Angry Planet - Why China and India are Fighting With Clubs

Episode Date: August 5, 2020

A few weeks ago, two nuclear-armed neighbors got into a fistfight. Actually, there were some clubs and other handheld weapons, too. It was bizarre and people died, more than 20 on the Indian side. The Chinese have been more coy about their numbers.To get a grip on what happened and what it means for the future, we have Maria Abi-Habib of the New York Times on the show. Abi-Habib is a South Asia correspondent who is based in India’s capital of Delhi.Recorded 7/22/20India’s army focusHow the battle went downHow to project power without even tryingHow to lose friends and influence your enemiesWar College has a substack! Join the Information War to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict.https://angryplanet.substack.com/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.

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. China is pressuring India from all sides of its border. So I think that's going to be interesting. That's something to really watch is how India manages its own backyard, because it took it for granted.

It took countries like Sri Lanka for granted. it took countries like Nepal for granted, just thought we're the biggest nation in this neighborhood. So they're going to come to us no matter what. Guess what? Now they've got China. You're listening to War College, a weekly podcast that brings you the stories from behind the front lines. Here are your hosts. Hello and welcome to War College. I'm Jason Fields. And I'm Matthew Galt. A few weeks ago, two nuclear-armed neighbors got into a fistfight. Actually, there were some clubs and other handheld weapons, too.

It was bizarre, and people died, more than 20 of them on the Indian side. The Chinese have been more coy about their numbers. To get a grip on what happened and what it means for the future, we have Maria Aby Habib of the New York Times on the show. Abi Habib is a South Asia correspondent who is based in the India's capital of Delhi. Maria, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. So can you tell us a bit about the incident that happened in June?

Yeah, so basically it had been going on for several weeks and then it boiled over in June. And what had happened was the Indians had accused the Chinese of crossing over the line of actual control, which is a rough demarcation of a border that's still disputed between the two countries. A lot of people don't really realize the geographies that are going on here, but you're basically taking like a swath of what was to like what in a fairer just world or maybe those are hypercharged terms would have been Tibet and Tibet is actually spread across between India and China. A lot of people don't really get that and that's fine. And so basically the Indians accused the Chinese of crossing this line. These countries have had not really

demarcated their borders formally yet. And, And it led to what we saw in June, which was they actually went with, you know, their own fists and clubs that were, in some cases, had like barbed wire wrapped around them. Some people say nails. They had combat and several died. By some estimates, there's a few dozen that died from the Chinese side and there's definitely about 20 that died from the Indians. The Indians have confirmed it. They've been a lot more open with this. But even then, they haven't been super open.

They had been denying for like weeks that the Chinese had crossed the border until it became too apparent to hide. Why did the Chinese cross the border? What we've seen is we've seen in this post-COVID world, what we've seen is we've seen China actually become even more territorial, ambitious, and aggressive. A lot of that stuff was happening even before COVID, but you still speaks to the Indians to this day. And nobody really understands why. This line of actual control has been in place for decades. This is the most serious hot war that we've seen from India and China since they fought the Sino-Indian War in the 60s, and about 2000 or so died then. So nobody really understands why now.

There are lots of theories. One of the theories is this was to show India that if it dreams of ever upstaging the Chinese as the leader of the developing world, which the Indians were doing in the wake of COVID, that they were going to bop them on the nose and teach them a lesson. Some of the things that India had been doing in order to position itself as the leader of the developing world or the global South, as it likes to say, they had joined the executive board of the WHO. They had invited businesses, Western businesses,

who had set up shop in China and say, hey, you don't like what's happening with China secrecy. Yeah, we don't either. They really messed up on that coronavirus situation. So why don't you come and set up shop in India? We're open. We're a democracy. We're the world's largest democracy. Whether or not that actually transpires is a pipe dream for India because it has lots of red tape and terrible legislation that would make it very difficult for any businesses to set up shop and actually manufacture anything in a serious way.

But it was making these moves to try to upstage China. And so there's a theory that was possibly it as well. So what's the territory like? You mentioned that it's mountainous for sure. It's, I think I saw it was 14,000 feet up. Yeah. It's a part of India where if you go there, you actually have to spend time like acclimating.

