Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
You are listening to the War on the Rocks podcast on strategy, defense, and foreign affairs. My name is Ryan Evans. I'm the founder of War on the Rocks. In this episode, we're talking about icebreakers and how they might juice American shipbuilding. Here with me on this episode is William Hennigan, the National Security Council Director for International Economics.
Robert Obeda, the NSC Director for Infrastructure and Investments, who's detailed from the Treasury Department over to the National Security Council. And Selina Laidga, the Director for Maritime and Arctic Security, detailed from the U.S. Coast Guard, where she's an officer. Hope you enjoy the show.
IcePACT is a trilateral agreement between the United States, Finland, and Canada that we announced on the sidelines of the NATO Summit this year, which is essentially a partnership to build icebreakers together. There are three components to it. There is an agreement to share the information associated with building these icebreakers. There is a second component to develop our respective workforces. And then there is a third component to funnel global demand for those icebreakers into our three respective workforces.
countries and the associated shipyards. So I have a bunch of questions about this, but starting why, so I get Canada, I get Finland too. I mean, they're, you know, they have the high North, but there's other Nordic countries with Arctic equities. Why Finland and not some of the other Scandinavian countries?
I think it comes down to shipyards. The Helsinki shipyard in Finland is considered best in class for the production of icebreakers and has produced over 60% of the icebreakers operating around the world today. So this is essentially the center of expertise for how to build this ultra specialized, high IP content, high complexity vessel.
We were interested, along with the Canadians, who a Canadian firm actually purchased the Helsinki shipyard a couple of years ago, with engaging the Finnish government and engaging the Helsinki shipyard and the intergenerational knowledge base and workforce that lives there on how do we get better in our own shipyards at building icebreakers alongside Canada, who's sort of the natural partner.
So a lot of our listeners will have heard about the importance of icebreakers and read about it in War on the Rocks mostly, and we need more, we're not getting more, what's going on. Let's start with why these are so strategically important, especially for those who are not versed in the dark arts of the high north. Yeah.
I will definitely take this one. So I think icebreakers, I think William kind of alluded to this, but as far as like icebreakers go, they are strategically important because they ensure year-round critical access to the high north. Without icebreakers, we lose the ability to project power, the ability to conduct scientific research, the ability to facilitate
marine environmental response should a catastrophic spill occur in that region. And so our ability to be able to produce this type of complex vessel at scale at the speed within which we need to address these pressing national security concerns, where we're challenged is right now when you look at what our current fleet mix is, right? We have what is essentially considered 1.5 icebreakers. We have...
Is that because one's always in maintenance? No, it's because one is what we call a medium-class icebreaker and the other one's a heavy icebreaker. So we have the medium icebreaker, which is the Kuskar Cutter Healy, built in the 1990s. And then we have the Polar Star, which was built in the 1970s and is considered a heavy icebreaker and really is the focus of the concentrated effort for recapitalization via our Polar Security Cutter program.
And so when you look at that in the context of like IcePact and why IcePact is so significant, essentially we haven't built this type of vessel class here domestically in 50 years. And so when you talk about complexity in design, workforce training and capacity, it's not surprising that we don't have
the capability here currently. Like it's atrophied. So explain to me why icebreakers are spoken of, especially in publications like War on the Rock, so often in the context of competition with Russia and increasingly China. Where does this fit there? I think like the Arctic as a region, right, what we're seeing is a
geostrategic competition intensifying, certainly since Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the accession of Finland and Sweden into NATO. But also the reality is there's increasing access to the region as a result of the effects of climate change. And so when we only have 1.5 icebreakers to be able to project presence in that region, you know, of course there are
concerns with our ability to be able to preserve and advance strategic objectives there, i.e. Russia has 40-plus icebreakers in their fleet currently, and the only nuclear icebreakers in operation right now. Now, a majority of that is to manage commercial traffic through the Northern Sea Route, but also we're seeing increasing partnership between them and the People's Republic of China as well. They signed a joint MOU last year, recently,
to increase collaboration and partnership in the region. Since that time, we have seen joint patrols in the region just off of the Aleutian Islands. In July of this year, we saw them do a joint bomber patrol off of Alaska. And so, you know, when we talk about competition, there's both the more traditional sense of competition, but there's also competition
the aspect of increasing access and competition for critical minerals and untapped fuel reserves as well. So is this really, is China's increasing interest in your view at least, primarily economic? Is it about mining? Is it about... Yeah, I think one of the sort of like bigger picture like step back moments for icebreakers and their value in the context of competition, particularly with the PRC, is in the sort of worldview of industrial policy and the...
