General David Petraeus: Inside a World Glowing Red

28:51General David Petraeus:We need to see if, again, the actions the Ukrainians have taken, the Europeans have taken, can persuade the White House to continue that support and indeed, above all, to approve the sanctions package, which could be a missing element. It is a missing element and could be the critical ingredient that could do the damage to the Russian war economy and then could get the Russians serious about negotiations. very clearly expressed so that chessboard we're discussing of course has one other big piece you sit there looking after kkr's middle eastern you know businesses and the iranian equation is uh as unresolved i went back to one of our early interviews when there had been riots in the streets four years ago in iran and you said don't hold your breath this is you know this is a a long-running movie um but uh is there an argument that just as syria was obama's red line so president trump has talked about regime change has encouraged the protesters who are unbelievably brave to be out on the streets in those numbers being massacred by what's i think rightly the butcher of Tehran.

30:07Is there a danger that negotiation leads to a new figurehead, but no change in policy of the Iranians?

30:20General David Petraeus:Well, I'm not sure negotiation will lead to a change of regime, even as you expressed it, just a new head. I mean, there's a new head coming anyway, in some fashion because the supreme leader is an ill octogenarian who has got to be closer and closer to death's door. The question is what replaces him? Is there another religious figure that steps up into that? Do the Revolutionary Guards Corps leaders take over? But none of that really postulates the concept that you'd have real regime change. What you'd have is different leaders of a regime that is so substantial. Keep in mind that the besieged militia alone number in certainly over a million, maybe millions.

31:06General David Petraeus:This is a national, provincial district and municipal headquarters for it everywhere. And when they go out on the streets, they're willing to swing pipes, even shoot fellow citizens. And they've shown no real backing off. There's not happening what happened in Cairo, where the military said, you know what, let's step back. Let's not shoot our own citizens. Mubarak's going under the bus. We'll see who's elected to replace him. If we don't like them, then we'll see what we do about it. And, of course, that's exactly what had happened. The Muslim brothers won. A couple of years later, the military was dissatisfied with them, understandably.

31:47General David Petraeus:And you now have a military man in charge in Egypt. That is not the prospect, I don't think, in Iran. You have the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, essentially an Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine, in addition to the regular Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine, the Arteche. They're created for regime survival. And then there are other elements as well, the police, the Ministry of Interior Forces and so forth. And we saw all of them on the streets essentially crushing, ultimately, the demonstrators. I suspect we're going to find out that well over 2 ,000 or 10 ,000 have been killed and that tens of thousands more have been imprisoned.

32:33And most recently, they're going after the old figures that were leading the reform movement.

32:39General David Petraeus:Even they are brought into suspicion by the regime because of the possibility that they could lead. Keep in mind that this demonstration, these demonstrations across the country, have had no real leadership. And it's one of the shortcomings of it. In the past, the Green and so forth, you had some. And then, of course, the regime quickly took them down. There is the son of the Shah who has some degree of support, but I think that support is more just anti-regime than it is necessarily pro-return of a monarchy. Regardless, that has all been crushed. President Trump did indeed use language that's very much supported them, told the regime that if you don't stop, he's backed off that a bit by saying that, well, they didn't carry out the executions that had been ordered.

33:41General David Petraeus:Some other slight changes. And then there are negotiations going on. But the negotiations are about issues that the regime has shown very, very strong ideological conviction about. It's the nuclear program, missile program, support for these murderous proxies in the region, Hezbollah, Hamas, Shia militia in Iraq, Houthis in Yemen, and so forth. And these are very tough issues for Iran. And again, there's an ideological conviction about each of these that tends to suggest that they're not going to make the kind of concessions that President Trump could hold up and say, OK, we got what we wanted.

34:26General David Petraeus:no more ever enrichment or no more buried enrichment, only up to this, and it's all verified, and, and, and. And they're not going to relax all the sanctions the way Iran will seek, limits on missiles and the other activities, again, I think very difficult for the Supreme Leader to stomach. So then what happens? Well, the U.S. military is set in the region. The offensive capability, the aircraft carrier task force, which even includes a submarine and a bunch of other ships, many of which have sophisticated air and ballistic missile defense systems. F-15s in Jordan, the refuelers in one of the Gulf states, the prospect of B-2 stealth bombers flying all the way from the U.S.

