The War for Ukraine
Strategy and Adaptation Under Fire
Nick Ryan
Annapolis, MD, USA: Naval Institute Press, 2024
Hardback 360pp RRP $64.99
Reviewer: David Rees, January 2025
In his analysis of the on-going war between Russia and Ukraine, the author describes how each side has learnt from the progress of the war to date and how they continue to develop new strategies and adaptations to their weapons and tactics in order to create winning advantages. Mick Ryan is a well-known commentator on warfare and he is a retired Australian Army major-general. His speciality is in the study and teaching of military strategy and with that background, he is able to provide a deep understanding of the various strategies, tactics and weaponry employed by both sides and how effectively they have been used and further developed. In addition to the wealth of observations on the war for Ukraine, the book has 68 pages of Endnotes, an extensive Bliography of 32 pages as well as an extensive Index. In explaining his views on the war, Ryan draws on the strategic works of other well-known writers like Carl von Clausewitz, Eliot Cohen and Lawrence Freedman and many others. So, the book is an excellent historical reference for strategic theorists, politicians, military leaders and academics.
Ever since the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, which made Ukraine one of the twelve independent sovereign states within the Russian Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), Vladimir Putin’s view was that Ukraine and Russia were still one state. Putin’s strategy for bringing Ukraine back under Russian control was initially to capture the Ukrainian Crimean Peninsula. His method was to use covert actions and subterfuge before achieving battlefield success in 2014. He then followed up in February 2022 with a second military invasion of the southern and eastern regions of Ukraine with the objective of occupying the whole of Ukraine by a process of demilitarisation and ‘de-Nazification’. He saw the attempts by the Ukrainians to develop closer ties with the European Union and NATO as a major threat to Russia. This was especially the case in 2019, when Volodymyr Zelenskyy became the new elected President of the Ukraine. By the time of the second invasion, Zelenskyy had quickly developed better strategies then his predecessor to effectively resist any Russian moves towards conquering his country. These included the continued changing of the Ukrainian military from a Russian-type culture and organisation to a NATO-type organization using some of NATO’s tactics and weaponry. This depended a lot on the sustained training and support received from the USA, Europe and other democratic countries like Australia.
Under Zelenskyy’s inspired leadership and his clever strategies and adaptations, the smaller Ukrainian military forces, inflicted heavy casualties on the Russian forces during the first year of the war compared with their own lesser losses. Zelenskyy’s key strategy was to successfully ensure that by his own efforts, the West would continue to help to defend Ukrainian freedom, sovereignty and its Western liberal views on morality. He also ensured that the people of Ukraine were unified by his ability to continuously communicate a common believable purpose for defending their country and to continue fighting the war.
Ryan argues that the strategies used to date have not resulted in a win for either side. The main purpose of the book, nevertheless, is to learn lessons from its narrative of a modern war, especially when the character of war and its weapons have changed from previous wars. Some of the main lessons learnt for democratic countries was the need to provide better deterrence systems and better defence against cyber-attacks, new autonomous weapons, long range missiles and drones. Other lessons included a better preparation for the defence of targeted civilians and infrastructure, better stockpiling of weapons and better industrial defence equipment manufacturing support. This is a ‘must read’ book for those interested in modern warfare and a desire to know more about the Ukrainian war. It is highly recommended.
The RUSI – Vic Library is most grateful to the publisher for making this work available for review.
