Angry Planet - Death Math: Here’s How Many People Would Die in a Nuclear War

Episode Date: October 16, 2017

Tensions between North Korea and the United States are at a fever pitch. The DPRK’s nukes are scary, but once the first missile flies there’s no way to know who might join the fight and how it might end. That’s scarier.So just how bad could it get? Would global nuclear war leave nothing alive but the cockroaches? We talked with Neil Halloran, who has literally done the math. The answer wasn’t what we expected.You can see Halloran’s full analysis in his fantastic animated film:http://www.fallen.io/shadow-peace/1/You can listen to War College on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. You can reach us on our new Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/warcollegepodcast/; and on Twitter: @War_College.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast? Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. If one of those things did go the wrong way, and if there was something, an accident that triggered a series of responses and it kind of escalated in that way, you know, our telling of history about nuclear weapons and how they secured our future because of, you know, mutually assured destruction, that narrative would be different. You're listening to War College, a weekly podcast that brings you the stories from behind the front lines. Here are your hosts, Matthew Galt and Jason Fields.

Hello and welcome to War College. I'm Jason Fields. And I'm Matthew Galt. War, death, and chaos feel like they're always increasing. Kind of human entropy. nuclear war with North Korea looms over the horizon, at least of our imaginations. So what's the worst case? And is there reason for hope? Neil Halloran is going to help us figure it out. Halloran visualizes data in a unique way. He illuminates dark subjects, the number of dead in World War II, the likely casualties of a third World War, using animation. Thanks for joining us, Neil.

Thank you for having me. So can you tell us a little bit about the Shadow Piece project? What is it exactly and where can people find it? All right. So the Shadow Piece is a web series. It's available on YouTube or on my website, fallen.io. And it's going to be a multi-part documentary. Each episode will be maybe 15 minutes long.

And like my previous documentary, the Fallen of World War II, it's aiming to be a numbers first form of storytelling. And so in the case of worst statistics or worst case scenarios, it tries to tell stories in a kind of dramatic, emotional, cinematic way, if you will. but using statistics and numbers as the leading role of the story. And so in the case of the arc of the series, the opening part did focus on nuclear war to kind of establish this importance of creating peace going into the future because in this world of nuclear weapons, how important it is for us to avoid having another big war. but it also tries to kind of set the stage for talking about what are some things that seem to perhaps create conditions of peace, what are some things that the data tells us, you know, have worked in the

past and to try to look at kind of with a hopeful mindset, what are some things we could do to avoid wars going into the future? Right, because we were brought up to believe that nuclear war would be the end of the world. And one of the things I found really interesting in your video is that you very quickly say that it's not true. It won't be the end of humanity. You're presenting a different scenario, and I was wondering if you could speak to that a little bit. Yeah, so I think that it's important to stress, I mean, obviously, that it would be so, so terrible.

And when you get into these enormous numbers, like hundreds of millions of people, you know, billions of people dying, you know, it gets to this level of horrible that, you know, whether or not the human race survives or not, in some ways, you're completely, comparing, you know, infinity to infinity in terms of how terrible something is in some ways. But yeah, it does make the point that you kind of always hear that idea that, you know, it would be the end of the world. But when you try to crunch the numbers, or people who have crunch the numbers, they take, you know, various probable targets in the U.S., and they take, you know, targets in the Europe and then Soviet Union, and they kind of try to do any kind of modeling to figure out how many people would actually die and you have the winds and you have the nuclear fallout and then any way you model it it probably wouldn't it wouldn't obviously wipe out

the human race and so to some to some extent there's a who cares there but because of the fact that how many nuclear warheads are in play and how many missiles fire and hit their targets really does make a difference in terms of who lives and who survives it's not an all or nothing nothing game it does kind of highlight that disarmament and reducing the number of warheads has a real meaningful impact on who would die in the worst case scenario. So it's not to belittle how terrible World War 3 would be, it's to stress how important it is to reduce the number of bombs that are in play. Okay, so you were talking about all these nuclear casualties. And one thing again that you name-checked but kind of left aside in your video is nuclear winner.

