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To Protect Itself From U.S. Hostility Australia Decides To Buy U.S. Submarines
Yesterday the U.S., the UK and Australia announced that the latter one will buy nuclear powered submarines to do the U.S.' bidding against China:
Australia's next submarine fleet will be nuclear-powered under an audacious plan that will see a controversial $90 billion program to build up to 12 French-designed submarines scrapped.
The ABC understands Australia will use American and British technology to configure its next submarine fleet in a bid to replace its existing Collins class subs with a boat more suitable to the deteriorating strategic environment.
This is a huge but short term win for the U.S. with an also-ran booby price for Britain and a strategic loss of sovereignty and budget control for Australia.
It is another U.S. slap into the face of France and the European Union. The deal will piss off New Zealand, Indonesia and of course China. It will upset the international nuclear non proliferation regime and may lead to the further military nuclearization of South Korea and Japan.
Australia currently has 6 Collins class submarines. These are diesel driven boats based on Swedish designs but partially build in Australia. These boats are relatively slow and have a medium range and endurance. They were built between 1990 and 2003 and are mostly for defensive use. There were lots of trouble during the building of the boats as Australia lacks the technical capabilities and industrial depth to make such complicate products. The operational history of boats is also rather mixed with several scandals following each other. The boats are supposed to be upgraded to be in use for another decade.
In the 2010s Australia began to look for a new generation of submarines. After a long discussion it decided to stick to conventionally powered boats. The new subs were again to be build in Australia after a foreign design.
Germany, Japan and France were asked for proposals. The French state owned ship builder Naval Group (DCNS) won the race for 12 new boats and the €50 billion contract. Ironically the French conventionally driven Shortfin Barracuda design France offered is based on its own nuclear driven Barracuda class design. For Australia France had therefore to design a conventional power plant for a submarine that was originally designed, as all French subs are, to run on a nuclear reactor with low enriched uranium (LEU). It was quite obvious that this unusual conversion would run into difficulties and time delays.
Back in June Peter Lee, aka Chinahand, wrote about the delayed program:
The program is officially “troubled” and Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison held a confab with French president Macron to try to get the project back on track.
Although the contract was signed in 2016, construction hasn’t begun yet, and the first submarine under the program won’t be launched for another decade. At least.
This does not fit well with the Australian navy’s declared ambition to fling its armed might against a PRC invasion of Taiwan that might happen in the next few years, so there’s all sorts of flailing go on, including talk of spending a few billion dollars to upgrade the current Collins class fleet of submarines as a stopgap, or even rush-procuring some German subs.
There’s also some talk of canceling, threatening to cancel, and/or modifying the attack submarine contract to do better. And maybe steer the project toward Germany or back to America’s choice, Japan.
Well – it turns out that 'America's choice' builder for Australia's submarines was not Japan but the U.S. itself.
We now learn that talks about ditching the contract with French in favor of U.S. build nuclear driven boats already started in April 2020 and were finalized during a U.S., Australian, British summit in early June 2021. This was before Prime Minister Scott Morrison met with the French President Macron to get the French-Australian project back on track!
What the PM didn't tell Macron over that long dinner in Paris — and perhaps why the French President might be particularly miffed — is that Morrison had, just a day or so before, already reached an informal agreement with United States President Joe Biden and British PM Boris Johnson for an extension of a nuclear technology sharing agreement.
This revelation brings a new complexion to the tripartite meeting in Carbis Bay in Cornwall on June 12 between the two PMs and the US President.
…
The ABC understands the federal government began exploring the nuclear-powered submarine option about 18 months ago when Linda Reynolds was still defence minister.
Moreover on August 30 the French and Australian Foreign and Defense Ministers had met and issued a common declaration on bilateral cooperation in a number of policy fields. This included defense cooperation:
Both sides committed to deepen defence industry cooperation and enhance their capability edge in the region. Ministers underlined the importance of the Future Submarine program. They agreed to strengthen military scientific research cooperation through a strategic partnership between the Defence Science and Technology Group and the Directorate General for Armaments.
Just sixteen days later France learned that it lost a huge defense contract due a 180 degree turn around by its Australian 'partner'. It is no wonder than that the French are fuming:
The French government has hit out Australia's decision to tear up a submarine deal with France worth more than €50 billion to instead acquire American-made nuclear-powered submarines.
