Tracking the PLA Rocket Forces

Jeffrey Lewis 0:02

Scott, you were supposed to say, plarfity plarf. You are listening to the Arms Control Wonk Podcast, a podcast on arms control disarmament and nonproliferation. I'm Jeffrey Lewis, the founding publisher of the Arms Control Wonk blog and a professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.

Scott LaFoy 0:23

And I am Scott LaFoy, super producer of the Arms Control Wonk Podcast.

Jeffrey 0:27

Scott, we have a guest today, somebody who rivals you when it comes to obsessive detail about China's rocket forces.

Scott 0:38

That is exactly correct. Today, joining us is Decker Eveleth of Reed College, who has recently released a very extensive order of battle for the People's Liberation Army Rocket Forces, or as we discussed a few weeks ago, the PLARF.

Jeffrey 0:57

Yeah, you're putting us out of business, Decker. We used to have a PLA ORBAT that we kept at the James Martin Center for Non-Proliferation Studies, but no longer do we because you did it better.

Decker Eveleth 1:09

I mean, I'm not... Every time someone tells me that, I'm sort of skeptical, considering that I have no formal training whatsoever in this field, but... Ha ha ha!

Jeffrey 1:18

That is the trick, my friend. No one has any formal training whatsoever. And if you do have formal training, you have a security clearance, and then you can do this kind of work, but you're not allowed to show anyone. It's a crazy thing, though, because you are an undergraduate, right? Yeah, I'm a junior, actually. You are a child.

What year were you born?

Scott 1:39

No, no, no, no, no PII on the podcast. First off, Jeffrey.

Jeffrey 1:49

Yeah, well, poor Scott doesn't like my saucier stuff, but I actually think that's what keeps people coming back for more. Decker, how actually did you get into this field? Like what, you know, like lots of us, when we are 20 years old, there's like booze and there's music and there's like a whole bunch of other things. What led you to like start putting pins in Google Earth where there were Chinese missile bases?

Decker 2:19

Well, the entire thing started as sort of a procrastination outlet, which when I had something I didn't want to do, I would just go on Google Earth and look at things. And as I was following a lot of the work that you guys have been doing, especially the work that Geo4NonPro has been doing, which has given me opportunity to sort of participate in that.

They had the Berm Challenge last year, which is the sort of... The reason why on the internet I go as Tehrani Moghadam's head is because I thought it would be funny to change my username to Tehrani Moghadam's head because it was the berm challenge. We were finding berms.

Jeffrey 2:53

So you're going to have to explain that joke to listeners because some people are going to remember the joy that we all get from basically the public safety announcement. That is Tehrani Moghadam's head.

Decker 3:09

Sure. So Iran had a the old missile program that Iran had was led by a brigadier general named Tarani Mohaddam. Yeah.

Jeffrey 3:19

Who Fabian Hinz loves. Yeah. Like it's a it's a little creepy. We're not entirely sure. You know, there's like maybe a shrine to him. But go ahead.

Decker 3:28

Who was a very eccentric person. And one of the issues was that his compound at Bid Gine didn't have any berms, which are these sort of earthen or concrete mounds that you put around buildings that you might think explode. So that when they do explode, the blast is directed upwards and you don't get the sort of knock-on effect of buildings blowing up one after the other.

Unfortunately, they didn't have that. And so when there was an explosion during their assaulting missile program, all of them exploded and Mohaddam and his entire team were killed.

Jeffrey 4:07

And crucially, he had to be buried without his head because that was never recovered.

Decker 4:12

Right. They never found his head.

Jeffrey 4:15

So let that be a lesson to you. Put berms at your facilities that deal with high explosives. So how did you, so you said it just started as a procrastination challenge, but like lots of people procrastinate in lots of like weird ways. Is there something about this particular topic that like drew you to it or that made you think it would be really interesting to do?

I mean, basically we're interested in like reverse engineering you and like seeing if we can create, you know, like future versions of what to go pin things.

Decker 4:44

I mean, I think just the fact that you're finding things that are truly new and finding things that people don't know about already. And the appeal is you're doing a lot of detective work on trying to figure out what these places are, what's there. In my case, what kind of missiles are hosted there. So image sleuthing around and looking at images and matching it to places was really interesting to me.

