Saudi Arabia’s Big Missile Reveal

Jeffrey Lewis 0:07

You are listening to the Arms Control Wonk podcast, a podcast on arms control, disarmament, and nonproliferation. I'm Dr. Jeffrey Lewis, a senior research scholar and William J. Perry lecturer at Stanford University and a distinguished research fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.

Aaron Stein 0:24

And I'm Aaron Stein, president of the Foreign Policy Research Institute, and we have a guest again today.

Sam Lair 0:29

Hi, I'm Sam Lair. I'm a research analyst and fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. Jeffrey, Aaron, it's good to see you.

Jeffrey 0:37

Good to see you guys. We've got Sam here today because for the longest time, Sam and I have been geeking out about Saudi missiles, and now we have way more data. Than we did just six months ago. So, Holy crap. So for listeners, the two things we're going to talk about at the beginning before I think riffing kind of in a big way about, you know, wither, wither the Sandy rocket.

One is that the Saudis used a DF-15, a Chinese produced DF-15, a in Yemen. And also, Saudi Arabia is expanding the Chinese-supplied solid propellant missile production plant that we identified some years ago.

Aaron 1:34

So it's a lot. I had a question before we dive into this. On the scale of wonk porn, where did the wreckage pictures from Yemen actually hit? Was it like a 6 out of 10, a 7 out of 10, a little soft core? What was it? Oh, I want to hear Sam's answer.

Sam 1:51

I was in a cafe in D.C. when I got the images. I remember I mentally went awooga, and my eyes jumped out on springs, and my retinas were replaced with dollar signs. So it was pretty exciting. So that was like a 9 out of 10 for you on the wonk porn scale. It was pretty stoked. I think that we were talking with some reporters about this, and they were wondering, is it fair to say that the Saudi missile program is the most secretive in the world?

And while I don't know if we can say that with absolute certainty, it is really secretive, and it's very rare that we get any kind of meaningful insight into that program. This is probably the most concrete thing we've seen from them since they pulled their DF-3s out of storage and rolled them down some tarmac in a parade some years ago.

Aaron 2:39

Yeah, that was an old Arms Control Wonk podcast. I think it was called Missiles on Parade, which you can now get on the new Arms Control Wonk website because super website creator Greg found them all, or I guess Claude did. And we were at one point looking at little models in a glass case.

Jeffrey 2:54

Yeah, so that's why it was a 9 of 10 for me. Three things. One, Fabian Hinz had noticed that the Saudis were remaking all of the launch sites. Which Decker would appreciate. They were essentially moving from a system that was liquid-fueled to something that looked solid-fueled. And then there was this little glass case where we saw a senior Saudi royal family official being given, and it had a DF-15 in it.

Aaron 3:24

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jeffrey 3:25

And we were like, maybe that's like a 4 out of 10. OK, but already, then to see the thing laying there, and then you want to talk about full frontal. The front end was the warhead had come off and you could see the thrust termination ports on the front end of the solid rocket motor. I've seen diagrams of thrust termination ports.

I have never in my life seen the front end of a Chinese solid propellant missile and I did not ... Process until that moment how big the ports were, and there they were just gaping. That was pretty X-rated from my perspective.

Aaron 4:12

There's so many jokes I can make. I'm just not going to, because this is a family pod. Sam, you're looking sort of wistfully.

Jeffrey 4:21

Buddy, they won't even let Xi Jinping .

Sam 4:28

It's like the cask engineer looking wistfully at the, wow, okay. From missiles to drill tweets, the arms control on Kapod has it all. I think ever the skeptics here at the FPRI open source research team, the missile wreckage itself, it showed up in North Yemen. And a bunch of videos were released on social media. And so even though the missile had DF-15A helpfully kind of like spray painted across it, which helped a little bit with the identification process.

Jeffrey 5:00

I loved that so much.

Sam 5:03

Listen, I know people who use subtext and they're all cowards. But in addition to that, right, I think if you go and you compare the fins on the back end of the missile, they kind of sheared off. And then also, if you look at the jet vane actuators, the shape and structure of the jet vane actuators are very distinctive, right?

And they're distinctive of the ones that we see on DF-15 type missiles, so Chinese missile bases. So if you go and you track down... Like erection tests at Chong Rao and places like that, you can see that the actuators match really closely. So maybe someone could have thought about deceiving us by spray painting DF-15A on it, but it does look to be the genuine artifact.

