Sea Control - Sea Control 475 - Island Campaigns and the Founding of the PLA Navy with Dr. Toshi Yoshihara

Episode Date: October 29, 2023

Links1. Red Star Over the Pacific: China’s Rise and the Challenge to U.S. Maritime Strategy, second edition, by Toshi Yoshihara and James Holmes, USNI Books, 2018. 2. Mao’s Army Goes to Sea: The Island Campaigns and the Founding of China’s Navy, by Toshi Yoshihara, Georgetown University Press, 2022. 3. "China’s Lessons from the Pacific War and Implications for Future Warfighting," by Toshi Yoshihara, CIMSEC, March 22, 2023. 4. "China as a Composite Land-Sea Power: A Geostrategic Concept Revisited," by Toshi Yoshihara, CIMSEC, January 6, 2021.5. "How China has Overtaken Japan in Naval Power and Why It Matters," by Toshi Yoshihara, CIMSEC, June 22, 2020.6. "Assessing the Military Balance in the Western Pacific with Dr. Toshi Yoshihara," by Cris Lee, CIMSEC, November 5, 2018.7. Sea Control 288: Chinese Civilian Shipping and the Threat to Taiwan with Tom Shugart, CIMSEC, October 28, 2021. 

Hey, folks, it's Jared. Walker Mills is hosting today, and he has Dr. Toshi Yoshihara. They'll be discussing island campaigns and the PLA Navy's history. This episode was edited and produced by Brian Kurukulasuriya. Here at SimSec, we aim to further international maritime peace and security through an exchange of ideas and the rigor of critical thought and writing. If you haven't already, please check out SimSec.org for new articles on the most important maritime topics. Our latest call for submissions is for the annual fiction contest. If you'd like to contribute to the discussion, check out the Write for SimSec tab

to learn how you can submit articles for publication. 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 our own brew bottles wherever you download your podcasts. And with that, Kimber's Men. You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security.

Welcome aboard the Sea Control Podcast from the Center for International Maritime Security. I'm Walker Mills, and my guest today is Dr. Toshi Yoshihara, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and an adjunct professor in the security studies program at Georgetown University. We're going to be discussing his latest book, Mao's Army Goes to Sea, The Island Campaigns, and the Founding of China's Navy. He's also the co-author of Red Star Over the Pacific, China's Rise, and the Challenge to U.S. Maritime Strategy. Toshi, welcome aboard. If you start by telling the listeners a bit more about your background.

Thank you for having me. It's a real pleasure to be on the SimSec podcast to talk about my book. So I'm a senior fellow at the CSBA since 2017. I work primarily on the Chinese military, in particular Chinese naval strategy and Chinese maritime strategy. And in the past few years, I've dabbled in Chinese political warfare, Chinese nuclear doctrine, been working more on the PLA's operational history, and been very interested in looking at U.S. alliances in Asia. One of the things that I do that hopefully adds value to the discourse is that I rely primarily on Chinese language open

sources to get some insights from the PLA's perspective about how it views strategy, operations, and so forth. Prior to joining CSBA, I was a professor of strategy and the inaugural chair in Asia-Pacific Studies at the Naval War College, where I taught for well over a decade. And over the past 20 years or so, I've been teaching at a variety of policy-oriented international relations schools, taught for quite a few years at the Fletcher School at Tufts, taught two courses on strategy at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at UC San Diego, and I'm currently teaching a course on sea power in the Indo-Pacific in the security studies program at Georgetown. In terms of my personal background, I spent the first 20 years of my life in Taiwan and Japan. I have family in both Taiwan and Japan. So security issues in Asia is not something that's theoretical and abstract. It's actually quite, quite personal for me. So it's been particularly interesting to sort of compare and look at debates taking place within Taiwan, within Japan, and looking at the debates taking place inside the Beltway. And I've been fortunate enough to be able to sort of straddle those various worlds. well we're really excited to have you on and obviously we're talking mostly about your new book mal's army goes to sea but the listeners can seek out previous book which i believe is now in

its second edition from the u.s naval institute press and all the stuff that you've written some for us at simsec but also in usni proceedings and other places as well as a reminder to the listeners all the opinions here are solely our own and not reflective of any of the institutions with which may otherwise be associated. So starting out, your book is about the People's Liberation Army, or the PLA, as we like to call it, and their earliest amphibious campaigns. Why did you think that this was a topic? Why did this draw your attention? And why did you think that this was something worth writing about? Sure. So I think the starting point of the book was that there was simply very little written in the West about, firstly, the origins of the Chinese

