Angry Planet - Space Force Is Boring

Episode Date: March 4, 2020

Space Force. It’s here. It’s the newest branch of the U.S. military and it’s got it’s own uniforms and a snazzy new patch that looks a lot like the emblem for the United Federation of Planets. But it’s only got one member at the moment and what, exactly, is it doing?Here to help us figure out what’s going on is Joseph Trevithick of The War Zone. You can listen to War College on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is warcollegepodcast.com. You can reach us on our 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.

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Space Force. It's here. It's the newest branch of the U.S. military. It's got its own uniforms and a snazzy new patch that looks a lot like the emblem for the United Federation of Planets. But it's only got one member at the moment. And what exactly is that guy doing all day? Here to help us figure out what's going on is Joseph Trevithic of the Warzone. Joe, thank you so much for being here.

Thank you for having me. All right. So I feel like we've been talking about Space Force the entire time the show has been on the air in one form or another. But now it looks like we actually have a Space Force that's actually going to happen. Well, it has happened. Yeah, it has happened. There's camouflage now. There's a patch.

It's legally a thing. What are the broad strokes of Space Force? Like, what are we not seeing? It's like most of the focus has been on what I would call memeable dumb moments like the Star Trek patch, like people making fun of the camouflage. But this is a serious thing. We're going to spend money on it. What is it ostensibly supposed to do? So Space Force, and you're right, Space Force has been a thing we've been dealing with for some time now.

The first proposals for what has been alternately called Space Corps and Space Force and Space Force. similar things over the years. It dates back to before 2017, the first sort of inklings of this. And it had bipartisan support in Congress over the years, although relatively minor, you know, low-level support. But it became a big issue for President Trump and also for Vice President Mike Pence. And so they really promoted it and have pushed for it to become a thing. And it is now legally a thing. Space Force was created in the most recent sort of annual defense policy bill, what's called the National Defense Authorization Act, and that created Space Force. And Space Force, in its present guise, is akin to the way the Marine Corps is organized at the most basic level. And that it is its own thing.

It is the sixth branch of the U.S. military, with the others being the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine. Corps and the Coast Guard, but it is within the Department of the Air Force. And what that means is that the budget for Space Force will come through the Air Force. The head of Space Force, currently called the Chief of Space Operations, will have a seat at the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff table with the chairman and with the rest of the Joint Chiefs but he will basically be also coordinating with the Air Force. And right now, the immediate plan, is to take elements that had been in the Air Force and shift them largely on paper to Space Force.

This is important because the Air Force was basically doing a lot of these jobs already, right? The Air Force was responsible for over 80% of the military space launch efforts. So anytime the U.S. military would launch a satellite almost all the time the actual launch of that satellite would have been done through the Air Force. And the private contractors would help with the launches. But the Air Force was responsible for contracting those launches and maintaining the launch facilities and doing all of that work, as well as leading the development of the vast majority of sort of space programs. the development of new satellites and the setting of space policy in terms of, you know, are we vulnerable to certain new and emerging threats? You know, how are we going to integrate space more and more with our current military operations?

And remember that space is, military space impacts basically every facet of day-to-day military operations today, you know, from satellite communications to the use of GPS. And the use of GPS not only in navigation, but in the guidance of weapons. And then you get into early warning, like we saw recently with the Iranian missile strikes against targets in Iraq. Those strikes were first detected by an early warning satellite that the Air Force maintains. And then you get into intelligence gathering and other things. I mean, it runs a full spectrum of different tasks that we're talking about here when we talk about military space. And, of course, we're also talking about guys in command center.

on the ground in front of computers. Right now, there is no planning for any kind of Starship Troopers, Space Marines kind of thing. We're really talking about the maintenance and the operation of satellites and other space-based, you know, assets, what we would call assets. Was this strictly necessary then if we already had kind of the infrastructure and the people dealing with it through the Air Force? What's the point of this? The logic that Space Forces proponents argued from the very beginning was that because space is so important, space deserves to have a commander who is focused entirely on that.

