CSBA "Third Offset" paper

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GeorgeA

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A new CSBA treatise on "Global Surveillance and Strike" -- emphasizing long-range aviation, submarines, hypersonic missiles, and unmanned systems over currently-planned tactical aviation forces, surface combatants, and land forces.


Bill Sweetman overview here:



http://aviationweek.com/blog/you-say-you-want-revolution



Full report here:


http://www.csbaonline.org/publications/2014/10/toward-a-new-offset-strategy-exploiting-u-s-long-term-advantages-to-restore-u-s-global-power-projection-capability/
 
Bill is positively gushing about the possibility (however remote) of F-35 cuts. Quelle surprise. ::)
 
sferrin said:
Bill is positively gushing about the possibility (however remote) of F-35 cuts. Quelle surprise. ::)

Naturally, if the F-35 had the range advocated in the position paper, Bill would be condemning it as excessive to the needs of the international partners.
 
George Allegrezza said:
Just a note for the non-F-35-obsessed on the forum -- the report is about US military strategy and R&D policy over 94 pages, and if you're interested in the subject, you should give it a look. It is most definitely NOT about the F-35, although it proposed a program that gives a lower priority to shorter-ranged manned tactical aviation, which would, logically, call into question the appropriate level of investment in the F-35, *among other things*.


Aarrgghhhh . . .

I was commenting on the quality of the first link in your post. You can't post a link then be upset when people comment on it.
 
Shh, any discussion about USAF strategy returns to the F-35, because the F-35 is USAF strategy.
 
If anyone has any ideas as to how to change AF equipment buys in the next 20-25 years, within the current AF topline, without affecting the F-35, I'm sure Washington is all ears. And there's only so much that can practically be done within the Pentagon topline (that is, robbing the Army).
 
LowObservable said:
If anyone has any ideas as to how to change AF equipment buys in the next 20-25 years, within the current AF topline, without affecting the F-35, I'm sure Washington is all ears. And there's only so much that can practically be done within the Pentagon topline (that is, robbing the Army).

I'm curious how canceling the F-35C helps the USAF at all.
 
Well, the theory is the Navy uses some of that money to go all-in on the Bob Work Special, full-capability version of UCLASS. The AF then buys an upgraded version of UCLASS as a medium-attack compliment to LRS-B.
 
George Allegrezza said:
Well, the theory is the Navy uses some of that money to go all-in on the Bob Work Special, full-capability version of UCLASS. The AF then buys an upgraded version of UCLASS as a medium-attack compliment to LRS-B.

In the meantime the USN is stuck with a 40 year old fighter design for another 30 years and the USAF fighter fleet gets gutted because of the unit-cost death spiral. Not seeing why this is suppose to be a great plan.
 
LowObservable said:
If anyone has any ideas as to how to change AF equipment buys in the next 20-25 years, within the current AF topline, without affecting the F-35, I'm sure Washington is all ears. And there's only so much that can practically be done within the Pentagon topline (that is, robbing the Army).

Some ideas off the top of my head:

* Slow down the tanker acquisition and let the FedEx/UPS 767 buys help reduce unit cost.
* Make the LRS-B firm target price
* Develop a common SLBM/ICBM with the Navy (underway)
* Develop a common GLCM/ALCM/SLCM/ASCM with the Army and Navy i.e. Rep. Forbes' suggestion
* Retire 707 AWACS/JSTARS in favor of leased Wedgetails and Gulfstreams
* Develop a fleet of survivable UAV tankers and bi-static AWACS receivers under the UCLASS family
* Take the present sharp downturn in oil prices to renegotiate long term buys of Jet A + additives.

The Army gets some budget consideration when it can demonstrate that it can handle a complex project other than the Stryker; JMR/JVL is a good opportunity for the Army to shine. Same with UCLASS for NAVAIR.
 