the specifics of how do we build a resilient shipbuilding industry in the United States. So I think Icebreaker is a really useful vessel class as a case study for how the US is going to be competitive globally in shipbuilding. Because we're not necessarily, we're going to have a really hard time competing with the PRC, who's got like 49% of the global order book today on shipbuilding.
relatively simple vessel classes whose price and value is tied to freight rates. So moving sort of like relatively simple commodities around the world. It's really hard because they've already got big economies to scale. But technology is sort of the crown jewel of the American economy and our ability to do complex precision manufacturing.
And if you think about like, this is a parallel to semiconductors. What's a leading edge semiconductor in the context of shipbuilding? It's a highly complex, specialized product. And that's what an icebreaker is in the shipbuilding sector. So if we can target and focus on recapitalizing our ability to produce this highly complicated vessel, we can start to go after a higher share of the global order for vessels.
And right now we're at 0.2%. The question that we should be asking is how do we get to 1% or 2% of the global order book so that we have the resilience in our shipyards to be able to produce the kinds of vessels that we need, both from a warfighting standpoint and for the intrinsic purpose of needing an icebreaker, but also so that we can build commercial vessels at scale to meet the needs under the Jones Act. So it's basically a one-two punch. We need icebreakers in and of themselves and
you hope this juices our shipbuilding industry? Yeah. And if you're trying to prove out a case for why you would do chips for ships, why you would do a major investment of public capital into building resilience in this particular sector, you've got to prove with a couple of vessel classes. We think it's these kinds of highly tech
technically complicated, highly specialized vessels where you'd want to direct some focus. And I think if you look back at, say, the National Security Advisor's speech at the Merchant Marine Academy back in June, you start to see him tease some of that as a theory of the case for how we're going to be competitive in the shipbuilding sector. Why has it taken this administration so long to get going on this? It's not like this was an unknown problem. I mean, for years, people have been talking about the problem of...
Our shipbuilding industry is languished and we don't have enough icebreakers. You know, there was the Shipyards Act that was before Congress a few years back that just seemed to receive no White House support or attention whatsoever that would have invested $25 billion in maritime infrastructure to include shipyards. Why is it taken until what might be the last year? I mean, what definitely is the last year of the Biden presidency to take some what it seems to me to take serious action on this from policy perspective?
Yeah, I think it's a question of resilience versus dominance. So many of the upfront investments made through the administration were in sectors of the economy where we were trying to compete and we wanted to be dominant. We wanted to have a leading edge in global markets and global competition. So think all of the technology underwritten by the Inflation Reduction Act for the clean energy transition. Think the leading edge semiconductors underwritten by the Chips and Science Act.
But for the last year, Robert, Selena, and I have been focused on a couple of the sectors where we think we need to build resilience. I don't think anybody thinks that the US is suddenly going to control 50 plus percent of the global shipbuilding order book in the next 10 or 20 years. And I don't think they think that for other sectors of the economy that we've been focused on, like heavy lift equipment in the port environment. But now that we're turning our attention to some of these areas where we need resilience, we need
ex-PRC and ex-adversary supply chains and capabilities and production capacity, both at home and abroad. We've been able to use the power, both of our investments already and our international partnerships and multilateral alliances, to try to direct some focus on these areas where resilience is important. And I think that's one of the reasons that in a competitive environment for time and resources and focus of an administration, you see some of these pieces coming after the legislative window closed in 2022.
