Daniel sent us this one — he's asking two questions that kind of sit at opposite ends of the same spectrum. First, how many countries in the world essentially have no standing army at all? And second, along that long tail of global military strength, at what point does a military go from being small to actually notable in terms of personnel count? It's a great framing, because we spend so much time talking about the giants — the U., China, Russia — and almost no time looking at what it means to have nothing, or almost nothing.
The number of countries with no army is way higher than most people assume. I was digging through the CIA World Factbook and SIPRI data for this, and as of right now, mid twenty twenty-six, there are about twenty-three UN-recognized sovereign states with populations over a hundred thousand that have no standing army at all.
I would've guessed maybe eight. Ten at the outside. Maybe I'd remember Costa Rica and Iceland, then start guessing Caribbean islands and hope for the best.
Most people guess even lower. And the reasons vary wildly — some have constitutional bans, some just never rebuilt after a conflict, and some are effectively sheltered under a larger power's umbrella. So let's start with the obvious question — what does it actually mean to have no military?
Because there's a difference between "we literally have zero armed personnel" and "we technically have no army but also there are twenty thousand people with guns who work for the state.
So the definitional boundary matters. When we say no standing army, we mean no permanent, professional military force intended for external defense. These countries might still have police forces, coast guards, border patrols, or even paramilitary civil guards. Costa Rica is the poster child here — they abolished their military in nineteen forty-nine after a civil war, and Article Twelve of their constitution literally says, quote, "the army is prohibited as a permanent institution." But they maintain a roughly twenty-thousand-strong police force and a small Civil Guard. That's not a military in the classic sense, but it's not nothing.
They've got the fire extinguisher but not the fire department.
That's actually a perfect way to put it. And the fire extinguisher works because they're not in a high-threat neighborhood. Costa Rica spends about one point five percent of GDP on education — double the regional average — and has the highest Human Development Index in Central America. That's what some economists call the demilitarization dividend. Money that would've gone to tanks goes to textbooks, and in a stable region with strong diplomatic ties, that math works.
Of course, "stable region with strong diplomatic ties" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Put Costa Rica in the South China Sea and the math looks different.
And that's the core tradeoff. Let's get specific — here are the countries that have made this choice, and why. I'd break them into roughly three categories. First, constitutional bans — Costa Rica, Japan, and Panama. Panama abolished its military in nineteen ninety, right after the U.invasion removed Noriega. Their constitution now explicitly prohibits a standing army. Second category, post-conflict decisions — these are mostly small island states that had some form of colonial or post-colonial force, disbanded it, and never rebuilt. Samoa, Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. Third category — and this is the one I find most interesting — geopolitical shelter. Iceland and Liechtenstein. Both have essentially no military, but both are protected by larger powers.
Iceland is the one that always surprises people. NATO member, no army.
No army since eighteen sixty-nine. They joined NATO in nineteen forty-nine — founding member — and the U.maintained an air base at Keflavik until two thousand six. Today Iceland's entire military capability is the Icelandic Coast Guard. About a hundred personnel. That's it. They have a bilateral defense agreement with the U., and NATO covers the rest. It's a case study in what international relations scholars call free-riding on alliance security guarantees, though they don't love that phrase in Reykjavik.
They prefer "strategic burden-sharing optimization.
I'm sure they do. But the point stands — Iceland spends essentially zero on defense and gets the same Article Five protection as a country spending four percent of GDP. It's a brilliant geopolitical hack, assuming your allies stay reliable. And this is where the model gets fragile. If NATO fractures — if the U.commitment wavers — Iceland's entire defense strategy collapses overnight. They have no Plan B. There is no Icelandic resistance force waiting in the fjords. The coast guard isn't repelling an invasion. The entire bet is that the alliance holds.
That's the thing about geopolitical shelter — it's not a permanent structure. It's a lease. The landlord can change the terms, or sell the building, or just stop answering the phone. How does Iceland think about that risk in twenty twenty-six?
Not publicly, at least not in a way that suggests they're losing sleep. But privately, I think there's more anxiety than they let on. The twenty twenty-four U.presidential election, the shifting NATO burden-sharing debates — these are not abstract conversations in Reykjavik. They're existential. If the U.ever says "we're done subsidizing European defense," Iceland is exhibit A for the prosecution.
