The US will lose WW3 (2024)

With the potential for a hot war with China looming over America’s strategic future, the minds of U.S. defense planners increasingly turn with calm confidence to the Navy’s submarine force. Sub­marines—quiet, stealthy, and loaded with lethal combinations of mis­siles, torpedoes, and mines—can penetrate deep into the Pacific’s first and second island chains, negating Chinese investments in so-called anti-access/area denial weapons. These Chinese systems, long-range ballistic and cruise missiles as well as manned bombers and fight­ers, were purposely designed to negate America’s power projection forces—its Navy carriers and Air Force attack aircraft—rendering them irrelevant in the opening weeks of any future Pacific war over Taiwan. If a Chinese invasion force is to be defeated, then, most Western strategists and force planners believe that the burden will fall upon the shoulders of submariners (pronounced sub-mar-een-ers, and they will correct you).

Unfortunately, the U.S. submarine force is poorly postured to meet this challenge. Across my career as a naval officer, entering as an ensign in 1988 and retiring as a captain in 2014, and then as a consultant to both government and industry since, I have watched the American submarine fleet fall precipitously from its Cold War high of 140 nuclear-powered “boats” to less than half that number, sixty-seven boats, today. More­over, of the current sixty-seven nuclear submarines, only forty-nine fall into the hunter-killer “fast attack” classification.

The Navy and its shipbuilding partners have struggled in the post-Covid economy to ramp up submarine production despite rising strategic threats. The Defense Department announced recently that it would procure only one new fast-attack submarine in the fiscal year 2025 budget. Additionally, of the submarine force already in commission, sixteen of those forty-nine boats—or nearly a third of the Navy’s premier offensive force—are in drydocks or tied to piers, lacking required dive certifications. These submarines cannot get underway due to a three-year maintenance backlog in the U.S. Navy.

The bottom line is that the American submarine force, the “point of the spear” of American power, upon which so many military plans depend, is unprepared to meet the current threat environment, and there are no quick fixes. It has taken decades—and a sequence of bad assump­tions and poor decisions—to fall into the current state of unpreparedness, and it will take years, as well as significant investments in both new ship construction and submarine repair capacity, to recover.

The American submarine force emerged from the Cold War triumphant, with strategists giving it considerable credit for accelerating the collapse of the Soviet Union. Its technological superiority allowed for constant operational harassment of Soviet ships and submarines in the Atlantic, Pacific, and Arctic oceans.

This achievement was the outcome of a decades-long effort. Ameri­cans took an early lead in the undersea competition with the development of the USS Nautilus, the world’s first nuclear-powered submarine, launched in 1954. The Russians quickly followed, but their early nu­clear‑powered boats were not only noisier, and hence easier to detect and track, but their nuclear propulsion systems were also more danger­ous to their crews. Furthermore, every time the Soviets improved their designs, the Americans made more significant advances in their own submarines. The U.S. submarine force exceeded the Soviet Union in terms of both capabilities and capacity throughout the Cold War period. Everywhere they turned, the Soviets found themselves being monitored and tracked by American submarines who maintained constant “attack criteria” on their counterparts. Historians who reviewed the Soviet ar­chives have cited the near despair of Russian submarine captains, who were unable to elude their American peers, as well as the concerns of the USSR’s senior political leaders regarding their inability to keep up with American technical advances, including in the undersea realm.

By the end of the Cold War, the latest American fast-attack submarine, the Los Angeles (Improved) class, the fifth major new submarine class design since the Nautilus, was at least a generation ahead of its closest Soviet competitor, the Akula, even after the advances made in the newest Russian design following the illegal leaking of sensitive quieting technologies by the Japanese Toshiba Corporation. And as the Soviet flag was lowered over the Kremlin on Christmas in 1991, the American Navy had already laid the keel for a new fast-attack submarine design, the SSN-21 Seawolf class boat.

Because of the American Navy’s culture of constant technological innovation in both submarine design and investments in its industrial base, it was positioned to dominate the post–Cold War world for generations. The submarine industrial base, producing between three to five nuclear-powered submarines per year from 1958 to 1989, had generated a fast-attack force of ninety boats by the time the Soviet Union dissolved. This industrial base included a large population of skilled workers, just over fifty thousand laborers between the Electric Boat shipyard in Groton, Connecticut, and the Newport News Ship­yard in southeastern Virginia.

