Sea Control - Sea Control 346 - China's Gray Zone Tactics with Cristina Garafola

Episode Date: May 19, 2022

Links1. "A New Framework for Understanding Chinese Gray Zone Tactics," by Bonny Lin, Cristina Garafola, et al. RAND Corporation, 2022. 2. "Gaining Competitive Advantage in the Gray Zone," by Lyle Morris, Michael Mazarr, et al. RAND Corporation, 2019.3. "Competing in the Gray Zone: Russian Tactics and Western Responses," by Stacie Pettyjohn and Becca Wasser, RAND Corporation, 2019. 4. CMSI China Maritime Report #1: "China's Third Sea Force, The People's Armed Forces Militia: Tethered to the PLA," by  Conor Kennedy and Andrew Erickson, U.S. Naval War College China Maritime Studies Institute, March 24, 2017. 5. Cristinagarafola.com.

Hey, folks, it's Jared. I'm joined today by RAND Corporation's Christina Garofola, and we'll discuss the report she co-authored on China's gray zone tactics and potential counters. This episode was edited and produced by David Sieda. We are still looking for additional audio editors. We're happy to provide you some very basic training materials and instruction in a low-stress environment. So if you're interested in finding a way to contribute to SimSec and add to your resume and personal skill set, please send us an email with your resume to ccontrol at simsec.org. Finally, I want to take the opportunity to recommend our partners in the SimSec Podcast Network, the Bilge Pumps.

You can find Alex, Jamie, Drack, and a pile of iron brew bottles wherever you download your podcast. On that note, I'll turn it over to Kimbersman. You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Aloha, shipmates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control. My guest today is Christina Garofola. She's the co-author of the RAND Report, Competition in the Gray Zone, Countering China's Coercion Against U.S. Allies and Partners in the Indo-Pacific. So, Christina, welcome.

Would you mind introducing yourself to our listeners, please? Sure. Thanks for having me today, Jared. As you mentioned, I'm a policy researcher at the RAND Corporation, so my research focuses on broad topics related to China's rise with respect to defense and policy, foreign policy issues specifically, and in particular, looking at China's military, the People's Liberation Army or PLA. So it was also focused on the implications of China's policies and its military operations for the United States, as well as U.S. allies and partners. Well, thank you again for

coming on today. As a reminder to the listeners, all opinions are our own and not reflective of any institution with which we might be otherwise associated. So, Christina, let me start by asking you, how did you find your way to this topic? Yeah, so, you know, both among the research, academic community and policymakers there's obviously a lot of interest in understanding how does china use its increasing geopolitical economic informational means and capabilities as well as growing military capabilities right and how does it do this to pressure our countries to act according to beijing's interests um so obviously this has implications for u.s policy in the pacific um and you know for china that's china's priority region too they call it the asia

Pacific, but that's where we see a lot of China's efforts to advance its objectives through the gray zone. So it's not surprising that a lot of the countries that are bearing the brunt of China's efforts in the gray zone are, you know, some of our closest allies and partners in the region. But one challenge about looking in the gray zone, it's hard to assess, you know, what are the specific activities, who are the actors, and then how do you do this in a systematic way? You know, we've definitely benefited from a lot of research on specific case studies or incidents involving China and another country like think of the South China Sea, specifically, but our idea going into the study was, can we look at multiple countries and over a sustained period of time to see if there's trends and China's behavior, you know, over, you know, multiple years, and then, you know, separately there's been a lot of focus on the maritime domain. Obviously, that's of key interest for SIMSEC readers and listeners. But, you know, there's other domains and other areas where we

see tactics too, especially if, you know, maritime and non-maritime tactics are layered together or they're, you know, used in concert as part of a multi-layered approach against, you know, a target country. So basically what we were looking at in the study is analyzing gray zone activities over time against five allies and partners? And then, you know, what are the patterns and trends and what could U.S. government and DOD do to counter them? And last thing I'll say is, you know, we picked five countries, but it's not exclusive to Taiwan, Japan, India, Vietnam, and the Philippines. You can think about Chinese pressure against Australia in recent years, economic, diplomatic, and otherwise. The strong reaction to South Korea following the announcement of FAD and the