So you've got to spend like a night at the base of the mountain and then you can go up higher in a mountain. So it's a very arid area, very little rows there. it's there the it's mountainous it's there's like little squiggles of water bodies that go through it I'm not sure if that answers your question but it's fighting over a pretty barren territory but this is territory that's also really important because it basically connects zing jeng to Tibet and China really needs that corridor because those are the two or two of the some of the most rest of provinces in china so it would like greater movement and freedom of

in that area to be able to stitch up these two very rest of provinces in China. And that's why actually, essentially, the Indians and the Chinese went to war the first time in the 60s, was over this building of roads in orders for the Chinese to get to Tibet in a rapid manner and be able to tighten their grip on Tibet. We talk a little bit more about the nature of the fighting. As I'd read reports, there was mostly like hand-to-hand combat on very narrow passes, just one person on one person?

And why were firearms not involved at all? After the Sino-Indian War, they signed a treaty that basically said that there would be no arms. So neither side, neither of the military to carry any arms. So the nature of the combat was hand-to-hand because of this rule. How that comes to play when you're actually testing a territory, an actual line of control, who knows. But so that was part of the reason why there were no arms. The Indian media had much more graphic reports, as you can imagine, than the Chinese did. And one of the media said that is very plugged into the government,

so that basically the Chinese military had stopped the water source. And then when the Indian military rolled up, they then let it rip. And as the Indian soldiers were getting out of their cars, actually several of them were then like, were then swept away downhill by this gust of water and that killed a few. And then there were the reports of these like crude batons that had barbed wire wrapped around them that were also used. So that was the nature of the combat. It's really like 16th century style. Get out the maces. What was the buildup to this? How long have tensions been building? Is it just COVID that has really pushed this forward?

There's a few theories as I had said. One theory was India wants to upstage China as the leader of the Global South. The second is that actually China has been getting much closer to the U.S. militarily and is particularly the Navy. The U.S. military thinks the world, that might be a bit strong, but they think very highly at the Indian military. They find, or sorry, the Indian Navy is the most, it's the most streamlined. It has less bloat. It doesn't have the number of pensioners that like the army does. Another thing that's very important to the Americans is that they have. Their indigenization is quite high in the Navy as opposed to the Air Force or the Army. They're making their own things. They're able to train with the Americans. Just a few months ago, the U.S. and

the Indian navies actually did like a submarine hunt off of Diego Garcia. So their Navy-to-Navy relations are really strong. And of course, that is what freaks the Chinese out the most because that's where they're expanding their territory. And if you look at the map, the Indian Ocean is incredibly important. And it's really interesting because we don't really talk about the Indian Ocean. It doesn't get that much airtime. People talk about other bodies of water as South China Sea. But the Indian Ocean is where the majority of the world's trade goes through. And the Chinese Navy has really been making inroads. So they have an asset. The Navy doesn't itself have the asset, but the Chinese government, through its state-owned companies, has this asset, which is Hamun Poto and Sri Lanka.

There's concerns that Guadar in Pakistan would end up becoming an asset of the Chinese Navy, although that's disputed by the Pakistanis, but it's not unimaginable. They are building, their state-owned companies are building tons of assets in Guadar. So there's this real concern that that China is trying to expand into the Indian Ocean. And that's where India and the U.S. 's navies and their relationship would be incredibly important. Now, India also has like assets that it's not really using. And I think this is what really frustrates the Americans quite a bit as well, is that they could be doing a lot more to choke off the Malacca Straits, which would be really detrimental for China. That's one of the primaries where shipping actually goes through,

the entire world. It's like one of the choke points. Yeah, especially for China, like in their direction of China. Exactly. So they could be using their Andaman Islands to really try to contest China and the trade that it needs to flow and to roll towards China. And so what the U.S. would like to see is just more from India. And I think that the Navy relationship does allow that there's a lot of room to grow. Army to Army, not so much. Air Force, yes, but really it's in Navy, we're seeing a lot of growth and a lot of cooperation. And that really freaks out the Chinese. So I think that, so the other theory is that the Chinese made this move in June in order

to kind of, to kind of show India look, you think that you can turn your back on us, turn your back on your longstanding policy of non-alliance and try to counter us. But at the end of the day, we are stronger than you. And they're not really wrong there. This is like a force that even the Americans are really having a hard time struggling to contain economically and militarily. So India is going to have a much harder time of it as just more of an insignificant. I don't want to say insignificant, but as a, I don't want to say lesser, but as a power that doesn't have as much might military or economically. Honestly, who the hell knows?

