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  • War Transformed

  • The Future of Twenty-First-Century Great Power Competition and Conflict
  • By: Mick Ryan
  • Narrated by: Grant Cartwright
  • Length: 9 hrs and 38 mins
  • 3.9 out of 5 stars (12 ratings)

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War Transformed

By: Mick Ryan
Narrated by: Grant Cartwright
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Publisher's Summary

War Transformed: The Future of Twenty-First-Century Great Power Competition and Conflict provides insights for those involved in the design of military strategy, and the forces that must execute that strategy. Emphasizing the impacts of technology, a new era of strategic competition, demography, and climate change, Mick Ryan uses historical and contemporary anecdotes to highlight key challenges faced by nations in a new era of great power rivalry. Just as previous industrial revolutions have advanced societies, the nascent fourth industrial revolution will have a similar impact on how humans fight, compete, and build military power in the twenty-first century.

War Transformed seeks to provide a preview of the shape of war and competition in the twenty-first century. Ryan examines both the shifting character of war and its enduring nature. He proposes important trends in warfare that will shape all aspects of human competition and conflict in the coming decades.

Competing and engaging in combat in this new era involves evolved strategies and warfighting concepts. As the competitive environment and potential battlefields continue to change, conceptions of combat, competition, and conflict must also evolve. Mick Ryan makes the case for transforming how Western military institutions view war in this century.

©2022 Mick Ryan (P)2022 Tantor
  • Unabridged Audiobook
  • Categories: History

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Rewarding, a fact based "near-futurist" book.

Very well written, engaging and subtly argued. Mick lets the facts speak for themselves. I was delighted by the author advocating for the role of the arts in military thinking, particularly science fiction.
Grant Cartwright does a more than passable job of narration. Not perfect but professional.
Highly recommended to anyone interested in contemporary military thinking or anyone into the near future of conflict and defence.

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it'll get you thinking

I listened to this book to challenge by biases, and it delivered in spades. I certainly didn't and don't agree with everything, but that's not to say it isn't worth listening to.

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A frustrating lack of detail

I have a real problem with this book, or rather many problems. The largest is that it's incredibly nebulous, very scant on detail. If you try and boil down its message, it seems to be this: the past of war and the future of war are full of incredibly important lessons and practitioners need to know them all or they'll be wiped out. What is the future of war, though? Ryan talks vaguely about the proliferation of 'hypersonic' this or 'quantum' that -weapon systems that largely don't exist- with little useful insight. There's no detail, because none exists and Ryan is mostly incapable of imagining any.

The second major problem is in rampant assumptions Ryan makes with little or no acknowledgement. I think the worst one is the vast cost of his vision of the future. There's so much technology coming ...and your army needs all of it! It seems that, after his military career, he very badly wants a job as a lobbyist for the arms industry and is trying to write a resume. At one point he says the fundamental element of a military is people; many others would say it is money, money and more money, but Ryan declines to mention such 'budgetary constraints' much at all.

There was so little detail here that I started trying to pars what it did have to say against real world military issues. Here in Australia, beyond the looming threat of China -to which the only solution anyone can seem to imagine is very much like Ryan's blank cheque for military spending, or clinging to the hope of an increasingly fragmented US foreign policy; which doesn't necessarily make Ryan wrong, but it doesn't give us very much new to chew on in his book- the most recent is the massive waste of money on military products that either haven't eventuated or aren't fit for purpose. Ryan talks a lot about the need for military and government to collaborate, but has nothing to say about how and why this has failed badly enough to have dominated news headlines for literal years. When he's so keen to spend government money, that might be worth addressing.

Another real-world issue, barely spoken of, is anything much at all to do with war-crimes. Glibly and briefly Ryan puts them down to a 'failure of basic discipline, leading to bad things.' So, the recent alleged behaviour of the Australian SAS is because of a failure of basic discipline? It's both an incredibly bold statement to make about the nation's most elite fighting unit and stunningly short on useful detail. Closing the book Ryan notes, with a palpable air of surprise, that during his experience fighting in Afghanistan, it is possible that the locals might not have understood the nation-building vision of US and allied forces. What could have confused them? Surely the many alleged instances of unarmed civilians being executed can't have helped.

It's impossible to say, because Ryan is very unwilling to talk about that conflict, or indeed, most contemporary conflicts. His writing is very short on concrete examples to demonstrate the claims he makes for his vision of military organisation.

The ones he returns to most often are the two Gulf Wars and, unfortunately, the recent reorganisation of the Russian military. It's not his fault that this book was written right before the most recent Russian invasion of Ukraine -nobody expected it to transpire in the manner it has- but it does make his regular praise of 'innovativion' by the Russian military sound a bit ridiculous. Interestingly he refers to the PLA in similarly glowing terms and notes their employment of matching, interdisciplinary thinking in their strategies; on that basis, if I were the Chinese, I might review my plans!

Every now and then Ryan will also outline an element of strategic or operational thought and then point to the US defeat of Iraqi forces in the early '90s and 2000s as clear proof of his thinking. Is he right? It's pretty hard to know. It would be at least as easy to put these military successes down to the massive application of force by the world's largest and most advanced military on an enemy that was dwarfed in comparison and equipped with outdated equipment, much of which had been paid for and supplied by the US themselves.

If I were Ryan I might have tried to find more pertinent, documented examples to demonstrate my thinking, but he largely hasn't bothered. A conflict like the one in the Nagorno-Karabakh region -one of the few to have witnessed really modern technology in action, at time of writing- didn't even rate a mention. It should be unsurprising then that the vast majority of armed conflicts actually occurring in the world are of little interest here.

There are many other problems with this book, but I'll finish by noting that, once or twice Mick Ryan sagely points out that militaries must prepare for the wars they will fight, not the ones they want to fight. From reading War Transformed, there seems to be only one war that he wants to fight (I won't tell you what it is, you can probably guess and god help us all if we have to fight it) and the larger number of conflicts that are happening or will happen are not something he's interested in examining.

PS The audio book of this is not great. The reader seems to have been picked for his Received English / Australian accent alone and mispronounces many names like Herodotus and Peleliu. Also it doesn't appear to have a .pdf of its tables, graphs and other illustrations, which is unusual.

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This is a business as usual argument about wars…

Maybe a book about peace next time!? You completely forget to make an argument about how to work towards a more sustainable and peaceful world.

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