But then came the era of the “peace dividend,” and everything changed. The Seawolf class was larger, faster, quieter, deeper diving, and better armed than its predecessors; it led the world in every significant metric. It cost $3.5 billion per hull in 1990 dollars, however, roughly four times the cost of the Sturgeon class submarines and three times the cost of the Los Angeles class boats it was intended to replace. In 1991, the George H. W. Bush administration made the decision to end pro­duction of the Seawolf class, planned for twenty-nine boats, just as it was beginning.

The decision to truncate Seawolf class production was made for several reasons. First, the justification for the high cost of these boats had been the need to stay a generation ahead of the Soviet Union’s submarines. With the demise of the USSR and the establishment of friendlier relations with Russia, this was no longer a priority. Second, the Bush administration felt compelled to address the rising national debt and deficits, which included significant cuts in the Defense budget and the accompanying military force structure. As part of this process, the administration chose to draw down the size of the Navy from the Reagan-era high of 594 ships to approximately 440 ships, with the sub­marine component contracting to around fifty from the previous force of one hundred fast-attack subs. Given the number of relatively new Los Angeles class boats in the force at that time—sixty-two had been contracted to enter the fleet between 1972 and 1996—there seemed to be little need for thirty Seawolf class submarines as replacements for older fast-attack boats. The Navy could afford to simply decommission its older fast-attack boats on schedule, or even at an accelerated pace, and ride the population curve of submarines down until it met its new battle force goal.

Nevertheless, by the mid-1990s, it dawned upon policymakers that the future of the submarine force was in jeopardy. During the Clinton administration, the decision was made to complete a second, and then a third, Seawolf class boat, the USS Connecticut and USS Jimmy Carter, to maintain the submarine industrial base, whose workforce had dwin­dled to around twelve thousand workers, a quarter of its 1980s level, in the two major new submarine construction yards.

By this time, large numbers of Cold War–era boats were beginning to reach the end of their service lives and the size of the submarine force declined from eighty-eight in 1994 to fifty-four in 2002. Political leaders still had no appetite to continue production of the Seawolf class fast-attack submarine due to the lack of a significant undersea threat and the great expense associated with it. Instead, the Navy worked with industry to find a “Goldilocks” solution in submarine design, a boat that was larger and quieter than, though not as fast as, the Los Angeles class, but smaller, cheaper, and more modern than the Seawolfs. The resultant Virginia class submarine emerged in the late 1990s and was optimized for what were perceived as the post–Cold War mission sets. To keep the Navy from falling below forty fast-attack submarines, one Virginia was ordered in 1998, with one additional boat contracted for each subsequent year, save one, over the next decade to allow the submarine indus­trial base to gently shift back from the slow pace of the ’90s, when only three boats were built across the entire decade.

Yet new submarine construction represented only one of the chal­lenges facing the submarine industrial base during the 1990s. Another problem continued to worsen, even with the introduction of the Virginia class: drydock and maintenance capacity.

While it takes an average of four years to assemble a submarine from her keel-laying to her commissioning, over the boat’s thirty years of service life that follow, 20 percent, or six years, is spent undergoing scheduled, comprehensive maintenance in a U.S. Navy shipyard. Unlike the Navy’s conventional surface combatants—cruisers, destroyers, and frigates—Congress has decreed that the Navy’s nuclear-powered ships, its carriers and submarines, must be repaired in Navy shipyards or in the two commercial shipyards that build new submarines. The Navy’s carri­ers and submarines must be maintained behind secure fences and under close government supervision, serviced by highly trained, qualified, and certified workers.

The problem is that there are currently not enough shipyards to handle the scheduled maintenance for the Navy’s submarine force, and the line to get into a Navy drydock has gotten longer with each passing year. At present, there are ten drydocks available within the Navy’s four shipyards at Kittery, Maine; Norfolk, Virginia; Bremerton, Washington; and Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Additionally, there are two drydocks at the Newport News Shipyard and one at Electric Boat’s shipyard being used for submarine maintenance. These are full, but there are an additional five nuclear-powered submarines awaiting induction for their scheduled maintenance and cannot get underway or submerge again until they complete this process. According to Navy submarine admirals, the com­munity is experiencing delays of 1,100 days, or about three years, in its submarine repairs. Put another way, the Navy is currently short three drydocks and the workforce that goes with them, a problem that will only increase as the Navy plans to grow its fast-attack submarine force from its present fifty boats to over sixty during the next fifteen years. This shortfall, much as with the other issues facing the Navy, can be traced back to the post–Cold War decade of the 1990s and a series of poor decisions made at that time.