Especially just because people didn't know a lot of things that I was looking at. Sort of the fact that you're bringing in something new and showing people things they haven't seen before and really sort of contributing something that you don't necessarily can contribute in other work that undergraduates do. And that really appealed to me. It's just the sort of image sleuthing you do and going around and sort of looking at pictures and looking at what's there and then matching it to places that you can see on solid imagery was definitely like really appealing to me as just an ability to sort of like sleuth around.

Jeffrey 5:48

Well, you've got really like a nice eye for it. I mean, the one thing that you said the other day that kind of made me laugh was that... First of all, Scott is the only person else I know who obsesses about the differing firing tables for each of the types of Chinese short and medium range ballistic missiles.

And, you know, the Chinese seem to be censoring the firing tables for the DF-21, but only the DF-21?

Decker 6:15

Yeah, it's interesting. For background for listeners, there's the DF-21 and ballistic missile. The ones you want to look at in this particular case is the D or the C. And the C has a very particular firing table that you can see. Firing table being the thing that sits on the ground when you erect the missile. And then the D version has a firing table that looks the same like the one on the DF-26.

And so you can see what kind of missile it is based on the firing table. And I actually have images of a location. It's on the map of 653, Brigade 653, and they have the DF-21D. And then this week an image popped up of a picture of a DF-21 with a censored firing table.

Jeffrey 7:08

Right. And the point is that they really only censor the DF-21D firing tables, right? So it's like the equivalent of them painting this is a DF-21D on the picture. Basically, yeah. Yeah. So, like, why do you think they do that?

Decker 7:24

I don't know. I mean, the PLARF and CCTV has some very strange classification practices. And just, like, odd things are censored in some pictures and some things aren't, especially in other pictures. Just, like, you know, sometimes they'll censor, like, just weird things on the tell that, like, you wouldn't necessarily think are censor-worthy. So I'm not—I think it's just, like— If I had to guess, I would say that CCTV has very strange classification instruction criteria, and they're not particularly executing it in a way that makes sense if you know a lot already about the missiles themselves.

Jeffrey 8:12

Well, that actually raises a really interesting question that I have for you, because these things are really technical and often sensors don't really know what they're talking about. I mean, as an undergraduate, do you feel like I mean, you're kind of digging deep in this stuff, right? And the number of human beings that you can go interact with and ask, why would they censor a firing table?

Have you had kind of an experience with realizing at some point that even though you're pretty young and even though you're pretty new at this, you have now spent more time staring at this stuff than just about anybody?

Decker 8:49

Yeah there's sort of this, I mean, during when I was putting the, the map together I had continual conversations with people over Twitter and there was this like sort of change in the, you know, I would go and ask Scott lots of questions about about the, the missiles and stuff like that, and then eventually it got to the point where like I would come to Scott with new information he hadn't seen before.

There's a change in which people start coming to you with questions. People in my DMs have been coming to me with questions about different basing modes for things. And it's sort of switched around. It's very obvious to me now that, oh, I have things that people just haven't looked at before.

Jeffrey 9:39

Yeah, I mean, my favorite example of this is Dave Schmerler early on had been staring at a lot of North Korean, Chinese, and Soviet-era missiles. And he noticed that the covers for the, like, electricals, right, where you would plug cables into, that the – if I recall this correctly – Oh, I might have it backwards. Maybe it's the Chinese ones are circular and the Soviet ones are squares, or maybe it's actually the opposite way around.

And I'll never forget Dave coming to me and being like, Like, why, why is that, you know, as though because I was still like his like former professor, like I would like know the answer, and I was just like, Dave, I don't think anybody has ever noticed this feature before, like, you, you are now the expert. So I kind of love that moment of, of transition in someone's career, so you, you now feel like people are really coming to you with questions, and, and is that, is that like a scary feeling where you're like, oh, I don't know, maybe, maybe it's like not a knowable thing

Decker 10:44

Yeah, it's kind of terrifying sometimes. I mean, it happened very quickly. Like, I mean, I started looking at China, like, in December or January, and it's very quickly transitioned into a situation which, like, people come to me with questions about a field that I don't fully, truly think that I'm, like, qualified to speak on yet. But apparently I just have the data that people don't have already, so they really want to come to me with these questions and sometimes I just don't have the answers to them.

Jeffrey 11:18

But, I mean, I think that's great, right? Because what I think it really should show people is that this is a community that basically is essentially open to people. And people can come and they can bring their particular talents. And, frankly, nobody is going to be an expert on anything, right? So we all have to be able to collaborate.

