Chaos and Interregnum: Technology, Alliances, and Security in 2026
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey
Welcome to Technology and Security. TS is a podcast exploring the intersections of emerging technologies and national security. I'm your host, Dr. Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: . I'm the founding CEO of Strat Futures Proprietary Limited and adjunct associate professor at Deakin University. My guest today is Mick Ryan. Thanks for joining me, Mick.
Mick Ryan
Thanks, Miah it's great to be with you.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey
Major General Mick Ryan is a commentator and advisor on strategy, technology and war.
He spent 35 years in the Australian Army, commanding at all levels, including in East Timor, Iraq, and Afghanistan, as well as the Australian Defense College. He has been awarded Meritorious Service and Commendation medals and is a member of the Order of Australia. Mick is a Senior Fellow for Military Studies at the Lowy Institute and Fellow at CSIS. He's also a Strategic Advisor to a number of companies in Australia, the US, and UK. As well, Mick is a prolific writer, publishing regularly with numerous analytic papers and three books since 2022. You can read his work on the Futura Doctrina sub stack. We're coming to you today from the lands of the Gadigal people. We pay our respects to elders past, present, and emerging and acknowledge their continuing connection to land, community.
Let's go straight to the contest spectrum. What's a cooperation, competition or conflict you see coming in 2026?
Mick Ryan
I actually see a fourth C chaos. At the moment we've seen the end of the world that we were all very comfortable with since 1945. was hardly an easy world, but it was a world that democracies like Australia came to understand how to operate within. They came to understand the extent and the limitations on the economic, military, societal power within that 80 year span of history, that's gone. It's not coming back. That whole era of post-World War II Pax Americana is gone. It may come back at some point in the future, but I think the next year at least will be an interregnum, a period between two global systems. We know what the old one was, but the new one is yet to take shape, and there are multiple shapes that it might.
Assume it could well be spheres of influence. It could well be one dominant hyper power. There's a couple of countries that might be. It could well be an even greater fracturing with lots of mid-sized players all yapping for the scraps left over from an America that appears keen not to play on the world stage. So for me, the big C for 2026 is chaos.
The world's always uncertain, but I think we're going to see higher levels of uncertainty, higher levels of chaos over the coming year.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey
can you take us through what that might look like in daily life for Australians?
Mick Ryan
Well, think first thing it means we need to potentially reconsider our international security relationships. America is clearly our most important security partner, has been since the end of 1941. I think it will continue to be a very important one, but it's relatively important, so the time will probably decline just because Americans are overextended and unwilling.
to do some of the things that they've either committed to or appeared willing to do in previous decades. ⁓ That will have an impact on our relationship with other countries, but it's probably going to have an impact on defence spending. And the immediate impact for Australians is either taxes have to go up or governments spend less on other things. ⁓ We spend a lot more on health.
on ⁓ social welfare, on NDIS than we do on defence, we may be forced, I'm not saying it will happen, but we may well be forced in the coming year or two to reconsider the balance between internal and external expenditures by this and future Australian governments. That will have a very significant impact on Australians. It will have an impact on the level of service they've come to expect.
from government may have an impact on how much tax they pay. So I think that alone is a fairly considerable impact on Australians. And it's not just defence. It's all elements of national security. will be intelligence agencies. It could well be a very significant step up in civil defence and critical infrastructure protection. So there's a whole range of impacts this might have on Australia right from now.
and we really need to rethink how we see the world if we're to recast Australian strategy for interacting with that world.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey
You recently wrote that it is clear the pleasant post World War Two existence and network of relationships has been winding down. You then go on to argue the first step in addressing the situation is to have the intellectual honesty and moral courage to correctly diagnose the situation and describe it clearly. Is there anything else you wanted to add about this new period that we're entering?
Mick Ryan
Yeah, good strategy always starts with a good, honest diagnosis. We don't always get that from governments these days. information clearly plays a different role in strategy and governance and international relations than what it played even a decade ago with social media, with generative AI, ⁓ with, you know, agentic systems that support government and non-government decision making, ⁓ with the ability of countries to undertake cognitive warfare to convince whole populations about their aspirations or the reality of situation. I think that's a very important part of the global dynamic we need to understand. then obviously global economics is evolving. might just be the largest economy in the world, but it's relative. ⁓ wealth has changed over time. And China is making a very significant effort to wrest from America control of the international economic system. It's not there yet. It's not even close to it, but it could well ⁓ make a lot of headway in the coming year as countries look at what is going on in Washington, D.C. and some of the speeches from the incumbent president and wonder really whether they need to throw in all their eggs in the US basket in the future.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey:
You and I have spoken previously about the enduring and perhaps increasing nature of strategic surprise. In the realm of technology and security, what strategic shifts or surprises are you thinking about this year?
Mick Ryan
Yeah, I wonder whether we might see some kind of internal fracture in the United States. I think the trends are all pointing towards something like that, potentially. The very significant government domestic crackdown in several states in the United States point towards more civil strife there. I think that is ⁓ really important to keep an eye upon.
Also, Russia is certainly nowhere near as solid as Putin would like us to believe. It has some very profound societal and economic problems that could result in something bad quickly in Russia as has in the past. ⁓ I think that in places like China, we could see Xi Jinping decide 2026 is the year he to seize the prosperous young democracy of Taiwan that he seems to believe is part of China and in fact has never been part of the People's Republic of China. So I mean, those are the big three. I think too that we need to keep an eye on things like shifts in weather. I think that is still something that, you know, with everything going on out of the White House, tend to lose track that global warming is something that is happening. ⁓ The science is there. It's hard to have five scientists agree on one thing. Having thousands agree on it is good enough for me. It's not some cabal that's invented this thing. But I think we might see more of the macro impacts of that. And that's also going to change government policies around the world. It's going to change how they spend their money.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey
I want to go to a segment on alliances. So given everything you've just laid out, what are the key alliances in technology and security that we really need to be focused on?
Mick Ryan
Well, there's obviously the international ones, government to government, they're important alliances. I clearly the American alliance is critical to Australia. There's no replacement for that relationship because of its depth, breadth and length of time that we've had. There's not another country we could do it to.
So America's important is not just because of the military and intelligence relationship, but the financial relationship is far more profound in many respects than the one with China. We might trade a lot with China, but the foreign direct investment that Australia receives from the United States is an order of magnitude greater than the trade relationship with China. A lot of people don't look at that, but they should.
So that's a really important relationship for military intelligence, economic, and just in a social sense, Americans and Australians like each other. We like having a relationship generally.
I think individual Australians highly value that relationship and things like the annual low-e poll that we do every year prove that, that people value that relationship with our American cousins.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey
true, but how do we reconcile that with the way that America is currently behaving on the international stage?
Mick Ryan
Well, there's almost no reconciling it. And I think that's the problem at the moment, right, is we've had this relationship for 80 years across a wide array of societal concerns. And to see this is I think there's still for many people going through a mourning period. This is a country we've looked up to, a country that said, you know, we're bear any burden or any cost. ⁓ It's now saying, what's the best deal you can give us?
that is a really significant shift in outlook. I think we once again, we're in this interregnum period, not just in the global order, but we're in this interregnum period in our relationship with the United States. We don't know actually what the long term relationship might be like. We're not in the old one, but we're in this period of chaotic change for a little while yet. So America is the principal relationship. You know, I think
Our regional relationships are extraordinarily important. Japan is a first order partner in many respects. We've gone from being bitter enemies to being very close friends in less than a century. They have been extraordinarily good international citizens in many regards and have been very important to the economic development of Australia since the 1970s, as has Korea in a more recent, but they were also very important.