The U.S. Navy had entered the Cold War with eleven shipyards. Three were closed during the Cold War—the New York yard in 1964, the Boston yard in 1973, and the Hunters Point yard north of San Fran­cisco in 1988—leaving the Navy with eight public shipyards to perform maintenance. After the Cold War, two Base Realignment and Closure Commissions (BRACs) were authorized in 1991 and 1993 to consider whether there was excess infrastructure within the existing military footprint. In 1991, the decision was made to close the Philadelphia yard, and in 1993 both the Charleston, South Carolina, and the Mare Island, California, yards were shuttered. In the last two cases, submarine experts recommended that either the Charleston or Mare Island yard be kept due to concerns with drydock capacity going forward. The impor­tance of the three large and two medium-sized drydocks at Charleston, in particular, was noted by commentators at the time. These concerns were ignored due to a strategic assumption made by the BRAC commis­sioners that the submarine battle force should fall to the low forties in the absence of an external threat, a threat that became readily apparent just one decade later—China.

China is both a nation and a civilization with a history that stretches back three thousand years. Its fall as an empire in the early twentieth century was a bitter blow to a long-proud people, and it struggled to come back to prominence under both nationalist and communist gov­ernments. Deng Xiaoping, the second “emperor” within China’s current communist dynasty, enjoined his government to patiently “hide their strength and bide their time” before attempting to ascend to a position of global leadership once again. His successors followed this advice throughout the 1990s, as they observed America’s overwhelming mili­tary success during 1991’s Operation Desert Storm. This so-called hundred-hour war saw the United States use both stealth aircraft and precision-guided munitions to defeat a powerful Middle Eastern nation, Iraq, which then possessed the fifth-largest military in the world. After Desert Storm, China began to invest in a series of anti-access/area denial systems, long-range anti-ship ballistic and cruise missiles, long-range bombers, and stealth attack aircraft with the goal of holding America’s military forces beyond the range of their power-projection weapons, thus prohibiting them from executing a “regime change” campaign against China. Later, after the global economic crisis of 2008, from which China’s centrally controlled economy emerged more quickly and relatively unscathed compared to Western free market systems, China’s leaders concluded that their time had come, and that the moment was right to exit Deng’s “hide and bide” strategy.

To be sure, China’s navy was already modernizing. The Chinese Navy had made a habit of purchasing ships and aircraft from other nations, mostly the Soviet Union and then Russia, and reverse engineering the major weapon systems to be built in Chinese factories and shipyards. Much as with China’s steel industry, its commercial shipbuilding capacity had expanded exponentially during the 1980s by taking advantage of its low-cost labor as well as virtually nonexistent environmental and safety standards to pump out container ships and oil tankers well below global market prices, gobbling up shipbuilding market share over the years. When it came time to expand the navy in the early 2000s, China’s new submarines and surface combatants emerged, almost as by-products, from the same slips and drydocks that were building container ships and liquified natural gas carriers. Nevertheless, a focus on the expansion of the Chinese Navy misses the point, because China isn’t planning on fighting a traditional naval ship-to-ship, fleet-on-fleet war.

When naval theorists first began to define the principle of a “free sea” in the early seventeenth century, they described a condition wherein any ship carrying goods could move without restriction upon the world’s oceans. All the world’s oceans, the “high seas,” were to be considered free and open to trade, with one caveat, the “two-cannonball rule.” This rule allowed each nation that bordered the seas to claim sovereignty over the adjacent waters out to twice the range that a cannonball could be fired. This concept of “territorial waters” held that if a nation could assert persistent offensive control over the waters near it, it could claim sovereignty over them.