Aaron 5:45

I don't think they were trying to be that clever. I think they were just firing missiles at the Houthis because they were tired of missiles being fired at them.

Sam 5:52

They were tired of having their F-15s shot down.

Jeffrey 5:55

I just can't believe the Chinese still paint DF-15A on them.

Aaron 6:01

Yeah, and English characters, I guess, sort of.

Jeffrey 6:04

Wouldn't you, you know, like, it's not the, like, Muhammad number 12 or something.

Aaron 6:11

Like, who knows?

Jeffrey 6:15

Kabul 7. Like, come up with a cool name for your own missiles, for God's sakes.

Sam 6:21

Perhaps suggestive of a systemic lack of Ilan in the Saudi military.

Jeffrey 6:27

Name it the Zulfiqar like everyone else does, right?

Sam 6:31

Both the Pakistanis and the Iranians have a thing, right? Isn't that somebody's sword? I guess so. I think so. I believe it was the sword of Muhammad, but I can't remember.

Jeffrey 6:42

Yeah. So, you know, come on.

Aaron 6:45

Well, you guys had a delightful script you were working on here, and I took it completely off the rails by asking you about long porn scales.

Jeffrey 6:51

Well, let's talk about the – yeah, go ahead, Sam.

Sam 6:54

I was going to say, I think we're kind of mainly still there because ultimately, right, if you look at the missile and where it landed and kind of possible trajectories, it looks like it was fired from one of the southern Saudi Arabian missile bases. But I think that the really interesting part of this is that it kind of ends up firming up a question that we've had about what types of Chinese missiles were indeed exported to Saudi Arabia.

And this dates back to, I think, some documents that Jeffrey had dug up some years ago.

Jeffrey 7:26

Yeah. I was always slightly baffled by this because there is a 1991 NIE, which is just a freaking gold mine of proliferation information. I can't believe this thing is declassified. Partially, they declassified the range payload numbers for a bunch of foreign ballistic missile systems, including the Israeli ones. So I don't know why that's declassified, but whatever it is.

But in it, it very clearly stated that in addition to the DF-21s that everybody knew, sorry, not DF-21s, sorry, the- DF-3s. DF-3s, right, the CSS-4, that everyone knew China exported, that Saudi Arabia and China were also negotiating the sale of what at the time was called the M9 and the M11. And so the combination of that report that they were negotiating it, the little glass case, and now the hulking, smoking, spent carcass of that beauty, I feel like we can just cross that off the list.

Sam 8:41

I think for people who aren't real Chinese missile psychos, the M9 was the export designator for the DF-15, and then the M11 was the export designation for the DF-11. Because during the Deng Xiaoping era, contracts for some of these major munitions factories and military industries dried up as they focused on liberalizing the economy. And so they had to look elsewhere for business.

And so the solid propellant manufacturers decided to diversify via export.

Jeffrey 9:16

By the way, on the liquid side, there's a great story that the sale of the CSS-4 wasn't Sorry, CSS-2. God, my brain is not working. DF-3 CSS-2. The sale wasn't approved and when Deng Xiaoping learned about it because it was an issue of some controversy, his question was, how much did you get? They told him and his answer was, not small.

Aaron 9:46

That sounds like us when we're looking for sponsors.

Jeffrey 9:48

Yeah. But the other thing that I wanted to talk about, which is like the big update, which is why we're sort of focusing on the Saudi program and we should sort of, you know, when we're done, like step back and like, you know, what does all this mean? But the other thing is, Sam, you noticed that there was a substantial expansion of the Chinese supplied solid propellant production facility near al-Duwadimi.

Sam 10:17

Yeah, so when we saw the record show up in Yemen, I initially was curious about which bases it might have been fired from because the DF-15 has a particular range. I think it's like 700-ish kilometers, and that means that a number of Saudi bases are kind of ineligible as launch sites. But co-located with one of those launch sites, there's a missile base at a place called Al Dwadmi, and then it also is where, as Jeffrey said, the Chinese-supplied solid propellant rocket motor facility is.

And I went and looked at it and said, wow, there's a bunch of construction happening here. And then Michael Dutzman and I worked together to write up a short report, which eventually got published by Reuters, who went down and tracked down a couple of other things about it. But it looks like the Saudis are roughly doubling – The casting infrastructure there.

