to you. I really enjoyed our conversation. [upbeat music]
Jonah Goldberg
Mick Ryan has left the studio, and so have I. Again, I’m recording this, this outro on April 17th, uh, long after we recorded this conversation, and therefore, I do not wanna discuss or chew over much of the conversation because I wouldn’t wanna not do it justice, um, because it’s no longer fresh in mind. Um, but I really like Mick Ryan. I really wanna have him back. Um, really interesting guy who just knows a lot about a lot of stuff that’s relevant these days. So with that, thanks for listening and, um,
Jonah Goldberg
I will see you next time.
Jonah Goldberg
[upbeat music]