Podcast: What's Going On At The Pentagon?

Aviation Week editors discuss the impact of policy changes at the Pentagon before they break down the latest developments with the B-21 and multiple CCA projects.

Watch a video version of this podcast here

Subscribe Now

Don't miss a single episode of the award-winning Check 6. Follow us in Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Discover all of our podcasts at aviationweek.com/podcasts

AI-Generated Transcript

Robert Wall: Welcome to Check 6, where today we check in on what's going on at the Pentagon, and also as the shutdown drags on, we also want to cover some ground that stretches beyond the Beltway, including an update on the B-21 and on various CCA activities. So without further ado, since we're trying to pack in a lot here, we're joined today by our Pentagon desk-less Pentagon editor, Brian Everstine, senior Defense Editor, Steve Trimble and military space Editor, Vivienne Machi. I'm your host Robert Wall Aviation Week's executive editor for Defense and Space. Brian, why don't you kick us off and tell us a bit, how about your experience of moving out of the Pentagon and perhaps also what else has been going on there? And by the way, I do hope you managed to salvage my dot matrix printer from the 1990s that I'd stored there.

Brian Everstine (00:50): Well, yeah, I did salvage a couple things. I'm trying to figure out if it'll still work. So at this point, we're a few weeks removed, but just as a little bit of backstory, since pretty much the early days of this administration, Pentagon, under now Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, there's been a shift in their approach to dealing with the media. This started off with some of us losing our desks. Thankfully I was able to hold onto it, but some TV networks, etc., were forced to move out. There were not many briefings. And then over the past couple months, there was a trickling out of a new policy for those of us with badges that we would have to sign and agree to be able to keep access to the Pentagon. And essentially what boiled down for us for the Pentagon Press Association that for individual outlets is the policy made us agree to not solicit information that was not approved for prior release by the Pentagon.

(01:43): This includes unclassified information, CUI information, or they're saying CNSI and a new acronym I hadn't seen before this, but it included just normal. It's normal news gathering. It's what we do. Our job is to not just take what is handed to us. So pretty much everyone in the Pentagon Press Association declined to sign and walked out a couple of weeks ago. And since then we've been working outside of the building, but staying on the beat, still breaking stories. So the coverage has not necessarily changed that much except for I no longer have the desk that Aviation Week has had for decades now.

Robert Wall (02:17): That's been one of the things that's happening, but there has been also a noticeable just kind of withdrawal from the building about communicating about lots of things even before. But now the shutdown has kind of put that a bit into overdrive. So how is that all affecting what we're used to as the norm around this time of year?

Brian Everstine (02:37): Yeah, I mean, normally under just normal times I'd be interacting with public affairs folks, interacting with program managers, interacting with basically really anyone to share what's going on in the Pentagon from their perspective. If I hear some tips, I'd be going to them to kind of confirm and get their perspective. But really in the past few months, there's been almost no responses to queries. There's been very little public outreach. I think the one thing that was interesting, we had touched on discussing before, this is the new Netflix movie about "House of Dynamite" and instead of the Missile Defense Agency, instead of the Pentagon coming out publicly to like, Hey, let's talk about some of the issues raised, there was a memo that was leaked that was putting out their perspective on how the movie's wrong, but they depended on, we know about it because a memo leaked, the Pentagon didn't come out and talk about it themselves. So that kind of was a little emblematic of the way things have been going right now.

Robert Wall (03:34): Yeah, you've also kind of noticed a difference, even though you're not inside the Beltway, but it's really how things have changed and engagement. It's not just obviously with us, but also with industry.

Vivienne Machi (03:45): So this time of year, really all year round, there are industry conferences organized by different organizations that are really the best way for industry executives, for program managers, for new space and aerospace companies to connect and network with senior defense officials and get sort of the demand signal from high above, and also to connect and network with program managers and people that they want to work with within the government. And over the past few months, we have really seen a big, big impact on those industry conferences, especially since the government shutdown started on Oct. 1. So for my beat, for example, on the military space side, Space Systems Command, the acquisition arm of the U.S. Space Force typically holds an industry days conference. So two days of panels, discussions, networking here in Los Angeles, that was scheduled for mid-October and was completely canceled due to the government shutdown because it was not deemed an essential activity essentially.