So when you make a salt propellant missile, you are basically making a bundt cake. And so you take a bunch of dry ingredients and you mix them together in a mixer with an epoxy, and then you pour it into a case and you let it harden and cool over time. And one of the really cool parts about this, and our friends at Planet Labs got some really incredible satellite photos But we caught the buildings that they were making at an early enough phase of construction that the roof was off.

And so we could actually see the casting pits inside of the building. And by comparing it to what I think is the other suspect casting building on site, this was a larger building. It was about, I think, like... Between 50% and 100% larger than the existing building. I think what Michael and I ended up concluding was that it seemed like these pits were for larger missiles than they could currently handle at the other casting sites.

Jeffrey 12:07

Did you get a diameter off it? I don't remember it being in the piece. It was just not good enough, not high enough resolution to be sure.

Sam 12:18

I mean, look, you're working with even at 30, 40 centimeters, which- Right, which we did not have due to some, I think, enduring restrictions of satellite imagery in the region. It was, yeah, I think what we could say confidently was that we thought it was larger than the existing pit infrastructure.

Jeffrey 12:41

What I like about that is Fabian Hinz, back when he was at II, SS, noticed there was that new missile base, which is in the middle of the country. And that thing is like a thousand kilometers or more away from anything you would want to hit, which means you're going to need a bigger missile.

Sam 13:10

Well, and I think that aligns with back in the early 2000s, I think it was like 2007 or so, there was this Newsweek article that was suggesting that maybe the Saudis had purchased the F-21s. I'm half responsible for this. Oh, okay.

Jeffrey 13:25

Well, I'm really responsible.

Sam 13:28

Say more.

Jeffrey 13:30

The reporter got the tip that they had the 21s, and I couldn't confirm it, but I did know about the... Weird Intel analyst who's now somehow avoided prison, but disclosed a lot of alleged details about those transfers. And it's not an actor in LA. But, you know... Is this the book?

Sam 13:59

The self-published book? Patriot Lost. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jeffrey 14:02

Yeah, okay. Yeah, I Googled that guy the other day. He is like an actor. You can like see him in, you know, I mean, not like famous movies, but...

Aaron 14:13

He's an actor. He's transitioned from writing probably illegal memoirs into C-list acting.

Jeffrey 14:20

Yeah, it was definitely illegal. He made a big deal about how he didn't submit it for publication. He both described the technique of monitoring missile shipments And the way that bases were monitored in ways that I'm sure would have upset now, especially that I know how you do overhead imagery. But he also identified real ships that we were able to confirm.

So I'm certain he was telling his truth, whether it was garbled or not. But yeah, he said that these were DF-21 sails and he was told to shut up, kid. And I basically relayed that, but then it seemed like I was confirming it. And I don't know.

Aaron 15:00

I mean, admittedly, that also sounds like the start of a conspiracy plot where the main character you never know is if he's having a schizoid breakdown or not.

Jeffrey 15:09

Yeah, I think – I mean, there are two reasons he could have been told to shut up. I mean, one is he was wrong, right?

Sam 15:15

Like they were DF-15 exports or something.

Jeffrey 15:18

Yeah. And, you know, he just like wouldn't let it go. And, you know, the other is it was there was some SIGINT involved and they wanted him to, you know, it was no longer his business. But yeah, you're right. So anyway, Sam, you started looking into it because, yes, there are these reports that the 21 was sold and that was like 20 years ago.

Sam 15:42

Right, and I think even though that's probably not the case given the appearance of the 15A, I think that it does suggest that the Saudis were kind of interested in longer-range missiles even several decades ago. And these missile bases in the middle of the country are also kind of indicative of that. But then also, if you think about the kind of enduring Saudi competition with Iran in the region – I think that there's a lot of reasons why the Saudis might be interested in a longer range missile and seeing larger casting pits appear at their production facility seems consistent with trying to solve that particular problem.

If the Saudis are having this much trouble getting their fighter bombers over Yemen, I assume they're going to have slightly tougher problems trying to do that over Tehran or Isfahan.

Aaron 16:38

You guys didn't tell the story about, and I think we talked about it on a podcast, on this podcast a long time ago, which is finding the original site. Because it was a member of the team and it looked boxy, Chinese. Oh, right. Well, that was Fabian.

Jeffrey 16:52

I mean, Fabian just sent me a note out of the blue one day saying that he'd been looking at Egypt, and one of the things he was looking at was solid propellant production facilities. And then he happened to be looking at Saudi Arabia, and he noticed what to him looked like a solid propellant production facility. And it was.