Today, China, and to a lesser extent Russia, with their deep investments in long-range missiles, seek to adapt the two-cannonball rule to the modern strategic environment, claiming control over vast stretches of the oceans they border. Given that America’s allies in South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, and Taiwan all fall well within and under the range arcs of China’s land-based anti-ship missile systems, this means that the U.S. Navy would have to fight its way across the Pacific to come to the aid of any or all of these nations should China choose to go to war over Taiwan or assert its claims of sovereignty over the South China Sea. Given the lethality of China’s new weapons, which include the DF-21D “Carrier Killer” and the DF-26 “Guam Killer” ballistic missiles—and the results of numerous war games sponsored by think tanks such as RAND and the Center for Strategic and International Studies that strongly suggest the vulnerability of America’s aircraft carrier force—the Navy’s submarines will most likely have to be the “first responders” in any future crisis in the region. At present, we don’t have enough of them.

In 2022, Congress passed, and the president signed, the chips Act which sought to “reshore” semiconductor chip manufacturing fabs away from Asia and back to the United States. The justification for this legislation was that dependence upon overseas suppliers of critical semiconductor chips represented a danger to America’s national security. Taking a more expansive view of the U.S. defense industrial base, however, reveals that industries including metals and rare earth mineral production, as well as their accompanying trades, have shifted away from the North American continent over the past two generations, leaving a sizable vulnerability should the nation ever have to fully mobilize for war again. For this reason, and considering that the nation is in what is widely acknowledged to be a second cold war, a “Ships Act”—along the lines of the 2022 high-tech law, but with a focus on more basic industrial capabilities—may be the necessary and responsible course of action. If such a law were to take shape, given the current threat environment, the sub­marine industrial base must be dead center of its target sights.

It took twenty years of poor assumptions and bad decisions to deplete the submarine industrial base, and reversing these trends will take some time, perhaps seven to ten years. The problem is that the United States may not have that much time to make changes. Its strategic situation is not unlike the early years of the first Cold War. After World War II, America also thought it would enjoy a massive peace dividend. The Soviet Union had been our ally, after all. But after the Iron Curtain descended over Eastern Europe, the “loss” of China to communism, and finally the outbreak of the Korean War, a near panic set in among strategists and policymakers. Writing in the spring of 1950, Paul Nitze, one of the nation’s “Wise Men” in those early days, identi­fied 1954 as “the year of maximum danger,” when the Soviet Union would catch up to the United States in terms of its inventory of atomic bombs and might just be tempted to use them. It wasn’t until former five-star general Dwight Eisenhower took over the White House in 1953 that the nation moved from a panicked sprinter’s pace to a more regu­lated marathon gait for a “long-haul” containment strategy against the Soviet Union.

Today’s strategists and policymakers similarly must balance the short‑term “Davidson Window”—the period from 2024 to 2029, during which time Admiral Phil Davidson, the retiring Indo-Pacific commander, thought China might execute an invasion of Taiwan—with long-term efforts to reform and modernize the nation’s military and its accompanying industrial base. These two considerations, in many ways opposite ends of a scale, must frame any strategy addressing the submarine industrial base. In the short term, the Navy must chart a course for both increasing the production of new fast-attack submarines from the cur­rent 1.4 boats to three (or more) new hunter-killers per year, as well as clearing the two-to-three-year backlog of operational submarines awaiting slots in drydocks for depot-level maintenance.

The BRAC commissions of the 1990s cut too many public shipyards. Everyone knows this, but there has been little or no consensus for correcting past mistakes. As a result, the current 1,100 days of delays in submarine repair equate to a capacity shortfall of three drydocks for the Navy. The shortage grows to six drydocks if we include the two drydock repair teams at Huntington Ingalls’s Newport News facility and the single repair team at General Dynamics’ Electric Boat facility. The Navy contracted the two shipbuilders to help with submarine re­pairs some years ago. Both companies assert that their repair operations don’t detract from building operations but rather aid them by allowing managers to “level-load” their workforce as well as their parts orders from suppliers through building cycles, and this argument has merit.

Shipbuilders, however, are focused on new construction as the priority, whereas the Navy’s own yards have repair as their primary focus. Basic math suggests that we need a minimum of three repair drydocks back in the maintenance rotation with an optimal number of five, as the fast-attack submarine force should expand over the next two decades. The commercial shipbuilders should continue to be employed as repair yards, but that does not change the fact that the nation needs more repair capacity than the current industrial base can provide.