If you're coming, you know, the countries of Southeast Asia, whether it's Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Melanesia are also really important culturally and in a security sense to Australia and will be more important in an economic sense. And then of course, our cousins across the ditch in New Zealand. You know, I'm biased. have a Kiwi wife and I have a deep admiration and love for New Zealand. And I think most Australians feel that.
we sometimes forget that relationship, but I think we do so at our peril. think it's a very important one for our national character and that of New Zealand. I think we're very closely related. And then there's Europe that's always going to be important. ⁓ Not just the UK, but Germany, Netherlands and countries like that. Once again, very large sources of foreign direct investment in Australia and countries that we have cultural affinities with. And we shouldn't forget that security and prosperity in Europe has a direct impact on security and prosperity in Australia. It's not just something on the other side of the world.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey
Yeah, absolutely. Do you think there's a shift between this idea of national alliances based on values or interests? That's been the kind of discourse for generations. Is that going to stay but just in a slightly different manner?
Mick Ryan
I ⁓ interest is still going to be the principal driver for international relationships, whether it's security or economic interests. And that's always been the case in the American and Australian relationship. We're just dumb lucky that our interests and our values seem to align more often than not. I mean, it's kind of like a cake. The interest is the cake. The values is the icing on top. I think the icing is just going to be quite a bit thinner in some of our relationships in the coming years. Thucydides wrote, know, ⁓ fear, honour interests. These are the things that really do seem to drive
international affairs and relationships but interests I think are the principal concern and I don't think that's going to change.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey
So you are obviously very well known for your analysis and commentary on the current Ukraine war. In a recent paper, which I'll link in the show notes, you outlined 10 lessons from the Ukraine war for our region. Can you explain two of these in a bit of detail today and their implications for the Indo-Pacific? So firstly, cognitive warfare and inter-societal conflict, and secondly, rapid and expanding adaptation.
Mick Ryan
Sure. I just wasn't seeing the translation of Ukraine lessons for different geographic and political regions of the world. Too many journalists and others were just taking the lessons and flopping them down over the top of countries or military services. You've got to be able to filter the lessons from Ukraine, understand the specific elements of context there. and then kind of translate them for different regions, different political systems, different military cultures. So that's what I attempted to do in the macro sense for the Pacific, for Ukraine. So the two key lessons you want me to talk about, cognitive warfare and societal ⁓ interaction. know, ⁓ influence has always been part of war. Violence and influence are the two sides of the coin that is war. So influence is nothing new.
What is new is some of the new technologies, whether it's data sciences, whether it's our understanding of how the brain works, our understanding of things like game theory, ⁓ and obviously more recently, LLM's generative AI and their ability to ⁓ identify target sets, human target sets, from individuals to nation states and everything in between, craft specific messages very quickly for those target sets, deliver those messages.
almost instantaneously and then measure the impact of those messages. That is unprecedented. That has never been possible before in human history. And part of what that's resulting in is closer interaction between societies. It used to be, for example, in the Pacific War between America and Japan, the only people who came into contact with the soldiers, the airmen and women, ⁓ the sailors who were fighting.
The societies were separated by oceans and never came into contact with each other. They knew what they knew about each other through the different propaganda effects. That's not the case. Societies can directly interact with each other now. We've seen that, for example, in the Ukraine war, where Russians and Ukrainians have been interacting on an individual basis since the start of the war, understanding that most Ukrainians speak Russian,
So you're seeing a different dynamic in war, you're seeing a greater surface area of conflict because of that greater societal interaction. And you're seeing more weaknesses and fissures become exposed that might be exploited in a future conflict in the Pacific, for example. The other one was adaptation. This is something obviously near and dear to my heart over last 30 years.
You know, I think what we've seen in Ukraine is both sides have learnt how to learn better. You've seen ⁓ tactical adaptation, which is about learning and adaptation to improve how you win battles, as well as strategic adaptation, which is the learning and adaptation which improves your ability to win wars. And these have been spinning at different rates. I think the Russians over four years have made more progress in their ability
to learn how to learn, certainly at the strategic level. They're better at synchronizing between industry and lessons. And they've been very good at sharing lessons the adversary learning and adaptation block of Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, where they are able to share lessons, not just about drones, but about strategic coercion, about economic sanctions busting.
around strategic misinformation and cognitive warfare in near real time. So you're seeing this, ⁓ these adaptation cycles spinning and spinning and speeding up and they're moving at a speed that is incomprehensible to most Australian bureaucrats. They could not comprehend just how quickly the Ukrainians are learning, adapting and rolling out new tactics.
new technology on the battlefield, how quickly the Russians are doing. We are extraordinarily slow in our ability to do that in Australia, not just in the military, but our broader society, as the lack of reform in the business community shows. we need to understand how the contemporary adaptation war is working. It's not a battle, it's a global war of adaptation.
It's something that the authoritarians are doing in near real time, which once again was not possible just a decade ago. And it's something we need to understand and address because I tend to think that the most revolutionary transformation in war now is not AI or drones. It's the ability to learn and adapt at speed, at different levels with your partners.
I think that is transforming war in a way that even AI and drones are not.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey:
what lessons should Australia and our allies take from Ukraine about the relationship between commercial technology and national security?
Mick Ryan
Yeah, I think the most important thing we need to do, except ⁓ that there is a relationship and people in defence need to be humble enough to listen to ⁓ the defence industry ⁓ more than what they do and not be scared away by the probity zealots who seem to want to stop every kind of, not just discussion, but even thinking about defence industry. I mean, it's a pervasive fear in defence.
talking to the defence industry, just as there's a pervasive fear about talking to the media. We need to get over that because there's an enormously beneficial relationship there, I think, that not only makes both sides better informed, but allows us to move at a much greater speed than what we can and allows both sides to take more risk within the relationship if there's more trust and more understanding between them. We need to do better and we certainly need to do much better at nurturing small and medium Australian enterprises
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey
At Lowy, you've written about the Ukraine war as a laboratory for 21st century conflict. What technology lessons from Ukraine do you think Western policymakers are still oversimplifying
Mick Ryan
Yeah, think the democratisation of ⁓ digital systems and awareness has been something that went in a direction we probably weren't planning to go ourselves. Every soldier now carries digital systems that allow them to pull down and upload information for various functions they might undertake. mean, in the Australian Army, we can only do that at company level still.
It's not very impressive, to be quite frank, given the time we've messed around with it. So the Ukrainians in a very short time have rolled this out to every single individual. So the democratisation of information on the battlefield.
is and will continue to change command methods, tactics, structures, warfighting concepts, a whole range of things. It will change how we train and educate our people because we need a different level of trust. I don't think we're really across that. The second thing I think with autonomous systems, whether it's land, sea, air-based, it doesn't really matter. But what you're seeing is larger numbers of drones per person.
What that means is you are giving people even more capacity. You're not replacing people, you're extending human capacity. But what you're seeing is new and evolved organisations arising. So for example, you know, I visit frontline brigades when I go to Ukraine. Each of them has one or two drone battalions in each brigade. Every battalion has one or two drone companies. Australian Army has one drone battalion for the entire army.
But it's changing tactics, it's changing warfighting concepts and this is the real trick with technology. Technology doesn't change anything. It's when you combine technology with new organisations and new operating concepts, that's when you get true transformation. I think we're seeing that with autonomous systems in Ukraine, everything from drone services down to
the level of awareness that individual soldiers have. So I think they're really important lessons when it comes to technology. Technology's cool, but it's useless without the humans designing how it's used, where it's used, in what organizations and in what concepts.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey
One of my further questions was about how militaries are investing heavily in autonomous systems and decision support tools. leading on from that, how do you see human judgment evolving in defence decision making?