George Allegrezza said:
FWIW, I actually think the report has been overtaken by events to a certain extent. While it's a logically consistent way to approach AirSea Battle/A2AD in the Pacific and Middle East, the recent uptick in Russian revanchism in Europe argues for retaining the Army components and tactical airpower that might have seemed expendable even year ago (call it AirLand Battle Redux, or Suddenly It's 1979). To Bill's point, this scenario doesn't fit under the budget cap, so something's got to give. If the GOP wins the Senate next Tuesday and if they retain control of Congress and win the White House in 2016 (both very big ifs), they might be able to expand the DOD topline budget beyond current projections. If that doesn't happen, there will need to be some very difficult choices in the next few budgets.

Sweetman is also constantly reminding the reader about superior European military hardware. Surely, when coupled to defense budgets that actually meet NATO spending guidelines the Russian threat is manageable to an extent that doesn't require the US to invest for AirLand Battle 2.0.
 
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George Allegrezza said:
sferrin said:
In the meantime the USN is stuck with a 40 year old fighter design for another 30 years and the USAF fighter fleet gets gutted because of the unit-cost death spiral. Not seeing why this is suppose to be a great plan.


Again, their theory is that tactical airpower is less important in this scenario, so the resources are diverted to bombers, UAVs, and subs.

And once we've dealt with the anti-access elements, tactical airpower is just as relevant as it ever was. Furthermore, nothing's changed in the rest of the potential hotspots around the world. I guess I'm not seeing why a J-20 with AAMs is suppose to be more scarey than a Mig-31 with AA-9s in 1986 or a Tu-16 with antiship missiles is suppose to be more of a threat than regiments of Backfires with Kh-22s in 1986. Tactical airpower certainly wasn't considered useless then.
 
Well, in the Cold War the US was deployed on the inter-German border, where distances were very short and bases relatively plentiful. In that case, numbers and sortie generation were most important. (Sferrin is conflating two issues, TacAir in Central Europe and anti-access over the Atlantic...)

Now, the US's major peer threat, China, is across the Pacific from the US. Bases are few and far between, and more vulnerable to conventional weapons too. It stands to reason that TacAir is less important against China than against the Soviet Union. There is no short ranged 'Central Europe' where TacAir comes into its own.

Really, the Third Offset strategy begins with the obvious statement: shorter ranged TacAir is less useful against China than long ranged aircraft. That observation is controversial, because the USAF strategy is the F-35.

I do agree that Russia complicates this whole discussion. Apparently, Russia is going to unveil their new tank (Armata?) next year. If that tank is some unmanned turret 140mm super tank, a continuation of late Cold War armored research, than the M1A2 and Leo 2A4 / A5 are going to be looking awfully obsolete. In that case, the Army may have justification for new armored research.

PS. I don't think the US will be able to "deal with" Chinese anti-access elements. Degrade to an acceptable threat level, possibly, but eliminate, almost impossible. This is a peer threat on the scale of the Soviet Union. Industrial wars cannot be won easily, even when the correlation of economic factors are completely lopsided (WW2...). The challenge is not to fight back against anti-access, it is to achieve the strategic goal in the presence of anti-access. For China, that would be: destroy expeditionary forces in the A2/AD network.
 
http://warontherocks.com/beyond-offset/

The Beyond Offset project is a partnership between War on the Rocks and the Center for a New American Security that aims to build a community-of-interest that will address the challenges of maintaining America’s competitive edge in military technology and advance solutions.
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The Long-Range Strike Bomber is a leading element of the Pentagon’s new offset strategy revealed by Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel last week, but so far, no increase in LRS-B units is deemed necessary, said Lt. Gen. Ellen Pawlikowski, the Air Force's top uniformed weapons buyer. The LRS-B is "part of leading" into the offset strategy because it's oriented toward "global reach," prosecuting targets in "denied environments," and because it's "part of a family of systems," all hallmarks of Hagel's offsets, she told reporters in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 19. The LRS-B started out as an effort "to understand what was in the realm of the doable, in terms of what the technology could bring” and "fits very nicely into the strategy the Secretary has laid out," said Pawlikowski. The same is true of a so-called sixth generation fighter, which she said would likely be "less about the platform," meaning not so much an airplane as the "game-changing" technologies on it. Despite the good fit, Pawlikowski said "we don't see any reason" at this time to increase the number of LRS-Bs from the currently planned 80 to 100 airframes. "That seems to be about the right spot, again, seeing that it's part of a family of systems," she said. (For more of our Pawlikowski coverage, read Deep in the Heart of T-Xs.)
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Family of Systems still very much intrigues me.
 