35:15General David Petraeus:to carry out their missions over Iran, as they did during the 12-day war. All of that now is in place. And the defensive systems have been returned to the theater as well. So we're talking about Patriot ballistic missile defense systems that are tied into the Gulf states, Patriots and Terminal High Altitude Air Defense system. Keep in mind that the THAAD battery that was in Israel alone, that one, shot$1.2 billion worth of interceptors to help protect Israel just in the 12-day air campaign that Israel carried out. So, again, that capability is their offensive and defensive. And at a certain point, I think the Iranians have to expect that if they do not truly come to the table and truly make serious concessions, that they're going to see how defenseless they are against attack from the air.

36:11General David Petraeus:keeping in mind that the Israelis using U.S.-provided F-35 stealth fighter bombers took out the supposedly sophisticated Russian S-300 air and ballistic missile defense system that Iran had provided again by Russia and then other air defense batteries and systems that they had. So again, if you fly above, say, certainly 12 ,000, maybe a bit higher, again, Iran really can't touch them. And so, in effect, then defenseless against that kind of attack. But yes, there is a retaliatory capability. There are a number of scenarios that could really affect the global economy. Normally, this stuff doesn't really matter to the rest of the world unless gas and oil and distillates coming out of the Gulf are prevented from getting out.

37:03General David Petraeus:There's a disruption of maritime freedom of navigation, etc. And Iran has some capability for that, the prospect of mining the Strait of Hormuz, using other retaliatory means against U.S. bases and perhaps even U.S. allies. There's a threat against Israel if the U.S. were to attack. So lots of permutations here. And you're right to say, look, this is a red line, just as President Obama established a red line on the use of chemical weapons by the murderous Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria, and it was crossed and we didn't take kinetic action. I remember being actually in Singapore at that time, and Prime Minister Li said, you know, General, that undermines deterrence out here.

37:49General David Petraeus:That has repercussions in the South China Sea and so forth. So these are the considerations because of his rhetorical support for the demonstrators. I think there will be a degree of pressure to do something significant if the Iranians truly don't come to the table. But that's always a tough decision. But President Trump, again, has shown a willingness to do this again with Venezuela, the counterterrorism operations in various locations around the world, strikes on drug running boats and so on. And some of these were pretty dicey. You know, the operation in Venezuela, people, I think, have sort of overlooked some realities here.

38:36General David Petraeus:One is that the pilot of the lead special operations aircraft took three rounds in the leg as he was landing. And the aircraft got hit pretty hard as well. He stuck the landing nonetheless, managed to take off. They were able to recover the aircraft to a good location. But that's pretty dicey. The fact that over 30 Cuban special operators augmenting President Maduro's secret service were killed indicates that there were some serious gunfights as part of all this. Yes, we reportedly turned out the lights. Yes, we suppressed all of the air defenses and the bases that might have had quick reaction forces.

39:14General David Petraeus:and the rest of this reportedly again jammed or shut down communications and so forth. But at the end of the day, there had to be some really significant activity by those on the real cutting edge, our most special operators. And so there was a gutsy call here by the president, and that demonstrates, as have other actions over the years, including in Trump 1.0, the drone strike that killed the head of the Quds Force at that time, Qasem Soleimani, my most formidable enemy, frankly, back when I was the commander of the surge in Iraq, Central Command, Afghanistan, and even CIA director, because he's a combination of all of the above.

39:58General David Petraeus:The intel director, he's actually a policymaker for certain of the countries in the region, and he had the special operations component to carry out various activities as well. So I think there has been a demonstration of a willingness. In fact, when Syrians used chemical weapons in Trump 1.0, the U.S. responded kinetically. So we'll see where this one goes. I have to say, I also suspect that he is keenly aware that President Obama did not take action when his red line would cross. I think he really dislikes any comparison to his predecessor. And therefore, there's that element at play here as well.

40:43And although it may not play a role before we leave Iran, stepping back through the lens of

40:48General David Petraeus:the big other Middle Eastern countries, Saudi being the greatest of those, what would they like to see? Well, it's interesting because let me just sketch out first what's happened over the years since those terrible 10-7 Hamas attacks in Israel. The worst intelligence failure in Israeli history, worst military readiness response, and really the worst political miscalculation as well relative to Hamas. And since that time, Israel dramatically degraded the capabilities of Hezbollah and also disarmed them up to the Latani River with the Lebanese armed forces in there now, decimated their leadership structure, just didn't decapitate it, decimated it with that extraordinary intelligence supply chain operation where thousands of pagers blew up simultaneously in the hands of all the major leaders of Hezbollah.