"It's a stab in the back. We had established a trusting relationship with Australia, and this trust was betrayed," French Foreign Affairs Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said in a Franceinfo interview Thursday morning. Le Drian added he was "angry and very bitter about this break up," adding that he had spoken to his Australian counterpart days ago and received no serious indication of the move.
Under a deal announced Wednesday by U.S. President Joe Biden, Australia, the U.K. and the U.S. will form a new alliance to be known as AUKUS, which will see the three countries share advanced technologies with one another. As part of the new pact, Canberra will abandon its submarine deal with France.
The French, correctly, blame the U.S. for this decision:
In a statement released before the interview, Le Drian and Armed Forces Minister Florence Parly said: “This decision is contrary to the letter and spirit of the cooperation that prevailed between France and Australia."
The statement continued: "The American choice to push aside an ally and European partner like France from a structuring partnership with Australia, at a time when we are facing unprecedented challenges in the Indo-Pacific region … shows a lack of consistency France can only note and regret."
The French ambassador to the U.S. was a bit more subtle with this zinger:
Philippe Etienne @Ph_Etienne – 2:43 UTC · Sep 16, 2021
Interestingly, exactly 240 years ago the French Navy defeated the British Navy in Chesapeake Bay, paving the way for the victory at Yorktown and the independence of the United States.
There are some military reasons to prefer nuclear submarines over diesel driven ones if one plans to lay siege on a foreign coast far away from ones own one. Nuclear submarines (SSN) are faster and can stay on station much longer than diesel driven boats (SSK).
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But there are also many negative issues with nuclear boats. They are larger and more expensive than conventional ones. The cost nearly 50% more. They also require dedicated infrastructure and very specialized nuclear training for the crews. Australia has neither nor can it supply the necessary fuel for the nuclear reactors.
The price for the new submarines Australia will have to pay will be much higher that for the French ones. Some $3 billion have already been sunk into the French contract. France will rightfully demand additional compensation for cancelling it. The new contract with the U.S. or UK will cost more than the French one but will only include 8 instead of 12 boats. As three boats are needed to keep one at sea (while the other two are training or in refit), the actual patrolling capacity for Australia's navy will sink from 4 to 2-3 concurrent submarines at sea.
The much higher price of the fewer more complicate boats will upset Australia's defense budget for decades to come.
If going to nuclear propulsion were Australia's sole reason for changing the horse it could have stuck to the original French Barracuda design. This has the advantage of using low enriched uranium which is commercially available. There would be no Australian dependency on France for new fuel supplies. The British and U.S. boats use nuclear reactors with highly enriched uranium (HEU >60%). As Australia now decided to buy those boats it will forever be dependent on those suppliers.
The non-proliferation crowd and the IAEA will be up in arms over the deal. How much supervision will there be over the HEU? Who will have access to it?
Nuclear driven submarines are also perceived as offensive weapons, not as reasonable defensive ones. There are more countries on this map than just China.
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That Australia, with just 25 million inhabitants, is buying nuclear driven attack subs will not be welcome by its ten times larger northern neighbor Indonesia. Other neighboring countries, like New Zealand, reject any use of nuclear fuel and will not allow ships or boats using it into their harbors.
The new contract will also upset the Australian plans for manufacturing the boats on its own soil. While the French design was ready to start the actual building phase at the beginning of next year the whole submarine project will now go into a new 18 month long definition phase after which actual contracts will have to be negotiated and signed. Meanwhile the hundreds of Australian engineers who moved to France to help with the design and specialists who were hired by Naval Group in Australia will have to be cared for. Australia does not have many people with such knowledge. What are they going to do until the new project actually starts?
The UK will offer Australia to buy British made Astute class submarines while the U.S. is likely to offer the smaller version of its Virginia class submarines. As both countries have active production lines for these it will not make any economic sense to build more than some small parts for these in Australia itself. The U.S. will use all pressure that is necessary to make sure that its offer will win the race. A hint of that is that Australia also announced that it will acquire long-range US Tomahawk missiles to be used with the subs.
The first of the French boats for Australia was expected to be ready in the early 2030s. There will now be a long delay of perhaps a decade for Australia to get new boats.