Mick Ryan
Well, you know the hope of course is that ⁓ AI should extend human cognition and there's been some really good research Done on this topic about you know AI extenders. It's basically not replacing human cognition or human decision-making but Extending, know our attention and search features of the human brain our ability to Develop lots of courses of action or to analyse them more quickly. So the theory
of the case is it should extend human cognition. I think, however, the reality might be closer to social media where people have kind of given up their ability to critique or discriminate right from wrong, real from fake. And it worries me that generations in the future may just subcontract their cognition or cognitive functions to AI and not use it. And if you don't use it, you'll lose it.
It's like language, don't practice it, you lose it. And thinking and your critical thinking skills are the same. somehow we need to have the systems to sustain and build human critical thinking whilst augmenting and extending it with ⁓ agentic planning and other different agents.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey
What are some of the interdependencies and vulnerabilities between technology and war that you wish were better understood?
Mick Ryan
I guess the first interdependency is that wars and militaries are not the same thing. Wars are national, and people seem to think, you know, if there's a war on it's just the military. Well, it's not. A war is something an entire nation engages in. And we forgot that. We forgot that after Korea, and therefore...
You know, the disasters of Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere were built on entire societies thinking, well, the army can just go fix that. Well, that doesn't work. You need to engage an entire society or don't do it. And I think that's a really important ⁓ thing that people need to understand. If you're going to commit to military operations, the whole country commits, or don't do it. So that's the first one.
I think the second one is ensuring that your military forces, be they professional, conscripted, part-time, it doesn't matter. There'll be different models. But you need to ensure that they understand and abide by the values of the society they serve. ⁓ War is not just about kill them all. It's not just about arbitrary destruction. It still has some rules. And there's some really good reasons why.
It does. ⁓ you know, it's the right thing to do to only kill as many people as you need to, not as many people as you want to. Secondly, under just war theory, there's a long tradition of not deliberately killing civilians. You know, that's a pretty good principle, I think. And one, think Australian soldiers in particular, being very good at understanding and abiding by, with one or two exceptions. Three,
If you don't arbitrarily kill people who don't need to be killed or murder POWs like the Russians do, you have a better chance of your own POWs surviving that entire experience. So I think that's important. Fourth, it's about the reputation of your country and how your country sees itself. And finally, it's about protecting the souls of our soldiers. You know, if you kill someone, that weighs on your soul.
Maybe not immediately, but it does at some point. We know that for a fact. It is the single largest driver of ⁓ combat stress and potential PTSD down the track. So for all these reasons, the moral and ethical approach to military affairs and war fighting is really important. Now, that doesn't mean we don't do things we're not comfortable with. Sometimes we have to. You know, the firebombing of
Tokyo in March 1945, which killed 100,000 Japanese in one night, is, from modern sensibilities, a repulsive act. But it was the best choice of lots of awful choices at that time. So sometimes ethics isn't just about doing the right thing. Sometimes ethics is about choosing the least awful option, because in war, there's no such thing as a good choice. It's choices between terrible and catastrophic.
So we need to understand ethics, not just about doing good things, but sometimes when it comes to national survival, you've got to do the least awful thing.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey
On that sobering note, how can technology be used to strengthen national resilience?
Mick Ryan
Yeah, well, think there's a lot of areas here. mean, national resilience isn't something I think ⁓ governments have paid enough attention to. And, you know, what national resilience is, is changing. ⁓ know, Australia is the only member of the international energy community that doesn't have the 90 days of energy stocks onshore. We have these complex and, quite frankly, idiotic formulas that, you know, fuel on ships and...
Other things can be used to add up, but no one's buying that. We don't have enough energy reserves in this country But it's the same with critical manufacturers like medicines and key components in all the fertilizers used by our farmers. They're all imported. So that's one dimension of resilience, stockholding, understanding where your stocks are, what the quantities are.
how accessible ⁓ technology can deliver all this. The second thing obviously is cyber resilience. Everything's hooked up to the internet these days. And whether it is hospital systems, whether it is municipal, water treatment plants, all these kinds of things, they need to be resilient because there are very clever people who absolutely hate us, who are very happy to manipulate these things.
And then there's physical resilience, How physically resilient is our energy infrastructure? How physically resilient are our military bases? You know, how physically resilient is, for example, the ASIO headquarters in Canberra? You know, I think a spider web operation at an air base in Australia while a visiting B2 bomber is there and damages that would be
catastrophic for our alliance, in many other reasons. So there's a physical resilience piece. And then finally, there's a societal resilience. Now, how do you ensure people are well informed about the threats and can prepare themselves mentally for them? I mean, the Swedes and others have put out booklets to society. think Australians understand there's always a natural threat. This is another dimension of that. There is a threat from malign actors who hate us.
and we'd be very happy to see Australians die or suffer in large numbers in a future conflict. And we need to prepare our people psychologically for that.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey
I'm go to a segment called emerging tech for emerging leaders. What do you see as the biggest shift for leaders and leadership from new technologies?
Mick Ryan
Well, you need to understand them. mean, one of the things I did at the War College was set up
specific courses called technology for strategists so they could understand the policy and strategic implications of these new technologies quantum hypersonics these kind of things. So just basic literacy in new technologies is Fundamental to leadership these days you can't abrogate that
it is something that's an ongoing effort because one, there's always new leaders and two, technology is changing very, very rapidly. So I think that's the most important thing when it comes to technology and leadership is you need to stay across it.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey
What are the most underappreciated ethical and strategic risks of AI when it comes to shaping judgments about proportionality, escalation, and acceptable casual thresholds?
Mick Ryan
Well the obvious point is AI isn't human. It has no stake. It has no dog in the fight in any decision whatsoever. It has no existential imperative. It has no relatives that might suffer. It has no human empathy. Now you might say some of our leaders don't have human empathy either, but at least in theory they do. They may choose not to use it. Well AI does not have it, will never have it.
So we need to understand that it's not human. We shouldn't give it human characteristics. It's a computer program that's really, really good and has been well-trained and all this kind of stuff. I get the technology. It's not human. It is silicon-based. And therefore, we cannot allow them to make the final big decisions on strategies, policy. ⁓
that some are purporting that we should. We should never give AI any control over nuclear weapons because as ⁓ fragile as humans are and as stupid as we are at times, we've managed to avoid a nuclear holocaust for 81 years now. That's actually pretty good.
I think we need to be very, very careful about what we let AI do when it comes to large scale decisions about nations. Nothing wrong with it. Wargaming things, providing options, extending our thinking about strategic options or diagnosing problems. But when it comes to decisions, humans must make the decision.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey
You've long been interested in technology, adaptation and innovation in war and thread throughout your whole career. What are some of the trends that have most interested you?
Mick Ryan
I think trends in the last quarter century, one has been a... propensity to serve in society has changed. I don't think as many people are willing to commit to the rigours.
of a, for example, a military service career, you're seeing a greater professionalization. That's good in some respects but it separates the military from society more. I don't think that's a positive trend. I think it's a negative trend. as Sir John Hackett said, when a society looks in a mirror, it should see the military reflected back at it. And when that's not the case, which is very possible when it comes to
hyper-professional militaries, that is not a good outcome. So I think that trend is a very interesting one for us to understand. That's why I'm a big fan of national service. think it's something Australia's going to have to I don't think we're going to have any choice. We're going to have to do it. But that service needs to be ⁓ societal. You can drive an ambulance. You can be in the bushfire brigade because the imperative isn't building the military. The imperative
is joining 18 year olds to their society, not to their cell phones. I think another really important trend is ⁓ lowered trust in institutions. That's a real problem because people are more susceptible to misinformation. ⁓
more susceptible to violence ⁓ against ⁓ people serving their country, particularly police and others who do so much. So I think that's a really troubling trend.
