Please, let's do that.

Yeah.

So basically, in a place like Zimbabwe from 2008 to 2013, where there was this what they called the government of national unity, where you had President Robert Mugabe, who had been in power for decades at that point.

He lost the first round of an election for the first time in parliament.

And and but he didn't get neither party, the opposition party, the movement for democratic change led by then Prime Minister Morgan Chonger.

I neither of them got the threshold 50 percent required to to win in the first round.

So I went to a second round.

Yeah, you know, over over

They don't wanna build all that other stuff." Or the local military will say, "We wanna build institutions, but it requires local political input and to pass the laws, and we can't get people on board to pass the laws." And then other people will say, "Well, you know, it's great, but it takes 20 years to do that, and we don't have 20 years in this country." So how do you all think about some of the more practical challenges of institution building? It just seems a lot harder to me than just selling a weapon or doing tactical training.

I, I totally agree with you, and you do hear a lot about that.

I would say we're just myopic about all this, and if we really do want effective partners, we need to put in the time and the investment.

And, and when people cite, you know, Iraq or Afghanistan or Vietnam as military advising failures, I actually push back on that because, not to be coy, but in far too many instances of popular, uh, what, what, you know, popular culture thinks of as spectacular failures, we never really tried to build the defense institutions, or if we did, it was far too late.

So, you know, in, in the EU, in the European Union, and, and our British allies, they really bought into this concept of security sector reform in, in the, the mid-'90s, which is about, you know, holistic, uh, human-centered security and institution building and, and good governance and all that.

You know, the US government never really bought into that framework.

And so when we went to, uh, Afghanistan and, and, uh, you know, you've talked about how we might see some success at the tactical or operational level, but it's hard to build to see the successes at the institutional level.

So how do we actually do this defense institution building piece better?