Which brings us to Japan. Because Japan is the category-breaker. They have Article Nine of the nineteen forty-seven constitution, which renounces war and "the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes." That sounds like no military. But the Japan Self-Defense Forces have two hundred forty-seven thousand active personnel. That's the eighth-largest military in the world by headcount. Bigger than the UK's army.
Yeah, Japan is the elephant in the "no army" room. The JSDF is a military in every functional sense — ground, maritime, air branches, advanced fighter jets, Aegis destroyers, amphibious units. The constitutional fiction has been stretched so far it's basically transparent. And the twenty fifteen security legislation reinterpretation was the real watershed. For the first time since World War Two, Japan can engage in collective self-defense — meaning the JSDF can fight abroad to protect allies, not just defend Japanese territory.
They're on the list technically, but practically they're not.
And most serious analysts don't include Japan when they talk about countries with no army. The JSDF is a notable military by any measure. But the constitutional ban is still there, which creates this bizarre situation where Japan has one of the world's most capable armed forces and also a legal document that says armed forces are illegal. It's the constitutional equivalent of having a "no pets" lease and an eighty-pound Labrador in the living room.
The Labrador of collective self-defense.
And the landlord has just decided not to look at the dog. For decades, the Japanese government's position was essentially "the JSDF is not a military, it's a self-defense organization, and we're not going to define that too carefully." Every time they acquire a new capability — aerial refueling tankers, helicopter carriers, amphibious assault units — they perform this elaborate interpretive dance to explain why it's still consistent with Article Nine. At some point, the dance becomes the policy.
How long can that fiction hold? Is there a serious constitutional amendment movement in Japan right now?
There's been a serious movement for twenty years, and it's never quite gotten over the line. Prime Minister Kishida pushed for it, and the current administration is still talking about it, but the hurdle is enormous — you need a two-thirds majority in both houses of parliament plus a majority in a national referendum. The Japanese public is more open to constitutional revision than they were a generation ago, partly because of North Korean missile tests and Chinese assertiveness in the East China Sea, but there's still deep unease about formally scrapping Article Nine. So they'll probably keep stretching the fiction rather than replacing it.
The Labrador gets its own room and nobody calls it a kennel.
Now, there are also some messy cases worth flagging. Haiti disbanded its army in nineteen ninety-five, but then MINUSTAH — the UN stabilization mission — effectively served as its military for over a decade, and recently Haiti has been trying to reconstitute a small force. Grenada has had no army since the nineteen eighty-three U.invasion, but it maintains a roughly hundred-person paramilitary unit. These are edge cases. The clean list is about twenty-three countries with genuinely no standing army.
Some of these are microstates. You said we're excluding anything under a hundred thousand population?
Yeah, otherwise you get Vatican City, Monaco, Nauru, Tuvalu — places where the entire population could fit in a football stadium. The interesting question is sovereign states of meaningful size that made a deliberate choice to have no military. And the takeaway from the first part of this is that it's almost always a combination of three things: a constitutional or political decision, a benign neighborhood, and a powerful patron.
The trifecta of demilitarization. Lose any one of those legs and the stool falls over.
We've seen that happen. Ukraine gave up its nuclear arsenal in nineteen ninety-four under the Budapest Memorandum, with security assurances from Russia, the U., and the UK. That was supposed to be the patron leg of the stool. We all know how that worked out.
A masterclass in what not to do. And it's worth pausing on that, because Ukraine is the cautionary tale that haunts every conversation about demilitarization. They didn't abolish their army — they kept a substantial force — but they surrendered the ultimate deterrent. Nineteen hundred nuclear warheads, the third-largest arsenal on Earth at the time, and they traded them for a piece of paper that turned out to be worth less than the ink it was printed with. If you're a small country watching that play out in real time, what lesson do you draw?
The lesson is that security guarantees from great powers are only as good as the willingness of those powers to enforce them — and that willingness can change with a single election. Ukraine's experience has probably set back the cause of nuclear nonproliferation by a generation. If I'm sitting in Seoul or Warsaw or Riyadh, I'm looking at Ukraine and thinking: the only guarantee that actually works is the one you provide yourself. That doesn't necessarily mean nuclear weapons — it could mean drones, cyber capabilities, a highly mobilized reserve force — but it definitely doesn't mean trusting a patron.