Navy and the PLA's earliest amphibious operations. And the few good authoritative ones that exist are really decades old. And to me, I think it was important to tell this origin story, because in my view, the founding period, in my view, tends to leave a lasting imprint on any institution's outlook, values, and ethos. So if you think about the founding of Apple or the founding of the U.S. Navy or the founding of any institution, those origin periods have this sort of potentially imperceptible, but certainly a lasting influence on the way the institution looks at the world. And so just like Hollywood origin stories of superheroes and supervillains, this origin story, I think, tells us about the formative experiences of the PLA's turn to the

that, in my view, helped to shape the PLA's personality and the PLA that we see and know today. I also think that there was a tendency in the West to really downplay or deprecate this founding period. The conventional wisdom went like this. Chinese naval leaders were chosen primarily for their party loyalty. Their expertise was not valued, and they were at best indifferent to maritime and naval affairs. The other conventional wisdom was this idea that Chinese naval leaders were largely Soviet automatons. And because of their lack of expertise, they basically borrowed unthinkingly from the Soviet Union. But I think in looking at the Chinese sources that informed my study, the history actually tells a very different story, which is that Chinese

naval leaders thought very hard about maritime affairs, and they understood early on from the outset that they needed technical expertise, they needed high quality human capital to get this naval project started. And I think it's also important to note that in looking back at this history, it was clear that the PLA applied its own proud traditions, and they were actually quite pragmatic and borrowed extensively from Western ideas to inform their naval project. And I think it's also worth noting that 1949-1950 was arguably the most combat-intensive period in the maritime domain for the PLA. As I document in the book, they fought a series of amphibious campaigns that continue to inform their thinking. And I think ultimately, if you look back to this

history, it's clear that the PLA believes that it has a proud history that it can look back to to inform its thinking today. Lots of great stuff to unpack there. I think particularly well taken is the point about the value of understanding the founding myth and how critical that is. And I think even when if what we tell ourselves is not exactly how it happened, but you know, I'm in the Marine core and the founding myths. Maybe I shouldn't call them myths, but the founding stories and history of the organization is really key. So I think that's really important stuff. The book covers the period from about 18 months from 1949 to 1950. Can you set the scene a little bit for us? I think some of our listeners are probably not as familiar with Chinese or Asian

history as they would be with understanding what's going on in the West at that time and kind of give set the scene for us? Sure. So the PLA's naval and maritime project began really at the tail end of the Chinese Civil War in early 1949. So by this time, the great land battles to determine the fate of China were basically over. Communist forces had basically decimated and destroyed the nationalist armies in North and Northeast China. And by this point, Mao's forces were essentially positioned and poised to cross the Yangtze River, which was the watery barrier that separated North and South China. And once they crossed the river, they would then fan out across South China and conquer the rest of the mainland. And it was in this context that the Chinese

naval leadership began to think about maritime affairs. Mao, of course, understood that he was entering, once he crossed the Yangtze River, an intensely maritime theater. You had the coastal provinces of Zhejiang, Fujian, and Guangdong. And of course, Shanghai was the hub of maritime commerce and activity. And importantly, the defeated nationalists had fled or retreated to Taiwan and many of the offshore islands along the mainland coast. Many of these features were just a few miles offshore. And so the PLA leadership and the party leadership understood that they needed to adapt the PLA to the maritime domain. And I think what's pretty remarkable about this story is that this was really essentially about an agrarian, revolutionary, land-based army

that had to take the leap into the seas, both figuratively and literally. Many of the army officers and troops had never even seen the ocean before. Many of them didn't know how to swim. They knew nothing about maritime and naval affairs. And yet they had to retrain their forces to adapt and to deal with this entirely new operational domain. And so the story is really about getting an institution to do something very different, something that it has not done before. And importantly, something that the competitor is actually superior in. And I think the analogy here might be, you know, business companies or corporations that are trying to get into a very different line of business and the difficulties of doing that because of longstanding standard