deployment of THAAD to South Korea and so on and so forth. So this, you know, could lead to some interesting insights for a bunch of countries. Yeah, I should say we're recording this on April 10. So it'll probably go up, you know, three to four weeks from now. So if anything is going on in the Russia-Ukraine theater that you feel we should be talking about, and we're not, that's the reason. Because it happened after we recorded on April 10. So for the purposes of your report, how would you define a gray zone tactic? Sure. So I should start by noting there's no one-size-fits-all definition, even in the U.S. or Western literature on the gray zone. Overall, you know, analysts and scholars talk about operations that fall into an ambiguous, you know, hence the gray area reference,

you know, in between peace and war. So I'll start with our definition and say a little bit about how we got there. So we focus on specifically Chinese coercive geopolitical, economic, military, and other activities that are beyond normal diplomatic engagements, but they're below the use of kinetic military force. And we built on some past RAND research on this topic, so I'll just highlight a couple themes. So some of our colleagues, Lyle Morris and Mike Mazur, they had a report on gaining comparative advantage in the gray zone in 2019, and they focused on coercive actions, changing the status quo below a threshold, you know, trying to, when the adversary of the country is trying to blur the line between military and non-military actions. They also

talk about tactics can be gradual, or the use of tactics can be gradual. So you could think of salami slicing, which is a word we use a lot to talk about China's tactics in the South China Sea. Sometimes it's difficult to provide attribution. You know, who really is the actor? Is it state-connected or state-linked? You know, we see that as a characteristic a lot. And then often we see extensive legal or political justifications. So China will present a lot of evidence about historical claims in international legal forum,

use a lot of documentation to kind of make their case. Sometimes we talk about this as like a lawfare technique. And then some of our former colleagues, Stacey Pettyjohn and Becca Wasser, they're now at CNAS, they had a report in 2019 looking at the gray zone as tactics, rather than an operational space across, you know, the continuum of conflict. And that's, you know, sort of we built on that approach and kind of focusing on what are the tactics that can be used, you know, where they're completely in peacetime and sometimes they get to more escalatory tactics. So, again, that got to our definition of geopolitical, economic, military, and other tactics beyond these normal steady state engagements, but below kinetic force. So that gets to this other question is, how do you know if it's a regular activity versus gray zone, right? Obviously, this area can be quite blurry. um so you might see you know in regular diplomatic or economic engagements like trade there's going

to be these you know typical day-to-day fluctuations as things come up or you know there's other priorities in diplomatic engagements or for you know uh different reasons um you know trade or otherwise there's fluctuations um we don't focus on those kind of things where you know some sectors experiencing some shocks and so on um you know for economic activity but it's where there's some kind of significant change in activities that are, you know, undertaken under false pretenses, and particularly when the country, the target country perceives that there's, you know, this is coercive, and it's meant to pressure them to act in a certain way. So, you know, that leads to kind of two areas. When the activity message is really intentional, it has, it's

accompanied by a pretty clear coercive message or threat, or, you know, sometimes it's ambiguous. us. The ally partner may interpret this as having coercive potential, but it's not necessarily explicitly mentioned by China in this way. So we don't always know that the coercion was 100% intended, but if the target country is perceiving it that way, it's, you know, seeking or shaping their behavior and leading to concerns by that government. So I just mentioned, you know, some examples of the geopolitical tactics. Second was economic tactics. China could be manipulating how goods or products or services are exchanged. Other tools would be like limiting tourism or Chinese students in the country, and given China's economic, you know, the heft and importance of

some of those areas for a country's economic sectors, that can be pretty significant. Also, investing in land or properties in countries within the countries themselves near their military bases. We've seen that in Japan and Vietnam, especially. The third region or third area would be military tactics, obviously. So military or paramilitary activities that are interpreted by the countries as China's attempt to coerce them without large-scale kinetic force being used. So think of harassing other countries' fishermen and disputed areas of the South China Sea could be using military threats, exercises, or other operations too. And then the last one would be cyber or informational capabilities. For our study, we put, we lumped in military and

non-military cyber activities together because it was hard to determine the attribution. But this could be things like hacking government websites or even companies' websites in the target country. And it could also be, you know, investing in or establishing new pro-China media outlets in the country. So the last thing, you know, here is it's really difficult to track the activities over time. And there's probably other activities, frankly, we didn't capture where we're just not quite sure of what the intent was or what actually happened within the target country. Well, how does China view competition in the gray zone? Yeah. So I talked a little bit about how Western scholars talk about this field and this literature. Chinese

experts have a pretty overall inclusive and similar concept of the gray zone. So they talk about harnessing resources across military and non-military domains. This is beyond diplomacy or these other traditional statecraft approaches, but it's typically short of direct use of military force. So the emphasis that's a little different from the Western approaches is leveraging all the national resources available to advance political objectives, while at the same time, you're still managing that threshold or risk of military escalation. So they'll talk about diplomatic, economic, financial tools, informational, and cyber forms of coercion. And they also talk about carrying out these activities through military and non-military actors and means, including some discussion of harnessing things like military-civil fusion, which has been elevated to national strategy within China.