And that the commander of the Air Force Space Command under the larger Air Force Organization was not empowered enough to get the job done. basically you needed someone who could sit with the other chairmen of the Joint Chiefs and would be able to advocate for their own dedicated budget to properly prioritize what was going on in space. That's the logic behind us. All right. And how do we have any sense of how the Air Force generally feels about this? Because I know it's, how shall I put this? The Air Force is, in my opinion, the most sensitive of the branches when it comes to big structural.

change like this. So it feels like the space force kind of being underneath them is a way to resolve fears that the Air Force might have about something being taken away from them. In a way, Air Force was resistant to this for years, for years, and only recently sort of came around to it and was more or less directed to either come around to it or or get out of the way. And we saw that with the previous secretary of the Air Force, Dr. Heather Wilson, who retired last year from the post.

She had been very opposed to the plan for some time. And then there was clearly a shift in opinion that came from on high. And then she became, you know, basically as supportive as she felt like being about it. And then also just moved on from the job. And the current secretary of the Air Force, Barbara Barrett, is highly, highly positive on Space Force. She is a big sort of, you know, her own advocate now for Space Force. And it is true that so the civilian secretary of the Air Force retains an oversight role over Space Force in the same way that the Secretary of the Navy retains that oversight role over the Marine Corps. So there is a connection there, even though, like I said, Space Force has the authority to operate as its own independent service and do its own independent things, which will evolve as time goes on, no doubt.

You also make it sound like, again, in the media, we've got this tendency to kind of look at Space Force as a Trump thing. but you make it sound as if it's just something that he was kind of, let me see how I'll show I put this, it was stuff that was already in the works, things that people were already thinking about that he's just kind of highlighting. For sure, but I will say that Trump did seem to have a, Trump's support seemed to push this over the edge. Presidents and secretaries of defense over the years have been highly resistant to this idea too, and members of Congress on both sides have continued.

to criticize the idea that this is a necessary addition and that it's not just creating additional bureaucracy that basically we have to pay for, but that doesn't really increase the kind of attention to these capabilities and to these issues that we want, you know, that it's not the right way to go about doing it. Nobody seems to be in disagreement that military space is an important thing for U.S. military operations going forward. The debate is whether adding this level of bureaucracy, which, like I said, it's now a thing. It's going to be basically impossible to go backwards from here, but whether adding this level of bureaucracy was the appropriate thing to do. And do we have any idea how much that bureaucracy is going to cost? Is there a price tag? Are they asking for anything specific? Right now, the Space Force has requested budget in the upcoming fiscal year,

which will be its first official budget for the 2021 fiscal year, which begins this October because of how that works. They're asking for about $15 billion. And that's relatively small when you think about the context of a defense budget that's over $700 billion. So it's a modest cost. It's also higher in many respects than was initially estimated this was going to cost. It was estimated this was going to cost about that much over the first five years of space forces exist. at most. Many estimates were that it was going to cost less than that, but it's also not

entirely clear how much of that $15 billion is additive rather than this was $15 billion that used to be in the Air Force budget dealing with space stuff, and now is $15 billion in the Space Force budget that we've moved out of there. So it's not 100% clear how much new funding is sort of required to get this up and running. And let's be very clear that Space Force is in its infancy, too. Like, we have not yet seen the full scope of what Space Force is going to look like. They only had to recently submit reports to Congress that outline the basic structure they're talking about. And right now, the most immediate things that they're planning on doing, like I said, is moving Air Force space elements under the umbrella of Space Force.

And there's still not a real hard plan about what they're going to do about assets and personnel tasked with space. issues across the other services and how they might integrate those into space force in the future. There's talk about maybe integrating Army and Navy space personnel into space force basically within two years, two years down the line. So we really don't, there's there's one guy assigned to Space Force right now, the command of the chief of space operations. There's one person. He's due to get his, uh, um, top enlisted officer. the chief master sergeant of the space force soon. And then there's plans very soon after that to get a third person.

That's how many people are technically assigned to Space Force right now. Okay. What do we know about the commander? Who is this person? He used to be, well, I mean, he had already been named, you know, he's an Air Force officer, career Air Force officer. and he had been previously head of U.S. space command, which the U.S. military established a few years ago now to, basically that that command's job was to pull together all the different services space commands under one umbrella and help sort of shape their guiding policy. And so in a way that like special operations commands takes all the special operations forces from the different commands, space command was designed to basically help unify military space ahead of space force.