And very clearly for producing and then casting the motors, but also there was a test stand that looked exactly like a Chinese test stand. And then I guess, Aaron, you love this. Lots of lightning arresters because the Chinese must have had a bad day with some lightning ones because they are absolutely psychotic about lightning arresters. For some reason, that's- Which is good.

You should be, but you know.

Aaron 17:34

Of the podcasts that we do, there are a lot of them and they go a little mushy in my brain. And for some reason, when we were doing the script, I was like, there was a tell and I was like- Wasn't it the lightning rods that I was like, you know, I was like, I just remember a lot of discussion about the spacing of light of lightning rods on the podcast.

And for whatever reason, that's what stuck out in my brain from our previous podcast on this facility.

Sam 17:57

I also think one of the reasons why the construction of this site is so symbolically interesting as well is that if you go back and you look at old commercial imagery of al-Duwadimi, you can see these circular launch areas out in the front, which are consistent with a not particularly mobile old Chinese missile that you're going to have to take some time to align the guidance system using theodolites.

And then those circular launch areas that have been paved just get totally torn down and then replaced with this new shiny solid propellant missile production site. And you're like, oh, things are changing in this missile program.

Jeffrey 18:36

I think that's exactly right. I mean, it's a boy. Yeah, it's different.

Aaron 18:44

When they bought these things, they weren't to shoot at the Houthis. Because while I appreciated the wonk porn, I was also just sort of scratching my head like that's a big thing to throw at a bunch of dirt. You know what I mean? And I'm not sure why they fire it in the first place.

Jeffrey 19:02

Was it to send a message to clear stock or what? Yeah, I don't think they – solid propellant missiles have a shelf life. I mean, it's not like – they're not like eggs, but – You know, it's, I mean, I remember, so the commander of the Saudi rocket force in 1991 during Desert Storm, there was some discussion about how they didn't want to fuel the liquid propellant missiles because they only had a limited number and, you know, the fuel is quite corrosive.

It shouldn't be that corrosive, to be honest, but, you know, he said it was and that they really didn't want to fuel them and then defuel them. And so like a solid propellant missile, you know, it's, it's cast. So it's like a totally different technology. And, and, and, you know, because of that, like they do eventually degrade.

So I think it's, you know, it's possible they were just getting to the point where, I mean, assuming that they bought these, you know, they, they could be 20, 30 years old. Right. Just don't know.

Aaron 20:19

Yeah, and they were just something to use and to show off.

Jeffrey 20:26

Yeah. And also, I mean, everybody has them now, right? So I think it was one thing in the old days when the Saudis were keeping a low profile because they didn't want to be seen as driving this, right? They were actually the first importers.

Aaron 20:41

And the stigma of doing business with China, I think, is the other thing. Keeping it quiet. Or missiles. Or missiles. Yes.

Sam 20:50

Well, I think you're right that they were the first importers. Actually, a friend of the pod, Jim Lamson, and I have been talking about Kojir recently. And if you go and you look at the spot images of Kojir, they get their probably Chinese-aided missile production site there outside of Tehran in the early 90s.

Jeffrey 21:11

Yeah, but the CSS- But the DF-3s, yes.

Sam 21:16

That's much earlier.

Jeffrey 21:16

Is 87th. Partly, all of this ends up being driven by, I think, the Iraqis.

Aaron 21:30

Yeah. Yes, there was missile proliferation in the region and the Saudis were able to buy an army.

Jeffrey 21:36

I think the Iranians only get it because the Iraqis were hitting them.

Aaron 21:41

Yeah, and then availability of supply. There was a market, even if it was a relatively – was it gray or black? Which color would we say it was?

Jeffrey 21:49

It was sort of – The Iranians originally got them from the Libyans. Yeah. I mean, Gaddafi kind of had everything for sale. That guy was nuts. Anyway, so I guess one of the interesting things is just stepping back. Are we – Are we entering an era in which we are going to know a lot more about the Saudi missile program or is this just like that parade a few years ago where we get this brief glimpse and then everything locks down?

Aaron 22:23

What I would say to that is that we already know a lot more because of the open source tools available to us. And so, but I get your point, is this the start of we're going to show off the sword to continue the metaphorical imagery from earlier in the podcast, or are we going to try and put it away and hide it, even if we can still take pictures of what the missile bases look like?

Jeffrey 22:49

I do feel like using them is somehow really different.