Can you tell us what it is and why you decided to leave it out of the calculations? Yeah, so this is, this was a somewhat controversial topic for me as I try to decide and speak with other experts what to do about nuclear winner. So nuclear winner is, in theory, what would happen in the situation where a lot of these big hydrogen bombs go off, create massive fires, send up lots of dust into the atmosphere. And as the theory goes, a lot of that dust and ash would stay in the atmosphere. So in the beginning, you have, you know, the problem that the dust is radioactive and all that goes with, you know, radiation sickness. But the, the half-life of the radioactive material would be such that that would only be the problem for the first few weeks or so. But then you have all this dust and ash that's just in the atmosphere, which would essentially block out

the sunlight. And so there's a lot of uncertainty there. So one element of uncertainty is the modeling of the atmosphere. And you can imagine all the discussion around global warming and trying to model something like nuclear winter, which is a lot of the same complicated problems, but even more theoretical and everything else. But, you know, when you look back in history and they look at things that happened with asteroids, wiping out, you know, the dinosaurs, you can kind of see that there is a precedence for this being a huge global problem. So there's uncertainty there. And then the next level of uncertainty is what would happen to humans, right? So you can try to model what would happen to growing of crops and food supplies and then try to from there model the famine and the effect of what

what happened to the population. And then you had the fact that the various models of the global winder show that it would primarily be in the northern hemisphere, although some would be in the southern hemisphere. And so, you know, would people migrate? And so to a certain extent when you start to try to put numbers out there, it's just, for me, it got to the point where it was, the uncertainty was so high. And the studies that have been done, you know, the scientist, themselves will say that they're just, you know, there's resistance to even throw out numbers. And so I decided to not do that. And there were some groups I spoke to felt who were more, I would say, in advocates of preventing nuclear war when I showed them the film, they felt, hey,

you know, you're kind of perhaps downplaying the extent of what nuclear wind would do because you're not stating the numbers and you're not even saying most of the population could die. but I just felt uncomfortable doing that. So I left it kind of by saying, you know, giving a number a really rough estimate saying half a billion, which in itself is kind of crazy wild guess in one of the worst case scenarios for the first three weeks. And then that's all we know, three weeks and then, you know, the nightmare will continue, but I didn't throw out any more numbers from there.

Can we talk for a second about the sources of your numbers? When I was watching the visualization, you have sources all over the place. I mean, you're not grabbing these numbers out of nowhere. So can you tell us a little bit about how you pull it together? One thing to point out is that unlike in the case of the Fallen of World War II, where here I was using numbers of a past event, and even there, there's great controversy. So I tried to use the most official numbers, either the ones that the country, countries themselves have put forward or the most well-established studies.

In the case of these kind of theoretical projected numbers about the what-if scenarios for World War III, the whole different game. So I just tried to, A, there have been studies who have, say, in the state in the US, they've taken two scenarios, one scenario with 500 targets struck, another scenario with 2,000 target struck, and these are target lists that FEMA and the National Resource Defense Center have kind of put forward these kind of really rough target lists for, and then they just did some number crunching to kind of look at how many would die from the blast and how many would die from the radiation, and just throughout these huge ranges. And so I'd kind of take that

and then other, so at one point in the film, I do display dots on. the map, which are these possible strike points. And in the case of the U.S., again, I had these kind of probable target lists that were published or stated by FEMA, but then in the other cases, so in the UK, they had a similar list that they recently declassified, but in the case of the targets within the Soviet Union, there you had a list that the U.S. recently declassified. This is from the 50s of targets in some kind of a strike plan. So in some ways, I was kind of mixing and matching from all different sources and kind of, you know, throwing things together. So I tried to use studies that were done by serious scientists or various sources, but it was a mixed bag.

We are talking about theoretical scenarios. And so I try to say things like half a billion in part because that's a really, you're trying to establish. that that's a rough guess, rather than going into specific hundreds of thousands, etc. So that's the way I try to deal with that. There's definitely a worry that it was a little bit so rough and loose to talk about these numbers. You know, either you don't state them at all, or you do your best to kind of throw something out there in a responsible way. But in the case of World War III, you're always going to be dealing with numbers that are, you know, somewhat wildguessed. All right, can you explain to our audience your hourglass kind of model that you use and what you think the advantages of having these visual representations of vast numbers?