And that was created at a time when it was not clear whether or not space force was going to happen. So this was sort of an immediate step that could be done that would help. help again prioritize military space issues. And so General John Raymond, who is the chief of space operations, is also still a commander of U.S. Space Command. It's a second job for him. He's what we call dual-hatted in both of those positions. So he currently does both of those things. And he was also previously head of Air Force Space Command, which will form the core of Space Committee. So this is a guy, I mean, if you were going to pick a guy, I mean, he's the logical choice for sure. He's the, he's the person who's been dealing with the Air Force

space issues, which are the bulk of military space issues in the United States for years now. When it comes to the other military branches, what are they doing in space? What could be moved off of their plate? So the other services do maintain, at a much lower level, the Army and the Navy do maintain their own satellites. They have their own satellite constellations, which, again, are operated sort of on a joint service level. You know, they share these assets to a degree, but they are managed by the Air Force and the Navy. And they also do a smaller number of space launches by themselves for their own purposes. You know, there's also other space-based, you know, it's sort of,

the issue then becomes about where you draw the line of what Space Wars controls, because you also have the National Reconnaissance Office, which is the military spy satellite entity. An entity so secret that it did not publicly exist until the 1990s, when its existence was declassified. And there's also the National Security Agency, which has its own spy satellites in space as well. and the National Reconnaissance Office and the National Security Agency, the NSA, are both technically elements of the U.S. military, but both have been relatively resistant to handing over the keys to their stuff to space force, which already creates these sort of weird dotted line potential command structures.

And, you know, it's sort of, there's all of this other bureaucracy that also has to be decided on. And that's not even touching on space-based things elsewhere within the U.S. government because there's been talk about, you know, how does this work and how does this align with the central intelligence agencies own satellites that, you know, there's top secret satellites sort of across the intelligence community like this. And then how does this fit in with civilian space and how does this sort of intermash with what NASA is doing and what might also, you know, happen in other places. in the future as, you know, because there's much more talk about commercial space and about space tourism and all these things that the Department of Commerce has actually been sort of promoting on its own level. And so over the, since the create, you know, since we decided to go to space, the intersection of civilian and military space has been, has been pretty, pretty gray. You know, it's not clear where the, where the lines begin and end. There's a lot of times where

NASA has supported military space programs, including using the shuttle to service various military satellites or launch military satellites and other things like this over the years. So there's a lot of discussion left to be had about exactly how this is supposed to fit within sort of this broader context, not just of the U.S. military, but of the U.S. government as a whole. Okay. I mean, yeah, bureaucracy is important in everything, but I think everyone really wants to know is, you know, how are we going to dogfight in space?

And that's a phrase that's been used before. That's actually a phrase that members of the Air Force have used to describe, you know, how do we go about dogfighting in space? And it's a good, it's a good poll quote. But, I mean, again, what we're talking about is there are increasing concerns that other satellites in space may have a military purpose. there have been reports of Russian satellites basically shadowing American spy satellites in space. And these Russian satellites are described as sort of inspector satellites,

which ostensibly you're supposed to be able to get really close to other Russian satellites to basically inspect them, to see if there's been any damage or if there's an issue to try and get a sense of what's going on. The concern is that that kind of close maneuvering capability means that, you could use them to attack other satellites or do other things like that. And there's really no international norms. There's no guiding treaties or principles that exist right now as to, like, what does combat look like in space? What does a war in space look like?

If you have top secret satellites that you don't acknowledge exist and somebody destroys one of them, how do you respond to that? and there's a ton of classified space stuff that basically no one acknowledges exists. They actually keep talking about this. One of the issues they seem to be having is that they're going to have to go before Congress to argue for Space Forces budget and not just this year, but every year going forward. And if they can't talk in public about why they need all this money, they're really actually quite worried that it's going to be hard to convince legislators

to give them their budget. And so they've been talking a lot about, you know, maybe we can try and declassify. more of what we're doing in space and maybe it doesn't need to be so top secret. But right now, if something were to happen, it's very possible that only the affected parties would know and attributing that issue to an opponent. You know, if somebody fires a laser at your satellite and you really can't see up there in space to see it happening

or you don't know where it's coming from or something else like this, just attributing that attack to someone and then being able to figure out how you're going to respond. I mean, there's a, there's a lot that, you know, unknown unknowns. And it's actually quite, quite scary in many ways. And it's at least nice to know that people are aware of this. The U.S. military does seem to be trying to figure out what that looks like, what conflict in space looks like. And on a level, it's perhaps not comforting, but it's certainly nice to know that we're not the only people faced with this issue. The last year, the French expanded their Air Force to be an Air and Space Force and also announced that they were going to deploy a bunch of satellites sometime in the future, armed with lasers to defend their satellites.