This is what's so incredible about China is nobody really knows why it does these things. And you speak to, I'm speaking to Shashankar Menon, who was the former national security advisor in the previous government. And he was saying, like, that doesn't even make sense either this theory. Because surely if they were going to be, if they were going to be signaling to the Indians, hey, don't, don't strengthen your alliance militarily with the U.S., this action in June only strength, only made India more. inclined to rely on the U.S. as a partner. So honestly, why this is happening, it's anybody's guess. As soon as this conflict was over, China all of a sudden made another territorial claim in Bhutan, which is India's neighbor, and that would affect India as well.

They're coming up with all sorts of territorial claims that people hadn't really had or haven't heard of before. That was very long-winded, I apologize. No, we actually specialize in long-winded on this show. No, more realistically, the idea is that the guests probably know more than we do, so we don't really mind letting them talk. I would hope that they're more eloquent than I, but yeah. So I think the two leaders are probably worth talking about. They seem to, they're both focused on bringing their countries into some kind of dominance.

They're both been called nationalist, and I'm wondering what, you know, you've seen, than what you think. Yeah, that's what makes us so interesting. It's the world's largest democracy pitted against the world's largest autocracy. This is incredible. And this is the Sylvester Stallone moment that the U.S. is waiting for. And at this point, both of these leaders are incredibly nationalistic. And this is not the first time that their military have fought over territory.

There was Doeclam in 2017. Again, that was in Bhutan. and affects India's security, even though it's, it concerns the Bhutanese border. And they both have to play to their audiences. And for China, and I'm not a China expert, but I listen to people who are smarter than I on China. And for them, it's military, right? China's economy is not doing so well. there's a real kind of consternation over COVID at this point domestically.

Maybe this was part of the reason why China decided to do this was because they realized that at the end of the day, they can challenge India militarily, and India can't really fight back. For India, this was very humiliating because they take a lot of pride in their military and actually Modi was clinched a landslide victory in the elections last year, partly because it was the Pakistani Indian military had a came to had the first actual clash in decades

right before the election and and the Indian military was able to assert itself and get major concessions from Pakistan. And Modi really played up the Indian military in a way that India doesn't really do because India likes to be this like neutral power. Oh, we were part of the non-aligned military. movement. We're friends with everybody. We were friends with the Soviets and the Americans. Modi went to Israel, Palestine in 2018, and the headlines were like, oh, he dipped his toes in the Galilee with Netanyahu. And then a day later, he was hanging out with Mahmoud Abbas.

So India really doesn't play up its military. So this is the fact that they're doing so or being forced to do so against a much larger military power is incredibly uncomfortable. They have a lot of appetite to take on Pakistan because at the end of the day, even though the Pakistanis are arguably a better military, it's a much smaller military. But coming head to head with China, they know that they're not going to win that. Can you tell us a little bit more about the state of the Indian military? What kind of shape is it in? I know we've talked about the Navy, but what about ground troops? Oh, you're just like begging me to be trolled right now. Okay, so the most trolled I've ever been. And it lasted for about a month or two.

I wrote a story about the Indian military. So basically, the Indian military is in a bit of a, it's one of the world's largest militaries. It's, I think, it's over a million troops. But the thing is that the large chunk, like, of the, one of the biggest chunks of the budget goes to actually just paying off pensions. Like, in Delhi, I live in kind of, the diplomatic area. There is an area called defense colony, and that's typically where soldiers

would get, military officials of a certain rank would get a plot of land, and that's why it's called defense colony. This is like, just, this is a very archaic way of managing your military that is very expensive in today's day and age. It's a military that can throw bodies at the problem, but technology, not so much. And unfortunately, today's wars are not about bodies. it's all about technology. That's why the Israeli military, which is a very small country, tends to do quite well, is that they're tech savvy. And so the Indian military, it's, so it doesn't have, now it finally does. It's like about six months old or something like that. It doesn't have, it did not have a joint chiefs of staff up until recently. So basically, in order to

get funding, the army would have to trash talk the Navy and the Navy would trash talk the Air Force. And they're all working against each other. And there was really not a lot of unity there. And so that was hugely problematic. And there was nobody just running, there was nobody kind of playing referee amongst these three, the three units of the military. It's very army focused, but very troop focused, troop heavy.