(04:57): And a second conference, the MILSAT Symposium, which is held every year in Silicon Valley, there were more than 20 defense officials that had to pull out of speaking or participating in that conference again because it is not deemed an essential activity. The organizers of that conference even said they offered to pay for travel and for hotels for those defense officials to still be able to participate, but U.S. military officials typically are not allowed to accept gifts of more than $40. So that bill would've been much higher than that. So for all of the industry folks who are attending these conferences in the hopes of connecting again with the DOD and understanding what they need to be preparing for, it's difficult to plan now because we don't know even after the shutdown eventually ends. To Brian's point, since communication has been vastly reduced, not just for the press but for industry as well, it's hard for them to plan, should I still be going to AFA's Air Warfare Symposium in Colorado in March, should I still be going to Space Symposium and so forth. It just makes it much, much harder for everybody to plan, and it really has reduced the ability for there to be communication, very easy communication and networking between industry and DOD officials.

Robert Wall (06:26): Luckily, there's nothing going on in space right now and not a million new programs springing up that they might want to communicate on.

Vivienne Machi (06:34): Not to mention Golden Dome, which already has a $25 billion down payment, but very few details have come out since that executive order first dropped in January, and we're now in early November. So it would be good to have more communication is what industry officials were saying, even at that MILSAT Symposium conference.

Robert Wall (06:54): Yeah. And Steve, if I remember correctly, you also had your eye on an industry day that also got canceled.

Steve Trimble (07:02): Yeah, I mean most of them have. Yeah, I think that one was for the Navy modular missile that I wrote about just because they can't bring in people. But the bigger issue is this, I mean, this is not new in the sense that there's this tension between what the Pentagon thinks we should report on and what we think we should be reporting on our job is to just like anybody else in the press, your job is to write the complete truth, to seek the complete truth and publish the complete truth about what you're writing about. And in my experience, whether I covered cops when I was a very young reporter, I've covered airlines, I've covered defense, the complete truth is never authorized information. Nobody ever wants you to report the complete truth about something. So there's always tensions. I remember back when I had that desk in the Pentagon Rumsfeld, that was the Rumsfeld era, and he certainly had his way of dealing with that, including at one point banning anyone in the department from cooperating with the New York Times for quite a long period over some dispute they had over a particular story.

(08:09): I mean, these tensions have been around for a long time. This administration's approach and this department's approach to addressing that is a little more severe, I would say significantly more severe, not just with the press, but with authorized disclosure really to anyone. And we even heard that in hearings, confirmation hearings this week where Republicans on the Senate Armed Services Committee are complaining that they're not getting answers from the Pentagon's policy shop. There's going to be a discourse over this, a pull and push over where that line of disclosure needs to be. That's always there, but it is tilted far to one end of the spectrum this time, and it's hard to imagine that's going to be sustainable over the term, or it's just going to see more and more of this and the atmosphere will get worse and worse.

Brian Everstine (09:02): The one thing I wanted to make sure we cleared up before we move on to a different topic about Pentagon access was there was definitely a lot of misinformation put out there about the state of what it was. Being a Pentagon reporter, I didn't have unfettered access to the building. I always had to wear a badge that said press on it. The one big change earlier was they cut our access down to a very small amount of the Pentagon, which made things a little bit difficult, but it wasn't really the end of the world. On a normal day, for example, and I'll use the Air Force just because that's one of the services we cover the most. I would go in and I'd hit the secretary of the Air Force Public Affairs desk and go on and you'd talk to different people, hold different accounts, and that's on the basement below corridor nine or eight.

(09:46): And then I'd go from there and I'd want to go up to the E Ring top floor, and that's where the secretary, the chief of staff and the chief master sergeant of the Air Force all have desks and in their front kind of foyer area, front of the desks where their aides including their public affairs aide. So I'd go in and I talk to them. And so I'd walk a lot of different halls to get between these people whose job it is to interact with the media. So I wasn't going around walking by the tank where all the joint chiefs of staff are and putting a glass up against the door to try to hear some whispers. We had access, but I didn't have unfettered access to break down any hall and just jump into see what's going on in current operations or anything like that.