So the United States is certainly not the only country talking about this and looking at it from this perspective. It strikes me that GPS is a big part of this conversation, global positioning systems, right? One thing I wanted to make clear to the audience is that there's more than one satellite-based navigation system out there. It's the most ubiquitous. GPS is ubiquitous because most of the listeners live in the West, and that's what we use. But Russia maintains its own satellites that run its own global positioning system, correct? Right. And GPS is like Kleenex or Xerox. It technically refers to one constellation of navigation satellites, but has become the term for all sort of satellite navigation. And the Russians operate the second sort of largest such constellation called Glosnus, which is their version of this.

and it is understood to be slightly less capable, but they're also expanding that constellation of satellites themselves. And so there may increasingly be competing networks. But you're right. I mean, a lot of people, especially in the United States, they don't know this because, I mean, you're not, the GPS in your car doesn't give you the option of which constellation you'd like to use. Who does, what system does China use?

Does it have its own or does it plug into the Russian system? I'm going to butcher this, but I believe it's pronounced, Beidu, but it's abbreviated BDS. And that's the Chinese system, which again is sort of at an experimental level at the moment, but it is, again, expanding and it's now offering actual service to customers in Asia. So. Okay, but it's ostensibly at the moment these satellite systems

are the battle lines, I would think. Because so much of what happens on the ground, in terms of military technology, is keyed into these separate systems, right? So if you can disrupt the enemy's GPS, then you've got one up on them and there's going to be a lot of stuff that doesn't work on the ground. Yeah, I mean, this is the,

this is the thing, is that GPS, from a military perspective, when the average person thinks about GPS, you think about the GPS on your phone or in your car and it helps you get from point A to point B, and it displays a map. But in a military context, GPS is about, you know, any kind of, you know, autonomous guidance for, you know, any kind of unmanned system, like a drone. anytime you basically say trying to plot out waypoints for something to go somewhere and if it were to get confused or otherwise lose that link, it could be a problem.

But it's also, you know, it's used for targeting. You know, we have GPS, we have GPS guided and sort of GPS assisted weapons that use GPS coordinates as a, as the target. You key in,

you key in the coordinates and it uses the satellite constellation to find the target. And so, although, you know, if the GPS system were to get knocked out, all of those bombs are dumb bombs. That's sort of the end of that. There's no, unless they have some sort of multi-mode guidance system, any purely GPS-guided weapon is now not guided because it doesn't have a link to whatever it's using to find the target.

Well, we're trying to figure out a way to not be so reliant on one system now, right? There is an executive order, I believe, on February 12th. There is a lot of work being done in the same way as, you know, the U.S. military is looking at what conflict looks like in space. The U.S. military is preparing for what that looks like down below. And not just in – so there's alternatives and backups as part of that to – discussion, there's been an increased emphasis on map reading, for instance, and just being able to navigate without the assistance of a GPS system. There has also been looking at other kinds of modernized non-GPS navigation systems. One of the most sort of interesting of these is the continued use of basically automated sextants in many large aircraft.

So like the B2 stealth bomber actually has an automatic astro-navigation system that is computerized but uses basically a set of optical sensors to look at the stars and calculate position based on that as a backup to a failure of a GPS navigation system. That's a technology that's been in use for decades now, but is increasingly advanced. and that's also a place where people are looking, and that is likely to be a feature, especially on long-range aircraft going forward, is that you have a backup like that. At the same time, there's also been this big talk about access to space and about so fine, my satellites get destroyed,

my satellites get knocked out, how do I get a dozen new GPS satellites into orbit right now? And there have been various discussions about how to do that too, and that one end of that is cheaper space launch vehicles, whether those be traditional rockets or some other method of doing this, you know, air-launched rockets or some other sort of configuration there. There's also been talk of rapidly launching small satellites. And Elon Musk just talked about this today.