It's Air Force relies on migs that are very old. It's now getting Raphael's from the French, not in the quantities that are needed. Its Navy is the best when it comes to indigenization and creating its own equipment. But unfortunately, the Navy, which is actually the most efficiently run and the U.S. military really loves, is the least funded. So that's the state of the military. And the thing is that India is like it's surrounded by so much water and it's really necessary for it to fund the Navy. a much bigger way than it's really doing at this moment.

So it doesn't make sense for the military to be so army focused. You're going to pause there for break war listeners. We are talking about China and India and why they came to blows. Welcome back from the Break War College listeners. We are talking about India and China. And they've only got one aircraft carrier and they're building another. Is that correct? Yes.

Okay. They not only are conventionally armed, though, these are all nuclear-armed countries, India, China, and Pakistan. Do people actually worry about it coming down to using nuclear weapons in some of these confrontations, or is that just so off the table that no one even worries about it? Yeah, there is concern about that. You have nationalism mixed in with religion. And that tends to lead to some pretty interesting policy decisions. So basically what happened last year, India and Pakistan,

they had their first kind of like hot war in decades. And the Indian Air Force crossed the border into Pakistani airspace to bomb what an area that used to be very like terrorist heavy. And there were lots of terror training camps. there. Those camps had been evacuated for a while. There was a real concern for a while, for days that the Indian military was going to actually use missiles tipped with nuclear warheads to actually hit back Pakistan. And it caused some consternation actually within the diplomatic community. And there was like a real kind of diplomats fell onto two sides of this. One side was

no, this was just posturing. The Indian military was never going to do that. And the Pakistanis were just playing this up as a threat to say, oh, look at how dangerous the Indians are under this Hindu nationalist government. But there were also some diplomats were incredibly concerned and thought actually, like, the Modi government could really go there. It's really hard to say. But I don't know. Maybe it's, I just to see unicorns and rainbows, but I can't imagine the landmass and all of the population sides. The Indians on the continent is huge. it would just be really amazing to see that. Anyway, sorry, I'm not really answering your question.

No, I think you are. Yeah, I think so too. Yeah, nukes are weird and unique and terrible. Has Modi himself talked about them at all? What is he, like, what's come from him directly? On China. A nuke's and, yeah, I'm wondering about like nukes and China. What's the messaging from him been directly after all of this?

So Modi right after the skirmish and the casualties that ensued, he had a, he got into like fatigues and he gave a very kind of nationalist speech on the front line of the line of actual control where this whole skirmish happened with the Chinese. And the whole, the general line was we will not allow anybody to take one injured India. Chinese on the other hand have, in their press, what they have said is there's been a lot of like mocking of the Indian-American partnership saying, oh, the Indians think that like the Americans are going to step in to help them. That's not the case.

The Americans are just using them to challenge China. But as soon as China slaps India around, the Americans are going to be gone. And there has been this kind of back and forth. Also amongst the newspapers as well, you have lots of Indian diplomats or former diplomats who are still plugged into the government. You're really saying it's time for Indies to drop this whole non-aliance. a non-alliance theory and we have to actually become more aggressive. So I think India, we are starting to see in India that has just been forced to take aside. I think it would

have preferred to have spoken from both sides of its mouth as it's done for a while now. But I think it's realizing that it actually has to step up and show the Chinese that, you know, that they are going to create these alliances, that they are going to empower their military to do. But their options are not that great, frankly. Their military spending is like one-third of what China's is. And with the economy in the doldrums, which it's going to be this year, with like negative 6% growth, there's no way that they're going to be able to increase their military spending in the way that the Chinese have. I've heard some sort of vague things about connections between India and Russia as well, that if they're not aligned with the U.S., that

there's, I know there are old connections between what was the Soviet Union in India, but is there anything between them now? Yeah, they are. So because so much of India's equipment was from the Soviet Union, that kind of then transitioned into what is today Russia and relying on Russian equipment. As you both probably know, once you buy one piece of equipment, it's hard not to from one military. It's hard not to keep purchasing from that military because everything has to fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. So you can't just fit a French missile. with a Russian anti-missile shield, for instance. It's like picking between a Mac and a PC.