So in the case of the intro of the series, it has this hourglass that talks about these big, big numbers of all the people who are alive today versus an estimate of how many people who have ever lived. if you define people as homo sapiens going back 50,000 years ago, but some say it should be 100,000 years ago, but to kind of establish this big, big picture of mankind or humankind. And so part of the reason for kind of establishing this model. And then what it does is it kind of lays out all these cubes, each representing, you know, 1,000 people on a timeline. So in the case of people who are alive, it shows one of these population pyramids, so they're arranged by age, and in the case people who have died, they're arranged by the year that they died. And so this is creating this overall timeline of living and dead

that the series is going to return to throughout the series. And so I spent maybe a little too much time in the beginning establishing this model. one of the things I was trying to do is that is that when you lay out a chart or a graph a lot of times it's worth spending some time explaining to the audience this is what this chart is this is in this case the y-axis represents years

and this is how many people died per year each cube a thousand people all this really boring stuff to explain and the hope was to make that explanation of the chart in itself dramatic and interesting right so this hourglass cube metaphor was this kind of, you know, dramatic and kind of cinematic way of showing this sense of time and this very kind of cosmic way of looking at this big picture of human history. And one of the things that's actually kind of nice when you're talking about war and death about arranging deaths by year, the year of death versus, say, showing a timeline

of total world population is that things like World War. World War II, or especially World War II, it kind of comes through, you can kind of see it as like the scar in our history. It reminds me a little bit of when you cut down a tree and you see the rings of how all the tree is. And when there was a forest fire, you kind of have this scar. And so by showing by year of death, you can kind of very dramatically see the impact that war had on our history, that was, you know, so sharp. and dramatic because it all happened in six years to kind of highlight, you know, how devastating big, big war can be. And then, you know, of course, it'd even be worse if it became a nuclear war.

Speaking of nuclear war, you didn't get a chance to include current tensions with North Korea in the visualization, partially because you completed it before the most current round. Do you think that what's happening in the news right now has an impact on what you created? Are things scarier now? Just your overall impression. I do get a little bit uncomfortable talking too much about the current day situation, in part because it's constantly in motion. It's so hard to predict what's going to happen next tweet or next week, let alone.

And it takes me so long to make these films that is partly I just want to avoid it. I also feel a little bit unqualified to talk. about strategy for how to deal with North Korea. So a lot of what I'm trying to do is to kind of establish this big picture framing of total number of nuclear weapons, total number of nuclear countries, and to kind of look at present-day current events in that kind of important context. So yeah, I definitely, you know, one of the things that makes me so nervous about everything that's happening is that in a lot of case with war, it's There's always this level of chaos and things that you can't predict, right?

And oftentimes, you know, we tell these narratives after the fact and we'll give credit and blame to leaders' decisions and not really give enough importance or credit to these things that are totally hard to predict and the kind of the randomness and chaos of war and history. And so with nuclear strikes or nuclear warfare, if you go back and look at all these near-misses, cases where things seem like they were really, you know, potentially could have gone the other way. You know, the Cuban Missile Crisis or these various cases where there's false alarms. If one of those things did go the wrong way and if there was something, an accident that triggered a series of responses and it kind of escalated in that way, you know, our telling

of history about nuclear weapons and how they secured our future because of, you know, mutually assured destruction, that narrative would be different. based on something so random and out of, you know, that seems hard to predict. And so when you hear about all this stuff it's happening and all this kind of chest-thumping talk and every time, say, North Korea sends a test over Japan, there's always a possibility that something might go wrong or there could be a miscommunication or something to kind of create a series of escalations. And that makes me nervous because it's very hard to, I think we underplay the likelihood of accidents.

So that part does. But at the same time, you know, you also want to keep a cool head and show that there has been a tremendous amount of progress that we don't give enough appreciation to with regards to the fact that things are so much less scary and tense today than they were at the height of the Cold War. I mean, North Korea still, you know, we're talking about a small country, a small nuclear power.

so the worst case kind of scenario is just a whole other ball wax. So it's kind of you want to be fearful of the worst, but also try to not freak out because the fact that things aren't as bad as they've been in the past. Can we talk about the past for a minute? Because the other piece that you're well known for, I think you won a number of awards for it, the Fallen of World War II. That's right, yeah. And you talked about just a couple of minutes ago,

how if you have just an hourglass looking at deaths in the human race over the course of history, World War II actually was so violent and deadly that it sticks out on either side. It doesn't follow the normal curve. Can you tell us a little bit about that project and also why you felt it was so important to tally the dead? I got kind of pulled into World War II on a previous film that I actually. never finished. It was about air strikes. It was going to be a feature length film that started with the

bombing of World War II and then progressed to this drone warfare. But in the process of that, I kept getting pulled into the story of World War II bombing. And it's just a war in which this story has been told so many times from so many different angles. You have

fiction and non-fiction video games. But in some ways, you know, I'm biased. In some ways, it's the scale, the size of the war, which is possibly the most important thing about it. The number of lives that were lost is just so incredible. And so I got kind of excited about the idea of taking this war that has been explored in so many ways, but just really making it about the numbers to give it kind of a fresh perspective on a war, which is now, you know, 70 years old.