Its current Collins class will require more than an ordinary refit to be sustained that long. That is going to be expensive. The Germans may want to jump into that gap by offering their Type 214 submarines with hydrogen driven propulsion. While these boats are much smaller they offer a long endurance, can be supplied reasonably fast and come for a much cheaper price than the nuclear driven ones.
Altogether I do not see any advantage for Australia in this move.
What then is the reason to take that step?
It is called blackmail.
China is by far Australia's largest trading partner. U.S. and Australian 'strategist' claim that the submarines are need to protect Australia's maritime trade routes with its largest trading partner … from China. That makes, as this sketch provides, zero sense.
The only reason Australia has turned politically and militarily against China is U.S. blackmail. Two years ago the U.S. 'realist' political scientist John Mearsheimer came to Australia to explained to Australians (vid see at 33min) how that works.
As Caitlin Johnstone summarizes:
“Now some people say there’s an alternative: you can go with China,” said Mearsheimer. “Right you have a choice here: you can go with China rather the United States. There’s two things I’ll say about that. Number one, if you go with China you want to understand you are our enemy. You are then deciding to become an enemy of the United States. Because again, we’re talking about an intense security competition.”
“You’re either with us or against us,” he continued. “And if you’re trading extensively with China, and you’re friendly with China, you’re undermining the United States in this security competition. You’re feeding the beast, from our perspective. And that is not going to make us happy. And when we are not happy you do not want to underestimate how nasty we can be. Just ask Fidel Castro.”
Nervous laughter from the Australian think tank audience punctuated Mearsheimer’s more incendiary observations. The CIA is known to have made numerous attempts to assassinate Castro.
So there you have it. Australia is not aligned with the US to protect itself from China. Australia is aligned with the US to protect itself from the US.
Joe Biden may have forgotten the name of the Australian Prime Minister. But Scott Morrison knows who he is expected to work for. In 1975 the U.S. and the UK launched a coup against the Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam who was moving his country towards independence. Few in the U.S. will remember that but Australian politicians do. Their country has since always done as it was told to do.
And that is what all the above is about.
Very nice breakdown by Bernhard. The graphic showing the range and station-keeping capabilities of the two respective classes of boats is very helpful.
The Global Times is using some very strong language today, directed at Australia:
Nuke sub deal could make Australia ‘potential nuclear war target’
And: AUKUS to bring ‘nuclear-powered submarine fever’ across globe: Global Times editorial
However, no matter how Australia arms itself, it is still a running dog of the US.
We advise Canberra not to think that it has the capability to intimidate China if it acquires nuclear-powered submarines and offensive missiles.
If Australia dares to provoke China more blatantly because of that, or even find fault militarily, China will certainly punish it with no mercy.
Amdrei Martyanov, a former Soviet naval officer, and naval academy graduate, provides an interesting technical take: in his view, the nuclear subs are not such a big deal, for the simple reason that a sub is merely a weapons PLATFORM.
Ie, the real meat and potatoes is the in the kinds of missiles it can launch. In this respect, these subs, armed with Tomahawk subsonic cruise missiles, a 30 year-old technology, are not a serious threat to modern Russian [and Chinese] air defense systems designed to shoot down those kinds of aerial targets.
He points to the recent performance of the Syrians in knocking down about 90 percent of Israeli cruise missile volleys, using the rather dated Buk M2 surface to air missile system. Indeed careful observers of the Syrian conflict can confirm that the Syrians have tightened up their air defense performance considerably—probably due to much improved missile crew efficiency under Russian tutelage. This was always the weak link for the Syrians, going back decades even to the wars with Israel.
Another factor would be Russian electronic warfare that is now helping out.
In recent weeks Israel is no longer putting out sat images of purported targets struck, as it used to do regularly.
At the same time, the Russian MoD began, for the first time, issuing official tallies of these interceptions, stating that in two separate strikes, each of 24 cruise missiles launched by Israeli jets from Lebanese airspace, 21 had been successfully intercepted by Syrian defenses, in each instance, while others missed their targets.
Technically, this is perfectly credible. A subsonic cruise missile, although much more dangerous than a slow-flying drone, is not the threat it once was. Russian air defense systems have been working on this for a very long time.
Subsonic cruise missiles can also be intercepted by air-to-air missiles fired by fighter jets. This is what the MiG31 was specifically designed to do, introducing some very advanced technology for the time, such as powerful phased-array radar, and datalink between up to four aircraft flying abreast at 200 km separation, and able to cover an 800 km-wide swath of airspace under attack by Tomahawk cruise missiles.