You're buying into a whole structure. Exactly. You're buying into a whole structure. So the Indians are still very reliant on Soviet weaponry and equipment. But it's also archaic, something like 68%. And this is from India's reports from generals and also a parliamentary report, but something like 68% of India's military equipment is sold. It's considered vintage. A lot of that is Russian. And so the Americans get very nervous because they want India to be all in. And India can't really be all in because it relies so much on Russian equipment. The majority of India's equipment is Russian. They are buying the S-400, yeah, S-400 anti-missile shield. And they thought that it was better. in the Patriot defense system. So yeah, so that makes the American, the American government

incredibly nervous because for them it's all or nothing, but the Indians are trying to say, look, it can't be all or nothing. Like, you have to take our hand and walk with us a little bit. Like, it can't just be a sprint. It has to be a walk towards the partnership that we need to be in. Another thing I wanted to talk about a little bit, if we can, is what COVID response has been like there and how that's affecting everything. I know we've touched on it a little bit, but I'm just really curious about how India is dealing with it and what Modi's messaging has been on it and how people are responding to him. So on COVID, the response was they locked down very, very early.

Some people say they lock down too soon. The numbers are rising. India is one of three of the most affected in the world. They've crossed the million mark in terms of cases. People do not seem to be dying in as great numbers as we've seen in the U.S. or Europe. Modi was really able to parlay the coronavirus into hypernationalism. So India was the first, at Modi's urging, India was the first country to stand where everybody stood outside and started banging pots and pants to say thank you to essential workers.

Other countries took that on like the UK. And they found that as a point of pride. This has really worked out well for Modi in that sense in order to continue to portraying himself as a competent leader, the father of the nation. It's a lot of I am the father of the nation. And while the numbers are pretty high, it's people are not dying in the streets and the way that they feared that they would be like when we looked at New York. So he's considered to have done well on the crisis. However, the economic pain that is coming down the way is quite high. There were some other missteps, including with migrant laborers, but I think that's going to be

forgotten about. But as long as the economy continues to be mismanaged and the economy was being mismanaged even before coronavirus hit, eventually that will catch up to Modi. And he might pay for that electorally down the line. So, right, they, I'm going to get this wrong, but the, he messed with the currency somehow, right? Yeah, demonetization. That happened right before Trump was elected. So that happen in 2016. Okay. I've got, we've got just a couple more follow-ups,

or just a couple more questions if you've got time. Yeah, sure. So something that we've, one of the words I've heard repeated as we've been talking over and over again is nationalism. I think it's fair to say that Modi's a nationalist. What do you think the consequences of this are going to be in the near term for India?

Like this nationalist push. In the near term. I don't think the consequences will be very great because the opposition is in shambles, the opposition is run by the Congress Party and it's in shambles. And I think that it's just going to be very hard for anybody on a national level to really compete with the BJP, which is Modi's party. However, they are not getting the state level governments that they really want. And once they have the state governments and then they also have the national government,

that's when you could really start to see major policy changes, which is what the BJP would like. That has been denied to them so far in the six years that they've been in power. I don't think there are going to be major consequences anytime soon. I think it's a lot going to depend on the economy. And that's the way that we've always seen nationalists fall. Unless it's either a major war that they lose, like Hitler, or the economy going into shambles, which is what we're seeing now in Venezuela. we're not quite Venezuela at this point

and we're very far from Venezuela, let's say. But eventually it's going to come to haunt Modi because you can't have negative 6% growth, which is what is projected for India's economy, and then also create the like about a million jobs that you need in order to just keep people employed because that's how many, that's the scale. Like when we talk about India,

we really have to remind people of the scale of it. This is 1.3 billion people. In about 10 years, India will grow another America in terms of population. There will be another 300 million people. And in order to keep up with, to keep growth levels healthy and provide jobs, they have to be creating about a million jobs a month. And without that, you're going to see major economic pain, which will result in major political pain for Modi. Do you think that this incident with China is going to carry over? Is this going to escalate from here?

