But who are some of the guys that have really come on in these last two victories that you didn't know that they were going to be in the position to help you the way they have been?

Oh, yeah.

You know, we have all of our returners that have all contributed and improved.

But, you know, like I said before the season, there's a young man that was our DB.

He actually still is our DB, Landon Figgins.

We moved him to our three back, our fullback spot, you know, where he's going to get some of those inside dives and off tackle runs and You know, he's just been dynamic.

He's opened that up where we didn't have to worry so much about attacking the perimeter.

That's some big shoes to fill, and it seems like that confidence is growing and it makes you happy and it makes the team happy, too, seeing your quarterback get better.

Coach Peters, I know that, you know, we see the highlights, and we see the players that, you know, obviously their name is mentioned on television or radio, but who are some of the guys that have really come on in these last two victories that you didn't know that they were going to be in the position to help you the way they have been?

Oh, yeah.

You know, we have... all of our returners that have all contributed and improved.

But, you know, like I said, before the season, there's a young man that was our DB.

He actually still is our DB Landon Figgins.

We moved him to our three back, our fullback spot, you know, where he's going to get some of those inside dives and off tackle runs.

And, you know, he's just been dynamic.

That's some big shoes to fill, and it seems like that confidence is growing, and it makes you happy, and it makes the team happy, too, seeing your quarterback get better.

If they were to move against an ally like Japan or Taiwan, for example, tomorrow, would we be able to respond?

Well, it depends on the scenario.

So if they move against Japan, we would be able to, um, I'm confident that we would be able to destroy their naval forces before they're able to touch down on some of the home islands of Japan.

We still have relatively good anti-ship capabilities, and the Japanese Navy is very strong, so I feel confident that we can defend the home islands of Japan.

It's different for Taiwan.

Um, Taiwan is closer to the mainland of China than Miami is to Cuba, and so you're looking at a flight time of about half an hour, forty-five minutes from mainland of China to Taiwan and only about three hours steam time to the shores of, uh, off the coast of Taipei.

So w- that would be a hard-pressed thing.

Ooh.

So where do we stand on the nuclear deterrent as part of the larger equation of force deterrent vis-a-vis our enemies like China and Russia?

Sure.

We have the oldest nuclear arsenal in the world.

The newest weapon that we have that's deployed is at this point 37 years old, which I think is almost the age of the average American.

That's the newest one.

Many weapons are decades older.

The ICBM, the intercontinental ballistic missile, was meant to be retired in 1988, supposed to stay in service until 2050.

Where does maritime defense fit within the larger American framework? We spoke a little bit about it, but where does it fit in the larger picture? It's

Obviously there's a lot more fitness to come, but I, I thought his recent jump out at Caulfield was quite good.

Yes, that, that surprised me a bit.

We, uh, my intention was to trial him twice before, uh, he raced in the, uh, P.B. Lawrence and then, uh, I'd look at it and there was a 1,200 meter...

Well, I've always known it was there in the back of my mind that, uh, and that's really taking the place of his second trial.

Do you expect him to be ridden a bit cooler on the weekend? How do you think that race will play out Bletch- the Bletchingley Stakes having a look at the final field?

Um, well, you know, as owners, we're always looking for inside barriers, but, uh, he's probably a horse I'd prefer not to have an inside barrier so he can get to the outside and wind up.

But, uh, that's how it is and, uh, it's up to the jockey, isn't it, to how, how he handles that.

When you're talking about our adversaries and the stockpiles that they have, could you walk us through where they can actually target, like how far their stockpiles can actually reach?

So Russia, to give you a sense of the scale of the Russian missile threat, the Russians have invested heavily in both cruise missiles and ballistic missiles, as well as these new hypersonic missiles.

Cruise missiles, we've all seen in movies and television and some of the news in which They can carry relatively modest payloads, but they're very accurate.

And we've seen the Russians employ these things across the battle space in Ukraine.

Ballistic missiles, those are the things that go outside of the Earth's atmosphere and come back down, and they can carry much, much heavier payloads.

Hypersonic missiles are these types of missiles that can go 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 times the speed of sound, which makes it very difficult to track them and then intercept them and shoot them down.

And so, to give a sense of scale, Russia has maybe 1,500, 2,000 of these ballistic missiles that can reach out and touch the American homeland.

Could you just walk us through the history of the partnership on missile defense cooperation?

Can you just give us a little bit of aBetter picture as to what our current arsenal looks like, and how does that compare with China and Russia?

Yeah, happy to.

So the American arsenal was built during the Cold War, and we have not, as you correctly pointed out, built a new weapon since 1989.

And so we inherited this, this, this large stockpile from the Cold War, and, um, they've been on life support ever since.

We've been doing life extensions on them.

Um, but we've retired most of the low-yield theater range weapons 'cause in the 1990s and 2000s, there was this view of, "Well, you're never gonna u- use nuclear weapons in a conflict anyways, and, and we don't really need them to achieve our objectives because we're able to do just astonishing things with our conventional military using, using jet fighters and bombers and destroyers and tanks and so forth.

So we don't really need these, like, low-yield weapons, but we do need a small handful of these big city-busting, you know, high-yield explosive warheads that were really designed to turn Moscow into a glass parking lot during the worst days of the Cold War." And so by and large, that's what our arsenal looks like, right? The Chinese have been building those types of weapons to be sure, and they've built an enormous number of missile silos out in the western desert where they could fire these big intercontinental range missiles that could strike anywhere in the world.

And while, yes, you can train the next generation to do so, if there was no real world practice, implementation, or desire to try and develop something new, and all they know is how to steward something older, we are really setting ourselves up for failure with regards to being able to compete with our adversaries and keeping the deterrence that we have right now actually credible.