Aaron 22:54

As I said, I don't know why you use them against the Houthi. I mean, I guess the Houthis are there, and they're a target, and then the symbolism of Iran – I mean, it's still remarkable to me that Iran has been firing missiles into Saudi Arabia for – it's on and off for half a decade?

Jeffrey 23:15

Oh, yeah. I think in our podcast, we were like, this is humiliating. It's humiliating. You acquire these missiles, and then you just take it in the face or the airport over and over and over again, and you don't retaliate. And nobody can do anything.

Aaron 23:31

As I was saying, there's all this talk about whether or not there'll be regional security alliances and stuff like that. And I kind of chuckle and laugh. I was like... I would make fun of these things if not for the fact that the American security guarantee wasn't able to stop these either. You know what I mean? In fact, perhaps made it worse.

It's just not as if anything will ultimately change the status quo and people have just forgotten about this. There's a missile that lands in Saudi Arabia every day.

Jeffrey 24:01

I found it absolutely bizarre. When we found that site initially, later CNN did some reporting, it turned out that the administration had not notified Congress. Both the Saudis and the Chinese imagined, as did the, I think it was the Trump administration at the time, that nobody was going to notice a giant solid missile production plant sitting out in the desert.

You know, and I know that there's stuff that we miss because we don't have an infinite amount of time to go look, but there are more people looking with more imagery. Yeah. This thing gets pretty big. Yeah. So, like, I wonder, but then it just kind of went away. Like, just both, not only do they, the fact that they're getting hit with missiles, they've sort of just normalized to it.

Like, people just don't think about the Saudis as having missiles.

Aaron 25:00

Yeah. Wasn't it the Fareed Zakaria article? They can't build a car so they can't build a bomb? It's that mindset. It's insane. These people are technologically backwards and they rely on servants to do everything so they can't possibly have missiles. I mean, this is ethno-supremacy mindset 101 right there.

Sam 25:19

Well, also you would think that like – If they have the money to buy all of these things that they do like, like luxury goods or servants, as you said, Aaron, they could also just buy missiles off the shelf, which they did end up doing. Well, that's what they did. Yeah, they did end up doing.

Aaron 25:34

That's what they did, but the story was told in an NIE, and I'm going to stomp on Jeffrey a little bit. We love that. I remember reading that NIE. Nobody's going in the archives looking for that NIE other than like the 12 people who do this, who are on this podcast. And then the second one is you've sent around that crazy book a few times.

There's some wacky stuff in there. You know what I mean? Sort of viable, allegedly. I want to put that in my humble opinion. I don't want to get sued. You have to be a sicko to be digging out a self-published sort of CIA analyst's diatribe against the agency for shutting them up. I am a connoisseur, Aaron. We know, Jeffries.

I am a connoisseur.

Jeffrey 26:18

By the way, thanks to Sam, I've now acquired this, which for listeners I'm holding up, it's a self-published memoir by the guy who worked at Kodak on reconnaissance satellite cameras. There's a lot of technical detail. Sam is the one who pointed it out to me. There's a lot of technical detail in there that I'm not sure is unclassified.

Aaron 26:42

When your roof collapses from weight of books, blame Sam and they can send Ali his way, not mine.

Jeffrey 26:51

When that happens, I will take the books off your hands, Jeffrey.

Sam 26:54

But I think you skipped one of the most interesting details about that book, which is the author's name, I you not, is Michael Clayton, which for real Tony Gilroy heads will kind of spark interest.

Jeffrey 27:08

I think we're off the rails.

Aaron 27:09

No, no. I was going to land the plane like this. So when I was around Sam's age and ascending in the think tank world, I also wanted to be a Stanton Fellow. And my Stanton Fellow proposal was that we have an unconstrained missile race in the Middle East. And there's just no norms. There's nothing stopping it. And I ultimately did not get that stat in fellowship.

That's not a knock on the foundation. It's just, I still, that was 20 years ago. You know, and I just feel like we have more tools to be able to look at these things than ever before. And the Chinese just slough missiles off everywhere. As somebody who follows Turkey, I mean, if you look at Turkey's solid missile production, do we know where that came from?

Yes.

Jeffrey 27:53

I continue to urge Sam and Michael to finish that giant paper on the Turkish missile program.

Sam 28:00

Well, it's incredible, though, because you can go and you can find these interviews in Turkish media sources with – You know, people from rockets on who were part of the program and they were like, yeah, and then we had all the Chinese generals out here and they were, they were giving us the missiles and everything that I, I think your point, Aaron, right.