operating procedures, and so forth, that has to change in order to adapt to these very new circumstances. Yeah, I'll say quickly, that was one of the things that initially drew me to the book. And one of the reasons that I was so excited to have you on is because I think in military history, we get a lot of operational history that talks about decisions that commanders made tactical and operational. And that's important. And there is a lot of that in this book. But like you're saying, it's the deeper, I think, story, the thread that holds everything together is really the story of organizational building. And that's such a radical departure from what was going on before, which I think makes it really, really interesting. So you kind of touched

on this a minute ago, but what are some of the obstacles and challenges that they faced as they stood up the navy and started on these amphibious campaigns i was pretty dumbfounded frankly when i began to read the chinese story uh you know the chinese histories and realized the mind-boggling obstacle that the communists faced they had no experience no knowledge base no personnel no hardware, including they had basically no shipping to speak of. And I think one way that I tried to highlight this enormous challenge was to start with a story of a Chinese leader who was responsible for this naval project. And so in the book, I talk about Commander Zhang Aiping, who was, before taking up his naval post, was a promising rising army officer.

He had been wounded in an earlier battle during the Chinese Civil War, taken offline. And when he had recovered and returned to duty, he was actually very excited to rejoin his unit to conduct the cross Yangtze River campaign to take over the rest of South China. And so when he reported to duty to his commanding officer, his boss basically sprung a complete surprise on him and said, hey, actually, you're not joining your unit. Your new job, your new assignment is actually to start this new Navy from scratch. your job is to start the East China Navy, the regional Navy, basically the predecessor to the East Sea Fleet, and that your experiences building up this regional Navy would help to inform the PLA's buildup of the National Navy, which of course we now know as the People's Liberation Army Navy. And Commander Zhang, of course, was completely taken aback, was completely surprised, but importantly, he was quite dismayed. And he pushed back against his CO and basically said,

look, you know, I don't have the technical expertise. I have a basically a middle school education. I barely rate to being the leader of this new organization. And he wanted to turn down the assignment. But his boss basically told him that he wasn't chosen for his technical naval expertise, but he was chosen primarily because of his managerial skills, his ability to lead institutions. And he also added that Zhang was chosen personally by Mao Zedong himself. And so when, you know, when the big man makes that kind of a decision, it's very difficult for you to say no. So he reluctantly accepted the assignment. But you can imagine as he walked out of his boss's office, he realized that he had no staff, no headquarters, no money, no resources, no ships,

absolutely nothing. I mean, he was literally starting out from scratch, and he was basically assigned to create this Navy out of thin air. I think that was really the beginnings, the very humble beginnings of this Naval project. And that applies, of course, to the PLA's amphibious capabilities, right? They basically had nothing. I think that was really the material, but also the software challenges that the PLA faced at the outset. You know, as you mentioned before, they had nothing and they were in the middle of fighting the Civil War still. So it wasn't, you know, like they had years of peace to get their show on the road.

Another thing I thought was particularly interesting that you talk about in the book was how the communists needed to integrate not just nationalist equipment that they acquired, but also nationalist officers and sailors to get their expertise. Can you talk a little bit about that and how that worked? Sure. So the PLA's naval leadership understood from the outset that naval power and amphibious capabilities were not just about hardware, right? It was about software. It was about institutional knowledge and expertise. It was about human capital. It was about developing doctrine, operational concepts, and so forth. And of course, the communists had none of their own. And so they decided very early on, including under the leadership of Commander Zhang Aiping,

to recruit and absorb the remnant nationalist officers and troops on the mainland. And so once the PLA began to take over major naval facilities along the Yangtze River and along the coast, they began to take over ships, but they also began to absorb the former nationalist personnel that either decided to stay on the mainland or fail to escape to Taiwan. And the communists decided early on in a very pragmatic move to engage in a series of amnesty programs and recruitment drives because many of these nationalists were afraid of communist reprisals. And so they went into hiding. And so the communists went to great lengths to bring them in from the cold and to try to get them to help the communist cause. And this was not an easy process. You know, we have to understand that we're talking about an effort to absorb former arch enemies who probably had blood on their hands, right? There were also ideological adversaries because the nationalists were bourgeoisie who held very different social and political values.