I think this is the point in which I want to actually say, like, you have a blog called aboyandhis.blog, right? Yes. And that's where the post resides. It is called Mapping the People's Liberation Army Rocket Force. We will put a link in the show notes. We will also tweet that out. I've been tweeting it out a lot.

But you've got both a very nice write-up as well as a KMZ file people can download.

Decker 11:57

Yeah, there's going to be an update to that pretty soon here, probably before this podcast goes up, because people have now sent me more data that I'm putting into the file there. And also some clarifications on a couple of the missile bases. But yeah, you can go there. It's aboyness.blog. And I have put together a KMZ file for Google Earth of almost every missile base in China and a lot of their support facilities.

And then attached to it are some range bubbles that I drew from the actual basing modes and also a sort of short list of tells we can see on the satellite imagery.

Jeffrey 12:43

Yeah, I mean, it's actually really surprising that you can identify the type of missile at a – I was kind of surprised at how many bases you were able to identify the type of missile for just because they left the – things out for a satellite to take a picture of.

Decker 12:58

Yeah, for the SRBM bases and a lot of the DF-21 bases, they are very just sort of casual about leaving their missiles out. You don't really see that as much for the ICBM bases. Very, very rarely do you see them actually leaving anything out. But definitely for all of the smaller missiles, they just will just leave them out.

Jeffrey 13:25

Well, you know, I think the value of the project, I don't know if you felt this way when you started, but at least for me, you know, when I'm talking to people about how many nuclear weapons China has, that number is pretty small. And I often encounter this kind of intellectual resistance to the idea that the number is small, mostly because people hear a lot about it on the media, but also because it's a big country and we sort of imagine that the size of a particular nuclear force is going to be roughly proportional to the size of the country.

And so, you know, I cannot tell you how many times I would be sitting in meetings in D.C. and, you know, I would state what the official U.S. intelligence community estimate of the size of the force is. And, you know, some man would say, I wouldn't be surprised if the real number was two or three times that.

You know, as though, you know, and I, Scott, you know as well as anybody the horror of the Chinese tunnels. Oh, I have extensive experience with the Chinese tunnels. You know, this idea that there's somehow like 3,000 nuclear weapons just stashed away in tunnels, but like people don't live in tunnels, right? People can't exercise in tunnels. And so, you know, it's hard to count missiles.

Right. It's really impossible to count nuclear warheads, but you can count infrastructure. And, you know, that actually allows you to build up an open source independent estimate of the size of the rocket force.

Decker 14:52

Right. Yeah, it's difficult. There's two sort of competing misconceptions about the Chinese strategic forces. The first is the fact that people overestimate how many warheads they have and how many things are deployed. The second misconception that I see a lot is, at the same time, people... Don't realize that Chinese nuclear forces are very unique in the fact that you know, the United States and Russia were bound by INF and so people, I talk to people who don't realize that like China has certain capabilities that the United States don't necessarily have, and so I building this picture, I'm trying to show that like There are these IRBM forces that we don't really have a comparable system to.

And at the same time, as the number of warheads is very small, their capability is actually quite strong.

Jeffrey 15:55

Well, and growing. I mean, one of the things that Scott and I talked about in a previous episode of the podcast is that there are these claims, which I think the research bears out, that In the past two years, particularly, the Chinese have added a lot of new missiles to the rocket force. You know, I think people sort of when you read that in the newspaper, I think people must imagine that the U.S. intelligence community is like somehow actually counting missiles.

But right, they're not. They're doing what you're doing, which is they're watching the Chinese add force structure. And I think you've documented pretty compellingly that the accounts that there is more force structure are true.

Decker 16:39

Yes, yes, definitely. We've definitely seen a lot of activity. And I've been going back to, you know, you had an earlier episode about the popular science article. And, you know, I've been going to the locations that are marked.

Jeffrey 16:52

Plurf, plurf, plurf, plurf, plurf, plurf, plurf. Sorry. Scott, you were supposed to say, plurfity plurf.

Scott 17:00

I'm just going to edit in the real song over it so that it keeps going in the background for the next five minutes. Sorry, Decker, go ahead.