The Air Force is participating in a series of technology development committees supporting Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work's new "Third Offset" strategy, which is looking for leap-ahead capabilities that can put the US well ahead of its military adversaries again, said Air Force Research Lab chief Maj. Gen. Thomas Masiello in a Wednesday interview with Air Force Magazine. "We're fully engaged in the appropriate ones," Masiello said. "One of them's undersea warfare, which we're not necessarily part of, but the other ones, we are." These include hypersonics, directed energy, automation, autonomy, robotics, remotely operated vehicles, and others. "There's no doubt about it, there's definitely a sense of urgency" in the work, Masiello said, but AFRL's focus is to meet the requirements and "gaps" in capability identified by USAF's major command chiefs. These "align very nicely" (with) where OSD .. or the [Deputy Secretary of Defense] wants to take us." The "game-changer" technologies USAF is working on aren't necessarily near-term but "could play significantly in that Third Offset strategy." AFRL is working alongside the tech development divisions of all the services, but what the "product" of the studies will be is not yet clear, he said.
 
http://www.airforcemag.com/MagazineArchive/Pages/2015/March%202015/Better-Buying.aspx

http://www.airforcemag.com/MagazineArchive/Pages/2015/March%202015/The-Silicon-Offset.aspx
 
Eight Miles High and Falling Fast

—John A. Tirpak

3/19/2015

The Air Force is losing its edge and has to warn the nation against being too sanguine about the threat, service acquisition chief William LaPlante said March 17. “Don’t assume benign conditions,” LaPlante said. “We have to innovate and experiment ... we’ve got to catch up and get our margin back ... We are losing our margin.” USAF, he said, is “not just going around saying the threat is 10 feet tall. Even if you say the threat is eight feet tall—when the intel says it’s 10 feet tall—we’re still losing our margin.” If a competitor has certain preliminary capabilities, but those are discussed with comments that “they haven’t fought [with] it yet, or trained with it ... Maybe. But we’re losing our margin. Okay? Every year, the briefings get worse,” LaPlante said. When the US looks at its adversaries, they are doing what the US should be, he said: “They’re doing shaping and deterring. Make no mistake, they’ve watched us very carefully over the last 25 years—they’ve watched us fight—and they’ve learned from it. So we really need to get on with” the third o​ffset of technology overmatch.

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Hypersonics for strike and DEW for defense first one there wins IMHO.
 
http://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2015/03/air-force-we-must-invent-future/108913/?oref=d-river
 
http://www.dodbuzz.com/2015/04/01/general-says-army-must-stop-banking-on-leap-ahead-technology/

“The future fighting vehicle is something we have needed. The Bradley is already approaching obsolescence,” he said. “We need a new fighting vehicle. We did a non-developmental study based on the requirements that we generated from the Ground Combat Vehicle … and what we found is we have certain armored vehicles that had an element or some of the requirements that we needed, but none of them put it all together.

“And this is one of those areas where you don’t want to have the second best fighting vehicle,” he said. “When you are up against the enemy in close combat, you want smoking boots on the other end. You don’t want a fair fight.”

Currently, the Army is working on a draft of the Combat Vehicle Modernization Strategy, McMaster said.
 
Third offset will have robots;

Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work on Wednesday outlined the Pentagon’s plans for an advanced war-fighting strategy involving robot weapons and remote-controlled warfare. In a speech to the Army War College Strategy Conference, Mr. Work said the “third offset strategy” will rely heavily on autonomous systems that will allow machines and U.S. technological superiority to win wars. The strategy follows two earlier “offsets” — the use of asymmetric means to counter enemy advantages. During the Cold War, strategic deterrence and tactical nuclear arms were used to offset the Soviet Union’s ground force numerical advantages. In the 1970s, precision-guided conventional weapons were deployed to offset the quantitative shortcomings of foreign conventional forces.