41:47General David Petraeus:Iran dramatically degraded in terms of its missile program, its air defenses, and the nuclear program set back by at least probably a couple of years. Yes, there's a possibility of some stockpiles somewhere and some centrifuges. But I guarantee that if that's there and they try to enrich it, we'll figure that out. Plus, they don't have the metallization capability anymore. You have to take the gaseous form of highly enriched weapons-grade uranium and actually metalize it, that capability has been destroyed as well. So they're set back very considerably. Hamas is dramatically degraded. Certainly still the guys with the most guns in that part of Gaza that they still control, 47%.

42:28General David Petraeus:I was in Gaza a few weeks ago when I was in Israel, met with a civil military coordination center commander, one of my old guys, and then also the international security force commander as well, very extraordinary special operator. So the landscape in the region is much improved, I think, from their perspective, the perspective of the GCC countries. And they're in the midst of very impressive diversification of their economies, especially the kingdom, but certainly also the UAE, Qatar, others up and down the coast. they are very heavily engaged in innovation, huge investments. In fact, I should note KKR is a major investor in Gulf Data Hub, a number of other investments there.

43:17General David Petraeus:In fact, the whole reason I'm the chairman of KKR Middle East is because we see the situation very differently there. It used to be that we invested lots of their sovereign wealth funds. We're still doing that, to be sure. But now they're welcoming investment in their countries in ways that was not visible in the past. Some of these have such very large pools of capital that they didn't really feel compelled to sell us$2 billion of Abu Dhabi National Oil Company or the like in their gas pipelines, which we did. And that allowed them to accelerate their campaigns to improve their infrastructure, pursue again innovation, enormous emphasis on AI in Abu Adabi in particular, they have the company they have supported that has done the first from native Arabic large language model.

44:10General David Petraeus:You're seeing similar efforts in Saudi Arabia. They want to invest very substantially in data centers and they have the cheap energy that can enable that. So lots and lots of developments there. They look around, they see, you know, this is not a bad situation. There's a reasonable amount of stability. Syria is no longer an ally of Iran because Hezbollah, Iranians and Russians couldn't come to their rescue when under pressure last year. And a caution, therefore, a concern about instability that could result from action against Iran. Again, undefined. Could it be, again, a civil war? Could there be some kind of crisis where some of the different ethnic or sectarian groups in Iran try to preserve to achieve some degree of autonomy?

45:01General David Petraeus:Again, just somewhat unclear, but just enough unsettling that I think they would probably prefer that there is not something further. And in fact, it's publicly known, a number of them have said, you can't use our base to carry out these operations. They're different criteria in each case. So that's the situation. Very, very impressive. Again, economic progress, very impressive education, innovation, support for entrepreneurship, all the rest of that. And they want to continue that and they don't want it threatened. And so therefore, there's a bit of caution, I think, that has been transmitted to the White House.

45:45General David Petraeus:And so President Trump and his advisors have to factor all of this into the decision on whether to strike Iran or not, if the negotiations do not produce what the U.S. and, of course, Israel and Prime Minister Netanyahu is in Washington today. That's what they want. And those are pretty tough terms, I think, for Iran to accept. So all of the backdrop that we've touched on has underpinning it a certain amount of cooperation and intelligence of the Western agencies. And it was William Burns, former head of the CIA, and obviously you will know him very well, said in a recent interview with the FT, the US's network of partners and allies is its advantage over China and Russia.

46:29And my question to you is there is an impression, and it may be more rhetoric than reality, that there is a burning of the bridges. How do you assess the reasons that that has become more of a concern in the West?

46:45General David Petraeus:Well, I think it's a result of, in some cases, pressure on Europeans in particular, but others as well. Koreans, Japanese, other allies and partners to do more for their own defense. That the era of cheap U.S. security is over. By the way, so is the era of cheap Russian oil and gas for Europe. And dissatisfaction. Look, I watched several different presidents. You know, I was a NATO guy as a one, three and four star, always dual hatted. But that was in Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan. So I spent a lot of time with the NATO military committee and the North Atlantic Council. And our leaders were absolutely frustrated beyond compare about the inability and the unwillingness of Europeans to spend even 2 % of GDP on defense, much less than now 3.5%.

47:41General David Petraeus:And everybody now gets this, and there are huge commitments, and that's really a tribute to President Trump and certainly to the threat posed by President Putin. He's been the greatest gift to NATO since the end of the Cold War in a perverse sort of way. But that, again, continues. It has to materialize. We have to see how it does transpire over the years that lie ahead if they meet these commitments and sustain that level of commitment. You see it, by the way, with Japan. And of course, the reelection of the prime minister with supermajority, well beyond what most expected, will enable her to dramatically increase defense spending there as well.