You talked about the Starlink network that he's working on. which is sort of about, you know, low-cost satellites that can be networked together for various tasks. And one of the things that the U.S. military is interested in doing is, can we exploit that for both satellite communication and satellite navigation, should something happen in the future? So you have all of these things going on. And this is, again, why to sort of bring this back to Space Force quickly, these are the kind of issues that proponents of space force were concerned. that the Air Force, which is also having to deal with flying planes down below, wasn't sort of up to focusing on, that it couldn't be a priority for that service. And you needed somebody who could just do this, who could be focused on answering these

questions and not have to go to work and be like, I have all this other work to do. It's like, no, it's, I'm going to focus purely on, on issues of military space. And that is going to be the only thing I do, and that's going to be the only thing I ask for money to do. And so that is, you know, these are the questions that proponents of Space Force cited when they were like, we need to do this and we need to do this now because there are all these, you know, threats. And even if there aren't threats, you know, accidents happen where something else happens and you need to be prepared for, you know, basically putting back, putting the pieces back together, you know. And it's, like I said, at the beginning, space and satellites, it's every day. And, you know, GPS is definitely a big deal, but satellite communications is a huge deal. That's a primary means of communicating for the U.S. military at long distances.

And it's also a primary means of sharing critical information in near real time across long distances, including, you know, when you see the sort of feed from, you know, the video feed from drones and things like that, that often goes across a satellite communications network. And that's so valuable to have that kind of information in real time that if you lose that, you know, it sort of throws a wrench in how the U.S. military has learned to operate over the last 20 years. And so there has to be a lot of discussion about, well, then what do you do? And, you know, like I said, people are looking to answer those questions, but there's a lot of, there's a lot of sort of deep thinking left to do. All right, we're going to pause there for a break.

You are listening to War College. We are on with Joseph Trevethick talking about Space Force. All right, welcome back to War College. We are on with Joseph Trevithic talking about Space Force. All right, let's do some blue sky weirdness here at the end and find it strange or depressing note to go out on as we like to do. What about weapons launched from satellites, so-called rods from God, or as the Air Force likes to call them, hypervelocity rod bundles? So before Space Force was created, there was a brief new push to, talk about putting

weapons on satellites in space ostensibly for defensive purposes. And these weapons systems, which would be used to, you know, the thought process would be that they would be used to engage

either incoming ballistic missiles that would be flying through space or threats to satellites. So anti-satellite interceptors or hostile satellites or whatever have you. And there was no discussion recently about having weapons in space to attack targets on the ground, which is a thing, you know, the rods from God thing was about creating a orbital bombardment system of some kind. And right now, there's no talk about doing that.

There is no treaty that prohibits the placement of conventional weapons in space, though there is one that prohibits the deployment of weapons of mass destruction in space. So that would be nuclear weapons and chemical and biological weapons and the like. So there is nothing technically stopping anyone. And this was sort of brought up when, as a concern, when there was this discussion about, quote unquote defensive weapons in space because, well, how, you know, are those weapons then purely defensive? Would those weapons be purely limited to engaging other targets in orbit or would they or out of the atmosphere or would they be capable of engaging targets on the ground? Especially if you

had something that could launch sort of physical interceptors at a thing, you know, could you point that down? So there has been this debate. Congress has been rolled back a lot of those plans and the Pentagon's offices that were tasked with that have rolled back a lot of those plans including canceling work that they had insisted they were going to do

on developing a particle beam, an orbital particle beam, which was a big focus of this. And that has been basically scrubbed for the time being. Lasers had also been discussed as well as, like I said, what do you call hard kill interceptors? The idea is that you fire a

missile to slam into an missile, basically. So, you know, it comes up from time to time, for sure. It's, you know, and as time goes on, like I said, the French are now talking about putting laser-armed satellites in space for defensive purposes. So people are talking more about putting weapons in space, and it's not just us. You make this all sound, so you got time for one more question? Yeah.