it's been a month and from the United States, you're not hearing much? Or do you think that that's it? We'll see. So you're going to have the quad. So the quad is Japan, Australia, India, and U.S. They are strengthening their alliance. And they've never come out and said, we don't like China, but the messaging is basically there, which is we want a free and fair Indo-Pacific, which is what the U.S. is renamed that region, that maritime mass. And India is. inviting in Australia for the first time for the exercises, the naval exercises that it's had with the U.S. and Japan called Malabar. So Australia will be invited by India into those exercises. This is something that makes the Chinese nervous. They have complained about this before and said

that these four powers are trying to box them in. So I think it will be interesting to see what happens with Malabar. Malabar was postponed. It was supposed to happen about now. It will probably happened later on in the year because of COVID. I think what we're going to see more of is, I think that this claim that China has made to Bhutan's border is going to be interesting and it's something to watch, whether that parlayes into a military action or not. It remains to be seen. But what we're also seeing now is like an economic war happening between China and India. And what India has is scale. And everybody wants a part of that giant pie. It's 1.3 billion people, only 50% of the country is connected to the internet. This is huge for any companies,

especially those that are state-owned, like in China. It has been wanting to enter the market. They wanted to do the 5G network. It seems that the India will deny them that. It's a growing middle class. It's going to be the world. It's going to, it's going to, it's going to overshute China fairly soon to become the world's largest population. And that combined with a growing middle class basically means lots of money. And so what India has done is that they created a new investment law in April. And that would basically mean that any investments coming from China would have to be reviewed by the government. They have told their telecom companies to stop using Chinese equipment. We're already starting to see some economic moves to try to deny China a share of a pie.

And that's an important market for China to grow. so that will hurt. I've got one more, Chase. Looking at all these different flashpoints, these rising tensions with China, what are you worried about? What do you look at and what worries you? I think that

with all of this, it's always the miscalculation and how two nations might misperceive in others' action and then that could actually trigger off a greater war. I'm not sure if we're quite there. that seems a little, that seems like a stretch today, who knows tomorrow.

I think Pakistan's going to be interesting because Pakistan's been really writing China's coattails on this. And the media has been like, we've been proven right. The Indians are terrible. Even the Chinese are having problems with them. And I think that what's really interesting is that really India has been boxed in this pretty phenomenal way. Like, China is making a play for greater bilateral ties with Nepal. You're seeing a lot of, you're seeing a lot of of tension between India and Nepal, and this has been like big brother, little brother. That's the way they prefer to each other. That relationship's quite solid. So it's interesting to see it break down a bit, although it's still very important and valued by those two nations.

India is now being denied container terminal in Colombo, Sri Lanka. And people feel like that has China's foot fingerprints on it because China has invested majorly in Sri Lanka. You're seeing China build a lot of infrastructure in Pakistan and territory that India considers its own. So you're seeing India really get boxed in. And I think that the danger here is that India is just, again, it's the economy. It doesn't have the money to spread around its own neighborhood to ensure that it's safe in its own backyard. I had an Indian official tell me something like, Why are we going to go build roads in Sri Lanka when we don't have roads connecting, like a decent road connecting Mumbai to Delhi? India is very well aware of the fact that it has a lot to invest.

It needs to invest a lot more domestically to do things like improve the literacy. Sanitary conditions and things like schools and things like that and infrastructure. It can't really be competing with China in this regional way that China is, which is what the pressure point that China is using right now. Really, China is pressuring India from all sides of its border. So I think that's going to be interesting. That's something to really watch is how India manages this, its own backyard, because it took it for granted. It took countries like Sri Lanka for granted. It took countries like Nepal for granted. Just thought we're the biggest nation in this neighborhood. So they're going to, you know, come to us no matter what. Guess what? Now they've got China. And they're really using that.

You see this all the time, which is like, oh, you don't want to give us that. We'll just go to China. And so you're seeing India finding itself in these uncomfortable situations where it's trying to manage how much it can really spend and invest in its neighbors versus just to keep China at bay versus what it would actually like to spend at home because India's own socioeconomic metrics are pretty down there. It needs to invest in its own people before it can invest in people abroad. Maria, thank you so much for joining us.

really helped us understand what's going on. That's it for this week, War College listeners. War College is a production of War College LLC. It is myself, Matthew Galt, Kevin Nodell, and Jason Fields. It was created by me and Jason Fields. If you like the show, you can find us online at War underscore College at Twitter and at Facebook.com, 4.S.WorCollledge Podcast. And we have a substack, Angryplanet.com, where we break down the week's defense.

news and also we will be dropping some bonus episodes in the near future. Some changes coming to the show. You can read about them here. We will be back next week with more conversations about conflict on an angry planet. Please stay safe until then.