Finding Light in Grief: A Conversation on Grief Support with Jason Dockeray, Executive Director, & Haider Abdul-Hussain, Fundraising Coordinator at Lighthouse

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I'm your host, Jacob Hagstrom, and I'll be talking with Dr. Thomas Gregory, who is associate professor of politics and international relations at the University of Auckland. Dr. Gregory is the author of "Weaponizing civilian protection", published by the University of Oxford Press in 2025. The book argues the American led coalition in Afghanistan changed the concept of civilian protection from a humanitarian concern to a strategic problem. This shift in focus resulted in fewer civilian casualties during these U.S. surge of forces from 2009 to 2013, but still Dr. Gregory argues the American decision to focus on Afghan civilians in their operational planning or to weaponize civilian protection resulted in negative consequences. Let's take a closer look at the text with its author. Tong, thank you for joining us on the NBN. Thank you for having me. Well, let's jump right into it. Your book's topic is a heavy one, the death of Afghan civilians during the global war on terrorism. How did you arrive at this subject? Yeah, it is a tough topic, and it's one that I've been looking at for quite some time. I actually had started, just started 6th from college when the 9/11 terrorist attacks occurred. So the war in Afghanistan has really been the backdrop to all of my studies and my entire career in the academy and I was also very involved in a lot of anti-war activism during my time at university. And one of the things that got me interested initially was the apparent disconnect that I observed between the humanitarian rhetoric that was used to justify the war in Afghanistan. And the apparent indifference that seems to be shown towards the Afghan civilians that were being killed. And I just remember sitting watching these Pentagon press conferences with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, where he was really fatalistic about civilian casualties, that he was very reluctant to count these casualties, very reluctant to acknowledge these casualties, very reluctant to admit fault. So the kind of initial interest was this apparent disconnect between the humanitarian rhetoric that was used to justify the war and this indifference towards Afghan civilian casualties. But weaponizing civilian protection is really interested in the shift that I observed. The started around 2008-2009 when the conflict was being redefined as a counterinsurgency. There was a big emphasis on securing hearts and minds. And we started to see the coalition talk about civilian casualties. Not as collateral damage, but as strategic setbacks. He had people like General Macrystal issuing a tactical directive in 2009, where he was warning about coalition forces, kind of securing tactical victories, but suffering strategic defeats because these operations were harming civilians and this was damaging relations with the local population. There's a bit in his memoir where he kind of recalls this particular kind of fiery meeting he had, where he slammed his hands down on the table and exclaimed, "What is it that we don't understand? We're going to lose this fucking war if we don't stop killing civilians." So the book is really interested in what happens when civilian casualties, and no longer talked about as collateral damage, but seen as strategic setbacks, something that could imperil the mission. That makes a lot of sense. And I think it's good to delve into this theme that really shows up with the U.S. embrace of the counterinsurgency strategy, something that happened really with the patronage of David Petraeus and also Stan and Macrystal, as he mentioned. So this gets us into the main argument of your book, which I think is a little bit counterintuitive. Because the American focus on protecting civilians, as you say, kind of in the midpoint of this war in Afghanistan, and they do reduce Afghan civilian deaths during this time period. So how does this result in adverse effects or negative consequences? Yeah, absolutely. So it is a little bit counterintuitive because you have these coalition commanders finally taking civilian casualties seriously, and they do introduce measures that result in a dramatic decrease in coalition-caused civilian casualties. So you had people like General McKinan, General Macrystal, General Petraeus imposing restrictions on close air supports, particularly in residential areas, that resulted in fewer Afghan civilians being killed in coalition air strikes. You had this expectation that coalition soldiers would exercise tactical patience or courageous restraints at checkpoints that resulted in fewer Afghan civilians being killed at coalition checkpoint. And there was even guidance issued to troops on how to drive on Afghan roads to minimize the number of road traffic accidents. And then in addition to this, you've had a bunch of post-incident kind of mitigation measures or consequence management techniques as the coalition called them. So General McKinan established this civilian casualty tracking cell in 2008 that was responsible for counting civilian casualties and collating data on civilian harm. And this was upgraded into a civilian harm mitigation team in 2011. And we had coalition troops even dispersing condolence payments to try and make amends whenever civilians were killed. So we had a whole bunch, a whole assortment of measures that were meant to both minimize and mitigate the harm to Afghan civilians. And these had a kind of noticeable effect on coalition called civilian casualties. And from a coalition point of view, these measures kind of exceeded legal requirements. They went beyond what was required by international humanitarian law. So what's the problem? What am I complaining about? Well, I