The nationalists, particularly the officers, typically came from urban areas, were better educated, were more cultured and lived in far better conditions than their communist counterparts. And so we're talking about really a very different class of people, essentially, the communists were trying to bring in to help their naval project. And one can imagine the great deal of mistrust and misunderstandings and tensions that prevailed between the communist cadre and the nationalists. And the mistrust and the hatred were mutual. And so that was a real personnel management problem that Commander Zhang Aiping and other leaders had to face. And so integration became a very difficult process. And the leadership, including Zhang, had to adopt really pragmatic policies, things that really went against the communist grain, if you will. For example, they had to give the Nationalists better food, you know, little things like making sure that the Nationalists had short-grained white rice, processed rice, versus the unprocessed rice that the Communist troops were used to eating. They also agreed to pay the nationalists higher wages to keep them on board. And of course, all of these things rubbed the communist cadre the wrong way. And so managing those tensions between the communists and nationalists turned out to be a major undertaking. But I think this process also went quite far to show communist pragmatism. They understood that they needed nationalist help and that they were willing to, in many ways, bend over backwards to make sure that the nationalists were brought in in a way that would allow them to assist them in this naval project. And they were willing to bend certain rules. They were able to overlook ideological differences to make that happen. Now, you know, I think it's important to note that they didn't do this out of the kindness of their hearts, right? They were doing this for very pragmatic, utilitarian reasons, which is to use the nationalists to help them go to sea. the anecdote about the rice is one that i remember particularly well because it seemed you know

almost a little bit out of place but it really makes the point that communists are not only getting these nationalist officers into their force but they're compensating them better than they are their own communist forces which it doesn't take any stretch of the imagination to think about how difficult that would be from a managerial perspective so how successful were they and how successful were they ultimately in these campaigns and their quest to build a navy over this relatively short period? So I think the communists did the best they could under the circumstances. And under those circumstances, I think they acquitted themselves quite well. And certainly PLA historiography suggests that they thought that they performed very well,

given all of the material and software constraints that they were confronted with. And so, you know, if you think about some of the challenges that they faced, pretty impressive what they were able to achieve. So the Nationalists had basically control of the air and of the seas using mostly modern American equipped vessels and aircraft. So the Nationalists were technologically and qualitatively superior to the Communists. And importantly, when the Chiang Kai-shek's armies retreated to Taiwan, they took the best ships with them. And so when the communists showed up at these naval facilities, and when they showed up along the coast, they realized that they only had the leftovers, basically second and third hand ships passed on to them. I describe this as a hodgepodge fleet in my book, that, you know, ships that came from different eras, from different countries, different countries of origin. Some of these ships actually dated back to the Qing Dynasty. So these were really old ships. Many of them were not seaworthy. And so one could imagine the nightmare of maintaining these ships and keeping them seaworthy and so forth. and because of the lack of shipping the communists actually had to recruit and conscript from the

civilian sector particularly to get the shipping to land troops ashore and so these were basically fishing boats crewed by civilian boatmen local civilian boatmen and these boats were to serve as the transports and it's worth noting that most of these were i think the majority of them were non-motorized wooden sailing boats. So not steel hull, you know, amphibious transports that we are accustomed to, but we're talking about civilian boats that were then used for military purposes. But I think it's worth noting that despite these material shortcomings and their material inferiority relative to the Nationalists, the Communists were still able to pull off some significant successes. For example, they were able to pull off the Hainan campaign in the summer of

1950. Hainan, of course, is a major feature, an island comparable in size to Taiwan. In U.S. terms, it's about the size of Maryland. And in that campaign, they were able to land 45,000 troops. That made that campaign essentially one of the largest amphibious campaigns in post-war history. So if you look at what they were able to achieve and the material capabilities that they had, I would grade them quite highly in terms of their performance. You mentioned about the reliance on commercial and non-naval shipping. And I think that's also an interesting thread because it's something that we've been talking about recently in regards to the contemporary PLAN. And we actually had a podcast maybe a year ago now with Tom Shugart about some writing that he had done about the potential for the PLAN to use civilian ferries and other types of civilian vessels in a future operation, a future amphibious operation. So of these campaigns, you mentioned the Hainan Island campaign.