Decker 17:08

So you look at the things that are marked on the Popular Science article, and you can go to these locations and you can actually see that, yeah, there's infrastructure being built there in those locations. And in some cases, we can identify what the system in question is. So for example, if we go to the location for 654,

Jeffrey 17:36

And by the way, listeners aren't going to know, China has a structure where they have bases and they have brigades. And so 654 is going to be a brigade at the, I don't remember which base.

Decker 17:50

That would be the northeast base. Right. So yeah, very quickly, the PLARF is organized into seven primary bases. One through six are all bases that are responsible for missile brigades. And then the seventh is their warhead depot base. Each base has around six or seven individual brigades, and these brigades can sometimes be very varied. There are some cases where you look at a base and you can see it has a very clear role.

Like, for example, 6-1 has almost the entirety of the PRC's SRBM inventory. And then you can look at other things like...

Jeffrey 18:34

So this is the, we're going to f*** up Taiwan base.

Decker 18:37

Basically, yeah. Yeah, that's definitely what it is. And then you look at other bases. For example, 6-2 has like ICBMs, MRBMs, IRBMs, and SRBMs. And so sometimes you use a very clear role, you can see. Sometimes you can't. But that's the organization structure. And each brigade has one type of missile. Okay. So you can look at some of the places that are here, and you can go and you can see what they've left out or what you can see in the imagery.

I think 617, which is Xinhua. Sorry, I'm going to butcher all these place names.

Jeffrey 19:15

Is that Xinhua? Xinhua. Oh, Xinhua. Okay, got it.

Decker 19:20

Sorry, I'm going to butcher all these place names.

Jeffrey 19:22

That's okay. That makes you right at home on the Arms Control Wong podcast. We can't pronounce anything. I took years of Chinese, and I still struggle to order a meal.

Scott 19:32

We started this podcast by messing up Decker's last name, even.

Jeffrey 19:35

Yeah, I know, and he's the one who feels bad. That's the ultimate scam. Yeah, actually, once in Beijing, I was trying to take a cab to the foreign ministry, and I couldn't get the tones on foreign ministry right. And finally, I had to resort to telling the cab driver it's, and I don't remember who the foreign minister was at the time, but I could do the name with the tones.

And I was like, you know, it's where so-and-so works. And the guy was like, the foreign ministry? I was like, yes, please take me there. Yeah.

Decker 20:04

I have a brother who lives in Taiwan, and he had a very similar experience. We'd gone to a cab, and my brother tried to, in Mandarin, tell the driver where to go. Driver turns to him, and then at length corrects his pronunciation, and we start driving.

Jeffrey 20:21

Anyway, so you were going to talk about a particular bass.

Decker 20:24

Yeah, in 6.1.7, you can actually see both. 6.1.7 has upgraded from the DF-11 to the DF-16, which is a newer SRBM variant. And on both the side of that imagery, we can actually see the missiles In the garrison, particularly because there's a very weird quirk with the DF-16 in that they put these blue tarps over the tell, and so they're the only system that does this.

And me and Scott are trying to figure out why that is. But you can see them on solid imagery, and you can go and look at CCTV imagery, and you can see by detail matching what the high bay looks like, you can see that is also a DF-16 base. You would think, you know, this is very strange to me, but you would think that the PRC would standardize what their high bays look like?

Jeffrey 21:22

No, but they don't. I mean, we've noticed this with the cruise missiles.

Decker 21:26

Right. You know, they build all of them, like, very different specifications, and it's up to the point where, like, every single one is unique, and you can go, and if you see a picture of a missile sitting in a high bay, chances are you can go to each base, and you can see which base it is based on things like shape, whether the roof is gable or curved, what the window pattern is, where the doors are.

You can detail match these things to each base.

Jeffrey 21:54

Yeah, we did this with a cruise missile base where they had two existing vehicle buildings, and they built the high bay structure to cover the lot in between them.

Scott 22:06

Mm-hmm.

Jeffrey 22:07

You know, and it was like, Jesus Christ, guys. Just knock the thing down and build something new. But I don't know.

Scott 22:14

Which is funny because they have no problem building entire seemingly – Suspiciously redundant-looking motor pools sometimes where they'll throw up an entire second area and make it very complicated to figure out what's actually going on.

Jeffrey 22:29

Yeah, I don't know. You know, Decker, one question I had for you is whether you plan to do a thing that I was not able to do when I last tried to do this, so I'm hoping you'll be smarter and more hardworking than I was, which is really start to try to then cross-reference the... Estimates we're getting out of the U.S. government with the physical infrastructure you found.