You know, that's one example. And then last, they don't see this as a new phenomenon. They talk about how during the Cold War, the U.S. and the former Soviet Union leveraged gray zone tactics, and it doesn't just need to be a quote-unquote revisionist power carrying out gray zone activities. So this gets to, you know, how they describe their own activities and others' activities. The term gray zone itself, so in Chinese, this is hui se di dai. It's pretty new to the discourse in China. You won't actually see Chinese sources really talking about China's activities in this way. So they tend to use this term to criticize other countries' behavior, like characterizing U.S. alliances in the Indo-Pacific or denouncing U.S. freedom of navigation operations in the South China Sea. Then in terms of how they talk about their own activities that, you know, Western scholars or others would refer to as Grayson, they tend to use some concepts within the PLA's concept of military operations other than war or mutwa. So we in the West, U.S. Armed Forces don't really use this term as much anymore, MUA, but it extends beyond the common use associations with things like humanitarian assistance and disaster relief. So they'll talk about terms like stability, maintenance, rights and interest protection is a key one, and security and guarding operations.

And those are the ones that have the characteristics of the gray zone operations. operations. So we found one source that talked about, you know, what's China doing in the South China Sea, and they said it shouldn't be considered free zone operations. China's actions, our actions here consist of, quote, lawful rights protection activities. So that's the kind of language that we're seeing them use in characterizing what they're doing. A couple other, you know, areas we explored is why is China using these tactics in the first place? This is their priority region, I mentioned, we find China seems to be seeking to balance three main areas. First, a key objective always for China's leaders is to maintain or, you know, improve stability that facilitates

continued economic growth. That's always a priority. But second, China's trying to improve its external environment, you know, to alter the regional status quo in China's favor. So that includes pursuing unification with Taiwan, certainly, but also advancing, you know, China's territorial maritime claims in the South China Sea and other places. And then third, you know, China's trying to act below the level of a militarized response, you know, whether it's from the U.S. or its neighbors or other countries. So they're trying to balance all these three things. And, you know, we see gray zone as the area and the kind of menu of options they have at their disposal to do that. And then the last thing I'll say is, you know, what's enabling

China's activities. And basically what we see is increasing use of gray zone activities that we're able to track over time. So there's kind of four areas. One, they're putting into place, you know, through the Chinese Communist Party, which of course, you know, facilitates and has a suite of laws, regulations, and policies to apply state power in a growing number of areas. So we found 11 new or revised national security laws since 2010. And, for example, there's the 2014 counterespionage law and the 2017 national intelligence law. And these laws both have provisions to requisition nongovernment people, assets, facilities for national security purposes. Second, obviously growing economic geopolitical military power offer new options and tools for gray zone tactics.

Third is linkages between military development and economic growth. So one example, the PLA Navy was able to successfully advocate for leveraging China's Beidou satellite navigation system to conduct command and control for the maritime militia. So that's something that wasn't available, you know, in the past since China's developed that system over, you know, over the recent decades. And last, we see growing co-optation of non-military actors for military operations. So PLA Navy, China Coast Guard, and Maritime Militia have coordinated operations in the South China Sea. So all that's to say is, you know, China's empowering the PLA and other actors to engage in these peace time operations. They're leveraging different resources available. It's not just, you know, military tactics are within the PLA, and they're seeking to manage escalation.

So if you'll permit me a follow-up, I'm going to deviate slightly here. You mentioned the PLA Navy using the Chinese version of GPS to enable command and control for the maritime militia. How are they doing that? That was the first time that I've heard that. Are they communicating that, or do you just mean they're enabling access to that system? Yeah, so the PLA Navy, Andrew Erickson and Connor Kennedy have an article on the reference to some of this. I can definitely link it for some type of readers. And Ryan Martinson, also at China Maritime Studies Institute, has written a paper about how the coordination sometimes works in practice and sometimes doesn't work as well. But basically, you know, the providing or giving the maritime militia some of these capabilities enables, you know, higher level of command to track and coordinate some of these assets.