And then just societal cohesion. think, as I wrote at one point, know, I think we have this Hebrew word, concepsia, which is about, you know, the dominant idea that can't be challenged. You know, for a long time, there's been this concepsia in Australia that we're socially cohesive. And I think things like the Bondi massacre and others have shown that maybe we're not as cohesive as we thought we were. And we should be asking some tough questions about ourselves.
and about a whole range of elements of how our society works and things like that. So there's no military and technology trends in there that I've ⁓ highlighted, but I think they're the three that would worry me most because when it comes to the kind of things I look at when it comes to war and strategic competition, you have to start at the strategic and national layer and work your way down, not start at the military layer and work your way up.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey
Yeah, from my perspective in national security the impending chaos requires so many elements of social, you know, institutions and citizens to become closer. When we think about that in the context of national resilience, what practical steps should we take now to harden our cognitive defenses?
Mick Ryan
I think the first thing is the state federal relationship. I know the COVID experience brought out some strengths and it brought out some weaknesses and I know there are some efforts at the federal level and state levels to relook and improve those relationships. ⁓ I think the bomb in the caravan in New South Wales was just a recent manifestation of state federal relationships probably not being as effective.
as they really need to be for the era we're in. They might have worked in the 80s, but they're not as effective as they need to be now. So I think that's really important. But I think of overwhelming importance, and it's something we haven't seen for a little while in this country, is having politicians and national leaders who are willing to have very tough, honest conversations with the citizens of this country and what the resourcing implications of that might be.
I think, you know, domestic harmony is one of those areas that we've been forced to have a conversation on. I think the China stabilisation narrative has prevented honest conversations about the nature of different threats being posed to this country in the modern era. And I don't see in any party in this country, the willingness to have those tough, honest conversations with citizens. They want tough, honest votes for them. And that's about it.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey
I mean, I agree, But I also see how difficult governing is in a society that is, has just the rise of disinformation, misinformation, kind of, you know, this cognitive influence and interference capacity.
government aren't especially well equipped right now to deal with, you know, different military, economic, informational, technological, other challenges. How can we better integrate those so that we equip government, and the bureaucracy as well as politicians to bring that together? Because you're absolutely right, those conversations need to be had.
Mick Ryan
Well, my radical proposal is give politicians more time to keep up by public funding elections. Outlaw political donations in this country, allocate individuals and parties a certain amount of money for elections, and that's it. ⁓ Don't allow them to get out and do fundraising for the next election, just publicly fund it. And you know what? It might cost us a couple of hundred million dollars extra, but I guarantee There are huge savings to be had in a more informed political class that aren't having to make backroom deals or promises for certain interest groups. I really think that's the political revolution that we need, not just in this country, but in every democracy. Publicly fund elections, outlaw political donations, and have people that have more time.
to become experts at governing rather than electioneering and ⁓ all the other things that go with that. know, if had to pick one thing, that's what I do. And I've got to tell you, it's way, way, way cheaper.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey
would have a lot of I think that would have a lot of support in Australia. I want to go to a segment called disconnect. how do you wind down and disconnect?
Mick Ryan
Get off all the digital devices, ⁓ go for a swim, go for a walk. I try and do those things, watch movies, read a real book, I just come back from a few days in New Zealand and my father-in-law has no wifi, no internet. It's actually pretty nice to do a digital cleanse and not be connected.
or hyper connected as is probably more the case these days. you know, it's a range of different things and you know, every now and then I'll wake up and I'll lie in bed, drink a coffee for a couple of hours and go, you know what? I don't feel like writing today. And that might be once a month, but I never go against it because somehow I just know I need it. And I know the next day I'll be twice as keen to get back into it because writing is my yoga. It's what I do.
nine days out of 10 or 29 days out of 30 or 31. So for me, I find writing cathartic, but I also find it a great way to create something that didn't exist before. And as someone who was a combat engineer, I always liked the making as well as the blowing up stuff. And the opportunity, which we all have, to create something that didn't exist before through a piece of writing is, I find enormously ⁓ wonderful and amazing and something that's accessible to every single human being on the planet.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey
Yeah, it's such a good discipline because it also forces clarity. Can be slow. Yeah.
Mick Ryan
Eventually, you know, well,
the clarity's not in the writing, the clarity's in the editing, as you know.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey
Absolutely. It's nice once it's done. I'm going to go to a segment called Eyes and Ears. What have you been reading, listening to or watching lately that's of interest to my audience?
Mick Ryan
I've just started a New book by a couple of former CAO officers called the great heist about how China over four decades has undertaken a very systemic systemic industrial espionage Program against the United States, you know collecting up to half a trillion dollars worth of IP a year over that period So that's a really interesting book
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey:
we're entering 2026 so deeply integrated, you know, with the United States on security and defence and notwithstanding many great shifts in that relationship. The foundations, are essentially there and our interests, at least, and many of our values still align. We're also economically intertwined with China and trying to build more relationships both in our region and of course, in Europe. How do any emerging technologies complicate our ability to navigate this strategic tightrope?
Mick Ryan
I think technology first and foremost provides opportunities for Australian companies to build different service models and service industries that can become part of our exports. So I think that's important. We've seen that from a couple of different companies in Australia. I'd love to see more. I I obviously love this country and think the people are extraordinary. I just would like to see a regulatory framework that's more encouraging of small and medium sized businesses so they can eventually become
global behemoths. ⁓ So think that's important. ⁓ The relationship with China and the United States is something that we're just not going to be able to walk away from, certainly not in the short or medium term. It's a careful and difficult dance. And frankly, to give the current government their due, they have managed the relationship with the Trump administration okay up till now.
They've managed to avoid the angst that the Europeans, Greenlanders, Canadians, Mexicans, Venezuelans, and many others have experienced. That might be good management. There's probably some of that. Might just be good luck because they haven't turned their particular eye of Sauron on us at the moment. That could be coming and we better be prepared for it. That is the worst case that strategists prepare for, not the best case that we're experiencing at the moment.
So Australian governments are going to have to have a red line of what they will take and what they won't take in abuse from the Trump administration. I think you're going to see administrations in the future potentially with similar instincts for abuse of partners and friends. But they're also going to have to have what they do when a friend crosses a red line, just as we're going to have to have a process for what we do when China crosses a red line with us.
And I'm not sure that's very clear at the moment.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey
My final segment is Need to Know. Is there anything I didn't ask that would have been great to cover?
Mick Ryan
Just two things. mean, what are the lotto numbers for tomorrow night? And who's going to win the State of Origin this year? the second one's probably more important than the first one.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey
I don't have great answers on either, I'm sorry.
Mick, thank you so much for joining.
Mick Ryan
No, I think it was a pretty broad
ranging conversation.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey
Yeah, thank you so much for joining me today. It was a real pleasure.