This is even more effective than SAM-based defenses, since the aircraft are up high and defeat the cruise missile’s terrain-hugging flight tactic to avoid detection from ground-based radars.
Even a run-of-the-mill fighter not specifically designed for this mission can easily intercept a cruise missile, by means of an afterburning acceleration to supersonic speed, and then simply taking it out with either a heat-seeking or radar-guided missile. Even onboard cannon at close range. The Chinese PLAAF would certainly be capable of this.
But this kind of defense is not possible against supersonic cruise missiles like the Russian P800 Oniks [or the Indian export Brahmos variant], much less hypersonic cruise missiles that are coming into service now, like the 3M22 Zircon, which I talked about in some detail in my hypersonic missiles article.
So Martyanov is correct. It’s not a very big deal at all from a military-technical perspective. But it is very much a political hot potato that could go wonky in any number of ways.
Posted by: Gordog | Sep 16 2021 18:41 utc | 12
@ Posted by: AtVK | Sep 16 2021 21:21 utc | 44
A while ago I speculated here that the USA is entering its fourth phase of historical development. This phase I termed “byzantine phase” for short.
This new phase is the manifestation of a slow decline of the American Empire. It will be marked by, among other factors, in:
1) the shift of the economic center of gravity of the USA proper from the East Coast and the Sun Belt to the West Coast (the three West Coast states that wanted to secede some years ago), plus, maybe, some key hinterland States such as Nevada, Oklahoma and Texas; New York and Washington D.C. may or may not retain their importance as the spiritual capitals of the Empire well into this period;
2) growing resort to Christian fundamentalist population from all across the USA proper, but specially from the Deep South States, to recruit and man the US Army, Navy and maybe even the Air Force, that is, the Christianization of the USA Armed Forces. This is due both to the fact that the other groups of the US society will not want to enlist and because fracture of the American societal fabric will impel the Pentagon to have to resort to the most conservative elements of society to quell and crush the internal enemy: the so-called “Marxists”/”Leftists”/”Woke”;
3) crescent loss of territory, mainly in the East (of the USA), which will result in the relative decline of the European Peninsula and the relative rise of Australia, Oceania, Japan and South Korea, but mainly Australia (and maybe also Japan); that is, I’m calling that loss of American territory will have an Eastern bias: since the main target is China, the Empire will abandon its eastern provinces first, only to give priority to its Western provinces;
4) increasing use of universalist rhetoric, that is, the more the American Empire loses territory and influence around the world, the more it will degenerate ideologically and intellectually towards some kind of messianic and esoteric claim of universality and eternity of the American Empire (a la the Roman Empire in the East, up to Heraclius);
5) increasing brutality towards Latin America, which will mean intensified use of Monroe Doctrine in order to quell the inevitable revolts and revolutions that will happen in Latin America; increasing urge to destroy Cuba and Venezuela, which are the only socialist countries in the subcontinent;
6) rise of fundamentalist Christianity within USA proper, in order to adequate the new lowered life style fruit of a decreased economy (Cultural Counter-revolution), e.g. loss of women rights (need for rising birth rates in order to compensate for the loss of cheap immigrants, women as “birthing pods”);
7) in general, increased use of the proverbial stick instead of the proverbial carrot, because of lack of resources, towards its remaining provinces (reverse Soviet Union) in order to slow down decaying quality of life in the USA proper, which may (nazism) or may not (social-fascism) have a racial, or religious (classical fascism) legitimizing narrative.
8) other important aspects I may have forgotten to tell here.
I also predicted this metamorphosis will take a lot of time, probably some 150 years, up to 250 years.
This is my wild prediction. I may be right or make a fool of myself.
Whatever the case, one thing is certain: the USA analyzed the case of the fall of the USSR and is definitely not willing to collapse suddenly like the Soviets did. The Americans will suck their provinces dry before showing the slightest signs of collapsing, they will fight to the end. The Soviets, hearing the cry for independence and right of self-determination of its smaller republics, quickly and easily gave them up, and dissolved the Union; that’s definitely not gonna happen with the American Empire: its “allies” will collapse first, one by one.
Posted by: vk | Sep 17 2021 1:06 utc | 81
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“I had a feeling from the start that these kind of deals were what brexit was all about.”