So I'm happy to link to some of those resources because I know that'll be of interest. Yeah, absolutely. We'll throw those right in the show notes for the listeners. You mentioned that the list of tactics that you developed was not comprehensive, but I will say to your and your team's credit is extensive. So how many different specific tactics have you observed? How did you classify or code them and which of those were used most frequently? Yeah, so we definitely found a lot of tactics across, you know, these kind of four main categories we looked at. So, as I mentioned, we focused on Taiwan, Japan, Vietnam, India, and the Philippines, and we found at least 77 different types of tactics. And I'll kind of break them into military and non-military buckets to explain a little bit. So we found 30 military tactics and 47 non-military ones.

On the non-military side, you know, as I mentioned, we talked about geopolitical, economic, and cyber informational approaches. But the tactics can affect countries in different ways. So it depends on, you know, is Beijing leveraging an international forum or regional forum? Is this kind of a grassroots approach? So we then sorted them in three ways. So the first one I mentioned is internationally. Can China pressure the target indirectly or externally via some sort of regional institution? It could be UN or it could be ASEAN institutions like that manipulating international resources

or even using third countries, which some of the countries we looked at, like Vietnam, are relatively concerned about China's increased presence in Cambodia and Laos, for example. Bilaterally, this is the most straightforward. China can simply directly pressure a country, so manipulating, you know, two-way trade, for example. And then the grassroots level, we see more and more activities directly on the ground within the target country. So that could be leveraging local proxies, you know, for example, in the country to act on behalf of China. For the military tactics, most of them, you know, we started with this approach, bilateral, grassroots, but most of them were bilateral, of course. China's undertaking,

you know, with military, paramilitary actors, these activities. So we saw them by military domains. So that was air, maritime, and land. And then we also had kind of a general category where we see joint activities, cross-service activities, or kind of high-level military threats. when it came to what was used most frequently for those non-military tactics we found a lot of geopolitical options so that could be again like through the UN or Aussie on these international forum or even supporting protests pro-China protests or countering you know the country's policy within the country things like that we also saw a lot of econ options but fewer cyber and informational tool so far. So I think that's an area of growth that we're seeing as more and

more of these types of tactics in recent years, the cyber and informational. So for example, India and China had a standoff in summer 2020. And sources were concerned that China may have conducted a malware attack on India's power generation and transmission network during that conflict. In terms of, you know, the international versus bilateral and grassroots, we saw a lot of bilateral and grassroots activities. And some of those international activities, you see less. And I think that's because, you know, they can potentially lead to backlash. They're more high profile and more easily observed. And then on the military tactics side, you know, it's not surprising. We looked at a lot of countries that have maritime related

disputes with China. So we saw a lot of military, maritime and air activities by typically like ships and aircraft patrols and incursions and things like that. But for India and Vietnam, they obviously share land borders with China. So we saw some ground-based tactics as well. And obviously, India is the most notable example in recent years. So as a reminder, you assess the tactics directed towards Taiwan, Japan, Vietnam, India, the Philippines. Did you observe any trends about the quote-unquote tactics of choice for those countries, or was there a lot of variance? Yeah, so we saw overall the largest variety of tactics against Taiwan. So, you know, we talked about 77 total we saw across the five. Over 60 different types were used against Taiwan alone,

and that's in contrast to, you know, some of the larger countries in particular. So for India and Japan, we only saw around like 30 or 35 different types. So it suggests that Beijing is a little more cautious about how it takes, undertakes activities against some of the larger regional powers, you know, thinking of Japan versus, you know, some of the smaller states in particular. We also saw China tailor gray zone activities to the target. So we wondered at the beginning, you know, would we only see some tactics against one country, like a high proportion where they only undertake this against Vietnam or something, for example. But we actually found a lot of the tactics were used against even all five countries or multiple countries. So basically, there's kind

of flexible approaches, you know, from this menu that China can use. So some examples where we saw against a lot of countries was the lawfare sort of legal campaigns we mentioned to pressure the target, or cyber operations against target government or military activities during periods of tension. A couple other areas, we see layering of different tactics, again, in different domains during periods of tension. So for Vietnam, for example, there's been a wide variety of activities to pressure Vietnam during resource-related standoffs in the South China Sea, so particularly during the 2014 oil rig incident. So, you know, it's not only PLA Navy vessels kind of in the background with maritime militia and China Coast Guard vessels, you know, getting up there and