48:25General David Petraeus:And that's the number four economy in the world. So an increase in a percentage of GDP is very, very substantial. But the U.S. has put pressure on them to do more for yourself all around the world. Occasionally there's been some rhetoric that has ruffled a lot of feathers, such as a speech at Munich last year and on tomorrow, in fact, I'll head to Munich for the annual security conference where this year it will be the Secretary of State speaking. I think there will probably be a bit of reassurance this time about the importance of alliances, of allies, of partners. I would hope there would be.

49:04Look, I strongly embraced what Churchill said, that the only thing worse than fighting with allies is fighting without them. And having led the largest military coalition, actual fighting countries, I think it was over 60 in Afghanistan alone, over 35 or so in Iraq.

49:26General David Petraeus:Yes, the counter-ISIS one was bigger, but a lot of those were just in it on the diplomatic side. Again, I do agree with him. You have to spend a lot of time and energy and effort on coalition maintenance, on alliance maintenance. But I think it's worth it. And I think that, again, Bill Burns is exactly right when he says that this is one of our true advantages over China. And I hope that we will continue to recognize that and embrace these alliances, having now gotten the allies to do so much more for their own defense. Yeah, that's very clear and very overdue as well. I absolutely agree. As we think about and having interviewed Jen Easterly, you know, who's had all that cyber experience, how do we think about what's going on in those other domains that are less talked about?

50:17is undersea, but it's cyber and the threats that have been so well demonstrated by our adversaries. And my question is, how well positioned or vulnerable do you think all the West is?

50:32General David Petraeus:Well, I think we have a lot of vulnerabilities. That said, there have been significant advances. The UK, in fact, led the way with its national cyber center. In fact, I visited it a couple times, a unique partnership between GCHQ and then civilian partners and so forth. And I think, again, in many respects, very close to the gold standard. Jen Easterly then headed our organization, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, started, established in Trump 1.0. So a little bit out of favor now because of some statements by the then head of CISA that The elections were very credible, best we've ever run and so forth.

51:17General David Petraeus:So it's got a bit less support on the administration side, but still moving along. And we did finally elevate U.S. Cyber Command to full-fledged Combatant Command. But it took too long for us. And I'm a bit worried that in the world of Doge, the effects of which are still felt. By the way, I felt that Doge should have been focused like a laser on the military procurement system in the United States. That is so hampered, again, by these support for legacy systems, legacy basing, legacy everything, that is very hard to move forward. I look at the pace, again, of Ukrainian invasion. Yes, they're fighting their war of independence or war for survival.

52:01General David Petraeus:But you have a partnership there. They've thrown all the rules out. You have a partnership between those who design the drones, those who manufacture, and those who use them that is like this. And it's just constant. Again, every week or two, software changes. Every few weeks, hardware changes. It's a constant battle to stay ahead of the enemy. By the way, the Russians are doing the same thing and doing it quite impressively. They also now have complete unmanned services. So Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, unmanned service units and so forth. So all of that is ongoing. But I think what I would do specifically to your question is I'd open it up much more broadly.

52:43General David Petraeus:It's not just cyber is, again, challenging as that is. And it's very significant. Almost every day there is a revelation about some hack of some type that is really quite serious and that we know who the major actors are in this and why they pursue it. but is devilishly difficult. And AI and greater compute power and more storage and all the rest of that aids not just those doing cybersecurity. It enables those that are doing the breaking and entering in the cyber world. But it's also assassinations. It's dragging anchors and cutting cables in the Baltic Sea. It is influence operations, the so-called cognitive warfare, where Russia tried to put a thumb on the scale of our elections, French elections, other European elections, trying to create a perception right now that Russian victory is inevitable.

53:41General David Petraeus:that there's no question that they're going to be able to out-suffer the Ukrainians, the Europeans, and the Americans, which I believe, again, if we do it right, is not going to prove the case. But all of these gray zone activities, as I think it's better to term them, not just cyber, although that's a significant component, all of these are very worrisome. And you see Russia, of course, also running drones into Polish airspace and other countries shutting down airports and the like. There were manned aircraft that went into some of the Baltic states' airspace. And we've got to be much better collectively at responding to this and also ensuring that it doesn't gradually creep up.