And so that was, you know, the spirit and thinking behind. it, even though in theory, numbers are these kind of hard facts and kind of more objective truths, to some extent, if you want to try to make this into a story which is kind of compelling and has, has like, you know, forward momentum, you know, the sequence of numbers, what you show first and how you explain them, definitely, you're definitely, you know, imprinting a narrative and in a certain position, if you will, on the telling of it. So it was primarily driven by numbers, but I also try to make it something that would hook the audience

and keep them in as the story unfolded, going country by country, military first and civilians and by different region. And so I try to make the story, even though it was about numbers, unfold in a way where it kind of felt like it was a story and making it as dramatic and hard-hitting is possible. it was appropriate to be dramatic.

And what did you learn about the stories, lies, and myths, different countries tell themselves about the deaths of their own people and the killings that they themselves committed? Yeah, so, I mean, for me, and I think for a lot of folks, the story I grew up believing about World War II was one in which the Americans were the heroes. And we certainly were. It's just that the story of the Eastern Front is just so unbelievable in terms of the numbers. of the amount of human loss from, you know, especially the Soviet side, and also to see how many more Germans died in the eastern front than the west-western front. For me, you know, I kind

of heard about that. And I, you know, I kind of, maybe that was somewhere in the back of my brain, but to really kind of dig into those numbers and to start sizing up, even like, you know, the story of Stalingrad with everything else that happened on the West, it is just a whole other scale of death. And so that gave me, this telling that story gave me, you know, a better appreciation for just how terrible the Eastern Front was and, you know, how impactful it was on, on the story of the war. Yeah. And, you know, I also, one of the things that I feel like I didn't do justice to was the extent of human loss in, in the Asian theater. And I ran into a problem where, you know, the one of the things I wanted to do was in terms of how to sequence this, I wanted, I started

with the U.S. soldiers because I wanted, you know, I'm kind of telling this from the vantage point of an American. And I wanted to start out with, with numbers which are more familiar to us. And then as the, as the other countries kind of get piled on top, it's one way of kind of dramatizing just how big the numbers are when you're all done and you see, you know, the sliver of American soldiers at the end. But in doing that, I start going with familiar to less familiar. I kind of left a lot of the, you know, China and Japan until the end. And so in some ways, I feel that I didn't give enough time, I think a fair criticism, I didn't give enough time to the extent of the Asian atrocities in Asia. But so that was also really dramatic to see, you know, some of those figures as well.

I mean, there's just so much in there that was new to me, I must admit, as I learned about the figures. I guess primarily it was the Eastern Front. Do you think that level of callousness towards civilians represented something new? Yeah, well, it's funny. I mean, one of the things to get back to this story of the U.S. bombing is that, so as the war was just starting up in the European theater, and at this point, the U.S. was not involved, it wouldn't get involved directly in a, you know, violence sense for a few years and in Roosevelt sent out this appeal to the warring powers and at that point he was very concerned about air power and and what this new kind of aerial bombing weapon could do

to civilians and the things that's interesting about that is that the the letter itself was so impassioned there was you know the the way it was written about protecting civilians and, you know, the importance of being civilized people. And then five years later, we were firebombing Japan and the nuclear strikes. And so it's, in some ways, when you read that letter, you get a sense of this huge, you know, morality that was, that we went into the war, that spirit of morality went into the war with. And, but then seeing how war can escalate and when stakes get higher what you're willing to do when you know when you're when you're when you're exhausted and your resources run out and you can't go on anymore your willingness to do what it

takes to end this thing so in some ways it's what's what's what is frightening about it is is this question about it or how this callousness what was it the war that made us more callous or were we back then more willing to do these things I think that it's a common I think in a lot of ways there is a lot of moral progress that you can see in all sorts of categories from civil rights to even a lot of these downward trends in violence that show like a higher level of, of whatever you would call, like a higher moral standards for how we treat people who are different than ourselves, how we treat, you know, races and nationalities different than ourselves. There's a lot of evidence that shows progress there since World War II,