The short answer is also that it's really hard and it's not something we've done in 30, 40 years. And so at the baseline foundation, you have just a shift in how we approach national security, right? If we are now sort of working under the assumption that future competition will be between nuclear powers, should we be focused on traditional warfighting capabilities or should we be focused on the economic arena? And I think we are just now starting to sort of
at a minimum, do both, if not outright shift. And the national security community as a whole isn't traditionally thinking about problems through that lens. And so it takes a long time. I mean, just looking at our process alone, it was challenging. And there was minefields everywhere. What was challenging about it? Is it because it involves so many different parts of the government? It's because the solution that we are proposing is not something anybody is familiar with. You know, what he outlined are sort of
very, very novel approaches that were executed by a small group of people and proposing a very sort of tactical approach to something that has never been done. Yeah, we're trying to get people to consider industrial policy as like a core pillar of American national security strategy. And I think one of the great weaknesses in the American government is the arbitrary delineation between our defense and our non-defense spending and our defense and non-defense sides of the government.
and trying to get the Department of Defense or the intelligence community or whoever it is in the foreign sphere to communicate back with the Department of Transportation or even the Department of Homeland Security or the Department of Energy. The dreaded whole of government impossibility, I guess. Yeah, totally. And that's what we were able to do with Icepact and with the ship-to-shore crane work is it's about taking a foreign policy objective, translating its value to the American people through a sort of like foreign policy for the middle class, and then
And then getting the domestic side agencies and advocates and stakeholders to focus on why we might want to focus on supporting the production of icebreakers for the U.S. Coast Guard for power projection in the high latitudes and why that's relevant to
shipbuilding communities in the Gulf. One other thing on that is we all know this, we operate on four-year election cycles. And so we are so traditionally designed to be reactionary to what's happening now. So the question here that we're raising is, do you lose the fight on the battlefield or do you lose the fight 20 years earlier when it was time to invest in
and the tools necessary to win that fight later. The polls are melting. It's opening up a variety of areas worth competing over. And we're seeing sort of the early stages of that, but that's not really front and center. That's not a current event that's being reported on and therefore not something that we can react to. Yeah, operating in the high latitudes is just straight up capital intensive. It's expensive for the types of equipment, the types of personnel, the types of training that you need to operate over there.
So we are looking at this through, we talked a little bit about, you know, how do we apply what are sort of traditional industrial policy levers to what is like very specifically a national security problem set. And the question that Robert posed specific to like, do we really lose the war on the battlefield or do we lose it 20 years earlier when we fail to invest in a critical sector like shipbuilding? You, I think kind of alluded to this earlier that like we've known for quite some time this challenge surrounding our decluttered
decline in terms of like our domestic shipbuilding capability and capacity.
And I think, you know, the reality is the reason why we first focused on icebreakers here and the reason why IcePact came to be is really because, like, they're an interesting business case in the context of that question because of the national security nexus. But also because when you look at these highly complex, highly technical ships that do require significant capital investment to build because really you're only building a handful of them.
So you don't necessarily always have the opportunity to reach the economies of scale such that it drives down the cost curve to build them. How do we, when we haven't built this type of vessel class in 50 years, like how do we start to accomplish that? And
And so I think we took sort of a novel approach to that in terms of this strategic arrangement with Finland and Canada. We talked about it earlier, Finland because of the Helsinki shipyard and Canada really because DV Shipbuilding is a Canadian company who now owns the Finnish shipyard. And so this strategic arrangement, part of the aim here amongst others is to compete to
to produce the large share of the estimated 50 to 70 ships that will be in demand over the next decade to help drive some of that cost curve down. So how important was Finland joining NATO for this agreement to be possible? Yeah, I mean, I think we should maybe back up and tell the story of the Helsinki shipyard, which is this fascinating movie script-esque evolution of a highly strategic asset.
in the context of the NATO alliance in the US. So if we look back 15 years ago, United Shipbuilding Corporation, presidentially chartered in Russia, it's a state-owned enterprise that builds Sovkomflot and a bunch of the core ships in the Russian fleet, actually owned the Helsinki shipyard, and then gets hit by sanctions in 2019.
And so USC sells the yard to Algodor Holdings, which is a Cyprus-based investment company owned by two Russian businessmen, Rashad Bogodinov and Vladimir Kazayenko. Those gentlemen and the Algodor Holdings team pushes the Helsinki shipyard to continue its relationships with Russian state-owned enterprises, buying and building ships for Russia's nickel and palladium mining smelting company, Nornickel.
But in 2022, when the war in Ukraine starts, the sanctions impact of the US sanctions on other Russian state-owned enterprises, many of which have contracts with the Helsinki shipyard to own and build ships, essentially find that they're no longer able to use the Helsinki shipyard. So
Once again, as a secondary impact of US sanctions, the Helsinki shipyard changes ownership again. And this is the situation where Davie Shipbuilding, the Canadian or Quebec-based shipbuilder, works with the government of Quebec to put in sort of an unknown amount of money, but the government of Quebec puts in $100 million and buys the Helsinki shipyard, pulling it into sort of like Canadian five-eye type control.