There is, there has kind of been this like simmering missile arms race in the region. I wouldn't call it simmering. Well, it's now boiled over. But I think one of the most interesting parts about this is a lot of countries get into this because of the Iraqis, as you said. But for everyone who basically isn't the Iraqis, the Chinese are perfectly willing to sell to everyone.

They're like Mac in that episode of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, where he's like, I'm playing both sides, that way I always come out on top. And I think the Chinese attitude is basically the same, where they're like, we're happy to sell ammonia perchlorate And precursor materials and designs to the Iranians and then turn around and sell a missile production factory to the Saudis.

Okay. Yeah, listen, the check clears.

Aaron 28:59

The B611 is like the Toyota Corolla of missiles in the Middle East. The Hilux? Do you have the Toyota Hilux of missile production?

Jeffrey 29:07

Do you remember when the fucking Qataris? They've got the B611. Yeah, but that's the Turkish missile. I mean, it's the same. Yeah. Yes. Yes.

Aaron 29:22

Like the Qataris. Yeah. If you want it, it's available. I guess that's the point. If you want it, it's available. They have a lot of cash. And so it's not all that different from when, again, forgive me, I'm an expert on China. These things were first put on offer in the late 1980s, early 1990s. If you have a hard currency, they'll build one for you.

Sam 29:41

Well, and so I think another interesting trend is that for liquid propellant missiles, when you think about missile proliferation, you can kind of trace basically everything back to the Scud often, right? If you look at all of these liquid propellant missile programs, oftentimes they're tightly knit to the Scud.

Jeffrey 29:58

Right, exactly.

Sam 30:01

For solid propellant missile proliferation, it looks like for many of these programs, it goes back to the B611 or the M9 in China. China is filling the Soviet void in the missile proliferation marketplace in the post-Cold War world.

Jeffrey 30:19

Did we get back on the rails? I think we got back on the rails. I think it's a good place to leave it though, because we just have Think really put our finger on what's different about this particular round of Saudi stories and all the stuff in the past, which is it's occurring in this environment in which obviously Iran has a giant missile program, obviously the Israelis have a giant missile program, but The Turks have one.

We can see the Saudis have one. We know that there are importations in places like Qatar. The Egyptians, I think, have a much bigger program than we're really paying attention to. The Iranians are exporting to all their regional countries. Don't call them proxies. People say proxies, clients, friends, birds of a feather, fellow travelers. They're fellow travelers. Right?

So just I think maybe what's different now and maybe we will continue to learn more is that when... When there were fewer missiles, I think the Saudis didn't want to stick out.

Aaron 31:29

Yeah.

Jeffrey 31:29

Now I think they're going to face the opposite incentive, which is not wanting to look like they've fallen behind. And so, you know, that's going to be fun for us because I'm going to get to see some more gaping thrust termination ports.

Sam 31:45

Well, and you know... I think Iranians learned this lesson the hard way, but something that the Saudis may end up learning as well is it turns out it's actually not that difficult to destroy an above ground solid propellant missile factory.

Aaron 32:01

We've been talking about this since whenever the Israelis and Iranians started shooting at each other.

Jeffrey 32:07

The Iranians shoot at that thing anyway.

Aaron 32:11

Conventionally armed ballistic missiles just aren't great. They're fine. No, they're the worst. You need to be really accurate. These things aren't really accurate.

Jeffrey 32:21

They're really degrading the public perception of ballistic missiles with their utter inability to hit shit.

Sam 32:29

Unless it's like a blue sparrow or something like, miss me with that. I don't care.

Aaron 32:33

Well, that's the type of stuff that is kept quiet. And so like the crap, so now we're going off the rails again.

Jeffrey 32:39

Well, air launch ballistic missiles next episode. Those things work. The craptastic ones.

Sam 32:45

You can ask Ali Khamenei how well they work.

Aaron 32:48

Those things work. And those things are interesting. And the Israelis, they're very accurate. So yeah, anyways. Okay. That's off the rails. We're making an Ali Khamenei joke. Okay, patreon.com slash ACW podcast. Support the show, $3 if you're a student, $5 if you are not. Check out the report, fpri.org, and also in Reuters. Good job, Sam. Jeffrey, the Black father, as it says right there.

We can thank you and Fabian for originally finding it. So thanks, everybody. And talk to you soon.