54:28General David Petraeus:And there's a boiling of the frog kind of routine going on here with respect to Russia, while absolutely continuing to do all that we can to enable Ukraine to prevent Russia from winning, to try to help Ukraine even regain some of the ground that they have lost, and continuing to inflict very, very heavy casualties on the Russians and going after their militarily significant strategic infrastructure like refineries, fuel storage and the rest. But know that this is going on around the world. And all of our adversaries are engaging in this to varying degrees. And there has to be a coordinated and significant pushback and penalty for all of this if we are to succeed in deterring further of it.

55:23And I asked Jen Easterly this question on spycraft and how much more difficult it's becoming and then she nicely she nicely said well you need to ask the general about that how difficult is that former head of the cia how tough is this sure no think about what used to happen

55:37General David Petraeus:i mean it's all publicly known and it's all out in the various spy novels and so forth where you know you come in under one identity and throw that passport away and get another one at a dead drop and you rent a car with that one or a room or whatever now everything is is connected um you're not only showing your passport, you're actually getting your iris scanned or your fingerprints or facial recognition. It is exceedingly difficult to operate in eras of ubiquitous surveillance. There are certain countries in which there is so much hanging off every light pole and in various other ways that it is very, very difficult to carry out traditional, again, spycraft.

56:23General David Petraeus:There used to be surveillance detection routes, for example, that would run 10, 12 hours to shake the enormous coverage that some countries can blanket our CIA officers and others with when they're just trying to get loose for a moment and pick something up or leave something or press a button or whatever. So it is increasingly much more difficult. Well, that said, there are some diabolically clever ways that you can contend with some of that, counter some of it. But but again, much, much more difficult and requires much greater expertise to do that. I'll give just without exposing anything an interesting story, though, when I was the director of the CIA.

57:08General David Petraeus:So I had all these plans because, of course, I was not from the CIA. I'd worked endlessly with them in the war zones for the better part of a decade and so forth. Knew the station chiefs in the war zones and the briefers and all the rest of this. But at the end of the day, I was conscious that I'd not gone to the farm myself or done a lot of what others had done, which is not uncommon. Often someone comes in from the outside. In fact, it's the norm. But I wanted them to get to know me. I wanted to get to know them beyond those that were at the director's conference room table every morning. And so we had a variety of programs.

57:45General David Petraeus:One was run with a director. Well, there was a certain standard for running. You had to be able to run six miles in 42 minutes or better because I want to be able to talk and get a workout at the same time. So I got to know the college interns really well. Nobody else. There was workout with the director. That actually turned out. It's not that easy to talk while you're doing push-ups or pull-ups or whatever else it might be. and so then there was Eat with the Director and that was a big hit and we would have four individuals not at the level that I was dealing with in the different directorates and I'd sit down and I'd usually ask him you know tell me a bit about yourself where are you in the building what's your job title what do we need to continue to do what do we need to improve or stop doing this kind of stuff and it was just me and them and usually I might have one note taker well one time I sat down and I went through this one guy and I said, Bill, now, so where are you in the building?

58:39General David Petraeus:And he said, well, director, with great respect, I'm actually not in the building. I said, oh, that's interesting. What's your job title? He said, well, I didn't really want a job title. I don't have one. I said, well, tell me, what are you up to? He said, well, look, I built and sold several companies out in Silicon Valley. I always wanted to help the CIA. So I came east. I have a little office with some people down in Crystal City or somewhere near the Pentagon. And I knew that you would be experiencing increasing challenges with tradecraft. And I'm here to help you solve some of the problems, these new challenges that you have with the kind of circumstances that I have described.

59:23General David Petraeus:And quite a genius and came up with some very novel techniques. But again, the bottom line is it's much, much tougher to be a spy now than it was before, although some of that is offset a little bit by the ubiquitous nature of open source intelligence. Everybody who has a smartphone, you know, this Gutenberg 2 moment, if you will, can take a picture, record a video, tape something, whatever, and upload it on social media. So everyone is a reporter. And if you can mine that effectively, and of course, it takes vast algorithms and the rest of that to do it efficiently. You have an extraordinary of a treasure trove of information that never used to exist.

1:00:11General David Petraeus:And when you look into what applications show you, for example, in advance of the Russian invasion in early 2022, I was looking at Google Maps for the Federation and for Belarus. And you could actually see the congestion. The routes were red because they were so clogged by Russian military vehicles. There's much more of that, you know, fitness apps that tell you where people are and on and on. So that's also become, again, very, very fertile grounds for exploitation. You just have to recognize it, figure out how to do it very, very efficiently, because there's no way that you can do what we used to do, say, during the surge in Iraq.