That's the dark side of the trifecta. If you can't trust the patron leg, you have to build your own stool. Which means you need a military. Which brings us to the second question.
If twenty-three countries have zero soldiers, the next question is: at what point does a military actually matter? When does "small" become "notable"?
This is the part of the prompt I really like, because it forces us to define what "notable" even means. Notable to whom? Notable for what? A military that can defend its borders is different from one that can project power, which is different from one that can deter a nuclear adversary.
That's why pure personnel count is increasingly a bad metric. But let's start with it anyway, because it gives us a framework. I've been looking at the twenty twenty-five IISS Military Balance data, and I think there's a useful taxonomy. Tier one — what I'd call micro-militaries. Under five thousand active personnel. This is Luxembourg with nine hundred, Belize with fifteen hundred, Fiji with thirty-five hundred. These forces are essentially ceremonial or constabulary. They can do disaster relief, border patrol, maybe contribute a platoon to a UN peacekeeping mission. But they have zero power projection capability. No independent air force, no navy to speak of, no ability to sustain operations beyond their borders.
Luxembourg's nine hundred personnel — that's smaller than some American high schools.
Yet Luxembourg is a NATO member. They contribute in niche ways — they have a reconnaissance satellite program, they specialize in cyber — but in terms of boots on ground, nine hundred people is not a military in any meaningful operational sense. It's a military as a diplomatic credential.
A membership card that comes with a gun. And this is where the taxonomy gets interesting, because Luxembourg's nine hundred personnel and Fiji's thirty-five hundred are both in tier one, but they're doing very different things. Fiji is one of the largest contributors to UN peacekeeping per capita in the world. They've had troops in the Golan Heights, Sinai, Iraq, Lebanon. For a country of less than a million people, that's a serious operational tempo. So is Fiji's military "notable" in a way Luxembourg's isn't?
That's a fair pushback. Fiji is an exception in tier one because they've carved out a specific niche — peacekeeping as a national export. Fijian soldiers are well-regarded, they get UN reimbursement rates that flow back into the Fijian economy, and it's a source of national prestige. But the capability ceiling is still low. Fiji can't independently deploy those troops — they rely on UN logistics, airlift from larger powers, and they have no ability to sustain combat operations against a near-peer adversary. So they're notable within a narrow band of peacekeeping, but they're not notable in the sense of being able to shape a conflict.
Tier one is a spectrum from "purely symbolic" to "niche player," but nobody in this tier is defending their borders against a serious threat without help.
Tier two — small militaries, five thousand to fifty thousand active personnel. This is where things get real. Ireland at about ninety-five hundred, New Zealand at nine thousand, Denmark at seventeen thousand, Norway at twenty-three thousand. These forces can defend national borders — at least against non-major-power threats — and they can contribute meaningfully to coalition operations. New Zealand's SAS is world-class. Denmark's frigates patrol the North Atlantic. But they cannot sustain expeditionary warfare on their own. If New Zealand wanted to conduct an amphibious landing somewhere, they'd need a ride from someone else.
Ireland is an interesting case here, because they're militarily neutral but not defenseless. Nine thousand five hundred personnel, mostly focused on peacekeeping and territorial defense. They've contributed to UN missions for decades.
They punch above their weight in certain specialized areas — the Irish Army Ranger Wing is highly regarded. But nine thousand five hundred active personnel means they have, what, maybe three or four deployable battalions? That's enough for peacekeeping, not for fighting a war. The thing about Ireland is that their neutrality is credible precisely because nobody is threatening to invade them. If that changed — if the strategic environment deteriorated — nine thousand five hundred personnel would start to look very thin very fast.
This is where the conversation gets uncomfortable for a lot of small neutral countries. Neutrality isn't a magic shield. It's a policy choice that works when your neighbors respect it. If they stop respecting it, you need a military that can make them reconsider. Nine thousand five hundred soldiers doesn't make anyone reconsider.
Tier three is where I'd put the "notable" threshold. Fifty thousand to two hundred fifty thousand active personnel. This is Australia at sixty thousand, the Netherlands at forty-one thousand, and then the case that really defines this tier — Israel at one hundred seventy thousand active and four hundred sixty-five thousand reserves.