engaging with Vietnam counterparts, but there's also military aircraft threatening the use of force against Vietnam by land or sea, conducting cyber attacks against Vietnamese government or infrastructure, even commercial companies, and then limiting cross-border trade and restricting tourism with Vietnam. We did see more variety of tactics over time, especially cyber and informational. And I mentioned that earlier, you know, China's building its capabilities in this area, it's reformed the PLA to have, you know, cyber and space specific capabilities and PLA strategic support force, you know, so there's more capabilities over time, and we're seeing them used more over time. And then when we started the study, we wondered if, you know,

China has growing geopolitical and economic power, maybe we see fewer military tactics in favor of non-military ones. But, you know, kind of related to the previous point, the opposite seems to be true. We're seeing military capability is improved a lot. And so now China has more military tools to pressure the other countries without using kinetic force, or at least high level kinetic force. So in the South China Sea, for example, we all know China's built up these capabilities and infrastructure at its artificial islands it holds in the south china sea and now we see not only pla assets but paramilitary and state-owned enterprise assets can operate out of those holdings they don't need to return to the mainland or to hainan to refuel or you know

resupply um so when there was um then 2019 vanguard bank standoff with vietnam the chinese survey vessel involved it went to refuel a fiery cross reef and then it returned right to the area the standoff and this is in the southern south china seas so they had to go back you know up to hainan or you know the mainland they would have been off station you know for a large period of time a couple other areas so we see china expanding its involvement on the ground those kind of grassroots tactics through local proxies different information efforts so you could think of the united front work department leveraging chinese friendship associations in these countries Sometimes also leveraging or even putting pressure on ethnic Chinese groups in the countries to help carry out some of these messages and informational campaigns.

And then last week, I didn't mention that Philippines that much so far. So this is a case where once we saw Duterte come into power in 2016, that he sought to improve relations with China, right, with Xi Jinping. But we saw, nevertheless, you know, military and non-military tactics continue to be used against the Philippines. So even as the Philippines was trying to increase its economic and political engagement with Beijing, the pressure didn't let up. And, you know, now we see in more recent years, Duterte has reconsidered that approach because, you know, China continues to send a large number of vessels, you know, to camp out near Philippines holdings in South China Sea and undertake all types of tactics. So we'll focus on some of the recommendations for the last couple of questions here. Are there specific tactics that you recommend the U.S. focus on countering? Yeah. So when we did our research, we didn't find a consensus method on how you could rank these 77 tactics we came up with. So we proposed three areas policymakers could consider in the aggregate. So the first is tactics that most challenge U.S. policy objectives and interests in the region. So we looked at strategy documents like the National Security Strategy, National Defense Strategy, DOD and State Department, you know, public documents.

So we compared what are the policy priorities in those documents to the 77 tactics and how do they all shake out? Second is what are the tactics that are really difficult for the allies and partners to respond to? So leveraging, you know, regional experts, you know, expertise and figuring out is the tactic relatively straightforward to counter or do the countries really struggle? And then third, you know, it may be useful to think about how widely the tactics are used, to your point earlier. So is it just against one country or multiple countries? Because that might suggest a common, you know, set of solutions that emerge, you know, that can benefit all of the countries. So it really depends how you weigh each of those three. We kind of opted for U.S. interests and the difficulty to counter them for the countries is a higher priority.

And then, you know, we weighed how widely the tactics are used is a little less important. And then, you know, when we did that, applied that, we ended up with the top 20 tactics and actually 10 were military, which didn't surprise us, but 10 were non-military. And that leads to kind of our main finding is that many of the most challenging tactics are problematic for allies and partners from their perspective are non-military as well as kind of the traditional military tactics. So when we think of those problematic military tactics, you know, that's primarily Chinese military, paramilitary, or, you know, civilian-enabled activities in disputed territories like the South China Sea, obviously. They could be landing or deploying aircraft, doing patrols in the disputed areas, obviously ship, you know, naval activity, and, you know, for those with ground disputes or border disputes, land forces as well. And then, you know, things like deepening military cooperation on a target country's border with a neighbor. You know, so I mentioned Vietnam, seeing that as particularly concerning. Some of the non-military activities that kind of rose to the top was using diplomatic or political threats to disrupt activities within the target, using Chinese companies or economic assets to advance disputed territorial claims, so like sending a state-owned or operated or managed oil rig to a disputed area, controlling or reducing public resources to the target.