Vivienne Machi (10:27): I mean, in that way, it's very similar to being a Capitol Hill correspondent, right? I mean, a few years ago I was a Capitol Hill reporter, and there are areas where you are allowed to go, and again, you have a press badge, everybody knows who you are, what you're doing there, and there are areas that are more secure and you are not allowed to go in. The process is pretty clear to everybody who operates there. If you don't know it, you learn very, very, very fast because there are security guards in places that know their job, know when you're supposed to be there and know when you're not supposed to be there. I think that's important to know is that for the vast majority of people, the process is clear and understood.

Robert Wall (11:09): Just to kind of wrap up, I guess this segment, we're just wrapping up the earnings season. Clearly one thing that came up in all the calls with the companies was while the numbers have been good, they're clearly seeing an impact on contract awards and things like that from the shutdown, and other decisions that they've been expecting to come are just not happening. And then the question is, how quickly will they happen? Will they now roll into 2026 or if the government opens back up here soon, can some of that still happen before the end of the year? One of them, and we were talking about this earlier, was the Northrop call and the conversation there on the B-21. And Brian, you've been keeping an eye on that. So why don't you kind of get us up to speed on that on the B-21 and then we'll talk about some other issues that are going on with the bomber that are also quite interesting.

Brian Everstine (12:07): Yeah, so specific to the shutdown, we've been hearing for, I mean honestly for years now that the Air Force wants to increase the program of record beyond 100 for the B-21s. For example, the current STRATCOM boss, Gen. Cotton, who's heading out said at least 145, his replacement in testimony, I think it was this week, reiterated about the same. And also there have been discussions and some funding in the reconciliation act to increase the rate to get to a bigger program of record. There's been deliberations on how this will go, how Northrop can meet this hopeful goal. And in an earnings call, Northrop's CEO Kathy Warden said that the shutdown has really kind of put this on hold. So we were expecting this to clear up by the end of the year, but that's made more uncertain now, specifically related to the shutdown.

Robert Wall (13:00): And then I was saying with B-21, Brian and Steve, you guys have been writing about kind of an interesting Air Force policy decision about the staffing around it. So Steve, why don't you kind of walk our audience through what's going on?

Steve Trimble (13:16): Sure. Well, I think it's a policy debate at this point. It's still no decision, although that got a little confusing at the beginning of this too. But I mean, the exciting thing is to talk about disclosure. I mean, trying to get any real information about operational details or operational philosophy on the B-21 has been very difficult due to its classified nature. But now that it's getting much closer to operational service, which actually may still be years away, they've only flown two aircraft. So I mean, that's a clue that they're still far away. But we are getting some more information now. And I saw some social media chatter about this in apparent decision by Global Strike Command to change the crew composition in the cockpit compared to the traditional way you would staff a bomber, which is having two pilots on board. In the case of B-52 and B-1, you also have weapon systems officers either below deck or behind the pilots.

(14:14): In the case of the B-2, there's only two people on board, so it was just two pilots in this case. We got our hands on the memo after this. It was signed on Aug. 15 by Gen. Thomas Bussiere, who is then the Global Strike Command commander. He signed this memo saying definitively that the B-21 crew composition shall consist of a pilot and a weapon system officer. Now if you're in the tactical aviation community, that's not a huge deal. They've been doing that. The F-4 had a RIO, a radar intercept officer. B-1-11 had a weapon systems officer, and even today an F-15E has a weapon systems officer. So I mean, this is a pretty standard thing to do in the tactical aviation community, but it was unknown to the bomber community. And there's still quite a bit of heated discussion internally about which direction they should take.

(15:11): And in fact, when I presented this memo to the Air Force Public Affairs, it's part of this exchange that we have that we've been talking about. We actually got a very strong comment back from the vice chief, the acting vice chief of staff for the Air Force Gen. Jim Slife. Brian can correct my pronunciation of his last name if necessary, where he said that no, that Bussiere's memo represented strictly a recommendation and that it was not a final decision, and that is still being adjudicated by the headquarters Air Force. So we'll see how that goes. But I mean, it really speaks to this creeping degree of automation in cockpits no matter where you look. And as you can imagine as the B-21, as a clean sheet aircraft design with a whole new mission system and cockpit layout that represents the state-of-the-art in technology, that it's going to push that even further.