So did I. When Brexit first came on the scene, my immediate reaction was “they’re circling the wagons. It’s going to be the Anglosphere .vs. the world”.
There are a few implications, centered on India:
a. India doesn’t really fit into the BRI model, and it doesn’t really fit that well into the Anglosphere model, either, just less-badly. India has population, needs markets and raw materials and the industrial make-over that China just completed.
a.1. Markets. If India doesn’t join BRI, it’s cut out of the eurasian markets. No EU (not part of the Anglosphere, right?), all that leaves is UK, Canada, U.S. and Australia, possibly some M.East non-BRI participants. Will any of those candidates want to run a trade deficit to support an industrializing and exporting India? Problematic. U.S. might be willing to trade imports for dollars, but will India go for that? How will the dollar fare once the Anglosphere plan gets in gear?
a.2 Raw materials. Import from Australia and Canada. Export what? Again, how much longer will a diminished Anglosphere be willing to export jobs to India?
a.3 Industrial make-over. Will the Anglosphere be willing to conduct the second, massive tech and production equipment transfer (first was to China) to India? How will that play at home?
So, from the U.S. point of view, its looking more and more like the “pivot” is indeed a strategic retreat. It looks like it’s an Anglosphere plus possibly India retrenchment. Karlof1, what’s your take on how the “retreat” is going to play out?
Looks to me like it’s going to be more of an economic contest than a military or a financial one. Looks like military and financial levers are reaching the end of their efficacy…and the economic contest is not looking that good right now for the U.S.
U.S. needs to concentrate on rebuilding itself. Retreat home and get to work.
===== relatedly….
Nuke subs to Australia? For what? U.S. has plenty nuke subs. They can go anywhere, stay as long as they like. Why does anyone need any more of them? I must be missing something basic…the idea is making no sense to me.
I also subscribe to the “it’s a political PR show” interpretation, and it seems … surreal. Maybe the sub deal is a carrot to cement the notion of “join the Anglosphere”. But forsaking China for the Anglosphere carries really big risks for Australia.
Think about how much raw material won’t get sold to China by Australia. That’s going to cause some political friction within Australia.
Here’s a quick thumbnail sketch of Australia’s exports, excerpted from https://www.worldstopexports.com/australias-top-10-exports/
Australia’s biggest export products by value in 2020 were iron, coal, petroleum gases, gold and aluminum. In aggregate, those major exports account for 63.1% of overall exports sales from Australia. That relatively large percentage suggests a concentrated range of exported goods.
Australia leads the world for exporting iron, coal and petroleum gases.
The latest available country-specific data shows that 85.6% of products exported from Australia were bought by importers in: China (43% of the global total), Japan (9%), United States (6.2%), South Korea (6.2%), United Kingdom (4.9%), India (3.4%), New Zealand (3.3%), Singapore (2.6%), Taiwan (2.6%), Hong Kong (2.2%), Vietnam (2.1%) and Indonesia (1.6%).
So who are those subs going to get pointed at? The customer who buys 43% of Australia’s exports?
Only possible alt market (big enough) for Australia is India, if indeed this wagon-circling “Anglosphere” strategy is actually afoot.
Should be seeing some movement on the India-Anglosphere-Aussie trade deals and “integration” shortly. If so, that lends credence to the Anglosphere theory.
Posted by: Tom Pfotzer | Sep 17 2021 1:16 utc | 84
I have to jump in here to correct some egregiously wrongheaded comments about submarines supposedly becoming ‘obsolete’ and ‘easy to track.’
Nothing could be further from the truth! Submarines are fiendishly difficult to find in the world ocean, which is basically a black hole, as far as being able to locate anything in it!
[Recall that it took nearly three years of a massive search effort involving France and the US to find the ocean floor wreckage of Air France flight 447 in the South Atlantic.]
Unlike the earth’s airspace, which can be completely monitored 24/7 and all flying objects tracked by radar and other means, even out to near space, this is not the case with the world ocean, which is completely IMPENETRABLE by radio waves. This means that neither radar, nor radio communications can work.
In fact, communicating with a submerged sub is effectively impossible—other than sending extremely low frequency signals [ELF] that require an antenna that basically consists of a very large chunk of the earth landmass itself.
