5. Leadership in Modern War by Mick Ryan (Parts 1 and 2)
Part One: Leadership in Modern War
Part Two: Leadership Lessons from Ukraine
These two articles should be useful for discussions in PME leadership courses as well as in graduate security studies programs.
Excerpts Part One:
A final lesson for political leaders from the war in Ukraine is about will. The key lesson is that no one will help a nation that doesn’t demonstrate the will to defend itself. It is a lesson about will, and one that politicians everywhere must learn. There are many dimensions to this demonstration of will. Ultimately it is about building national resilience in all of its forms.
Sovereign resilience, which also includes the requirement to mobilise people and industry people for large military and national challenges, must be led from the very top of a nation’s political leadership. It requires that they be able to explain the rationale for defending a nation and for the sacrifices needed. It is something that the Ukrainian president has done from the beginning of the Russian large-scale invasion in February 2022. In essence, a key observation from Ukraine is that political leaders must be able to ask themselves whether they would pass ‘the Zelensky test’ and hopefully the answer is ‘yes’.
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