Okay. You make this all sound so reasonable and so real. why do you think so much of our coverage of this has been kind of to mock and to poke fun? Because it's boring. I mean, it's the Air Force, the Air Force and, you know, in opposing this and the proponents of Space Force, there's a lot of been a lot of push to talk up Space Force in a way that that doesn't immediately sort of shoot. down the idea that it's going to be space marines. Because if you were talking non-stop about guys and command centers on the ground or teams of engineers or, you know, basically people sitting in front of a computer all day and you're like,

okay, whatever, you know, it's like satellites in space and et cetera. It's not really tangible to the average person. And it's difficult to sort of comprehend. And it sounds boring. And it's, and especially because so much of this initial. this initial debate has been about bureaucracy. And these are, you know,

I'd like to sort of highlight that these are real issues about the bureaucracy and about budgets and about how budgets go about getting made and how there's still no guarantee that, that a, that a space force budget will be able to be free from sort of outside influences and politicking and, you know, competing priorities because the secretary of the Air Force is still going to need

to sign off on every one of these Space Force budget proposals every year before it goes to Congress, who will then also do their own thing and have to approve it or not approve it or tweak it or what have you. And those are real issues because if you're arguing that you need an entire new branch of the U.S. military in order to prioritize space, and there's no guarantee that those guys are going to be heard 100% all the time, you're running into exactly the issues you were supposed to prevent. And the initial plans that thankfully have been abandoned

were really going to hamstring the new space force. And it's really nice to see a lot of those things got abandoned along the way because they were, for a while, like they were going to just set the whole thing up for failure by basically creating a space force that really wouldn't have a seat at a lot of tables and really wouldn't have equal standing

and could just be sort of shunted to the side. But, I mean, these are discussions that are very, very esoteric to the average person who doesn't, you know, look at how the Defense Department is organized on a daily basis. And it's difficult to communicate that. So when you see the guy wearing the Space Force, quote, uniform, and it's like, why is he wearing a camouflage uniform?

It's like, well, he's wearing a camouflage uniform because it's an Air Force uniform. They just changed the name tag. You know, the name tag. that used to say Air Force has now says Space Force, and he's got a new patch, but we're not buying new uniforms for guys who sit on the ground. And there could be a whole discussion about why Air Force people

who also sit in command centers need to be wearing camouflage on a daily basis, but they're already doing that. So it's easy to mock that, but again, it's because the average person doesn't sort of know how the weird uniformities of the U.S. military, and it's hard to necessarily expect them to. Right? I mean, I wouldn't, it's a lot of information to try and wrap your head around that really isn't that important. The Space Force logo looks like the Star Trek logo. You know, it looks like the Starfleet logo.

I mean, until you realize that it's the Air Force Space Command logo, which is almost worse, they're just sort of ripping that off. But, but I mean, these things, you know, they do look like that. You know, it's a tangible thing about Space Force that people can see. And, I mean, it kind of looks goofy. So Space Force was both boring and inevitable in a lot of ways. Well, remember that we had it. It's about whether this creates the right emphasis. You know, there's no real talk yet about adding large amounts of person. You know, there's no real talk right now about adding new personnel.

It's about it's about giving them new name tags and being able to then allow them to just just do that. And so it's inevitable in that it seemed that opposition to creating a dedicated force for this evaporated over time. But I mean, we've had military units tasked with dealing with space. You know, it's not like we were ignoring that issue entirely. You know, that was the entire debate. And now, you know, now we have space force. and where, you know, you can talk with people who still believe that the Air Force shouldn't have been created. And I'm sure we'll be having a debate years from now about whether it was worth creating Space Force in the same way.

I mean, that's sort of, when you think about it, you know, the Air Force is really young, the Air Force is really young, sorry, the Air Force is really young to have had Space Force split off. You know, the Air Force was only created in the 40s, you know, after the Second World War, and here we are breaking it up again to create a new thing. So we've created a, you know, created a lot of new U.S. military branches in the last 50 years, in the last, you know, 75 years. So it's a, it'll be interesting to see how this debate evolves now that Space Forces is a thing. And like I said, you could technically pass a law in the future that would disestablish space force and would jam space force back into the Air Force or wherever the bits had come from.

As we have seen with the Air Force, despite massive opposition to the Air Force initially and continued opposition to the existence of the Air Force over the years, it's very unlikely that that's going to happen. So I would hope Space Force turns into it. out to be what its proponents want it to be because that's the entire point. I have my own reservations personally about whether I think that's going to work or not. But it's here now and we should make the most of it. Joseph Trevithic, thank you so much for coming onto the show and walking us through this delightfully boring topic.

Thank you for having me. All right, War College listeners, that's it for this week. War College is me, Matthew Galt. and Kevin Nodell. I am at MJ Galt on Twitter. Kevin is at KJK Nodell, and you can follow the show at War underscore College.

We will be back next week with more stories from behind the front lines. Stay safe until then.