but at the same time, it does kind of show you that, you know, when war escalates and stakes get higher, you become more and more willing to do these unthinkable things. And that's kind of a really frightening story about the war. Since your efforts are sort of all about putting things into scale, one thing I really noticed is you try to take World War II and put it in a very, very complete timeline. You mentioned certain things like the Mongol invasions, the collapse of the Ming Dynasty, and it really made me wonder because those deaths are in the multiple millions

even though the Mongols were 800 years ago. I mean, can you talk a little bit about how you try to proportion this stuff? Because as you point out yourself in the film, population was so much smaller at the time that these other atrocities were happening. Yeah. And so a lot of this was inspired by and influenced by Stephen Pinker's book, The Better Angels of Our Nature.

And in that, he does do, he does make these comparisons to, in wars past, really kind of driving home this message that not just with warfare, but also homicide rates. There's this very dramatic downward trend in violence in a lot of ways. And one of the things where these numbers do get complicated is that, you know, when you're talking about, these huge death counts, there's the absolute number, but then there is looking at it from the standpoint of the percentage of the population. So, you know, the Soviet Union had the highest death count by far, but Poland in World War II had the highest percentage of its population killed. I think it was up to 16%.

And so that 60% number is, you know, is astonishing. But there are cases when you look back at history and you see these stories of genocide, and you see, you know, tired people being wiped out. It's, if you want to be careful to say World War II was the worst war in history, there's a certain amount of unknowns because there's just a lot of numbers we just don't know, maybe never will know. So it's kind of hard to compare World War II with these, you know, these wars that we have a lot of references to,

but we don't have very good, you know, figures on. But there is a lot of evidence of countries. nations, this being, you know, wiped out and these mass atrocities and genocides, so that you don't want to overly assume that World War II was the worst from a proportional standpoint, from the total body count of, you know, between 55, 70 million, whatever number you use, it's fair to say that that it was the highest number of deaths total. You can also say, like a lot of these past examples spanned, some cases like decades or hundreds of years. And so the fact that World War II happened in six-ish years also shows that it happened so quickly that it's hard to imagine anything in the past

happened so quickly in terms of that amount of death. But yeah, it is, you know, looking at war as a proportion to the population does kind of show things look a little different in terms of the scale. All right. So despite everything we've talked about, both of your videos end on hopeful notes. And I want you to explain to us kind of what you see and the role of peacekeepers going forward and how effective they are. Yeah, so I mean, one of the things that, so I'm into data and I'm into telling stories with numbers and data visualization. And one of the things that I feel, you know, data is paired nicely with peace because peace is something which it's the absence of something happening.

Peace is really war not happening. And that's not something that you can photograph. It's not something that makes a new story. And in a lot of ways, it's very hard to see peace. But you can see it if you start to crunch the numbers and show these trends. And there is a lot of reason to be optimistic. about peace growing, especially if you look at between World War II and today, there is a pretty steady, not steady, it does come in waves as wars have happened, but it's a pretty prominent

downward slope in the number of people who are killed in wars, and it becomes even more dramatic if you show it based on population. So if you ask, what's the likelihood that a human being will be killed in war today, it really is going down. And so if that's the case, the much harder question is, you know, why and why is this happening? And if we can learn something about why is it happening, you know, how do we make sure we keep doing it or, or at least how do we, you know, avoid things that have, as best we can lead to war again? And so in some degree, I want to be careful about not expressing too much certainty about what has brought peace. But there are some things that the series will look at.

And the example of peacekeepers is one where a lot of ways if you just look at these stories of peacekeeping forces, there are these stories of failures, right? And so it's very easy to kind of say, well, that doesn't work. I mean, look at Bosnia, look at these various cases where peacekeepers were deployed and war returned anyway. But different researchers, and I used the research by Virginia Page Fortna, and she was great to kind of send me some of her additional data that went beyond what she just included in her book and articles. That kind of showed where she took all of these cases of civil. conflict, where there is some kind of a period of peace afterwards, and look at all the cases where peacekeepers were deployed and where they weren't, and crunch the numbers,

induced some analysis on them and show with some pretty high level of certainty that there is a correlation between when peacekeepers were deployed and how long the peace lasted and the likelihood for countries to continue on being peaceful. So there are cases where you can look at something and say, hey, there's something we can point at and feel hopeful that we can come up with ideas. And not only does her doer numbers show that peacekeeping might work, it also, if you look at peacekeeping before the end of the Cold War, the numbers weren't as good.