The challenge is how and where to build additional drydocks for the Navy. The how is hard, because the addition of critical infrastructure generally requires military construction dollars (MilCon), whose over­sight falls under arcane bureaucratic rules that require the government to pay for new infrastructure up front rather than over time. There are, however, some innovative ideas in circulation that include using a private commercial entity backed by state-issued bonds to build and equip a new yard, and then lease that yard back to the Navy under “rent‑to-own” terms that would see the Navy take title of the facility after a thirty-year period with no massive initial outlay of tax dollars. Conversations with government comptrollers as well as underwriters in the bond markets suggest this approach is legitimate, but then the ques­tion would shift to where to locate the facility.

Two years ago, a proposal circulated to bring submarines down the Saint Lawrence Seaway to repair them at a shipyard on the shores of Lake Erie. Submarines had been built on the Great Lakes, in Wisconsin no less, during World War II, so such a move was not unprecedented, and there are both workers and excess industrial infrastructure in the Midwest. This idea was soon set aside, however, in favor of an opportunity along the American southeast coast due to concerns with trans­porting the submarines up and down the seaway.

There has also been discussion about reactivating facilities associated with the former Mare Island Shipyard north of San Francisco. The area features two large drydocks in working order and still used by the government for overhauls of Coast Guard ships. Yet almost all the rest of the old Navy yard, the machine shops and warehouses that are essen­tial components for ship and submarine repair, have been sold off and developed for other purposes. Local political leaders have stated that they could recreate the old yard in the aggregate by calling upon indus­trial capacity across the region to create a modern “distributed Navy yard.” But given the heightened security required for the repair and maintenance of modern nuclear-powered submarines—perhaps the most secretive and stealthy platform in the modern military—the idea of spreading security risks across a broad region seems problematic. The other former Navy yard on the West Coast, Hunters Point, which was never a submarine repair yard to begin with, has similar problems. Additional challenges on the West Coast include high regulatory hur­dles, tax regimes, elevated labor costs, and resistance to heavy industry construction at this time.

Some have suggested that the three-nation aukus (Australia-United Kingdom-United States) agreement has the net result of creating a repair yard in Australia that will be fully capable of servicing U.S. submarines as well as Australian and Royal Navy boats. This yard, however, is only envisioned to meet the maintenance requirements of Australia’s small flotilla of boats, and as such probably will not have the excess capacity needed to handle American overflow, and it certainly won’t have that capacity anytime soon. There is some additional repair capacity at the Navy base in Guam, but that comes from floating submarine tenders and not from a facility with drydocks.

Rather than reviving one of the yards closed during the 1990s, a new Navy ship repair yard will probably need to be built from scratch, something that has not been done in a century. The most likely location, both in terms of residual capacity for development space and the necessary workforce, appears to be along the Southeast and Gulf Coasts. State and local governments in this region are supportive and present relatively low environmental regulation hurdles. As such, some combi­nation of congressional and Navy leadership, as well as public-private financing, would be called for, and it must begin immediately considering the threat environment.

Expanding New Construction

New submarine construction has met serious headwinds in recent years. The Covid pandemic had a huge impact on the nation’s manufacturing and industrial base generally, and the submarine construction complex particularly. Because of the slowdown in submarine construction during the 1990s, and the significant accompanying drawdown in the labor force, the nation’s two submarine construction yards ended the second decade of the twenty-first century with a small but exceptionally experi­enced workforce. Prior to Covid, the average experience level within the blue-collar submarine workforce was just under fifteen years. During Covid, however, a disproportionate percentage of this workforce re­tired, dropping the average experience level down to the five-to-seven-year level, depending upon the trade, almost overnight. Planned expan­sion of the workforce to build not only the Virginia class fast-attack submarines but also the new Columbia class ballistic missile submarines further diluted the experience level throughout the shipbuilding indus­try, even as rigid training and certification requirements to build nu­clear‑powered submarines remained in place.

In fact, production of new submarines dropped from two to just over one per year at the very point when the Navy’s thirty-year shipbuilding plan called for industry to ramp up production to three fast-attack submarines and one ballistic missile submarine per year. While efforts to recruit more workers have been successful, today’s submarine builders, much like everyone else in the industrial base, face a significant challenge retaining them. Whereas in the past, robust pension plans were in place that provided generous payments and health care support after a twen­ty‑five- to thirty-five-year career at a shipyard, America’s heavy indus­tries today, citing the high costs of such plans, have moved to 401(k) plans, which have the benefit of being portable, allowing workers to leave one job when they want to pursue other opportunities, and take their accrued benefits with them. Upstream suppliers for submarine builders are facing similar workforce retention challenges as well.