(16:20): And so there's this question of what can you do with that? And not only that, you're looking at a future of air warfare where understanding your sensors, all the systems that you have on board, managing your signature in real time against real threats is going to take a lot of focus and a lot of attention and expertise. So how should you approach that? Should you train a pilot to be a WSO or should you train your WSO and then have them be able to take over the aircraft in emergency situations or if the pilot gets incapacitated to get out of whatever situation you're in? So that's really what's being debated. I've talked to some pilots about this, some bomber pilots, and they are skeptical that you can always depend on this automation for one thing, especially in a combat scenario. And even then in certain emergencies, not having two pilots on board to manage all the things that you have to manage in those situations is something that they're very concerned about.

(17:30): It makes them very nervous. This is not just about Luddites or we don't like new technology or automation. There are some real concerns about this, and there could be even sort of a nuanced interpretation of how this goes. It may not be this black and white. We either going to have two pilots or we're going to have one pilot and one WSO all the time. It could be situations where you could have, depending on the mission, you could have two pilots on board on different missions. You might have a pilot and a WSO depending on what that mission demands. That's also a possibility and something we've also reported on. So it's a really interesting discussion. I think it goes to a discussion the broader aviation community is going to be having over the next years and decades about how much to trust single pilot cockpits and automation in cockpits. As that technology continues maturing and getting more advanced.

Robert Wall (18:31): Is there a training staffing benefit from making the change? I mean, is that behind it partly?

Steve Trimble (18:39): Well, sure. I mean, right now we have a pilot shortage, especially in the bomber community. The B-2 community is feeling that more than any, and this gets rid of a huge pilot shortage problem, if you only need half the pilots now for all these B-21s that are coming into service plus, they were already talking about retraining WSOs from B-52s and B-1s into B-21 pilots as a way to sort of make up that gap. But now you don't even have to do that. You have this existing community of WSOs and yeah, they'd have to be retrained on the particular sensors and systems that are on board the B-21, you might need to do some other things too. Those pilots, sorry, those WSOs for B-52, they're below deck. They're not trained to fly the aircraft in the event of emergencies. Whereas you talk about an F-15E WSO that WSO has gone through pilot training, they've gone through introduction to fighter fundamentals. They don't go beyond that, but they have plenty of skills to take over the aircraft in most situations. So they would need that additional training. There's only two people on board. Maybe that does solve part of your problem with, and maybe that's driving this even, but there's just a lot of factors going into it.

Robert Wall (20:03): I mean, not to get the entire pilot community hating me even more, but if there's a pilot shortage and you have to embrace new technology, let's use that as our segue to go talk to our favorite topic. CCAs, no pilots at all. So more activity on the CCA front here for the U.S. Air Force, Brian, we have a new CCA flying.

Brian Everstine (20:27): Yep, absolutely. That was last Friday. Halloween and Anduril's XQ-58A took its first flight. We had been expecting this, hoping this for a little bit while now. About two months ago, General Atomics had its first flight of its XQ-67A and Anduril said that they were waiting for, they had a little bit more work to do because they wanted to do their first flight, whereas GA had a pilot on sticks for their first flight. So we finally saw it take flight on last Friday, not much detail on what it did, where it went if, how long it flew, etc. But Anduril and their follow-up briefing to us laid out that they have a few more in the works in production right now. This one that they had just flown will go into more intense flight operations next year, including weapons releases, formation flight with crewed aircraft on those sorts of things.

(21:26): So Anduril had the spotlight for about two days, and then General Atomics on Monday or Tuesday of this week announced that its second XQ-67A had flown. So a lot of progress happening on these two aircraft that are part of the first increment of the U.S. Air Force's CCA program ahead of what we expect to be a production decision in 2026. Now, that decision could be only one of these aircraft going ahead. It could be both. It could be someone else that would even a part of these two, but we were seeing a lot of progress that we had been looking for most of the year.

Robert Wall (22:01): Speaking of someone else, obviously one of the things that was very striking was the two companies that won the Increment One awards, General Atomics and Anduril. Not among them, obviously one of the big traditional primes. But Steve, you've unearthed the fact that Northrop is definitely still in the game. So what's going on at Northrop?

Steve Trimble (22:27): For sure. Yeah, so I was able to take a look, get a view of a picture of a completely built aircraft by Northrop at their Scaled Composites Rapid Prototyping facility in Mojave, California, which indicated very strongly that they have not just done what they've talked about doing. We've reported it. They put a lot of information out in the public domain about Model 437, which was going to be their version actually of the Model 401 Sierra. And then when we saw it, it actually rolled out publicly over a year ago, and it was actually a crewed aircraft to our surprise. But that's because they wanted to make it kind of optionally manned, and it allowed them to take off from Mojave without much trouble because it's not an automated cockpit. It's a human in the cockpit, fly to a military training range, and then turn on the automation and the autonomy systems to get more experience.