Mick Ryan
No problem, it's good to talk to you.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey
Thanks for listening to Technology and Security. I've been your host, Dr. Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: . This podcast is brought to you by Strat Futures. If there was a moment you enjoyed today or a question you have about the show, send an email to the address in the show notes. Please write, review and subscribe to help promote technology and security.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey
Welcome to Technology and Security. TS is a podcast exploring the intersections of emerging technologies and national security. I'm your host, Dr. Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: . I'm the founding CEO of Strat Futures Proprietary Limited and adjunct associate professor at Deakin University. My guest today is Mick Ryan. Thanks for joining me, Mick.
Mick Ryan
Thanks, Miah it's great to be with you.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey
Major General Mick Ryan is a commentator and advisor on strategy, technology and war.
He spent 35 years in the Australian Army, commanding at all levels, including in East Timor, Iraq, and Afghanistan, as well as the Australian Defense College. He has been awarded Meritorious Service and Commendation medals and is a member of the Order of Australia. Mick is a Senior Fellow for Military Studies at the Lowy Institute and Fellow at CSIS. He's also a Strategic Advisor to a number of companies in Australia, the US, and UK. As well, Mick is a prolific writer, publishing regularly with numerous analytic papers and three books since 2022. You can read his work on the Futura Doctrina sub stack. We're coming to you today from the lands of the Gadigal people. We pay our respects to elders past, present, and emerging and acknowledge their continuing connection to land, community.
Let's go straight to the contest spectrum. What's a cooperation, competition or conflict you see coming in 2026?
Mick Ryan
I actually see a fourth C chaos. At the moment we've seen the end of the world that we were all very comfortable with since 1945. was hardly an easy world, but it was a world that democracies like Australia came to understand how to operate within. They came to understand the extent and the limitations on the economic, military, societal power within that 80 year span of history, that's gone. It's not coming back. That whole era of post-World War II Pax Americana is gone. It may come back at some point in the future, but I think the next year at least will be an interregnum, a period between two global systems. We know what the old one was, but the new one is yet to take shape, and there are multiple shapes that it might.
Assume it could well be spheres of influence. It could well be one dominant hyper power. There's a couple of countries that might be. It could well be an even greater fracturing with lots of mid-sized players all yapping for the scraps left over from an America that appears keen not to play on the world stage. So for me, the big C for 2026 is chaos.
The world's always uncertain, but I think we're going to see higher levels of uncertainty, higher levels of chaos over the coming year.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey
can you take us through what that might look like in daily life for Australians?
Mick Ryan
Well, think first thing it means we need to potentially reconsider our international security relationships. America is clearly our most important security partner, has been since the end of 1941. I think it will continue to be a very important one, but it's relatively important, so the time will probably decline just because Americans are overextended and unwilling.
to do some of the things that they've either committed to or appeared willing to do in previous decades. ⁓ That will have an impact on our relationship with other countries, but it's probably going to have an impact on defence spending. And the immediate impact for Australians is either taxes have to go up or governments spend less on other things. ⁓ We spend a lot more on health.
on ⁓ social welfare, on NDIS than we do on defence, we may be forced, I'm not saying it will happen, but we may well be forced in the coming year or two to reconsider the balance between internal and external expenditures by this and future Australian governments. That will have a very significant impact on Australians. It will have an impact on the level of service they've come to expect.
from government may have an impact on how much tax they pay. So I think that alone is a fairly considerable impact on Australians. And it's not just defence. It's all elements of national security. will be intelligence agencies. It could well be a very significant step up in civil defence and critical infrastructure protection. So there's a whole range of impacts this might have on Australia right from now.
and we really need to rethink how we see the world if we're to recast Australian strategy for interacting with that world.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey
You recently wrote that it is clear the pleasant post World War Two existence and network of relationships has been winding down. You then go on to argue the first step in addressing the situation is to have the intellectual honesty and moral courage to correctly diagnose the situation and describe it clearly. Is there anything else you wanted to add about this new period that we're entering?
Mick Ryan
Yeah, good strategy always starts with a good, honest diagnosis. We don't always get that from governments these days. information clearly plays a different role in strategy and governance and international relations than what it played even a decade ago with social media, with generative AI, ⁓ with, you know, agentic systems that support government and non-government decision making, ⁓ with the ability of countries to undertake cognitive warfare to convince whole populations about their aspirations or the reality of situation. I think that's a very important part of the global dynamic we need to understand. then obviously global economics is evolving. might just be the largest economy in the world, but it's relative. ⁓ wealth has changed over time. And China is making a very significant effort to wrest from America control of the international economic system. It's not there yet. It's not even close to it, but it could well ⁓ make a lot of headway in the coming year as countries look at what is going on in Washington, D.C. and some of the speeches from the incumbent president and wonder really whether they need to throw in all their eggs in the US basket in the future.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey:
You and I have spoken previously about the enduring and perhaps increasing nature of strategic surprise. In the realm of technology and security, what strategic shifts or surprises are you thinking about this year?
Mick Ryan
Yeah, I wonder whether we might see some kind of internal fracture in the United States. I think the trends are all pointing towards something like that, potentially. The very significant government domestic crackdown in several states in the United States point towards more civil strife there. I think that is ⁓ really important to keep an eye upon.
Also, Russia is certainly nowhere near as solid as Putin would like us to believe. It has some very profound societal and economic problems that could result in something bad quickly in Russia as has in the past. ⁓ I think that in places like China, we could see Xi Jinping decide 2026 is the year he to seize the prosperous young democracy of Taiwan that he seems to believe is part of China and in fact has never been part of the People's Republic of China. So I mean, those are the big three. I think too that we need to keep an eye on things like shifts in weather. I think that is still something that, you know, with everything going on out of the White House, tend to lose track that global warming is something that is happening. ⁓ The science is there. It's hard to have five scientists agree on one thing. Having thousands agree on it is good enough for me. It's not some cabal that's invented this thing. But I think we might see more of the macro impacts of that. And that's also going to change government policies around the world. It's going to change how they spend their money.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey
I want to go to a segment on alliances. So given everything you've just laid out, what are the key alliances in technology and security that we really need to be focused on?
Mick Ryan
Well, there's obviously the international ones, government to government, they're important alliances. I clearly the American alliance is critical to Australia. There's no replacement for that relationship because of its depth, breadth and length of time that we've had. There's not another country we could do it to.
So America's important is not just because of the military and intelligence relationship, but the financial relationship is far more profound in many respects than the one with China. We might trade a lot with China, but the foreign direct investment that Australia receives from the United States is an order of magnitude greater than the trade relationship with China. A lot of people don't look at that, but they should.
So that's a really important relationship for military intelligence, economic, and just in a social sense, Americans and Australians like each other. We like having a relationship generally.
I think individual Australians highly value that relationship and things like the annual low-e poll that we do every year prove that, that people value that relationship with our American cousins.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey
true, but how do we reconcile that with the way that America is currently behaving on the international stage?
Mick Ryan
Well, there's almost no reconciling it. And I think that's the problem at the moment, right, is we've had this relationship for 80 years across a wide array of societal concerns. And to see this is I think there's still for many people going through a mourning period. This is a country we've looked up to, a country that said, you know, we're bear any burden or any cost. ⁓ It's now saying, what's the best deal you can give us?
that is a really significant shift in outlook. I think we once again, we're in this interregnum period, not just in the global order, but we're in this interregnum period in our relationship with the United States. We don't know actually what the long term relationship might be like. We're not in the old one, but we're in this period of chaotic change for a little while yet. So America is the principal relationship. You know, I think
Our regional relationships are extraordinarily important. Japan is a first order partner in many respects. We've gone from being bitter enemies to being very close friends in less than a century. They have been extraordinarily good international citizens in many regards and have been very important to the economic development of Australia since the 1970s, as has Korea in a more recent, but they were also very important.