think there are kind of two things that I try to flag in the book. One is that it instrumentalizes civilian protection and the other is that it's very dehumanizing towards the civilian population. So the first one is really about this idea that civilian protection becomes a means to an end rather than an end in itself. And this matters because in conflicts where civilian casualties are seen as a possible impediment to mission success, then commanders are likely to ratchet up these protections in order to minimize civilian casualties. And in conflicts where civilian harm is not seen as important to the mission or not seen as important to the mission. mission, then those protections, those enhanced protections, are going to be watered down and potentially reduced below the bare minimum threshold. It becomes a kind of reason not to worry too much about civilian protection. And I also think this kind of instrumentalist logic works to dehumanize a civilian population that civilians are still seen as loosable, as killable, on occasions where their deaths are considered kind of an acceptable consequence, a necessary consequence for the mission, even though it might create problems. So Afghan civilians were still seen as being eminently loosable in certain situations despite the possible risk to the mission. And that's a kind of, I guess, a rationality that kind of worries me. And I think as well, it's worth thinking about how these measures work to kind of rehabilitate the conflict in Afghanistan and actually help to rationalize the civilian casualties that were still occurring during this conflict. The thing that stood out to me most about just looking at the raw numbers, and I know it can be difficult to come to a consensus on casualties in each of the different theaters of war during the global war on terrorism. But the brown university costs of war estimates, casual civilian casualties in Iraq were about five times higher than in Afghanistan. I know this is getting a little bit beyond the bounds of your book, which just focuses on Afghanistan. But what do you think about this? Because a lot of the same personalities were involved in Iraq and Afghanistan. You mentioned Macrystal, who really develops this kind of counterinsurgency model in Iraq before bringing it to Afghanistan. Can you say anything about the comparison? Yeah, absolutely. So I think there are some really interesting comparisons between Iraq and Afghanistan. As you mentioned, there are some kind of key personalities that were involved in both conflicts. I think if you look at the kind of revisions to the counterinsurgency field manual, a manual that General Petraeus was heavily involved with, you start to see a kind of emphasis on a more judicious use of force that kind of comes through in that manual and you're warned about the kind of potential negative consequences of relying too much on firepower and alienating the local population. There isn't a whole heap about civilian harm in the field manual. But it's interesting that in the introduction to the published version, the University of Chicago Press version, Sarah Saul, who was someone again who was heavily involved in those revisions, talks about civilian harm quite extensively in her introduction. She talks about it that civilian harm is no longer just collateral damage because it does have this potential impact on mission success. So the kind of the seeds were sewn in the kind of revisions to the counterinsurgency field manual. I think there were some kind of interesting measures that were introduced in Iraq first. So the condolence payments, for example, the small sums of money that were dispersed to civilians who were harmed in attacks or families of those were killed. That was something that was introduced in Iraq before it was in Afghanistan. And people like General Chironi, for example, were looking at how to minimize civilian casualties at checkpoints because of the damage that this was doing to relations with the local population. So there were definitely some measures that were trialed in Iraq first. But there are some circumstances that were quite unique to Afghanistan. Well, I think there's a kind of big emphasis on minimizing and mitigating civilian harm. And so one of those was the fact that this was becoming a problem with relations with the Afghan government. So he had President Karzai threatening to replace his own restrictions on coalition operations because of civilian casualties. And that would have been a scene as a kind of huge limit on coalition freedom of action. I think support for the conflict in Afghanistan was really starting to wane, particularly amongst kind of domestic audiences in the various troop contributing countries. So some of those countries were threatening to reduce their contingent or remove their troops from Afghanistan. And I think this kind of emphasis on minimizing civilian casualties was part and parcel of helping to kind of rehabilitate the conflict to kind of make it sounds, make it seem like it was possible to win this war, to keep on killing the insurgents without causing harm or too much harm to the civilian population. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Let's drill down more into the counterinsurgency strategy that you analyze. And it really does the version that you discuss in your book is often known as population centric counterinsurgency because it does put the local civilian population as a center of gravity to use a military term. But kind of the prize is no longer territory or defeating the enemy, but it's persuading the population to support the host nation government. But what would you say to scholars such as Jacqueline Hazelton who's very skeptical of this kind of population centric counterinsurgency and who would claim that the strategy is not really so much about winning over a population's arts and minds as it is about controlling civilians through violent repellents. Yeah, absolutely. So I think there are some really interesting parallels between my work and her work, even though we approach the problem from completely different directions. So people like Jacqueline Hazelton have kind of really eviscerated the hearts and minds logic that was mobilized in Afghanistan and Iraq. And particularly this kind of idea that General Petraeus and some of the other Queen De Deisters kind of learned the wrong lessons from previous counterinsurgencies that success was not really rooted in good governance and all the hearts and minds staff, but really brutal campaigns targeted at the civilian population and kind of grubby deals with local elites. But what's interesting is she's not advocating for those measures even though she sees them as being kind of critical to success. She's cautioning restraints about not getting involved in these conflicts because the costs are too high and the moral compromises are too ghastly. Now I'm not interested in figuring out how to wage counterinsurgency in a more effective manner. I'm kind of approaching this from a completely different direction. I'm interested in how civilian harm is made possible. I'm interested in how it's made to seem permissible. And it's really a critique of the logic that makes these wars possible in the first place. So when I was kind of rereading all of this counterinsurgency doctrine, I wasn't there worried that Petraeus had kind of misread his Robert Thompson or his Frank Kitson or his David Galula. I was interested in how the coalition tried to kind of rehabilitate the conflict, tried to rationalize the harm inflicts on civilians by claiming that lethal force could be calibrated and calculated and controlled in such a way that they could keep on killing the insurgents without causing too much harm to civilians. So really I'm interested in how coalition's officials went about transforming the civilian population into an object, into an object, how you're making them center of gravity shapes the way that the war is both thought and thought. And I'm interested in how this continued to constitute the civilian population as killable, as loosable, as disposable in certain situations. So really those kind of martial calculations that were used to kind of shape how the war was conducted and the impact for the civilians caught up in it. So both of us I guess are interested in how these counterinsurgency ideas and ideals worked to kind of enable and excuse these pretty disastrous conflicts and we reach kind of similar conclusions but for really different reasons and that's that's really fascinating. A beautifully designed square space website is the difference between thinking about photography school and selling your portraits online. It's the difference between giving away those cookies you just made for free and running your cookie empire. A beautifully designed square space website is the difference between having a movie reviewing hobby and a movie reviewing career. Square space because no matter what you're into a website makes it real. 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But there were also suite of policies that were aimed at mitigating any harm that was deemed necessary. And this included things like counting civilian casualties so that coalition officials could respond more effectively. This idea of them being first with the truth so they could better manage the outcome. You even had senior commanders apologizing when civilians were killed and offering quite elaborate apologies when this harm was inflicted. But one of the main consequence management techniques that was introduced was the kind of extracure condolence payments. Kind of relatively small sums of money, kind of usually around $2,500 for when civilians were killed. And around $1,500 when civilians were injured or there was damage to civilian property. And these condolence payments were there to kind of try and prevent tactical victories becoming strategic defeats just because civilians were killed. It was trying to, I guess, kind of make amends in order to alleviate some of the potentially negative effects on mission success. And this for me is kind of quite problematic because it sees civilian harm as a problem to be managed with these kind of measly sums of money dispersed to try and manage that problem. Rather than this kind of catastrophic kind of moral outcome that we should really be kind of concerned about. And criticising, but you're absolutely right, this kind of use of money as a weapon system was not unique to Afghanistan. And not even unique to kind of recent counterinsurances, the American ex-grace payments have their roots in the first world war when general Pershing was over in France. And he was really kind of worried that some of the kind of incidents, particularly kind of road traffic accidents again, where American troops with damaging French property was kind of alienating friends and allies in France. And he wanted to have some money available so that he could compensate or provide some sort of monetary amends to those who had suffered damage in order to kind of repair those damaged relationships. Formalized in the foreign claims act in 1942, but there was a big problem. There was a combat exclusion that this money was available to provide compensation to those who suffered damage or death as a result of American actions providing it was not in a combat situation. Because presumably if it was in a combat situation, then the United States could just say, well, it was proportionate damage, right? It was proportional and therefore acceptable. And so we don't have to compensate anyone is that right? Yeah, and this because this I mean, the origins in the first world war is a lot a lot to do with with just car accidents involving American vehicles. And so