Both the US and Russia have such antenna systems, which require soil of unusually low electrical conductivity, over a huge area. Here is a graphic outline of the Russian ZEVS ELF system in Siberia.
Obviously the sub cannot communicate back since it has no such huge antenna. It has to either surface or release a radio buoy to the surface in order to talk back. But using such a device makes it possible for the adversary to intercept such signals and even home in on the location.
The ELF system would be used to send a launch order to subs carrying SLBM nuclear intercontinental missiles.
There is no known physical principle that could make it possible to find subs from space satellites as some have speculated here.
The only way to find a sub is to LISTEN for it. Sound carries very far in water, due to its density. And subs use sophisticated SONAR arrays to listen for the distant sounds of adversary boats.
A similar kind of device is used by anti-sub aircraft, by dropping a sonobuoy to the surface which consists of a small sonar listening device and a radio transmitter that sends back information. But this is like looking for a needle in a haystack. It is only viable in relatively confined navigation channels were it is known that subs have traversed in the past, or you suspect that they may be there.
Mostly these are exercises in futility against modern nuclear submarines. If they do not want to be found, they won’t be!
From time to time, we hear some sensationalist claptrap about new whizbang ‘technologies’ being developed to find subs. For instance this piece in the ridiculous National Interest popular magazine, about Chinese experiments with lasers and magnetic anomaly detection.
This is all pie-in-the sky. Such techniques have been explored for years by the much more technologically-advanced Russia and US [although China is making very big strides in all areas of difficult science nowadays].
The most promising technique for locating subs is by means of ocean-floor sonar detection networks, like the US SOSUS, which is no longer in operation, but consisted of undersea cables with passive sensors that bridged the so-called GIUK gap, for Greenland-Iceland-UK.
The Russians are now building a much more comprehensive active detection network that rings the entire Arctic Ocean. A graphic here, and an article here, by the prominent amateur researcher HI Sutton [who despite lacking formal military-technical credentials is a knowledgeable source].
The network will consist of a multiple sonar arrays analogous to the famous US Navy SOSUS system (actually nothing like the vintage SOSUS in technology terms but a convenient analogy).
The logical aim is to provide Russia with real-time tracking of the latest NATO submarines operating in northern waters. This addresses the NATO submarine advantage head-on and would allow persecution of prowling US-UK nuclear powered attack submarines, and improve survivability for Russia’s own nuclear armed ballistic missile submarines.
This system will be powered by miniature underwater nuclear reactors placed on the ocean floor. These undersea nuclear power plants will power the ocean-floor sonar arrays, and there is a good description and lots of interesting graphics in the above-linked article.
Obviously things like this sub detection network are huge undertakings, and there is no guarantee that they cannot be compromised in some way. The history of military technology is one of measures and countermeasures.
The simple fact is that subs are the most deadly weapons carriers in existence. And will remain so for the foreseeable future.
Ships and aircraft trying to find adversary subs need to get fairly close—sound does carry for long distances in water, but not like radio waves in air.
But subs do not need to get all that close to surface ships that they may be targeting. They are equipped with anti-ship cruise missiles [supersonic and even hypersonic in the case of Russian cruise missile subs] that can have a range of hundreds of kilometers. That is well outside the range of any detection or antisub weapon that a ship or aircraft may carry.
Even surface ships are difficult to find. Ground-based radars cannot reach ships in the ocean because of the curvature of the earth that limits the radio horizon. I have written here about Russia’s long-range hypersonic weapons, some of which, like the Zircon and Kinzhal, are designed to target ships from long range of several hundred to over 1,000 km.
But that poses the problem of how do you know where the enemy ship is located?
Well, one method is radar surveillance aircraft, but they cannot be up all the time and everywhere at once. The solution is having radar onboard orbiting satellites.
This is exactly what the USSR had for years, the RORSAT system, for radar ocean reconnaissance satellite. It was the only such system ever in existence, and it was used back in the day for the same purpose of finding US surface ships for Russian ship, aircraft and sub-borne missiles to target [which were high supersonic and long ranged of up to 1,000 km even back then].
That system has been out of commission for years, but Russia is now putting up a similar radarsat system called Liana. These will also be able to intercept ship communications, unlike the old sats.
That network is still being built out, and there is some info here, and here.
Posted by: Gordog | Sep 17 2021 1:56 utc | 90
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