(23:41): And then they reclassified it as the Beacon aircraft over the summer. Well, all along they've been also building this other aircraft called Lotus. They haven't revealed it yet. We've asked them to give us more information, but they're not willing to do that yet. I think they will probably in the very near future. The fact that it is as complete as I saw it to be means that we'll probably see it flying around California and perhaps other airports and other states in the near future, not unlike what we saw with Firebird 15 years ago or 12 years ago, something like that. So they're very much in the CCA game. They had to do this on their own risk. When the Air Force did not select them for increment, for the Increment One prototypes and went with General Atomics and Anduril, that meant that companies like Northrop could continue to compete, but they had to build their aircraft on their own and fly it on their own in order to be competitive. So that might put them in contention for Increment One, but I suspect they're moving closer to that or they're pushing more to that Increment Two requirement, which we've yet to see defined but should be coming out in the near future.

Robert Wall (24:58): Yeah. What is your sense, I mean, just looking at it mission wise, where do you think, what's the target?

Steve Trimble (25:10): It is hard to say. I mean, I would suspect it's more inclined for air-to-air than air-to-ground. Although I mean the difference is pretty blurry these days. And certainly it could do both. Sorry, I have to think about that.

Brian Everstine (25:25): Well, Steve, shortly before this reporting, Lockheed Skunk Works had its ATUS rollout, which was very high-end, very air-to-air. Would you say it's similar in that sort of capability from what you've seen?

Steve Trimble (25:40): It's not quite as advanced. ATUS was. ATUS is tailless and ATUS looks like it has a much more reduced signature than what I saw briefly with Lotus. But I mean the important difference between ATUS and Lotus is that ATUS is, from what we know still just a concept, they haven't built it yet and they're not supposed to fly it until 2027 according to the timeline that they came out with the Skunk Works came out with back in September. So if that is true and they're not secretly building something behind the scenes there at Skunk Works, then Northrop is ahead of the game there in that sense. And they're pretty much on track with where the Increment One prototypes are.

Brian Everstine (26:28): I'd be curious to see how it plays out if how the autonomy part of thing of Lotus will we saw with Increment One, the Air Force awarding contracts to, for example, Anduril is not flying with their own mission autonomy. Their first flight was with their own just flight safety autonomy just for takeoff and formation work and landing. But as it goes forward, they're going to be using Shield AI's. And when I talked with Northrop about their Beacon, basically the main focus of what they want to do with this, it's to show the Air Force that they can build their own aircraft to use other AI. There were, I think six or seven companies that did a briefing with all of us saying what they want to do with Beacon. It's kind of like what we've seen with VISTA, but with a company owned asset. So I'd be curious to see how that progresses.

Robert Wall (27:14): And we got one more new CCA, this one that came out here in recent days. So who wants to brief our audience on that one?

Steve Trimble (27:24): Sure. Well, just a couple days ago in Rome, General Atomics rolled out their concept for the new Gambit aircraft. Now Gambit is the company name for what became the XQ-67A Increment One prototype for the Air Force. Now, the XQ-67A represents an air-to-air optimized configuration that the Air Force specified for Increment One. And General Atomics is now saying that Increment Two would be optimized for an air-to-ground configuration for the new Gambit or what they're calling Gambit 6, right? They had previously revealed Gambit 5 as their Navy CCA back in the summer. And we also know what Gambit 4 is. It's become an AFRL project called Ghost, which is a hybrid electric with their diesel engine, which is really interesting, actually, a project that they're not prone to disclose much information about, but I think is one of the more interesting projects out there right now.

(28:32): But Gambit 6 is going to be this air-to-ground focus version of Gambit. Now, the big difference that has come up is when General Atomics first unveiled this whole Gambit concept, it was based on what came out of this little known program within AFRL called the Low Cost Aircraft Platform Sharing Program. And the whole idea of that was to take the common chassis approach that you see in automotive design where you have this chassis and then you build a sedan on it, or you build a pickup on it, or you build a crossover UAV or crossover SUV, not UAV on it. And you can mix and match depending on what the market wants. But you have this common drivetrain, common engine and wheelbase to play with. Well, if you tried, the idea was to take that to the aerospace industry and have a common keel.