Is there one in particular that stands out to you that we should pay special attention to or that's especially informative as a case study? Sure. I would point to the Jingmen campaign that took place in October of 1949. This was actually the opposite of Hainan campaign. It was an absolute disaster. It was a complete failure on the part of the communists. And I think the failure itself and the lessons that the communists drew from that failure makes it an important campaign. So just to sort of set up the story of the Jingmen campaign. It was actually a dual campaign. The communists wanted to take both the Jingmen Island just off the mainland coast, and they also wanted to take Xiamen. It was an island metropolis located just west of Jingmen. Both of them were located off the

mainland, and they had to decide which island to take. Could they pull off a simultaneous invasion? Did they have to do it sequentially? They ultimately decided because of the limits to their shipping capacity, the limits to their transports. They decided to do it sequentially. They would take Xiamen first and then eventually take Jingmen. Now, the Xiamen campaign turned out to be successful, but in the process of conquering Xiamen, the communists lost quite a few civilian ships. And importantly, the horrors of taking the Xiamen island scared a lot of the civilian boatmen who were involved in the campaign. And so you can imagine when they were told that these boatmen were going to do it again against the island to the east, they were of course certainly

not happy about it. In fact, many of the boatmen fled. Many of them actually sabotaged. They basically destroyed their own boats so that they wouldn't be forced into another horrifying, terrible experience. Of course, what that led to was a significant shortage of shipping for the follow-on campaign against Jingmen. And that's kind of the operational context. That then led to the formulation of really bad strategy, because the communists realized that they had just enough shipping to bring about half of the troops ashore against Jingmen. And so their plan was to have the ships do two round trips. They would land the first wave of troops ashore. Those boats then would go back to the mainland and bring the second half,

the second wave of troops to Jingmen. And what made this plan even worse was that they had bad intelligence. They had significantly underestimated nationalist strength, the nationalist troops in Jingmen. The garrison was actually reinforced significantly. And so even if they were able to land the entire force onto Jingmen, there was a huge imbalance in the force ratio in that campaign. They also suffered from bad command and control. So I talk about how one core organization had responsibility over units from another core that they had absolutely no familiarity with. And that you can imagine the coordination problems, the lack of communications, the lack of knowledge of their own friendly troops, and the impact that that had on the operational design.

The communists also suffered from bad execution, very little coordination among the various units that landed on the beaches of Jingmen. And then, of course, there was, because of those reinforcements, the nationalists were ready. And so the communists were facing very powerful resistance. The nationalists, in this case, were not going to get steamrolled that they, you know, that they suffered from in previous campaigns. But I think the most important thing that happened in Jinglin was Mother Nature. Mother Nature intervened. And so after the communists successfully landed the first wave on the beaches, the tides receded. And when that happened, many of the boats, actually all of the boats were trapped on the mudflats. And part of

the reason that this happened was because, you know, as I talked about earlier, many of the local boatmen had refused to serve or had fled. So they had to recruit boatmen from other regions outside of the Jingmen area. Many of these people were not familiar with the local hydrological conditions. And so they didn't realize that the tides were going to receive when they did. And so this compounded the challenges that the communists faced. And when day broke, because this was a night assault, the trap boats basically became open fixed targets. And they were systematically targeted by nationalist naval and air power and shore-based artillery. And literally every single boat trapped on the mudflats were destroyed. And so the troops that landed on Jingmen were trapped.

And the second wave, of course, that were on the mainland were now unable to reinforce their comrades on Jingmen. And I talk about this really powerful image of the second wave troops on the mainland looking across the sea because they could see what was happening because the island was so close to the mainland, they could see the fiery wreckages on the beaches, and they realized that their comrades were trapped, and that they were unable to do anything to help them. And in fact, within days, the entire communist force on Jinmen was decimated. There was maybe a division worth of troops, about 9,000 men were wiped out within days. This setback deeply shocked the high command, including Mao Zedong himself. The failure forced the PLA essentially to abandon plans to take

Taiwan because Jingmen was thought of as a stepping stone to taking the island garrison on Taiwan. And importantly, it forced the PLA and the communist leadership to take amphibious operation much more seriously. And this disaster remains a classic case study for the PLA. Many Chinese strategists continue to debate its causes and its lessons. And I think it continues to cast a long shadow over the PLA's thinking about a Taiwan invasion today. And some of the lessons that are pretty obvious, but I think these are lessons that the Chinese take very seriously is the need for mass, the need for adequate shipping, the need for a lot of firepower, the need for intense preparations, the need for superior logistical support. And ultimately,

the PLA needs to have overwhelming force to pull off a very complex amphibious operation. So I think this suggests to me that the Jingmen campaign informs not only PLA thinking, but it also suggests that PLA does not take amphibious operations lightly because they have this terrible experience in their own history. Yeah, I think that's a really fascinating analysis. And it's interesting to hear that you think there's such a direct link from these early campaigns that now, 70 some years ago, to contemporary planning. And so kind of as a last question, I know you already kind of addressed some of the key takeaways. But I want to ask, you know, you work a lot in kind of contemporary security policy around Taiwan and