Israel is the poster child for "personnel count doesn't tell the whole story." One hundred seventy thousand active is smaller than Pakistan's army, smaller than Iran's. But the capability gap is enormous.
Because Israel has independent air, land, sea, cyber, and space capabilities. It can project force regionally, sustain brigade-level operations, and has a domestic defense industrial base that produces everything from small arms to satellite systems. That's what makes a military notable — not just the headcount, but the ability to operate across multiple domains independently. The twenty twenty-five IISS Military Balance pegs the global median military size at about thirty-five thousand active personnel. That means half the world's militaries are smaller than that. The inflection point where you start seeing truly independent multi-domain capability is around fifty thousand.
Fifty thousand is the Mendoza Line of military significance.
Below fifty thousand, you're probably dependent on allies for at least one domain — airlift, strategic reconnaissance, naval power projection. Above fifty thousand, you can start to do things yourself. But here's where it gets interesting. The historical context flips this on its head. In nineteen hundred, a force of twenty thousand was considered major. The British expeditionary force at the start of World War One was about a hundred thousand. Today, twenty thousand is Denmark. Mechanization, air power, and nuclear weapons raised the bar dramatically throughout the twentieth century. But now, in the twenty twenties, technology is lowering it again.
Drones and cyber.
Drones and cyber. The twenty twenty-six Ukraine war has been the definitive demonstration. Ukraine doesn't have the largest army in Europe, but its drone capabilities — everything from modified commercial quadcopters to long-range one-way attack drones — have allowed it to attrit a much larger Russian conventional force. Personnel count is becoming less predictive of combat effectiveness every year.
This connects to something we've talked about before — the shift from mass-based warfare to network-based capability. A small force that can see the battlefield, communicate in real time, and strike precisely is worth more than a large force that's blind and slow.
Estonia is the perfect case study. Seven thousand active personnel. That's tier two — small by any measure. But they have sixty thousand reserves, and more importantly, they have a world-leading cyber command that's been operational since twenty eighteen. NATO considers Estonia a notable contributor despite the tiny active force, because in a conflict with Russia, Estonia's cyber capabilities would be disproportionately valuable. They also host the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence in Tallinn.
Seven thousand active personnel, but they've basically weaponized their entire digital infrastructure. That's the network-to-soldier ratio in action. And this is where I want to push on the taxonomy a bit. If Estonia is tier two by headcount but tier three by capability, is our taxonomy already obsolete?
It's obsolete in the sense that personnel count alone is a bad classifier, but it's still useful as a starting point because headcount correlates with budget, and budget correlates with options. Estonia's cyber command is exceptional, but Estonia still can't do independent air superiority. They don't have fighter jets. They rely on NATO for air policing. So even a highly sophisticated tier-two country has domain gaps that a true tier-three country doesn't. The taxonomy holds if you use it as a multi-factor framework rather than a single number.
So Estonia is tier two with a tier-three asterisk in one domain.
Singapore takes a different approach but reaches a similar conclusion. Seventy-two thousand active personnel — that's solidly tier three — but the real story is the reserves. Three hundred fifty thousand reservists, and Singapore can mobilize them within forty-eight hours. That's the fastest mobilization rate in Asia. The twenty twenty-six Global Firepower index ranks Singapore twenty-fourth overall, ahead of countries with ten times its personnel. Because Singapore invests massively in technology, training, and integration. Their air force flies F-fifteen SGs and F-thirty-fives. Their navy operates submarines and frigates. For a country of five point six million people, that's extraordinary.
The city-state that decided to become a porcupine.
A very expensive porcupine. Singapore spends about three percent of GDP on defense. But the point is, seventy-two thousand active personnel doesn't capture Singapore's military power. You have to look at reserves, technology, alliances, and industrial base. And that's the real answer to the second question. The threshold where a military becomes notable is not a single personnel number — it's a capability threshold.
What's the capability threshold? If you were advising a defense analyst, what would you tell them to look for?
First, independent multi-domain operations — can the country operate in air, land, sea, cyber, and space without relying on an ally for one of those domains? Second, sustainability — can it keep fighting for more than a few weeks? That means logistics, maintenance, and a domestic or reliable foreign supply chain. Third, deterrence credibility — does the force structure match the actual threats the country faces? Israel's force structure deters Iran and Hezbollah. Singapore's deters Malaysia and Indonesia. Estonia's is designed to make a Russian invasion costly enough that NATO has time to respond.