(29:34): So you'd have a single sort of structural foundation of the airframe and the same avionics and electronics and the same engine, but you could mix and match the wings. So you could have swept wings if it was going to be air-to-air, you could have straight wings if it was going to be air-to-ground. You could have inlets either on top or on the sides or on the bottom, depending on what you wanted to do, how you wanted to optimize it for a particular mission. And clearly they've chosen not to do that now because Gambit 6, the one that they've just revealed for air-to-ground looks exactly the same, at least from what I can tell. There might be small differences, but I can't see them from just the concept image that they released. It's the same as the one that they're offering now in the air-to-air configuration.

(30:31): And that's not unlike aerospace design in general. I mean, we saw that with the F-16. It was designed for air-to-air. Well, guess what I mean? It's mainly doing air-to-ground, and it has been for decades. C-130, it's a truck that can do anything. And so maybe they've decided to go with that approach to this rather than that automotive approach in a way that you even save more money that way because they were talking about reusing 30% of the systems and 70% of the cost because you're requalifying all the avionics every time, but this time you're reusing the exact airframe and reusing all of the components. So there's probably a huge cost savings to that as well.

Robert Wall (31:25): Well, honestly, quite the pace here of new CCA developments, and I don't think necessarily a sign that's going to slow down before we get off the stage. Vivienne, you've been kind of quiet, I guess a dearth of CCAs in the space domain.

Vivienne Machi (31:44): Until CCAs reach low Earth orbit. I don't have much to contribute to the conversation.

Robert Wall (31:50): Give, but I'll say give it.

Vivienne Machi (31:52): I will say just in terms of big developments on the space side, and to kind of tie this back to our first part of the conversation, the Space Force is we're anticipating several contracts to come from the Space Force side once the government shutdown ends. Primarily on my end, the Space Development Agency's Tranche 3 Tracking Layer is a big contract that should be coming out, but I would expect it to come out essentially as soon as the government shutdown lifts. We're expecting some more information about, again, Golden Dome elements from the Space Force. They're going to have a big part of that with the space missile defense missile tracking layer, as well as the space interceptors themselves. We're anticipating some contracts related to moving target indicator from space as well. So all that to say, there will probably be a big rush of news announcements, contract announcements from the Space Force whenever the shutdown lifts.

(32:55): But in the meantime, I think it's important to discuss how the Space Force, particularly everybody in the Pentagon, is now doing more with less in terms of the workforce impacts from both the start of the Trump administration and Elon Musk's sort of workforce reorganization efforts, and then as well as the shutdown. But the Space Force in particular, before the shutdown even happened, they had a 14% reduction in their civilian workforce. And the commander of SSC, Lt. Gen. Philip Garrant told reporters at the AFA conference last month that a big majority of that were civilians working on acquisitions. So the contractors. So there is just this cascading effect of both the workforce cuts that were already in effect before the shutdown. And then now a lot of civilians are on furlough. Those are the people who are moving these contracts through the system. And again, this is not exclusive just to the Space Force, but I would say with the Space Force also having an 11, more than $11 billion budget increase, proposed budget increase between discretionary funding and the reconciliation bill this year, they are in particular being asked to do a lot more, a lot more missions, a lot more capability with a lot fewer people.

(34:23): So I think we just need to kind of plan for a new normal in terms of how quickly contracts are going to be turned announced, and especially for the reporters that they will be disseminated out to us. And I will say the last thing is that, again, I want to say Gen. Garrant told us, gave us these numbers, told us these impacts in response to reporters asking him about them at the Air Force Association conference, and just want to reiterate that interactions can be very helpful and they can get information out. So we just have to operate in a new normal going forward. Perhaps

Robert Wall (35:02): Information they want out too, right? It's not

Vivienne Machi (35:05): Exactly

Robert Wall (35:07): Both. All right. Well, as our listeners can hear, it's going to be a busy few weeks through the end of the year. If things go well, we'll have some new contracts. We may have some more CCAs, who knows. So that I think we'll leave it there. Thanks, all three of you. Thanks for chatting and thanks to our audience for checking in with Check 6 and check back soon.