So, for example, you know, I'm thinking that, you know, you've got, if I remember correctly, 12 DF-5 silos identified.

Decker 23:05

Yeah, that's sort of based on existing, the existing CIA documents.

Jeffrey 23:13

Right. The declassified documents that have the lat longs for things. Right. So, I mean, this is kind of the thing I'm like now toying with, which is we know we know the U.S. government thinks there are 18 silos. And so, you know, one thing we can do is sometimes when we see rounding, right, like China military power will say that there's five to 10 of a certain missile.

What I think that means is a brigade. They've identified one brigade and they don't want to give you the exact number. But we really ought to be able to take those estimates, reverse engineer them, and then see if what we're seeing in the open source community matches up with the classified numbers. I don't know if you've thought about doing that.

Decker 23:52

I've already started to do that, actually. The DF-5 is a very clear example, because you can look at the 18 number, and you can look at the fact that there are three DF-5 brigades, and you can conclude that each brigade is going to have six silos. Or around there. And so you can already do this based on what's going...

There are a few complicating factors. The DF-21D complicates things because they're co-located. I think they're co-located with Sea Brigade, which I'm going to have to update. But... That sort of throws people in there of how many they actually have. I've seen numbers around 11 or 12 for the D brigades, or for the D... Sorry, they are companies, I think.

And the other companies are all going to be... No, they're not companies. Yes. Are all going to be DF-21C brigades. Sorry, I keep forgetting.

Scott 24:55

No, this is just another... It's another good thing to address in terms of the complexities of dealing with PLARF Organizational structure is when people choose to translate things different ways. And everything has its, you know, MUCDs where it's just a generic unit. So sometimes it's not ported at its correct height.

Jeffrey 25:14

If I recall correctly, didn't Ken Allen, the great Ken Allen, go with launch units for the word which was like Fundway or something? The broader point is that, I mean, I think we are all... We are all in service to Ken Allen and the work he did trying to think about what was then the second artillery organizationally.

And then I would add, I'm also pretty in debt to Mark Stokes, who has been kind of the keeper of the war bat. Oh, yes. And it's just really exciting to see Decker come along and just do something really different with it.

Decker 25:54

Yeah, the issue is that people try and translate the brigades and the regiments and the companies from the Chinese into their equivalents. And the problem is people don't actually have universal stands for that. And sometimes you see citations and people have written about, like, you know, regiments, but they're using a different, like, criteria for what that means.

And so trying to figure out what they're actually talking about is difficult sometimes.

Jeffrey 26:29

Well, although I think also it ends up being the advantage of the kind of work you do, because it's one thing to have this ambiguous language that we're struggling with, right? Brigade or regiment or, you know, like... But when you're like, look, this is where they live. This is the oval track that they exercise on. You can actually, it helps, I find, clear out a little bit some of that.

Some of the hassle when you're trying to represent this stuff in words and you're replacing that with a pin. Because you put the pin there and you're like, I don't care what you call it, but that's whatever, 16 DF31s or 8 DF31s. What do you think they come in? Are we talking hot dogs, hot dog buns? What's a brigade of DF31s these days?

Decker 27:16

Which DF-31? Yeah, right. AG.

Jeffrey 27:20

AG. Yeah, let's just go with the AG.

Decker 27:23

Okay, AG I have seen around 12.

Jeffrey 27:26

Around 12. Yeah.

Decker 27:28

The, the DF actually, I think it's less than that. It might be, but the, the ICBM brigades are much smaller. I think I saw a citation for the original DF 31 being around six to eight, and then the new ones seem to have more. I have to look at the my notes again for that, but the ICBM brigades are not that big in terms of launchers.

Jeffrey 27:55

Well, the last really big thing I wanted to talk about, which I think is super interesting, is the other advantage of doing this is... And often I find I struggle to explain this to reporters. You know, we'll see in a satellite image substantial changes to a missile base. And reporters will be like, yeah, so what? And we're always like...

Well, look, when you get substantial changes to infrastructure, you actually get new missiles, right? And you and Scott have an example of that, right? Where you actually have a case where there are old launch sites that we think get a new purpose, right?