it was not about civilians harmed on the battlefield or around the battlefield. It was kind of activities off the battlefield that were causing damage to relations between the US and its local allies. Now, this became a problem in Iraq because there were situations where it made sense for coalition forces to provide some sort of compensation or some sort of, you know, it's not compensation the strict sense because there's no legal liability attached to it, but some sort of kind of financial acknowledgement to Iraqi civilians, but they couldn't because of this combat exclusion. And you had these really kind of perverse situations. There was one where a man was killed on his fishing boats in Iraq. The coalition troops wanted to provide some sort of financial amends with the family, but they couldn't because the death occurred in a combat situation, but they could provide compensation for his boat, which was damaged after the attack because they didn't tie it up properly. So, it drifted away and sank. So, this was kind of really obscene, really perverse situation. So, they were able to get permission to use money that assets that were actually seized from the bath party in Iraq to provide these ex-grace payments that was meant as a kind of gesture of sympathy, a gesture of condolence to local civilians who were harmed in coalition operations in order to try and kind of repair that relationship. Now, interestingly, these ex-grace payments were not used in Afghanistan originally. It was seen as not being culturally appropriate in the Afghan context, but eventually the coalition changed attack. We started seeing these payments, and we started seeing the coalition encouraging other troop contributing countries to introduce their own ex-grace payment systems in order to provide this monetary amends to civilians who were harmed in coalition attacks. But this was a really dehumanizing bureaucratic process, really poultry sums of money. There were situations where families were given receipts listing their dead relatives on the receipt. There was no legal liability, no real accountability attached to this. And one of the things that I try to argue in the book is that these consequence management techniques kind of enabled the coalition to keep on killing that they actually became complicit in the violence that was being enacted. And so you've had this idea, General Petraeus, kind of often talked about money being a really important ammunition in the struggle against insurgents. Yeah, I think it's fascinating the deep history of this, and so many of the current issues we're dealing with seem to stem from World War I. And so here we can add another element of our modern world that dates back to that time period. I want to switch now over to talking about theory, because unlike most books about Afghanistan, yours contains a lot of postmodern theory. So how did Michel Foucault help you to think through military operations in Afghanistan? Yeah, I think the book is really in conversation with some of these kind of liberal war theorists, particularly people like Vivian Jackson. McTillian, Julian Reed, who are really interested in what happens when wars are waged on behalf of a population rather than on behalf of the Sovereign. And these theories all owe an obvious debt to the work of Michelle Foucault, who kind of looms large in their work, but also in this book as well. Now, I think the theory is really important to the argument because it helps to kind of illustrate some of these kind of martial logics, these martial calculations. But I'm hoping it's not too overbearing. The kind of the focus on the book is really tracing how coalition officials tried to kind of reconceptualize civilian harm and how they tried to kind of rationalize the violence that was targeted at insurgents as well as the incidental harm that was happening to Afghan civilians. So kind of using these theorists to kind of look at the specific techniques that were used to try and calculate and calibrate and control the violence that was inflicted to optimize its effectiveness and how this violence was kind of how the kind of certain lives continued to be seen as loosable in the quest to make the war winnable. Now one thing that I think is particularly important to the book is the feminist theorist Judith Butler and in particular a distinction that they make between grievable and ungrievable lives. And this idea that certain losses will register as significant losses that their deaths will be kind of recognized and remembered and the idea that other losses will not register as being quite as significant if they register at all. So this idea that certain casualties are not going to be counted, certain victims are not going to be named, certain violence is not going to be condemned. And I think that was really helpful their work was really helpful in weaponizing civilian protection because it enabled me to trace how civilian protection was kind of co-opted into these martial calculations that were ultimately concerned with winning the war rather than protecting people. And how this worked to constitute Afghan lives as still being loosable even though civilian protection was being prioritized more by the coalition. So thinking about why it was that coalition's officials started counting civilian casualties. Was it because Afghan lives now counted or that these counts were actually useful to coalition officials when it came to kind of mitigating and managing the violence. Were these X-Gracia condolence payments kind of recognition that Afghan lives were valuable or that providing some sort of financial amends was helpful from a military point of view in trying to mitigate to limit the damage that these deaths were causing to the mission. So Butler's work was really helpful with that and one of the things that I try to do in the book is to show that questions