Industry has responded to these challenges by launching an innovative plan to distribute the construction of key components and large sections of new submarines out to satellite manufacturing centers across the nation, seeking production from regions where skilled labor exists in higher numbers. These “focus factories,” located in places like Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Charleston, South Carolina; and Mobile, Alabama, currently provide four to six million man-hours of labor, effectively another ship construction yard in the aggregate. Once completed, com­ponents and sections are loaded onto railcars or barges to be transported to either Newport News or Groton for integration into new submarine hulls during final assembly. These focus factories not only help to expand ship construction now, they also support the expansion of the industry’s workforce going forward by training and certifying new workers across the nation.

Any approach to a “Ships Act” should expand upon this innovation by identifying both population centers as well as existing ship construction yards that could be easily adapted for inclusion in submarine construction. While the Atlantic and Gulf coast populations still retain potential for additional contributions to submarine construction, the Great Lakes as well as the Mississippi and Ohio River valleys also have large maritime metal trades workforces and numerous existing industrial facilities located on major lakes and rivers. Focus factories in places such as Superior, Wisconsin; Jeffersonville, Indiana; and Vicksburg, Mississippi, could also contribute by building sections of submarines that could be transported via barge to final assembly centers. The looming national crisis requires outside-the-box approaches to submarine pro­duction.

Inside the Event Horizon

Prior to World War II, several national leaders, including President Franklin Roosevelt, Senator Park Trammell, and Representative Carl Vinson, recognized that the coming war with both Germany and Japan was all but inevitable and began planning accordingly. The U.S. Navy grew from 790 ships on December 7, 1941, to 6,768 on August 14, 1945. But these numbers obscure a simple fact: in 1934, before the passage of the first Vinson-Trammell Act, the U.S. Navy’s battle force stood at 320 ships, a number that is some thirty ships higher than the fleet we have today. Under the leadership of Vinson, Congress passed two naval buildup bills in 1938 and 1940 that pulsed infusions of cash and demand into the nation’s shipbuilding industrial base. Many of the ships, includ­ing fleet carriers and submarines that were commissioned into the service during the critical years of 1943 and 1944, were the products of these earlier congressional acts. While there have been several serious voices in the Congress who have called for the expansion of the Navy broadly, and the submarine force specifically, there has not yet been a sufficient consensus to support a dramatic expansion of the nation’s submarine industrial base even though the threat of war, and a naval war at that, has only grown more intense.

Also, it’s important to note that in many ways we find ourselves in exactly the opposite strategic situation today than we were in entering World War II. At that time, we had a weak Navy but a rather robust industrial base. Today we have a technologically strong Navy (albeit too small), but one that is backed by an anemic defense industrial base that cannot seem to accelerate no matter how hard we step on the gas pedal.

The threats from rival powers grow by the day. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Iran’s widespread attacks upon the United States and Israel via proxies, and China’s activities in the South China Sea, genocide against the Uyghurs, and suppression of democracy in Hong Kong all portend still more acts of aggression. Unfortunately for the United States and the broader West, hostile states have studied our strategies and tactics and learned them well. Accordingly, they have structured their militaries around anti-access/area denial sensors and weapons to hold most of our traditional military platforms at bay, far beyond the effective range of our weapons. As the old timers say, when it comes to striking Chinese targets or even coming to the aid of our allies in the western Pacific, we can’t get there from here. If China does invade Taiwan, most of our military forces will not be able to come to that island nation’s defense. But American submarines can.

The priority of American national security policymakers today must be the revitalization of the nation’s defense industrial base. We have let it atrophy for far too long. But even within that priority, special emphasis must be placed upon the submarine industrial base, both new con­struc­tion and repair capacity. Because of the severity of the Chinese threat to American national interests in the Pacific, and the specific role of sub­marines in both deterring that threat and responding if deterrence breaks down, addressing shortfalls in submarine production and repair must be at the head of the line. Or our navy faces being sunk at the pier.
This article originally appeared in American Affairs Volume VIII, Number 2 (Summer 2024): 22–34.