If you're coming, you know, the countries of Southeast Asia, whether it's Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Melanesia are also really important culturally and in a security sense to Australia and will be more important in an economic sense. And then of course, our cousins across the ditch in New Zealand. You know, I'm biased. have a Kiwi wife and I have a deep admiration and love for New Zealand. And I think most Australians feel that.
we sometimes forget that relationship, but I think we do so at our peril. think it's a very important one for our national character and that of New Zealand. I think we're very closely related. And then there's Europe that's always going to be important. ⁓ Not just the UK, but Germany, Netherlands and countries like that. Once again, very large sources of foreign direct investment in Australia and countries that we have cultural affinities with. And we shouldn't forget that security and prosperity in Europe has a direct impact on security and prosperity in Australia. It's not just something on the other side of the world.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey
Yeah, absolutely. Do you think there's a shift between this idea of national alliances based on values or interests? That's been the kind of discourse for generations. Is that going to stay but just in a slightly different manner?
Mick Ryan
I ⁓ interest is still going to be the principal driver for international relationships, whether it's security or economic interests. And that's always been the case in the American and Australian relationship. We're just dumb lucky that our interests and our values seem to align more often than not. I mean, it's kind of like a cake. The interest is the cake. The values is the icing on top. I think the icing is just going to be quite a bit thinner in some of our relationships in the coming years. Thucydides wrote, know, ⁓ fear, honour interests. These are the things that really do seem to drive
international affairs and relationships but interests I think are the principal concern and I don't think that's going to change.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey
So you are obviously very well known for your analysis and commentary on the current Ukraine war. In a recent paper, which I'll link in the show notes, you outlined 10 lessons from the Ukraine war for our region. Can you explain two of these in a bit of detail today and their implications for the Indo-Pacific? So firstly, cognitive warfare and inter-societal conflict, and secondly, rapid and expanding adaptation.
Mick Ryan
Sure. I just wasn't seeing the translation of Ukraine lessons for different geographic and political regions of the world. Too many journalists and others were just taking the lessons and flopping them down over the top of countries or military services. You've got to be able to filter the lessons from Ukraine, understand the specific elements of context there. and then kind of translate them for different regions, different political systems, different military cultures. So that's what I attempted to do in the macro sense for the Pacific, for Ukraine. So the two key lessons you want me to talk about, cognitive warfare and societal ⁓ interaction. know, ⁓ influence has always been part of war. Violence and influence are the two sides of the coin that is war. So influence is nothing new.
What is new is some of the new technologies, whether it's data sciences, whether it's our understanding of how the brain works, our understanding of things like game theory, ⁓ and obviously more recently, LLM's generative AI and their ability to ⁓ identify target sets, human target sets, from individuals to nation states and everything in between, craft specific messages very quickly for those target sets, deliver those messages.
almost instantaneously and then measure the impact of those messages. That is unprecedented. That has never been possible before in human history. And part of what that's resulting in is closer interaction between societies. It used to be, for example, in the Pacific War between America and Japan, the only people who came into contact with the soldiers, the airmen and women, ⁓ the sailors who were fighting.
The societies were separated by oceans and never came into contact with each other. They knew what they knew about each other through the different propaganda effects. That's not the case. Societies can directly interact with each other now. We've seen that, for example, in the Ukraine war, where Russians and Ukrainians have been interacting on an individual basis since the start of the war, understanding that most Ukrainians speak Russian,
So you're seeing a different dynamic in war, you're seeing a greater surface area of conflict because of that greater societal interaction. And you're seeing more weaknesses and fissures become exposed that might be exploited in a future conflict in the Pacific, for example. The other one was adaptation. This is something obviously near and dear to my heart over last 30 years.
You know, I think what we've seen in Ukraine is both sides have learnt how to learn better. You've seen ⁓ tactical adaptation, which is about learning and adaptation to improve how you win battles, as well as strategic adaptation, which is the learning and adaptation which improves your ability to win wars. And these have been spinning at different rates. I think the Russians over four years have made more progress in their ability
to learn how to learn, certainly at the strategic level. They're better at synchronizing between industry and lessons. And they've been very good at sharing lessons the adversary learning and adaptation block of Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, where they are able to share lessons, not just about drones, but about strategic coercion, about economic sanctions busting.
around strategic misinformation and cognitive warfare in near real time. So you're seeing this, ⁓ these adaptation cycles spinning and spinning and speeding up and they're moving at a speed that is incomprehensible to most Australian bureaucrats. They could not comprehend just how quickly the Ukrainians are learning, adapting and rolling out new tactics.
new technology on the battlefield, how quickly the Russians are doing. We are extraordinarily slow in our ability to do that in Australia, not just in the military, but our broader society, as the lack of reform in the business community shows. we need to understand how the contemporary adaptation war is working. It's not a battle, it's a global war of adaptation.
It's something that the authoritarians are doing in near real time, which once again was not possible just a decade ago. And it's something we need to understand and address because I tend to think that the most revolutionary transformation in war now is not AI or drones. It's the ability to learn and adapt at speed, at different levels with your partners.
I think that is transforming war in a way that even AI and drones are not.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey:
what lessons should Australia and our allies take from Ukraine about the relationship between commercial technology and national security?
Mick Ryan
Yeah, I think the most important thing we need to do, except ⁓ that there is a relationship and people in defence need to be humble enough to listen to ⁓ the defence industry ⁓ more than what they do and not be scared away by the probity zealots who seem to want to stop every kind of, not just discussion, but even thinking about defence industry. I mean, it's a pervasive fear in defence.
talking to the defence industry, just as there's a pervasive fear about talking to the media. We need to get over that because there's an enormously beneficial relationship there, I think, that not only makes both sides better informed, but allows us to move at a much greater speed than what we can and allows both sides to take more risk within the relationship if there's more trust and more understanding between them. We need to do better and we certainly need to do much better at nurturing small and medium Australian enterprises
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey
At Lowy, you've written about the Ukraine war as a laboratory for 21st century conflict. What technology lessons from Ukraine do you think Western policymakers are still oversimplifying
Mick Ryan
Yeah, think the democratisation of ⁓ digital systems and awareness has been something that went in a direction we probably weren't planning to go ourselves. Every soldier now carries digital systems that allow them to pull down and upload information for various functions they might undertake. mean, in the Australian Army, we can only do that at company level still.
It's not very impressive, to be quite frank, given the time we've messed around with it. So the Ukrainians in a very short time have rolled this out to every single individual. So the democratisation of information on the battlefield.
is and will continue to change command methods, tactics, structures, warfighting concepts, a whole range of things. It will change how we train and educate our people because we need a different level of trust. I don't think we're really across that. The second thing I think with autonomous systems, whether it's land, sea, air-based, it doesn't really matter. But what you're seeing is larger numbers of drones per person.
What that means is you are giving people even more capacity. You're not replacing people, you're extending human capacity. But what you're seeing is new and evolved organisations arising. So for example, you know, I visit frontline brigades when I go to Ukraine. Each of them has one or two drone battalions in each brigade. Every battalion has one or two drone companies. Australian Army has one drone battalion for the entire army.
But it's changing tactics, it's changing warfighting concepts and this is the real trick with technology. Technology doesn't change anything. It's when you combine technology with new organisations and new operating concepts, that's when you get true transformation. I think we're seeing that with autonomous systems in Ukraine, everything from drone services down to
the level of awareness that individual soldiers have. So I think they're really important lessons when it comes to technology. Technology's cool, but it's useless without the humans designing how it's used, where it's used, in what organizations and in what concepts.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey
One of my further questions was about how militaries are investing heavily in autonomous systems and decision support tools. leading on from that, how do you see human judgment evolving in defence decision making?