about whose lives agreeable the kind of differential allocation of grievability is not something that just matters post-mortem in terms of how we respond to people's deaths but also shapes our attitudes towards them in life. Yeah, whether we are prepared to risk certain lives to expose them to violence and this really kind of brings us back to kind of you know quite racialized assumptions about who counts as a human. Who do we recognize as having a politically significant life. I can see how the theory does fall to illustrate a lot of these issues. I was a little bit surprised when I read the Revenge of the Sovereign scenario that Foucault discusses that you kind of reproduce in the book that you didn't then go to talk about some of the episodes of spectacular violence that the Taliban notably engaged in. You do mention that the Taliban was responsible for more many more civilian casualties than the American led coalition. Did you consider at all thinking about the Taliban's use of spectacular violence with that Revenge of the Sovereign scenario? Yeah, absolutely. So I mean I think the book is interesting in how coalition officials tried to kind of rationalize their violence against civilians but what was kind of interesting is that the Taliban didn't even bother to try and rationalize their violence. So they were engaged in these spectacular acts kind of detonating suicide bombs in crowded marketplaces and so forth. So you know in that respect Afghan lives were inherently ungrievable to the Taliban that they were quite happy to instrumentalize civilians in order to achieve their mission objectives. So in weaponizing civilian protection is not an attempt to kind of excuse insertion violence. I think it's interesting that one of the kind of obscene side-effects of the emphasis that the coalition placed on reducing civilian casualties is that it created a perverse incentive for the Taliban to then start targeting civilians in an even more kind of ferocious manner because you know the the coalition puts such an emphasis on its ability to minimize civilian casualties that the Taliban saw an opportunity to kind of undermine that by ramping up their attacks on civilians but absolutely the kind of the the insurgent violence demonstrates are kind of even worse disregard for the lives of Afghan civilians. Yeah I thought that was an important part of your analysis in which you identified the Taliban's looking at American-led priorities and saying okay if this is a priority for this campaign we're going to try to negate that and we're going to try to to eliminate that. It kind of leads into this the next question that I wanted to ask you it's which is not about the Taliban but about about different schools of international relations talking about realists. So your book is really critical of the idealists the people who were trying to fight a "better war" commanders who were trying to reduce civilian casualties as an operational focus but are you at all concerned that that criticism of of this group could play into the hands of realists? I'm thinking of the current US president and at least for now the current self-styled secretary of war. These kind of thinkers might say any restriction on armed forces is a bad idea because it risks lengthening wars into deadly or stalemates. What would you respond to these type of folks? Yeah absolutely so I think it's a really important point and as I said earlier the book is really a kind of a critique of the kind of the myth of the liberal war. But one of the things that I tried to show is that what we saw in Afghanistan was not some great awakening of humanitarian sentiment but an attempt to kind of co-op civilian protection into a martial logic that was ultimately concerned with winning war. So in this sense the measures that I'm analyzing in the book are firmly in sconce within a kind of realist utilitarian logic. And I remember kind of one interview I did with General Patreus where I kind of told about the how coalition violence continued despite the kind of risk to civilians despite the damage that it could do to the mission and he kind of responded by saying that you know if you have a problem coming from a certain area that is sufficiently serious you're going to bomb that problem you're going to blow up that problem even though it could do damage to your relations with the Afghan people. So the book's really interested in how these kind of how this kind of weaponization of civilian protection encourages commanders to ratchet up their these protections when they think it's in their interest to do so. But how the the same logic kind of enables them to kind of ramp down to decrease or abandon these protections when it's no longer seen as being in their interest. Now there are definitely better and worse versions of this and you're absolutely right to mention Hegsurf and his kind of desire to resurrect some warrior ethos with a kind of assault on international ethics and test testosterone jabs for soldiers this idea that the rules of engagement are kind of an impediment to American leafality that anything to do with civilian protection is seen as woke and ethics are seen as a distraction. And the changes that he has ushered in have had catastrophic consequences for civilians. We've had these restrictions removed civilian casualties are no longer being counted in the same way as they were previously and the victims are not being compensated. But it's really interesting to look at some of the debates that are unfolding around the civilian protection center of excellence and the broader civilian harm mitigation and response action plan. the kind of weed after life to some of the measures that I discuss in the book, which were kind of set up prior to the current Trump administration coming in, but have been dismantled undecimated by Hegsf and his supporters. What's fascinating