War Transformed

Mick Ryan finished War Transformed as a retired Australian Army Major General with three decades in uniform behind him, including command of the Australian Defence College and a long run of doctrinal, training, and joint-force appointments. Naval Institute Press published the book in 2022, at a moment when the strategic conversation in Washington, Canberra, and London had swung decisively away from the counter-insurgency and stabilisation preoccupations of the previous twenty years toward great-power competition with China and, more urgently in Europe, Russia. Ryan was writing into a growing shelf of books — Christian Brose’s Kill Chain, Paul Scharre’s Army of None, P. W. Singer’s earlier work on robotics, David Kilcullen on hybrid threats — that argued military institutions built for one era were staring down another. What set Ryan’s contribution apart was the vantage point: rather than a Washington think-tanker or a technology journalist, the author was a career practitioner who had spent his last uniformed years running an institution whose entire purpose was preparing officers to think. The book reads like the crystallisation of that project — an attempt to hand the next generation of officers a framework, not a set of predictions.

The central argument leans on a distinction familiar to anyone who has read Clausewitz. The nature of war, Ryan insists, is not changing. It remains political, violent, uncertain, and irreducibly human — a contest of wills waged for political ends, carried on the backs of soldiers, sailors, and airmen who bleed. What is changing, and changing quickly, is the character of war: the technologies armies use, the domains in which they fight, the speed at which decisions must be made, the competitors they face, and the intellectual demands placed on those who lead. The book’s implicit warning is that Western militaries have grown complacent about that distinction, treating each new capability as an incremental upgrade rather than reading the pattern behind them. Ryan argues that the convergence of artificial intelligence, autonomy, robotics, additive manufacturing, biotechnology, quantum sensing, and cheap ubiquitous sensors is producing something categorically different from the sum of its parts, and that the militaries which recognise the pattern and adapt their institutions to it will outfight those that treat the transformation as a procurement problem. The book keeps returning to a single word: adaptation. The organisations that win the coming decades will be the ones that can learn faster than their opponents, in peacetime and in combat.

The book is organised in three broad movements, though Ryan does not label them so bluntly. The opening section sketches the strategic environment — the drift from the post-Cold War moment into an era in which the People’s Republic of China is a peer competitor with global ambitions and a modernising military, in which Russia has demonstrated a willingness to overturn borders and conduct sub-threshold operations across Europe, and in which second-tier powers such as Iran and North Korea are able to project disproportionate influence through cheap drones, cyber tools, and proxy forces. The middle and largest movement is a tour through the technologies and domains that are reshaping the battlefield: artificial intelligence and human-machine teaming, robotics and autonomous systems, the militarisation of space, the maturation of cyber as a warfighting domain, the return of information and cognitive warfare to the centre of strategic contest, and the growing salience of biological and materials sciences. The closing movement, which is where Ryan’s own experience shows through most strongly, is about people and institutions — the kind of leaders militaries will need, the way officers should be educated, how doctrine should be written and rewritten, and how force design should be treated as a continuous process rather than a decadal event. Threaded through all three movements are historical case studies drawn from earlier moments of military transformation — the interwar German embrace of combined-arms manoeuvre, the American development of carrier aviation, Israeli wartime adaptation — used to make the point that the technology alone never explains the outcome. The institutions that read the new technology honestly and reorganised around it outfought those that grafted it onto old assumptions.

The evidence Ryan brings is deliberately mixed. He draws heavily on recent conflicts, particularly the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war, where Azerbaijani forces used Turkish Bayraktar TB2 drones and Israeli loitering munitions to dismantle Armenian armoured columns and air defences, offering an early public glimpse of what massed, cheap, semi-autonomous air power could do to a conventionally arrayed force. He examines the fate of the main battle tank in an environment saturated with top-attack munitions and persistent aerial surveillance, without ever making the easy claim that armour is dead — his interest is in how the balance between concealment, dispersion, and mass is shifting, not in gadget-worship. He gives substantial attention to Chinese thinking, walking readers through the People’s Liberation Army’s post-2015 reforms under Xi Jinping, the concept of “intelligentization” (智能化) as the successor doctrine to “informatization,” and the way Chinese military writers describe algorithmic and cognitive warfare as the next competitive terrain. He does the equivalent work on the Russian side, tracing the intellectual lineage of “New Generation Warfare” and the integration of conventional, unconventional, cyber, and information tools into a single continuous campaign. He looks at Western defence tech firms — Palantir , Anduril and their peers — as evidence that the civil-military boundary in advanced economies is dissolving, and that the future defence industrial base will look less like the twentieth-century primes and more like a hybrid of platform contractors and software firms. On the American conceptual side, he engages with ideas such as DARPA’s mosaic warfare, the Air Force’s Joint All-Domain Command and Control, and the broader push to disaggregate mass and reconstitute it dynamically through networks. Throughout, Ryan is careful to distinguish between doctrine that has been fielded, doctrine that is being fought over inside institutions, and doctrine that is still aspirational.