Scott 28:42

Exactly. We'll frequently see these infrastructure changes, and it doesn't just mean that a brigade is sort of getting a nicer pool and get to hang out in a nicer bunker. It means that the unit itself is being upgraded to a different missile. Decker and I wrote about this for Arms Control Wonk, where there's this old base that I, so a lot of the times when I first started with working with second artillery positions, we knew them by their geographic designations and not so much by their brigade numbers, which was sort of a thing we researched later.

And so this was at a place I knew as Sundien, which Decker, do you remember the brigade offhand that operates out of Sundien?

Decker 29:23

662.

Scott 29:24

All of the brigade numbers I learned are gone. Okay. They've changed them, and I don't know any of them offhand anymore. When I was doing it, everything started with a 5. And so Sundian is part of 662, which operates in an area larger than just the Sundian Valley. But Sundian held these, like you said, rollout-to-launch sites for DF-4s, which is a horizontal cave in which an ICBM-class missile is stored horizontally on a trailer...

And it is physically rolled out to a pad, erected, fueled, and launched. What was that? There's a phrase that is bandied about for the launch mode that I think is launching the firecracker outside the door.

Jeffrey 30:06

Yep, lighting the firecracker outside the door.

Scott 30:09

That only exists because DF4s, they tried to put them in silos, and they sucked. The silos were bad. They were very similar to the Titan I silos in the United States where they had a whole... Elevator built into it that would lift the entire missile, and according to the CIA declass stuff, they kept multiple missiles inside the silos, so it'd be like a little case.

And so, that's a very long way of saying these were very old sites that were used for an outdated and deprecated launch mode that China abandoned pretty much immediately after it developed it, and it was used as a stopgap. And what we saw is that over Three sites that the CIA had identified as launch sites and one site they had not.

Yeah, these nice blue buildings went up over it and obscured the spots that the CIA identified as the physical launch site. And in several of the cases, we actually have like imagery and pictures of the launch site. Sometimes it's still obscured. And we think they're upgrading them to probably a silo.

Jeffrey 31:16

Yeah, I should say for listeners, we have seen China build new silos, one at Wuji for test launches, one at Jilin Tai for training. And in each case, when the Chinese built the silo, they built it underneath a large building, right?

Scott 31:32

Yes. You obscure... The silo digging, the coring for the silos always obscured. You don't want to do that in naked sunlight where satellites can very easily see it just on the visuals.

Jeffrey 31:44

So it's possible they're just clearing out the old rollout to launch sites and doing some kind of remediation. But like there's probably not a reason to do that under a big building.

Decker 31:54

You've been covering it. I think the real big thing about those sites is the fact that they have spoil piles. So you can see that they're removing large amounts of earth from under those buildings.

Scott 32:05

And putting concrete in. Three of the four sites had on-site concrete batch production plants, indicating that they have such high concrete requirements they can't reasonably just bring it in. They have to have their own plant on site, which is something you'd see for

Jeffrey 32:22

You know, large scale infrastructure. So still waiting for them to pop the buildings off. But I mean, again, and I think this is just like enormous testament to the value of the thing that Decker has built. When you can comprehensively watch all the sites in a particular country using commercial satellite imagery. You're now in a position where we can watch them do things like add infrastructure and see growth in the force.

You can watch them switch infrastructure out to see deployment of new missiles. It's a really different era, and you can all do it as an undergrad at Reed, which I think is just awesome. So, Decker, thank you so much for coming on and talking to me.

Decker 33:01

It was a pleasure being here. Thank you very much for inviting me on.

Jeffrey 33:06

Scott, do you want to say a couple of nice words about how people can throw a couple of bucks at the Patreon page and keep Anne Pellegrino in Baker's Flower?

Scott 33:15

If you would like to support the Arms Control Wonk podcast and help us keep the lights on and keep the podcast going, we are supported by listeners like you. And for $3 a month, if you are a college student or any type of student, or $5 a month, if you are not a student, you can get access to our Slack channel at Where folks like Decker are hanging out and exchanging cool ideas, documents, actual open source intelligence.

Jeffrey 33:42

Building a system to do open source detection of missile launches, but we'll save that for another day.

Scott 33:47

Yeah, civil technical means. Coming online soon, but on Valve time soon. It's a very cool community of people. We've done watches of North Korean military parades together. It's a great group of people. So if you would like to support us, that's patreon.com slash acwpodcast. So kick us a couple bucks and help us keep going. Decker, thank you for joining me.

And thank you for listening.