about the debate is that on the one side you have people like Hegsf talking about civilian protection as an impediment to American leafality. And then on the other side of the debate you have people like Wes Bryant who talk about civilian protection as actually enhancing American leafality that we need these measures because it enables the US and its coalition partners to wage war in a more effective manner. In both cases, despite some really significant differences between the two camps, civilian protection is seen as a means to an end. It's not really about protecting civilians per se, but using it in order to wield force, to optimize force to achieve the martial outcomes that the military wants. And I find that really problematic. It's that kind of instrumental logic that I kind of talked about earlier. And still a very kind of dehumanizing from a disposition towards the civilians who are caught up in these conflicts. So I guess my worry is not that my critique could be kind of co-opted by realists and utilitarians because I think in a sense these measures are already caught up in this instrumentalist logic. But I do think that there's something in the book that enables us to critique what the current Trump administration is doing without us falling back into a kind of misplaced nostalgia for what previous administrations were doing. We can recognize that there are differences that there are better and worse versions without celebrating previous mistakes as somehow being better than what we've got present. I mean, I was thinking about this idea of kind of criticizing a less bad option. It's not necessarily going to lead to that worse option. It's still important to level the critique. And it does make sense that both of these sides of the debate are arguing for this instrumentalization or this kind of conditional, conditional nature of the importance of civilian casualties. So that makes a lot of sense. You mentioned Judith Butler earlier. So I wanted to finish on a note that's sounded by her. When it comes to civilians caught in the path of war, how can we make their lives grievable? As I mentioned, the book really kind of draws on this distinction that Butler identifies in their work between grievable and ungrievable lives. And I think the book tries to show in quite painstaking detail at times how Afghan civilians are kind of rendered ungrievable within this kind of martial logic. And within that critique, there is I think a clear normative commitment to contesting this dehumanizing logic, the kind of this logic that renders certain lives so loosable. And I think there is a basis in that for a critique of war, not just certain practices within war, but a critique of war as an institution. But I think it's not so much about making civilians grievable, but recognizing that their lives are grievable. And one of the criticisms of Butler's work is that they end up reproducing the very frame that they seek to contest, that it's really focused on our ability to mourn their lives. And I think one of the things that is important to recognize is that these lives are already grievable and their deaths are grieved, that these losses are significant to the friends and families of the civilians. And I think these moments of grief are an opportunity for dissensors that enables us to critique the martial violence to contest this dehumanizing logic that treats them as a disposable population. So it's not so much about us making their lives grievable, but thinking about how we recognize their grievability and how we turn that into a critique of war. There are some kind of, I guess, interesting methodological issues that arise from this. The book is based on a lot of archival work where I was immersing myself in coalition texts in order to understand how coalition officials were thinking. And there was a lot of interviews with coalition officials to kind of ask them about where particular policies emerge, what they were trying to achieve with it and so forth. So it's really kind of a case of me studying up rather than studying down, looking at the victim. So I tried to be careful in the book that when I was talking about these measures that they were counterposed with very detailed accounts of specific incidents. So we kind of understood the consequences of the violence that was being enacted. And there's a Italian feminist, Adriana Cavero, who is again someone who's worked, been really influential for me, where she talks about this idea that all of us have our own individual stories to tell. And the problem is that we often reduce people to what they are rather than understanding who they are. So we kind of talk about people in categories, combatants, non-combatants, insurgents, civilians without recognizing them as kind of singular individuals with these kind of unique and irreplaceable stories to tell. So one of the things that I try to do is bring some of those stories into the book alongside this very kind of boring archival work that I do at times in order to kind of demonstrate that grievability. But yeah, it's not I think about making people grievable but recognizing their grievability and kind of contesting using that to contest the dehumanizing logic that leaves them so vulnerable to death and destruction in war. But I think your book did a great job of bringing out that human element. So thank you for including those bignettes because I think they are incredibly powerful and allow us to see a human story within what as you mentioned can be a story at times about doctrine and figures and other kinds of numbers. So thank you for bringing us back to the human element. Thank you. And thanks for joining us on the new book's network. It was really a pleasure to have you here to talk about weaponizing civilian protection. Thank you so much for having me. 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