Mick Ryan
Well, you know the hope of course is that ⁓ AI should extend human cognition and there's been some really good research Done on this topic about you know AI extenders. It's basically not replacing human cognition or human decision-making but Extending, know our attention and search features of the human brain our ability to Develop lots of courses of action or to analyse them more quickly. So the theory
of the case is it should extend human cognition. I think, however, the reality might be closer to social media where people have kind of given up their ability to critique or discriminate right from wrong, real from fake. And it worries me that generations in the future may just subcontract their cognition or cognitive functions to AI and not use it. And if you don't use it, you'll lose it.
It's like language, don't practice it, you lose it. And thinking and your critical thinking skills are the same. somehow we need to have the systems to sustain and build human critical thinking whilst augmenting and extending it with ⁓ agentic planning and other different agents.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey
What are some of the interdependencies and vulnerabilities between technology and war that you wish were better understood?
Mick Ryan
I guess the first interdependency is that wars and militaries are not the same thing. Wars are national, and people seem to think, you know, if there's a war on it's just the military. Well, it's not. A war is something an entire nation engages in. And we forgot that. We forgot that after Korea, and therefore...
You know, the disasters of Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere were built on entire societies thinking, well, the army can just go fix that. Well, that doesn't work. You need to engage an entire society or don't do it. And I think that's a really important ⁓ thing that people need to understand. If you're going to commit to military operations, the whole country commits, or don't do it. So that's the first one.
I think the second one is ensuring that your military forces, be they professional, conscripted, part-time, it doesn't matter. There'll be different models. But you need to ensure that they understand and abide by the values of the society they serve. ⁓ War is not just about kill them all. It's not just about arbitrary destruction. It still has some rules. And there's some really good reasons why.
It does. ⁓ you know, it's the right thing to do to only kill as many people as you need to, not as many people as you want to. Secondly, under just war theory, there's a long tradition of not deliberately killing civilians. You know, that's a pretty good principle, I think. And one, think Australian soldiers in particular, being very good at understanding and abiding by, with one or two exceptions. Three,
If you don't arbitrarily kill people who don't need to be killed or murder POWs like the Russians do, you have a better chance of your own POWs surviving that entire experience. So I think that's important. Fourth, it's about the reputation of your country and how your country sees itself. And finally, it's about protecting the souls of our soldiers. You know, if you kill someone, that weighs on your soul.
Maybe not immediately, but it does at some point. We know that for a fact. It is the single largest driver of ⁓ combat stress and potential PTSD down the track. So for all these reasons, the moral and ethical approach to military affairs and war fighting is really important. Now, that doesn't mean we don't do things we're not comfortable with. Sometimes we have to. You know, the firebombing of
Tokyo in March 1945, which killed 100,000 Japanese in one night, is, from modern sensibilities, a repulsive act. But it was the best choice of lots of awful choices at that time. So sometimes ethics isn't just about doing the right thing. Sometimes ethics is about choosing the least awful option, because in war, there's no such thing as a good choice. It's choices between terrible and catastrophic.
So we need to understand ethics, not just about doing good things, but sometimes when it comes to national survival, you've got to do the least awful thing.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey
On that sobering note, how can technology be used to strengthen national resilience?
Mick Ryan
Yeah, well, think there's a lot of areas here. mean, national resilience isn't something I think ⁓ governments have paid enough attention to. And, you know, what national resilience is, is changing. ⁓ know, Australia is the only member of the international energy community that doesn't have the 90 days of energy stocks onshore. We have these complex and, quite frankly, idiotic formulas that, you know, fuel on ships and...
Other things can be used to add up, but no one's buying that. We don't have enough energy reserves in this country But it's the same with critical manufacturers like medicines and key components in all the fertilizers used by our farmers. They're all imported. So that's one dimension of resilience, stockholding, understanding where your stocks are, what the quantities are.
how accessible ⁓ technology can deliver all this. The second thing obviously is cyber resilience. Everything's hooked up to the internet these days. And whether it is hospital systems, whether it is municipal, water treatment plants, all these kinds of things, they need to be resilient because there are very clever people who absolutely hate us, who are very happy to manipulate these things.
And then there's physical resilience, How physically resilient is our energy infrastructure? How physically resilient are our military bases? You know, how physically resilient is, for example, the ASIO headquarters in Canberra? You know, I think a spider web operation at an air base in Australia while a visiting B2 bomber is there and damages that would be
catastrophic for our alliance, in many other reasons. So there's a physical resilience piece. And then finally, there's a societal resilience. Now, how do you ensure people are well informed about the threats and can prepare themselves mentally for them? I mean, the Swedes and others have put out booklets to society. think Australians understand there's always a natural threat. This is another dimension of that. There is a threat from malign actors who hate us.
and we'd be very happy to see Australians die or suffer in large numbers in a future conflict. And we need to prepare our people psychologically for that.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey
I'm go to a segment called emerging tech for emerging leaders. What do you see as the biggest shift for leaders and leadership from new technologies?
Mick Ryan
Well, you need to understand them. mean, one of the things I did at the War College was set up
specific courses called technology for strategists so they could understand the policy and strategic implications of these new technologies quantum hypersonics these kind of things. So just basic literacy in new technologies is Fundamental to leadership these days you can't abrogate that
it is something that's an ongoing effort because one, there's always new leaders and two, technology is changing very, very rapidly. So I think that's the most important thing when it comes to technology and leadership is you need to stay across it.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey
What are the most underappreciated ethical and strategic risks of AI when it comes to shaping judgments about proportionality, escalation, and acceptable casual thresholds?
Mick Ryan
Well the obvious point is AI isn't human. It has no stake. It has no dog in the fight in any decision whatsoever. It has no existential imperative. It has no relatives that might suffer. It has no human empathy. Now you might say some of our leaders don't have human empathy either, but at least in theory they do. They may choose not to use it. Well AI does not have it, will never have it.
So we need to understand that it's not human. We shouldn't give it human characteristics. It's a computer program that's really, really good and has been well-trained and all this kind of stuff. I get the technology. It's not human. It is silicon-based. And therefore, we cannot allow them to make the final big decisions on strategies, policy. ⁓
that some are purporting that we should. We should never give AI any control over nuclear weapons because as ⁓ fragile as humans are and as stupid as we are at times, we've managed to avoid a nuclear holocaust for 81 years now. That's actually pretty good.
I think we need to be very, very careful about what we let AI do when it comes to large scale decisions about nations. Nothing wrong with it. Wargaming things, providing options, extending our thinking about strategic options or diagnosing problems. But when it comes to decisions, humans must make the decision.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey
You've long been interested in technology, adaptation and innovation in war and thread throughout your whole career. What are some of the trends that have most interested you?
Mick Ryan
I think trends in the last quarter century, one has been a... propensity to serve in society has changed. I don't think as many people are willing to commit to the rigours.
of a, for example, a military service career, you're seeing a greater professionalization. That's good in some respects but it separates the military from society more. I don't think that's a positive trend. I think it's a negative trend. as Sir John Hackett said, when a society looks in a mirror, it should see the military reflected back at it. And when that's not the case, which is very possible when it comes to
hyper-professional militaries, that is not a good outcome. So I think that trend is a very interesting one for us to understand. That's why I'm a big fan of national service. think it's something Australia's going to have to I don't think we're going to have any choice. We're going to have to do it. But that service needs to be ⁓ societal. You can drive an ambulance. You can be in the bushfire brigade because the imperative isn't building the military. The imperative
is joining 18 year olds to their society, not to their cell phones. I think another really important trend is ⁓ lowered trust in institutions. That's a real problem because people are more susceptible to misinformation. ⁓
more susceptible to violence ⁓ against ⁓ people serving their country, particularly police and others who do so much. So I think that's a really troubling trend.