And then 2023, next year after, Finland ascends into NATO. So over a five-year period, you go from what's functionally a strategic asset for the Russians to one of the most strategic, most capable shipyards for building a highly complicated, highly specialized, strategically important vessel is now inside a NATO partner owned by a Five Eyes partner and in the linchpin of a three-way multilateral initiative with the United States, Canada, and Finland.
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How is this agreement going to work? Tell me how we get from the shipyard in Helsinki to producing more ships and icebreakers in the United States. Yeah, so I think Robert laid it out a little bit, the core components of it. You saw the joint statement that was released when President Biden, Prime Minister Trudeau, and President Stubbe of Finland met at the NATO summit. I didn't watch because I wasn't invited, so that's just how I roll. Right.
Since the summit and over the next couple of months, we are in the midst of negotiations with the governments of Finland and Canada to come to the terms of a memorandum of understanding, which will govern the arrangement.
That'll try to strike the balance between ambitious and actionable and govern how the arrangement is implemented over the ensuing years. I think the three components of it, which we can unpack more, are information and technical exchange. So how do we get people who know how to build icebreakers here to the United States? How do we get our experts on different aspects of Arctic security out to Finland and up to Ottawa?
And then the second piece being workforce development. How do we cross-train people in all these different yards? Both our shipbuilder here in Louisiana and Mississippi, Bollinger Shipyards, moving up to visit Irving, the Canadian builder, Davy, the Canadian builder in C-SPAN, as well as out to the Helsinki shipyard. And then the third piece, which I think is sort of the most interesting and evolving component of this, is if we all just built icebreakers for ourselves on our own, all of our allies and partners around the world,
we would all build one, two, or three ships in our respective shipyards. I mean, the Canadians are building 20, we say we need to build nine, but you wouldn't get a stable order book such that you can specialize a yard with the economies of scale necessary to bend the cost curve that Selena was talking about. So really what we're trying to do with the third piece of this agreement is encourage through multilateralism and through collaboration with our allies and partners,
to drive investment and drive procurement through yards in Finland, Canada, and the United States so that we can all benefit from the economies of scale. Because if you go it alone, your shipyard is going to experience financial difficulty. And we've seen that in yards around the world that have tried to just build a single icebreaker. There's a definite trend here on the industrial policy side that I'm sure is not lost on any of you since you're a part of it. What you're describing reminds me of what we're doing with chips, what we alluded to earlier with crucial support from our partners in Taiwan.
It also reminds me of Secretary del Toro has expressed interest in South Korean shipbuilders opening up shop in the U.S. as well. So it seems like this is a clear trend of trying to get our allies and partners to help us become producers of ships and high-tech things again in a way that we once were but no longer are.
Is that a fair? I think it's fair. The U.S. is always open to foreign direct investment, and I think it's one of the fundamental underlying factors of our industrial policy is how do we use government incentives to pull investment here to the United States, pull capability, pull know-how. It's also a fundamental part of this entire arrangement, right? It's an arrangement between three partners and allies, but then also built into the MOU as an option for other like-minded partners and allies to participate and contribute and be a part of the whole thing. So
How long is this going to take? So you guys are negotiating the MOU, right? And the three of you are intimately involved in this. Is this going to happen before January of next year? Yes, definitely by January, by the end of this year. And what's the next step after the MOU? Do we start doing contracts or how does that work after that? I think we launched the implementation process. It's likely to be led by a combination of departments and agencies across the US government, including the Department of Homeland Security, who's sort of one of the natural leaders given that they own the Coast Guard mission.
and then also the Department of Transportation, the Department of State. It's going to be a whole government effort.
So whether Donald Trump or Kamala Harris are president next year, the US government will be committed to seeing this through. I think that we have been incredibly excited to see the kinds of bipartisan support for American shipbuilding and for ice pact that's come from statements on the Hill. You think like you look at the House Homeland Committee and the comments that they've made about their support for ice pact and the support for ice pact implementation. You look at the significant public and positive comments that people on both sides of the aisle have made sort of around the country.
