 Our next speaker will be David Sturman, who is a senior policy analyst here at Future Security in New America, also a research fellow at ASU's Future Security Initiative and one of the key forces behind the book mentioned earlier called Understanding the New Proxy Wars. And he's gonna be talking about the state of America's counterinsurgency wars. Thanks, Daniel. So as mentioned, I'm a senior policy analyst here and affiliated with the ASU's Future Security Initiative. And I'm gonna be talking about America's various counterterrorism, drone and counterinsurgency wars, which are in a moment of substantial change right now. As we all know, the US withdrew from Afghanistan in 2021. And as far as we know, at least publicly, the United States has only conducted a single drone strike in Afghanistan since then. That drone strike killed the leader of al-Qaeda, I'm not solid hearing. Beyond Afghanistan, the number of US strikes, whether you count it as a global total or whether you want to zero in on particular theaters is also at an unprecedented look. However, and in addition in October 2022, the Biden administration released new roles with more restrictive guidelines on the use of direct action outside of areas of active hostilities, which was publicly released in redacted forms this summer. But there are three important cautions that I want to emphasize and I think are important to understanding the state of America's wars today. First, well, most strikes are at unprecedented lows. The trajectory is not downward in every war. US strikes are actually escalating in Somalia where when the Biden administration took office, it paused US strikes in Somalia and many other locations. Indeed, our count at New America where we tracked these strikes has the Biden administration conducting only four air strikes in its first year in office in Somalia. And there were seven more in the first month or partial month under the Trump administration. However, this year, which is still not over, we have tracked 17 US air strikes in Somalia and a ground operation. Importantly, most of these strikes are occurring under an exception to the new rules regarding US strikes, the allowance for collective self-defense of partner organizations. This goes to show the importance of looking at the trajectories in their particular conflict context that not only are there cases or at least one case where it is escalating, but it is escalating and increasing and decreasing at various points in relationship to a specific ongoing conflict which is not purely decided by the United States. Second, the decline in strikes that we've seen produces unprecedented reduction in strikes is a much longer trend than it is often given credit for. There have been no strikes, for example, reported in Pakistan since 2018. So we're now at half a decade. In Yemen, there was an unprecedented spike in strikes due more than 130 under the Trump administration in 2017. But what is often not told in discussions of the number of strikes is that the strikes then fell to be in line with what was occurring under the Obama administration in the late years and then actually fell to almost zero with a couple strikes against significant leaders, at least according to our tracking by the end of the Trump administration. In Libya, US strikes actually spiked under the Obama administration. Why? Because there was an operation to retake a specific city in Libya, CERT, and that actually wrapped up before the end of the Obama administration. And that involved hundreds of strikes and was led into a Trump administration ongoing with a couple occasional strikes that eventually petered out. In Iraq and Syria, there's often a lot of discussion of a major spike in strikes and casualties under the Trump administration. And indeed, there was an increase in the early Trump administration. However, it is also important to note that that aligned with the efforts to retake major cities in Iraq and Syria that were held by ISIS. And while there may be an effect of administration decisions and different roles regarding strikes, was also in large part of product of a preset campaign that was already going on to crush the Islamic State's territorial caliphate. Finally, and then what we see now, this current reduction was actually prepared again at the very end of the Trump administration with very few strikes once ISIS's territorial hole was smashed. Again, these examples caution against focusing on the particular legacy of administrations rather than the longer-term campaigns which often cross administrations. Finally, we need to be cautious about what we know. Take, for example, Yemen, where this year, there were reports of a mystery drone strike in the government of Marib, actually two that killed senior Al Qaeda and the Arabian Peninsula leaders. Do we know whether it was the United States? We actually do not. Sencombe denies conducting the strikes, however, it could be a covert U.S. strike. It could also be by a U.S. partner. Unfortunately, the current setup of the way that strikes are confirmed or denied leaves a lot of room open for this kind of confusion and it's particularly important when we seem to see strikes that bear sort of markers of what could well be a U.S. strike in these two cases in January and February of this year, specifically use of a technology, the R9X or Ninja missile that is believed to be potentially a U.S. signature, targeting high-level Al Qaeda figures that could conceivably fit under the new roles even without a declaration that Yemen is an area of active hostilities. And just generalized reporting from the region, even as we have no acknowledgement from the U.S. side, even anonymous claims regarding whether this was a U.S. strike. Similar issues regarding challenges of whether a strike is the United States or not have popped up in Somalia recently as well as in Afghanistan. So in conclusion, I want to leave you with three, four points about this moment of significant change when the number of U.S. strikes and other operations has radically declined. First, just the intensity is declining and that's an important thing to know. But the trajectory again is not consistent across every location and could well re-escalate in some conflict areas. Second, the trend began well before the Biden administration and is in large part connected to the ups and downs of specific campaigns and should be analyzed thusly. And third, we just need far greater transparency to be able to know when strikes are occurring, when strikes occur and they are not the United States and when they are U.S. strikes that undergirds the entire understanding of when the United States does or does not kill civilians but also major strategic questions. And with that, thank you.