And then just societal cohesion. think, as I wrote at one point, know, I think we have this Hebrew word, concepsia, which is about, you know, the dominant idea that can't be challenged. You know, for a long time, there's been this concepsia in Australia that we're socially cohesive. And I think things like the Bondi massacre and others have shown that maybe we're not as cohesive as we thought we were. And we should be asking some tough questions about ourselves.
and about a whole range of elements of how our society works and things like that. So there's no military and technology trends in there that I've ⁓ highlighted, but I think they're the three that would worry me most because when it comes to the kind of things I look at when it comes to war and strategic competition, you have to start at the strategic and national layer and work your way down, not start at the military layer and work your way up.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey
Yeah, from my perspective in national security the impending chaos requires so many elements of social, you know, institutions and citizens to become closer. When we think about that in the context of national resilience, what practical steps should we take now to harden our cognitive defenses?
Mick Ryan
I think the first thing is the state federal relationship. I know the COVID experience brought out some strengths and it brought out some weaknesses and I know there are some efforts at the federal level and state levels to relook and improve those relationships. ⁓ I think the bomb in the caravan in New South Wales was just a recent manifestation of state federal relationships probably not being as effective.
as they really need to be for the era we're in. They might have worked in the 80s, but they're not as effective as they need to be now. So I think that's really important. But I think of overwhelming importance, and it's something we haven't seen for a little while in this country, is having politicians and national leaders who are willing to have very tough, honest conversations with the citizens of this country and what the resourcing implications of that might be.
I think, you know, domestic harmony is one of those areas that we've been forced to have a conversation on. I think the China stabilisation narrative has prevented honest conversations about the nature of different threats being posed to this country in the modern era. And I don't see in any party in this country, the willingness to have those tough, honest conversations with citizens. They want tough, honest votes for them. And that's about it.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey
I mean, I agree, But I also see how difficult governing is in a society that is, has just the rise of disinformation, misinformation, kind of, you know, this cognitive influence and interference capacity.
government aren't especially well equipped right now to deal with, you know, different military, economic, informational, technological, other challenges. How can we better integrate those so that we equip government, and the bureaucracy as well as politicians to bring that together? Because you're absolutely right, those conversations need to be had.
Mick Ryan
Well, my radical proposal is give politicians more time to keep up by public funding elections. Outlaw political donations in this country, allocate individuals and parties a certain amount of money for elections, and that's it. ⁓ Don't allow them to get out and do fundraising for the next election, just publicly fund it. And you know what? It might cost us a couple of hundred million dollars extra, but I guarantee There are huge savings to be had in a more informed political class that aren't having to make backroom deals or promises for certain interest groups. I really think that's the political revolution that we need, not just in this country, but in every democracy. Publicly fund elections, outlaw political donations, and have people that have more time.
to become experts at governing rather than electioneering and ⁓ all the other things that go with that. know, if had to pick one thing, that's what I do. And I've got to tell you, it's way, way, way cheaper.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey
would have a lot of I think that would have a lot of support in Australia. I want to go to a segment called disconnect. how do you wind down and disconnect?
Mick Ryan
Get off all the digital devices, ⁓ go for a swim, go for a walk. I try and do those things, watch movies, read a real book, I just come back from a few days in New Zealand and my father-in-law has no wifi, no internet. It's actually pretty nice to do a digital cleanse and not be connected.
or hyper connected as is probably more the case these days. you know, it's a range of different things and you know, every now and then I'll wake up and I'll lie in bed, drink a coffee for a couple of hours and go, you know what? I don't feel like writing today. And that might be once a month, but I never go against it because somehow I just know I need it. And I know the next day I'll be twice as keen to get back into it because writing is my yoga. It's what I do.
nine days out of 10 or 29 days out of 30 or 31. So for me, I find writing cathartic, but I also find it a great way to create something that didn't exist before. And as someone who was a combat engineer, I always liked the making as well as the blowing up stuff. And the opportunity, which we all have, to create something that didn't exist before through a piece of writing is, I find enormously ⁓ wonderful and amazing and something that's accessible to every single human being on the planet.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey
Yeah, it's such a good discipline because it also forces clarity. Can be slow. Yeah.
Mick Ryan
Eventually, you know, well,
the clarity's not in the writing, the clarity's in the editing, as you know.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey
Absolutely. It's nice once it's done. I'm going to go to a segment called Eyes and Ears. What have you been reading, listening to or watching lately that's of interest to my audience?
Mick Ryan
I've just started a New book by a couple of former CAO officers called the great heist about how China over four decades has undertaken a very systemic systemic industrial espionage Program against the United States, you know collecting up to half a trillion dollars worth of IP a year over that period So that's a really interesting book
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey:
we're entering 2026 so deeply integrated, you know, with the United States on security and defence and notwithstanding many great shifts in that relationship. The foundations, are essentially there and our interests, at least, and many of our values still align. We're also economically intertwined with China and trying to build more relationships both in our region and of course, in Europe. How do any emerging technologies complicate our ability to navigate this strategic tightrope?
Mick Ryan
I think technology first and foremost provides opportunities for Australian companies to build different service models and service industries that can become part of our exports. So I think that's important. We've seen that from a couple of different companies in Australia. I'd love to see more. I I obviously love this country and think the people are extraordinary. I just would like to see a regulatory framework that's more encouraging of small and medium sized businesses so they can eventually become
global behemoths. ⁓ So think that's important. ⁓ The relationship with China and the United States is something that we're just not going to be able to walk away from, certainly not in the short or medium term. It's a careful and difficult dance. And frankly, to give the current government their due, they have managed the relationship with the Trump administration okay up till now.
They've managed to avoid the angst that the Europeans, Greenlanders, Canadians, Mexicans, Venezuelans, and many others have experienced. That might be good management. There's probably some of that. Might just be good luck because they haven't turned their particular eye of Sauron on us at the moment. That could be coming and we better be prepared for it. That is the worst case that strategists prepare for, not the best case that we're experiencing at the moment.
So Australian governments are going to have to have a red line of what they will take and what they won't take in abuse from the Trump administration. I think you're going to see administrations in the future potentially with similar instincts for abuse of partners and friends. But they're also going to have to have what they do when a friend crosses a red line, just as we're going to have to have a process for what we do when China crosses a red line with us.
And I'm not sure that's very clear at the moment.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey
My final segment is Need to Know. Is there anything I didn't ask that would have been great to cover?
Mick Ryan
Just two things. mean, what are the lotto numbers for tomorrow night? And who's going to win the State of Origin this year? the second one's probably more important than the first one.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey
I don't have great answers on either, I'm sorry.
Mick, thank you so much for joining.
Mick Ryan
No, I think it was a pretty broad
ranging conversation.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey
Yeah, thank you so much for joining me today. It was a real pleasure.
Mick Ryan
No problem, it's good to talk to you.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey
Thanks for listening to Technology and Security. I've been your host, Dr. Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: . This podcast is brought to you by Strat Futures. If there was a moment you enjoyed today or a question you have about the show, send an email to the address in the show notes. Please write, review and subscribe to help promote technology and security.