I think that shipbuilding is something that we can all agree on. We think ice packed is one of the ways that we're going to prove American competitiveness. And I think that's something everybody can get behind. It's also worth mentioning that this has been a problem for a long time and nobody else has been able to come up with an alternative. And even if, you know, the election goes towards Donald Trump, the two of you, and I'm pointing at our friend, the detailee from the treasury department, our friend detailee from the coast guard,
will presumably still be in this building working on these issues. Presumably. Presumably. Nothing's guaranteed, of course. No. Sorry, you're done. He's gone. But you two might still have the opportunity to continue working on this. Yeah, that's the... Possibly. It's obviously up to the next president, the next national security advisor, et cetera, et cetera. Part of the issue is this is hard to do. It's not that it's hard to do. It is hard to do, but the reason that it's hard to do is we don't actually have as much
power, as I think the outside world likes to think, when we come up with an idea, when we come up with a creative solution to something, we have to convince our interagency partners to support it because ultimately they're the ones that are going to be implementing and executing on it. And I think when you're presenting a new novel idea that's not an approach that we traditionally think about, it takes some sort of convincing and that takes time and is...
challenging at times. I would agree with Robert's assessment there. But I think ultimately, too, as we were thinking through this problem set and what the right approach is, like ultimately some of the fundamental questions that we had asked ourselves is, one, how do we address the pressing need to accelerate the delivery of icebreakers? And two, can we utilize this as a proof to the business case for how we might start to address the intractable problem that is U.S. shipbuilding and sort of
change the narrative surrounding how we might be able to do so at the speed and scale at which we know we need to meet current demand, but also future demand. And so this is certainly a novel approach specifically to the icebreaker problem set, but we had some precedent there. I would point to AUKUS as another trilateral strategic arrangement to address security needs in the Indo-Pacific. And so I do think the NSC staff here and the administration
does recognize the value of allies and partners and leveraging their expertise when we need to to address pressing national security concerns. If we get more of these icebreakers, are they going to let you steer one of them? I know that's not your career field, but I feel like since you worked on it, we should get to first whack at it. Everyone should be concerned if you see me on the bridge of an icebreaker. Nothing good can come of that. How involved have industry, particularly shipbuilders, but not just shipbuilders...
And organized labor and people representing the kind of skilled labor that will be required for this, how involved have they been as partners, consultative partners, et cetera, et cetera? It's been an extensive process as we were developing the initial concept. And then as we developed the MOU and all of the associated pieces of implementation, there's been regular and consistent consultation with labor about this project.
And then we've also spent a lot of time talking to people who are experts in the shipbuilding sector, trying to figure out how do we jumpstart American shipbuilding? How do we jumpstart shipbuilding related to the particular vessel class of icebreakers and other polar capable vessels?
We've talked to the shipbuilder for the Coast Guard, Bollinger, down in Louisiana and Mississippi. We've talked to international partners, Irving, C-SPAN, Davie, the Canadian shipbuilders. Have there been any responses from industry? I mean, I imagine they're very supportive, but have there been any responses that have surprised you or any reticence without naming particular companies? Yeah, of course. Yeah. So I think the challenge, right, that many shipbuilders, particularly in the United States, faced is how do you get a long-term stable order book?
And that's been, I think, one of the most important selling points to industry is they can't make the kinds of capital investment decisions that they would want to make without knowledge that they're going to need to build three, four, five, six, seven of a type of vessel class because you lose money on the first ship. And then you break even on the second ship. And only on the third ship do you start to make money. And particularly for the Coast Guard or the icebreaking vessel problem, the Coast Guard's shipbuilding budget is like a billion dollars a year. And
And the time it's going to take to build the nine icebreakers that we need on that kind of budget is going to take a really long time. And the shipbuilder, say Bollinger, for example, is looking for additional orders of the type of vessel class that it's building such that it can begin to bend that cost curve using economies of scale, which you wouldn't otherwise be able to do just on the basis of government contracts. And so I think that's one of the challenges in American shipbuilding today, right? Is like we're all, all of our shipbuilders are really reliant on
either the production of Jones Act compliant vessels or the production of vessels for the Navy shipbuilding budget, which is $32 billion a year. But the question is, how do you provide them with an order book that isn't just government contracts? Yeah. One of the frustrations that I have is there's so many people, well-meaning people, great people, great leaders, who still are sort of stuck to the idea of
Yeah, totally. There's a really oft-missed component of a recent announcement that we did following the release of IcePact, where we commissioned a study, a fact sheet, effort by MARAD.
to take a look at what's the total demand under the Jones Act for vessels built in the United States over the next 10 years? How can we provide certainty to capital markets, to banks, to PE firms who are determining the cost of capital for a shipbuilder based on their view of that shipbuilder's risk? And how do we put something out that says, you should incorporate this into your Excel model and drop the weighted average cost of capital or the cost of a loan for a shipbuilder? Because shipbuilding is really capital intensive and the margins are really small.