Mr. Work said precision-guided warfare is reaching the end of its shelf life as foreign states have developed countermeasures. The third offset will be designed to defeat states like China, which is developing niche, offset weapons such as anti-ship ballistic missiles and anti-satellite arms. “The real essence of the third offset strategy is to find multiple different attacks against opponents across all domains so they can’t adapt, or they adjust to just one, and they died before they can adapt again,” he said. Mr. Work said defense strategists are divided between those who seek to continue to focus on low-end conflict and those who say future wars will require high-end forces for use against competitor states with large militaries, like China and Russia. “We don’t have an answer right now” on which direction the Pentagon will go, he said.

The deputy defense secretary said the offset strategy calls for adapting “three-play chess” to modern warfare, in which U.S. military forces will employ highly skilled people operating advanced technological machines against less-capable forces. Mr. Work said the “Air Sea Battle” concept, designed to break into Asia against Chinese missiles and submarines, has evolved into “Air Land Battle 2.0.” “Air Sea Battle, in my view, kind of went wrong,” said Mr. Work, one of the concept’s architects. The revised concept will involve avoiding being targeted by massive Chinese missile salvos or submarine attacks through “getting into their networks, blowing them up and keep them from seeing you,” he said.

Next, salvo attacks will be countered with defenses designed to hit missiles and destroy submarines and missile-carrying bombers before they fire. Last, after surviving the massed strikes, joint assault forces will be injected to make it an “air-land battle.” “I believe that what the third offset strategy will revolve around will be three-play combat in each dimension,” Mr. Work said. “And three-play combat will be much different in each dimension [air, sea, land], and it will be up for the people who live and fight in that dimension to figure out the rules.”

“We will have autonomy at rest, our smart systems being able to go through big data to help at the campaign level and to be able to go through big data at the tactical level. So autonomy at rest and autonomy in motion,” he said. The most difficult domain for robots is the ground. “Just getting robots to move over terrain is one of the most difficult things you can imagine,” Mr. Work said.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon’s high-tech development center, is working on a program called Squad X that is focusing on human-machine interaction at the tactical level. The program includes ground robots, microdrones and squad-sized military units equipped with intelligence and super-lethal weapons that can cover large areas. “And this is not as far away as you might think,” Mr. Work said, noting that the Army is conducting experiments with “manned and unmanned teaming” of Apache attack helicopters. Robot-driven vehicles also are coming, along with human-sized robots used as porters, firefighters, countermine robots, and countersniper robots.
 
http://www.avascent.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/WP_AEROSPACE_Unmanned-Swarm-Systems_Apr2015.pdf
 
Work Details the Future of War at Army Defense College

By Cheryl Pellerin
DoD News, Defense Media Activity

WASHINGTON, April 8, 2015 – On stage today at the U.S. Army War College in Pennsylvania, Deputy Defense Secretary

Bob Work summoned up scenes from a future war where soldiers and machines join forces in a multidimensional “informationalized” zone, using advanced tools to fight adversaries from space to cyberspace.

During a keynote address on international security and future defense strategy on Carlisle Barracks, Work described a daunting array of challenges for warfighters.

“In the future, U.S. Army and U.S. Marine forces and our allies who fight with us are going to have to fight on a battlefield that is swept by precision-guided munitions but also one that is swept by persistent and effective cyber and electronic warfare attacks,” he said.

That fighting will include regular warfare, hybrid warfare, nonlinear warfare, state-sponsored proxy hybrid warfare, and high-end combined-arms warfare, Work added, like what might be seen on the Korean peninsula.

To prepare for the threats, the deputy secretary offered three principles of future war.

The Future of War

The first is that the future of ground warfare, regardless of the type, will see a proliferation of guided munitions and advanced weaponry, he said.

“We should just assume that is the case. If we're wrong, so much the better,” Work said. “If we're right, we'd better be prepared for it. And this proliferation of precision will continue because we see it continuing today.”

Ground forces will be faced with what many call G-RAMM -- guided rockets, artillery, mortars and missiles with GPS capability and laser guidance, infrared homing, anti-radiation weapons, and fire-and-forget anti-armor weapons, he added.

“We're not too far away from guided .50 caliber rounds. We’re not too far away from a sensor-fused weapon that instead of going after tanks will go after the biometric signatures of human beings,” Work said.