1:00:53General David Petraeus:In fact, I had a British political advertising campaign agency working for us, watching every TV, listening to every radio, reading every newspaper, all of this. And we thought there was a lot of that. That was before social media exploded the way that it has now and before the advent of real smartphones and all the other adverts. And by the way, of course, now you have Starlink. So even in a war zone, you still have Internet connectivity. So the world has changed dramatically for spies. And I would contend, and Bill Burns confirmed that when he was in office, that our spy agencies, particularly the greatest one on the Western side, the CIA, they have made enormous changes, both to take advantage of new opportunities and to deal with the enormous new challenges, traditional ways of carrying out intelligence operations.

1:01:49General David Petraeus:operations. That's brilliantly cogent and concise. And we're going to wrap up. But just wearing your KKR and your experience hat, what advice to business leaders, given the backdrop, is as uncertain as one can remember? Yeah. In fact, during the time that I've been at KKR, 13, almost 13 years now, which is vastly longer than any job I ever had in government. I mean, the longest I ever had in the military, I think, was two years. That was a command. Otherwise, you're almost rotating every year and so on. But during that 13-year period, the world has changed dramatically. We were in what could be described as a world of benign globalization, in which all the barriers to trade, investment, capital flows, even intellectual property and people were being reduced.

1:02:39General David Petraeus:Globalization, as measured by global trade at least, was going up like this. And economics largely drove geopolitics. It was also a time when just in case logistics worked. Now we're in an era of renewed great power rivalries. Geopolitics is back with a vengeance. The so-called holiday from history is over. All of those barriers, instead of going down, have been going up. And not just with the advent of the Liberation Day tariffs in the U.S. President Biden put 100 % tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles. His administration fenced off entire areas that you could not invest in China or sell them various products that we had.

1:03:21General David Petraeus:So enormous change over that time. Certainly these tariffs take it to a different level, although many of them, the aggregate level now is probably somewhere around 15%. So still the highest since the Smoot-Hawley tariffs of the late 1920s that did so much to deepen and extend the Great Depression didn't cause it. But again, all of this. So now globalization is measured by global trade. Instead of going like this, it's now slobalization. And within it, you carve out regionalization. So it's a very transformed landscape. And again, now it's geopolitics that is driving economics. So what's the advice for businesses?

1:03:59General David Petraeus:You've got to have a KKR Global Institute. You've got to have a global public policy team, which we have as well. We partner with them. You have to have a global macro team. All of these are so significantly more important. It used to be if you were investing in the United States in a company, geopolitics wasn't a huge concern. Now it's a very significant concern because of all the factors that I have mentioned. And so you have to have geopolitical, macro, public policy, examination, identification of challenges. And you have to be able to mitigate those sufficiently so that they will not prevent a successful outcome.

1:04:42General David Petraeus:And this is playing a much bigger role. We have actually vetoed a handful of investments where the deal teams wanted to continue forward. And we're like this with the deal teams. And there are other elements as well. Sometimes it involves a cybersecurity assessment also and other actions that we take during the diligence process. But the point is that instead of just sort of the financial aspects of these and maybe some policy issues involving license to operate and so forth and to pass the front page of the Washington Post test. Now, this is a central part of the diligence process. And if investors don't have that factored in, at some point, they're going to run up on the rocks of reality because that reality is very different.

1:05:30General David Petraeus:And by the way, not only we don't have just-in-time logistics anymore, now we have just-in-case logistics because of disruptions to supply chain that have continued even beyond COVID. So all of these dynamics make this a very, very different landscape and one where expertise in what we've been discussing really matters. So I was amused because the other day in a talk I gave, I referred to Churchill's comment that the further back you look, the further ahead you can see. And somebody then said, actually, remember, John Paul Getty said at times of great change, memory is unhelpful. So the KKR Institute.

1:06:07General David Petraeus:Also remember Churchill saying you can always count on the Americans to do the right thing after trying all the other things. You know what? I was going to say that earlier on, and then I thought I'd be more polite. Well, it's been terrific to have you back. You've been so generous with your time for the third occasion. Our listeners and viewers around the world will be, you know, I'm sure just as thrilled as I've been today. I could summarize with so many things, but I just like that last thing you said is that as businesses think about best practice, they've got to think about just in case, not just in time.

1:06:38Absolutely.