So China has a lot of dams constructed upstream on rivers to flow down, like Mekong and Red Rivers to Vietnam, and they're able to meter out the water levels, actually, of those rivers, and that's something that Vietnam's really worried about. And then, you know, on the informational side, controlling existing target media outlets, you know, investing in them or doing joint media productions, you know, these kind of joint licensing agreements and things like that, basically getting China's narrative into the target countries either directly or through proxies. So the bottom line is, you know, the military tactics challenge a lot of U.S. interests directly, but the countries are concerned about some of these geopolitical and economic and cyber tactics as well. And then what are your recommendations for the U.S. and its allies moving forward to best counter all the tactics you identified? Yeah, so as I mentioned, we came up with this approach on how you might prioritize the tactics. And I think, you know, the first step would be, whether it's that approach or a different approach, you know, how does U.S. government prioritize which tactics, you know, it wants to focus resources on encountering. So, you know, identifying that set of criteria where the U.S. can focus either whole of government efforts or coordinating across departments and agencies. We also thought, you know, to inform that prioritization, can the U.S. government hold maybe gray zone discussions on different scenarios with key allies and partners?

Can I better understand their concerns and perspectives? Because, you know, we coded all these 77 tactics for, you know, the difficulty encountering them now. Is that changing? Are there areas where the countries, you know, are feeling more confident or more concerned? And how should that inform what the U.S. does? and then you know we saw some of the geopolitical international tactics were particularly concerning for countries as well as economic coercion so as we know you know China's securing more and more leadership positions in new or international or new or existing international regional forum where can the U.S. promote you know our allies and partners who have candidates

to assume those leadership positions and make sure you know China's not limiting you know their own voices and their, you know, their activities in these forums. And, you know, where can the U.S. work together with other allies and partners if a country is being coerced economically? Are there options for, you know, like-minded countries to counter that pressure? And then finally, you know, we see a lot of increasing cyber and informational activities. So certainly, like, Taiwan would be the key example with, you know, hundreds of thousands of cyber attacks, but other countries to, and particularly what, you know, when those countries are undergoing key leadership transitions, that could be a particular moment in time where disinformation campaigns

could be, you know, quite detrimental. So, you know, how can the U.S. help them counter these activities, share information, you know, share intelligence, or even just publicize we see these disinformation campaigns going on. For DOD, you know, having some sort of gray zone plans that might be similar to you know maybe not as detailed as operational plans and you know how do you develop that prior planning that provides options if U.S. or if allies and partners were to request that support and then for the Air Force of course there's a lot of intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance to ISR capabilities in the region how can the U.S. Air Force continue to build out that infrastructure work with allies and partners on that and you know cyber defense and other

capabilities that would counter some of these tactics. Well, that's all the time that we have for today. I'd like to thank my guest, Christina Garofalo. Christina, where can we find you online and what are you working on next? Sure. So rand.org is our website. I also have a lot of my research on christinagarofalo.com. I'm on Twitter, so I post new stuff there that's coming out. My handle is clgarofalo. And stuff I'm working on next, I just had a report come out on Chinese airborne forces relevance for Taiwan Strait contingency. So China Maritime Studies Institute has a volume

coming out soon on Taiwan Strait issues and all sorts of PLA topics. So folks may be interested in that. And then I'm working on a book chapter, what does it mean for the Chinese Air Force to become a world-class Air Force? So we've heard Xi Jinping call on the PLA, this is your mandate to become a world-class military

by 2049. The Air Force has its own mandate become a world-class air force but what does this actually you know mean and what is both the progress and kind of their gaps in achieving this so that's that's what's coming next and i guess that'll be interesting contextually as we watch sort of russia ukraine and perhaps the over estimation of russian forces prior to that conflict the current assessment of where those forces stand and then how did the chinese assess where they stand um so i look forward to reading all those things. We'll link as many of them as we can here in the show notes for the ones you've

already published. But thank you again for joining us. To listeners, thanks for tuning in. We'll see you next time. Thanks so much. © BF-WATCH TV 2021 Timbo now.