But if you look at the numbers after 1989, you see much higher levels of success. And part of that was because the approach to peacekeeping really changed. Peacekeepers became much more kind of hands-on and engaged in some of the peacekeeping process. And so you can also say not only does peacekeeping, is there evidence that peacekeeping works, but there's also evidence that we can get better at this. Very idealistically, I feel that everything humans do, we can get. better at from, you know, we can make better weapons, but we can also perhaps make these

better instruments of peace, which is a kind of a recurring theme in this series. And so there's this kind of a hopeful idea that we can figure this out if we believe in it and continue to try to, you know, be willing to make, I want to call them experiments, but really work towards peace. And there's evidence that it could really work. So what's the next video about And after that, you've got to tell us, where can people find you and try to support what you're doing? All right. So the next one is going to go, you know, get it. So part of the reason that I set up the whole series with these cubes and showing this big, big picture of human history is because, you know,

the series wants to get into kind of present-day situations like peacekeeping forces, but also get a little bit, I don't say philosophical, but look at the big picture. picture of war and so the next episode is going to get into some of these these non-state warfare rates or pre-state warfare rate or rates this is where archaeologists who dig up you know sites or find sites of societies that were before countries were established and they determined through all sorts of ways whether or not each each human they find was killed by an other human and there's some really obvious cases where you'd have a spearhead in their ribs, but you also have cases where there's these kind of blunt trauma on the skulls and multiple skulls have similar accidents where you can kind of earth injuries and they can kind of tell

if this injury was more likely to lead to death. And so with all this kind of analysis, like being like detectives, they can come up with some kind of estimates for how which humans died through violence. And then there's a lot of amazing. data there because there's always different sites and different assessments. But the picture you look at and you start looking at these percentage of people who died due to other human beings, the numbers are really dramatic, like really in terms of the level of violence. And so that kind of sets up the additional chapters to kind of get into what happened from there. What are some of these kind of big picture pacifying forces in terms of civilization and it'll even get into

the government's evolving and democracy. And so the next chapter is going to kind of go way back in history, but then start to get into this kind of bigger picture of what are some things that made us more peaceful over the long haul. And yeah, I'm definitely very excited about the next chapter. So in terms of pitching where it can be, it's on YouTube. It's called The Shadow Piece. You can also visit my website, which is fallen.io.

and yeah, it's available for free and you can watch these films. I'm doing my best that continue to produce them independently and trying to figure out how to do that from a funding standpoint, but I'm determined to carry on and make this series work. You have a Patreon, right? That's right, yeah, I do have a Patreon campaign

and yeah, I'd love to be able to grow that because essentially the more funding I have from audiences, the more time I can spend on that as opposed to doing client work and the faster I can produce these episodes. So the last one took me two years and I'd love to produce new ones in less than a year. So that's one of the reasons why I'm pushing on this funding drive is to try to be able to spend more of my time and resources on this and make them faster. So when can we expect the next episode?

shoot well that's i would like to have it in less than a year uh that's that's the goal and and i've already kind of got started with it and whether it's a year or two years it really does depend on on either some certain certain things in the works in terms of getting additional funding so it really does depend on that right now so between a year and two years i'm afraid to say so you're going to hold us hostage until we go to patreon dot com right And I'll try to help you out. Okay, well. Thank you, yes.

Fair enough. All right, well, thank you, Neil. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. That was great. Thank you very much for listening to this week's show. If you enjoyed it, tell a friend, or even better, tell iTunes by leaving review. This week, we want to thank Gucci Melan Balls, which is a fantastic handle who left this five-star review.

These guys cover a huge array of topics related to U.S. defense policy, military history, current events, and analyses of modern warfare. A truly excellent podcast. Thank you, Gucci Melan Balls, and we couldn't agree more. You can also reach us on Facebook. We are Facebook.com slash War College Podcast, and if you want to tweet at us, we are at World. underscore college. More college is me, Jason Fields, and Matthew Galt. Thanks again, and see you next.