One of the book’s more distinctive threads is its treatment of the human dimension. Ryan is emphatic that the coming era is not one of pure autonomy, in which humans are gradually pushed out of the loop by faster and cheaper machines. His preferred formulation is human-machine teaming — the pairing of algorithmic speed and machine endurance with human judgement and moral responsibility — and he treats the design of that partnership as one of the central intellectual problems of the coming decades. The book argues that the officers who will succeed in this environment will need a broader intellectual base than their predecessors: fluency in the strategic history of technology, comfort with data and with the limits of machine learning, an ability to write and to communicate, and the discipline to keep asking political and ethical questions in an environment where technical possibility runs ahead of policy. This is the point at which Ryan the former head of a defence college is most visible. His prescriptions on professional military education — that it must be continuous, that it must be intellectually serious, that senior officers must be readers and writers, that institutions must reward original thinking rather than punish it — read less as futurism than as a plea from someone who has watched too many bright junior officers ground down by the wrong incentives.

Reception in the professional military and defence-policy community was warm. War Transformed became a widely cited text in Western staff colleges and appeared regularly on reading lists across the Australian, British, and American services. Ryan’s public profile grew substantially after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, when his running commentary on operations, published on Twitter and later on his Substack “Futura Doctrina,” made him one of the most-quoted independent analysts of the war. That exposure had a retrospective effect on the book: readers went back to it looking for the framework behind the tweets, and many of its arguments — about the intersection of cheap drones and precision fires, about learning organisations, about the fusion of civilian and military tech — read as unusually well-timed. Counterpoints exist. Some reviewers argued that Ryan, like most of the strategic-competition literature, still frames the world through a Western-centric lens and does not fully reckon with how Chinese and Russian theorists understand cognitive and political warfare on their own terms. Others pushed back on the assumption that convergent technologies will meaningfully favour open societies; the Ukraine war has since offered evidence in both directions. A separate line of criticism, common to the whole future-war shelf, holds that authors of this kind consistently overweight the shiny new capabilities and underweight the persistence of attritional, industrial, logistical war — a critique Ryan himself has substantially absorbed in his subsequent public writing on Ukraine, where he has been unusually clear that mass, ammunition production, and the ability to sustain casualties still decide campaigns.

For a reader building a shelf on artificial intelligence and war, War Transformed sits in a specific and useful place. It is not primarily a technology book — those who want a granular treatment of autonomous weapons should reach for Paul Scharre’s Army of None or his more recent Four Battlegrounds, and those who want the procurement and Pentagon-politics angle should reach for Christian Brose’s Kill Chain. Ryan’s book is a strategy and institutions book, in which technology is the driver rather than the subject. It is also unusually accessible: written in clean prose, organised around ideas rather than systems, and pitched at a reader who cares about how militaries think rather than at a specialist tracking specific programmes. That makes it especially useful for serving officers looking for a framework to hang their own reading on, and for policy readers who want to understand why the doctrinal conversation inside Western militaries feels so unsettled. It pairs well with the tech-heavy books already mentioned, with T. X. Hammes on cheap precision, with David Kilcullen on the Dragons and Snakes competition, and with the older but still relevant work of Andrew Krepinevich on assessing military transformations. It does not attempt to be an encyclopedia of every emerging capability, and readers looking for a comprehensive technical taxonomy will find it thin in places. Its ambition is different: to hand the reader a way of thinking about the transformation rather than a catalogue of its parts.

What is likely to age well in War Transformed is precisely the material that is least dependent on any specific technology. The insistence that the nature of war has not changed, the emphasis on institutional learning as a decisive variable, the argument that intellectual preparation of officers is at least as consequential as procurement, the framing of adaptation as a continuous practice rather than a periodic exercise — these are Clausewitzian rather than futurist points, and they will read as sensibly in a decade as they do now. What will date faster are some of the specific programme names, the particular weight given to systems that were prominent in 2020 and 2021, and any implicit prediction about the exact shape of the next decade of great-power competition. Ryan’s subsequent output — his Substack, his novel White Sun War imagining a Taiwan conflict, his running commentary on Ukraine — is best read as a continuation of the book, not a replacement for it. Anyone who follows the ongoing conversation about how democracies should prepare their militaries for an era of accelerating technological change will find that War Transformed remains the compact statement of a view that has since been extended, tested against a European land war, and largely, though not entirely, borne out.