Informationalized Warfare

The second principle of future ground combat on the front lines will have to contend with what the Chinese call “informationalized” warfare, he said.

Work defined informationalized warfare as the combination of cyber, electronic warfare, information operations, and deception and denial to disrupt command and control and give the enemy an advantage in the decision cycle.

The third principle is that the combination of guided munitions and informationalized warfare will span all types of ground combat, meaning that the foundation for ground-force excellence will be combined-arms operational skill, Work said.

Defense Innovation Initiative

“It's also why we applaud the fact that the U.S. Army will not declare its [brigade combat teams] full-spectrum combat ready until they have completed two decisive-action rotations at the National Training Center,” the defense secretary said.

Training and the familiar operational and organizational constructs will take U.S. forces only so far, the deputy secretary said.

New operational and organizational constructs and technological capabilities must be deliberately identified, he said, and that’s what the Defense Innovation Initiative is all about.

Defense Secretary Ash Carter has expanded the initiative, which was announced in November, and Work said Carter wants the department focused on three things:

Increasing Competitiveness

-- Increasing competitiveness by attracting talent. This includes the future of the all-volunteer force, the way the services train the force and their leaders, and the way the department trains the future civilian and contractor force.

-- Improving competitiveness through technological superiority and operational excellence.

-- Increasing competitiveness through accountability and efficiency throughout the department.

Work said a key part of the initiative is called the “third offset strategy.”

Third Offset Strategy

“The whole purpose of the third offset strategy,” the deputy secretary said, “is to identify the technologies, the operational and organizational constructs, and the new operational concepts to fight our future adversaries.”

A big part of the offset strategy will be to identify, develop and field breakthrough technologies and to use current capabilities in different ways, he added.

“We just demonstrated firing the Tomahawk land-attack cruise missile against a ship without changing its seeker-head, completely doing it by off-board sensing. Well,” Work said, “now we have 2,000 potential 1,000-mile-range anti-ship missiles.”

Work said that since World War II, American military strategy and the national defense strategy have been built on an assumption of technological superiority and better-trained men and women organized to employ the technologies in an innovative way.

A Wall of Flesh and Blood

“I like the way Dwight Eisenhower explained it after World War II,” he said. “While some of our allies were compelled to throw up a wall of flesh and blood as their chief defense against the aggressor's onslaught, we were able to use machines and technology to save lives.”

After 40 years of an all-volunteer force, Work said, the United States has an enduring advantage in its people.

“I will stack this all-volunteer force up against any potential opponent and especially those that are authoritarian in nature, because they will never, ever be able to match the creativity, the initiative, the mission drive that our people have,” the deputy secretary said.

“But our technological superiority is slipping,” he said. “We see it every day … the fact is we want to achieve an overmatch over any adversary from the operational theater level all the way down to the fighter plane, Navy ship or infantry squad.”

New Ways to Fight

The department’s focus on innovation is about finding new ways to fight, train and create organizational constructs, he said.

“Battlefield advantages in the future are going to be very short-lived because the amount of technology that is out there right now is unbelievable,” Work said.

Work said he believes the third offset strategy will revolve around something called free-play combat in each dimension of combat.

The deputy secretary described a book called “Average is Over” by an avid chess player and economist named Tyler Cowen.

Free-Play Combat

Cowen wrote about how people used to think that a computer could never beat a grand master at chess. That proved to be wrong, but he found out that in a person-machine chess game, in three-play chess, the combination of a person and a machine always beats a machine and always beats a person.

“How far do we take three-play combat in air-sea battle 2? How does it affect our command and control? Where are we comfortable having autonomous decision-making? Where are you going to have a person in the loop? How will you net all of this together to give you a decisive, enduring advantage on the battlefield?’ he said.

Work added that these are fundamental questions for organizations like the Army War College to think through.

Another aspect of future war will be at the squad level, which will be operating in a far more disaggregated way than they have in the past, the deputy secretary said.

Disaggregating Infantry Battalions

“When I went to Afghanistan to visit Marine units, I asked [Marine Corps] Gen. Joe ‘Fighting Joe’ Dunford about the record for the disaggregation of a single infantry battalion across the battlefield,” the deputy secretary said. “He said the record was a single battalion disaggregating into 77 discreet units spread over a wide area.”