That third one is the one I think gets overlooked most often. Deterrence credibility isn't about beating the adversary — it's about making the cost of attacking you higher than whatever the adversary hopes to gain. A small country doesn't need to win a war. It just needs to make the war not worth starting. That's the porcupine strategy in a nutshell.
It's why the personnel number is so misleading. If your deterrence strategy is "we will make this so painful you'll regret it," you don't necessarily need a large standing army. You need a mobilization system that works, a population that's willing to fight, and a few sharp teeth — cyber, drones, anti-ship missiles, whatever — that can inflict disproportionate damage. Singapore's three hundred fifty thousand reservists aren't there to invade anyone. They're there to make an invasion of Singapore a nightmare.
If you look at the twenty twenty-six landscape, the countries that are adapting fastest are the small ones. The superpowers are burdened by legacy systems, bureaucratic inertia, and the sheer cost of maintaining million-person forces. Meanwhile, a country like Estonia can reorient around cyber and drones in a matter of years.
The twenty twenty-six NATO summit is reportedly discussing a new "cyber personnel" category for force planning — essentially counting cyber operators alongside infantry. That's a recognition that the definition of military personnel is expanding. An Estonian cyber operator sitting in Tallinn can have more strategic impact than a battalion of motorized infantry.
Which raises the provocative question: could a country like Costa Rica defend itself with a drone fleet and no soldiers at all?
I think the honest answer is not yet, but the trajectory is pointing that way. If you had a network of autonomous surveillance drones, ground-based air defense systems, and cyber capabilities, you could make an invasion costly enough that it might not be worth it — especially if you're in a region where no one has a burning desire to invade you. Costa Rica's real defense isn't drones, it's the fact that Nicaragua and Panama aren't existential threats, and the U.would probably intervene if someone tried anything.
The geopolitical shelter point again.
It always comes back to that. So what does this mean for how we think about military power in twenty twenty-six? I think there are three actionable takeaways. First, for countries considering demilitarization or radical downsizing, Costa Rica's model works — but only with strong regional alliances and a functioning internal security apparatus. Costa Rica didn't just abolish the army and hope for the best. They built a robust police force, invested in education, and cultivated diplomatic relationships. It's not a one-size-fits-all solution. Try this in the Middle East and you'd be gone in a week.
The "don't try this at home" caveat.
Second takeaway: the notable threshold is shifting from personnel to capability. A ten-thousand-person force with drones, cyber units, and precision munitions is more notable than a hundred-thousand-person force with Cold War equipment sitting in warehouses. The twenty twenty-six Ukraine war has made this irrefutable. Russian personnel counts are massive, but their combat effectiveness has been degraded by poor training, corruption, and an inability to adapt to drone warfare. Ukraine's smaller, more networked force has held them off.
Third takeaway — and this is the one I think defense analysts are still grappling with — the key metric is no longer "how many soldiers" but "how many networked kill chains." A kill chain is the process from identifying a target to destroying it. If you can close that loop faster than your adversary, you win. And a small force with good sensors and fast decision loops can close kill chains faster than a large force with a sclerotic command structure.
The IISS noted this in their twenty twenty-five report — personnel count correlates poorly with combat effectiveness in modern warfare. The correlation between defense spending and capability is stronger, but even that misses things like training quality, doctrine, and network architecture. Singapore spends less in absolute terms than Saudi Arabia, but I know which military I'd rather have on my side.
The Saudi military is a cautionary tale — massive spending, top-tier equipment, and a track record of operational mediocrity in Yemen.
Because equipment without doctrine and training is just expensive targets. And that brings us to what might be the most important shift. For most of the twentieth century, military power was a function of industrial capacity and manpower. The countries with the biggest factories and the largest populations won. In the twenty-first century, military power is increasingly a function of software, networks, and speed. A country with seven thousand soldiers and a world-class cyber command can be more strategically significant than a country with seventy thousand soldiers and no cyber capability.
The Estonia problem.