Japan and China. And if there are other major takeaways or ways maybe that we should, this study should inform our thinking about contemporary security policy, if that makes sense. Sure. I do think that this history and these campaigns really helped to shape the PLA's ethos and outlook that can be discerned to this very day. You know, as I mentioned earlier, the PLA looks at this period as a proud moment in its history that it looks back to constantly to draw inspiration. I think some of the key lessons and takeaways that inform sort of the PLA's thinking or strategy today is this idea that the weak can in fact prevail over the strong, because I think this was a series of examples in which an inferior PLA was able to, against

significant odds, defeat a qualitatively superior foe. And I think that is relevant today in the sense that the PLA is still trying to play catch up to the U.S. military, that there are still gaps that it needs to close. But even as it closes that gap, this history gives the PLA confidence, that it can compete against a superior foe like the United States. I think this history also shows that the PLA, in order to defeat the strong, had to employ asymmetric methods. They were able to convert guerrilla warfare tactics on land into the maritime domain. And some of the tactics that they employed include night attacks, surprise attacks, close in combat. And one can imagine that some of these asymmetric methods would take place in modern warfare, say, in the

littorals, in the near seas along China's coast to this very day. Another key sort of lesson or continuity is the mass mobilization of the civilian communities. The PLA was able to really mobilize coastal communities, towns and villages to provide logistical support to their maritime efforts. And I think what we saw in the past is extensive use of civilian assets and a high level of comfort with civilian assets. We see this today in terms of China's willingness to use paramilitary forces, whether it's the China Coast Guard or the maritime militia, to achieve China's operational aims. I think China's potential willingness to use civilian transports that Tom Shugart has done so well to document for us, the use of civilian transports in an amphibious scenario against Taiwan, I think can be traced back all the way to this period, which is that the PLA has shown that they're more than willing to use whatever tools they have at their disposal to achieve their operational aims. I would also say that the various island campaigns potentially serve as sort of models or archetypes for how the PLA thinks about a Taiwan scenario. So the Jingmen campaign that I talked about can be seen as basically the Normandy-style sort of direct attack against Taiwan, kind of the full-scale invasion scenario.

But there are other campaigns that I document in the book that suggest that the PLA could think about the Taiwan scenario in other ways. including the seizure of offshore islands, like Jingmen and others, to achieve its larger objective against Taiwan, or indirect attacks, including flanking air and naval assaults from Taiwan's east coast, and also the use of fifth column forces to engage in disrupting attacks within Taiwan itself, to tie down Taiwanese defenders while the main attack is coming from the outside. And the book actually talks about these various tactics and methods in other campaigns that the PLA could draw inspiration from. And so I think, to me, this history matters because it matters to the PLA. And if it matters to the PLA, we should study it to better understand

the PLA itself. Thank you. I think that's just about all we have time for today. I'd like to thank my guest, Dr. Toshi Yoshihara for joining us today to talk about his new book, Mal's Army Goes to Sea. I've got my copy here. I also wrote a review of it for USNI Proceedings, and it's definitely a recommend. Before we cut you loose, Toshi, where, if anywhere, can listeners find you online and what are you working on next? Sure. So you can find my CSBA studies on the CSBA website, which is csbaonline.org. I also occasionally post on Twitter, although I'm not an active user per se. And recently, I find myself because of this book going back to the past. And so I've actually been doing a lot of work on PLA campaign histories in the Chinese Civil War,

which I think tends to be under examined. But I think it tells us a lot as well about the PLA's institutional personality today. Awesome. Well, hopefully we can bring you back on sometime to talk about some of that future work. Great. Thank you very much. Thanks for having me.

Thanks again for joining us. And to the listeners, thanks for tuning in, and we'll see you next time. Help me, Boban, put it in the alley. Way, hey, put it in the alley. Help me, Boban, put it in the alley. Put it on the shimbo now. A porter, oh, and a porter, kiddo.

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