This has big implications for leadership and command and control, Work said, “especially in an informationalized warfare environment in which the enemy is constantly trying to get into your networks and disrupt your command and control.”

The key to ensuring that these disaggregated small units have overmatch is by providing support in fires, intelligence and logistics, Work said.

“If we combine them into well-trained, cohesive combat teams with new advances in robotics and autonomy and unmanned systems, three-play combat at the squad level, we can create super-empowered squads, super-empowered small units with enhanced situational awareness and lethality,” he added.

Exciting Times for the Force

The Defense Advanced Projects and Research Agency's Squad X program, among others, is working on several ideas now to increase human and machine collaboration at the lowest tactical level, including ground robots and small microdrones, Work said.

The deputy secretary said this is an exciting time for the force.

“This problem requires thinking,” Work added. “We need to tackle it together and not worry so much about the resources as the intellectual capital that we need to put in the bank to allow our joint force to be successful in the future.”
 
Third Offset links at War on the Rocks

http://warontherocks.com/beyond-offset/
 
http://warontherocks.com/2015/05/third-offset-tech-what-the-experts-say/?singlepage=1
 
http://warontherocks.com/2015/05/time-for-a-private-sector-pivot-on-military-technology/?singlepage=1
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KW1v8h9ecY
 
http://www.defensenews.com/videos/defense-news/2015/05/17/27493405/?hootPostID=2fc87e4e46ab4e6074f353324db2230e

Two analysts talk about Third Offset.
 
http://warontherocks.com/2015/05/trading-space-and-time-in-the-cold-war-offset-strategy/?singlepage=1
 
http://nextbigfuture.com/2015/06/usa-revamping-military-to-re-establish.html

First thing abrogate the INF Treaty develop heavy lift IRBM for PGS mission against Chinese mainland.
 
http://warontherocks.com/2015/06/independent-long-range-strike-a-failed-theory/?singlepage=1
 
bobbymike said:
http://warontherocks.com/2015/06/independent-long-range-strike-a-failed-theory/?singlepage=1
Thank you sir for posting that article was hopeing someone would. :)
 
jsport said:
bobbymike said:
Thank you sir for posting that article was hopeing someone would. :)

I wonder how long the author thinks it would take to build aircraft carrier and bomber fleets when it became obvious we couldn't operate safely from land bases near China. Maybe he thinks a referee would blow the whistle and give us a 20 year timeout eh? Of course then some other would-be Sun Tzu would then claim fighters are obsolete. ::) They all fill critical needs.
 
sferrin said:
jsport said:
bobbymike said:
Thank you sir for posting that article was hopeing someone would. :)

I wonder how long the author thinks it would take to build aircraft carrier and bomber fleets when it became obvious we couldn't operate safely from land bases near China. Maybe he thinks a referee would blow the whistle and give us a 20 year timeout eh? Of course then some other would-be Sun Tzu would then claim fighters are obsolete. ::) They all fill critical needs.
I agree that while the author has some interesting ideas, I am a big proponent of massive inventories of strike missiles, he seems too narrowly focussed and a little myopic IMHO.
 
bobbymike said:
I am a big proponent of massive inventories of strike missiles, he seems too narrowly focussed and a little myopic IMHO.

Right there with you, preferably on the end of a semi-ballistic missile. Aircraft have their uses, but sometimes you need to hit the target NOW.
 
http://news.usni.org/2015/04/21/global-guided-missile-expansion-forcing-u-s-navy-to-rethink-surface-fleet-size?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_term=%2ASituation%20Report&utm_campaign=SitRep0422
 
http://warontherocks.com/2015/06/getting-airpower-right-in-defense-of-the-long-range-strike-bomber/#comment-823519
 
http://warontherocks.com/2015/06/bad-guys-know-what-works-asymmetric-warfare-and-the-third-offset/?singlepage=1
 
http://www.defenseone.com/management/2015/06/pentagon-preparing-war-space-russia-china/116101/?oref=d-river
 
http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/trend-lines/16111/u-s-military-technology-primacy-challenged-by-private-foreign-development
 
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