So, one, two, three percentage point drops in the cost of debt financing matters a lot. And that's something the government needs to spend a little bit more time working on. To put it simply, private capital is 100% one of the groups that we reached out to, basically to better understand what is stopping you from making these investments.
And that's a good starting point for us, I think, in our processes, understanding the demand and supply side, understanding what is preventing private capital from investing and trying to use the tools available to us to sort of change that calculus in one way or another. How do we incentivize private capital to take the actions that are helpful to our national security? Carrots instead of sticks.
Selena, I know obviously your views do not represent those of the Coast Guard, but you've been working on this issue. What are some of the ideas that are being kicked around on how this might get paid for? The Coast Guard right now, as it stands, is a $13 billion organization with $1.5 billion towards major acquisition programs. Given the demand of the Coast Guard, not just in the Arctic, but in other key geostrategic regions, the Indo-Pacific being another one,
The reality is the Coast Guard actually needs to be like a $20 billion organization and probably have closer to a $3 billion major acquisition carve out. And so I think when we think about Coast Guard budget needs, there's sort of two challenges, right? One is where the Coast Guard currently sits in the defense versus non-defense spending on the budget. They're considered in the non-defense bucket.
And so there are really two fundamental ways to do it, right? It's one is increase the Coast Guard's top line such that they're able to build ships like the icebreakers that we know we need. Or the other is to seek some other funding mechanism outside of the normal budget process via like a supplemental.
Something like what the Shipyards Act could have been had that passed. Yeah, I think that you could either make a major investment in American shipbuilding such that it's significantly more competitive and the yards are more efficient at producing a unit of ship. Or you can, through a different mechanism, sort of not through the traditional grants, loans, like chip-style subsidy package, plus up the acquisitions side of the budget.
And I think it's a challenge given where we are in terms of defense and non-defense top lines. And the Coast Guard's frankly got a billion dollars for buying vessels and the Navy's got $32 billion. And there's real strategic questions about whether or not we need more of certain types of vessel classes that are being acquired on the Navy side versus icebreakers on the Coast Guard side. The reason that we're in this place is just because of historical budget architecture.
Strategically, icebreakers provide what is persistent presence in the Arctic, in the Antarctic, in a way that no other resource can provide. The icebreakers are going to be what allows us access to both of the high latitudes during a time of intensifying geostrategic competition with Russia and China in the Arctic and with China in the Antarctic.
And so I think, you know, recognition that the Coast Guard's ability to be able to project that presence in both of the high latitudes in a way that other government entities in the USG are not so that we can
facilitate marine environmental response, scientific research, and just normal presence and patrols is important to remember. Robert, what's next? Let's say this is wildly successful. We're zooming out. The big chessboard here is revitalizing shipbuilding. But what's the next big muscle move in this sort of policy, stream of policy initiatives? So I think we want to continue looking for specific sectors where
China has outsized influence in a place where it creates national economic or security concerns and where we can use public and private capital to invest in our own industry to mitigate that risk. You know, we're looking at critical minerals. We're looking at things like synthetic diamonds. We're looking at... Get me some of those? I mean, I'm trying to get myself some. Yeah, you after that, for sure.
We're open to a lot of things, but right now we're focusing on critical minerals and synthetic diamonds. Why synthetic diamonds, just out of curiosity? Because they are a key component to the tools that we use to build nearly everything, but specifically the tools that are used to cut metal.
So nearly everything. Wow. And without them, we couldn't do a lot of that work. And 95 plus percent of those synthetic diamonds and the tools used to create the synthetic diamonds are... Let me guess, China. Yeah. Thank you for listening to this episode of the War on the Rocks podcast. Stay safe and stay healthy.