The Estonia opportunity, depending on your perspective. And that leaves us with one final question that might define the next decade of defense policy. If capability is decoupling from personnel count, what does the military of twenty thirty-five look like? Does a country like Japan finally amend Article Nine and formally recognize what already exists? Does a country like Costa Rica build a drone-based defense force while still claiming to have no army? Does NATO start counting cyber operators in its force planning the same way it counts infantry battalions?
For the superpowers — the U., China, Russia — the question is whether they can adapt fast enough. A two-million-person military is an enormous institutional organism. Changing its doctrine, its procurement, its training pipeline — that's like turning an aircraft carrier. Meanwhile, a small country can pivot in a budget cycle.
is aware of this. The Pentagon's Replicator initiative is explicitly about fielding thousands of attritable autonomous systems to counter China's numerical advantage. But the institutional resistance is real. Every drone program threatens some general's pet tank program.
The infantryman's job security has never been more uncertain. And there's a deeper tension here that I don't think we've fully grappled with as a society. For two centuries, military service has been tied to citizenship, to national identity, to the social contract. If the military of twenty thirty-five is mostly autonomous systems managed by a few thousand cyber operators, what happens to that relationship? Does the public still feel connected to national defense when there are no draft notices, no local bases, no visible human cost?
That's the democratic accountability problem. If war becomes something that happens on screens, conducted by a small technical elite, the public's stake in foreign policy decisions erodes. We already saw this during the drone campaigns of the twenty teens — airstrikes conducted with zero American casualties generated very little domestic political friction, even when they went on for years. Scale that up to a fully autonomous force structure, and you have to ask: who's actually making the decision to go to war, and who's holding them accountable?
That loops back to the countries with no armies at all — the twenty-three on our list — they're not weak. They've made a strategic choice. Some of them, like Iceland, have outsourced their defense to an alliance. Some, like Costa Rica, have decided that not having an army is itself a form of security — it signals to neighbors that you're not a threat. And some, like Japan, maintain the fiction of having no army while fielding one of the world's most capable forces. The countries with small armies are not irrelevant either — they're adapting, specializing, and finding ways to be notable without being large.
The question isn't whether you have an army. It's whether your security strategy matches your threat environment. And for a surprising number of countries, the optimal strategy involves zero soldiers.
Which is a counterintuitive thing to say in twenty twenty-six, with a major land war in Europe and tensions in the South China Sea. But the data supports it. Twenty-three countries have looked at the cost-benefit analysis and decided that a standing army isn't worth it. And many more are realizing that the right question isn't "how many soldiers do we have" but "what can our soldiers actually do.
If I had to bet on the next decade, I'd say we're going to see more countries slide toward the Costa Rica end of the spectrum — not necessarily abolishing their armies, but radically shrinking their active forces and reinvesting in cyber, drones, and reserves. The math is just too compelling. Why pay for ten thousand infantry when a thousand drone operators can cover the same terrain?
Because the thousand drone operators can't hold ground. And that's the pushback I'd offer. We've seen in Ukraine that you still need infantry to occupy and hold territory. Drones can attrit, drones can disrupt, drones can make an advance prohibitively expensive — but eventually, if the adversary is willing to absorb the cost, someone has to be there with boots on the ground.
That's the counterpoint, and it's a strong one. The future is probably not "drones replace infantry" but "drones make infantry vastly more effective." A squad with drone support can do what a platoon used to do. A platoon with drone support can do what a company used to do. The personnel count shrinks, but it doesn't go to zero. At least not yet.
The hybrid model. Smaller human force, massively augmented by autonomous systems. That's probably where we're heading.
The countries that get there first — the Estonias, the Singapores, the Taiwans — are going to punch so far above their weight class that the old taxonomies won't make sense anymore. We'll need new categories.
Which is a good place to leave it, because the categories are already shifting under our feet. And now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: In the early fifteen hundreds, Basque fishermen working the waters off Newfoundland described the structure of their native language's ergative case system as having what they called "optical scatter" — claiming that the subject of a transitive verb bent the listener's attention differently than the subject of an intransitive verb, the way light bends when it passes through a prism. They insisted you could see the grammatical role if you looked closely enough at the speaker's face.
...right.
I have so many questions about sixteenth-century Basque fishermen's linguistic theories, and I'm going to suppress all of them.
This has been My Weird Prompts. Thanks to our producer Hilbert Flumingtop. You can find us at myweirdprompts dot com and on Spotify. We'll see you next time.
