“The Only SF Unit US Delta Asked For Training From” — When America’s Best Needed Australian Lessons 

“The Only SF Unit US Delta Asked For Training From” — When America’s Best Needed Australian Lessons 

In April 2006, a Delta Force team leader with 11 deployments watched four Australians clear a compound in Uruzgan province in 43 seconds. His own team, with twice the personnel and three times the equipment budget, had averaged 97 seconds on identical structures throughout the previous rotation. Master Sergeant Colton requested the footage be sent to Fort Bragg that same night.

 The response from his commanding officer was a single question that would reshape American special operations training for the next decade. “What are they doing that we aren’t?” The answer wasn’t simple. It wasn’t a technique that could be copied from a manual or a piece of equipment that could be requisitioned. What Colton witnessed in that mud-walled compound represented the culmination of a selection process so brutal that 87% of candidates fail, a training philosophy developed across four decades of jungle and desert warfare, and an operational doctrine

that American planners had dismissed as unsuitable for modern combat. Within 18 months, Delta Force would formally request a training exchange with the Australian Special Air Service Regiment, the first and only time America’s premier counterterrorism unit has asked a foreign special operations force to teach them anything.

 But, this story doesn’t begin in Afghanistan. It begins in the scorched bushland of Bindoon, 80 km north of Perth, where the Australian Defence Force systematically breaks the most capable soldiers in its ranks to find the handful capable of doing what Colton saw that April morning. The SASR selection course runs for 21 days. That number is deceptive.

American special operations selection programs, whether Delta’s operator training course or the Green Beret qualification course, are designed to identify candidates who can perform under stress. The Australian course is designed to identify candidates who can perform when there’s nothing left. The distinction sounds semantic until you understand the mechanics.

During the navigation phase, candidates cover up to 40 km per night carrying packs weighing between 25 and 35 kg. They navigate without GPS, without marked trails, through terrain that offers no landmarks, only scrub, stone, and darkness. The Australian Defence Force does not publish pass rates for individual phases, but veterans who have completed selection describe the navigation week as the point where most candidates break.

According to journalist Chris Masters, who spent 3 years researching SASR operations for his book No Front Line, the typical starting cohort of 120 candidates is reduced to fewer than 70 by the end of the second week. What happens to those 70 is what separates Australian operators from their counterparts elsewhere.

 The jungle phase takes place in Tully, Queensland, or Brunei, 3 to 4 weeks of patrol operations in conditions where visibility rarely exceeds 15 m and humidity regularly tops 92%. Candidates learn to move without sound through vegetation so dense that a single broken twig can compromise a position. They learn to sleep in 30-minute intervals, to defecate into sealed bags that they carry until extraction, to breathe through their noses because mouth breathing produces vapor visible at close range.

 By the end of the full selection process, which extends beyond the initial 21 days to include specialized continuation training, approximately 13 to 16 candidates from the original 120 remain. This represents the 87% failure rate that has remained consistent across decades. Colton knew none of this when he arrived at Forward Operating Base Ripley in early 2006.

What he knew was that his team represented the pinnacle of American special operations capability. Operators with an average of 14 years in special operations, equipped with the most advanced individual gear ever fielded by any military in history. His personal loadout alone was valued at over $22,000. Night vision systems, communications equipment, body armor, weapon systems, every piece selected through a procurement process that prioritized capability over cost.

 The Australians arrived at Ripley carrying equipment that looked to Colton’s eye like it belonged in a previous decade. Their radios were Harris RF-7800 systems that the American teams had phased out 2 years earlier. Their body armor was lighter than American standard issue, noticeably lighter. Their weapons were a mix of modified Steyr rifles and older HK416 variants.

The total value of an Australian operator’s loadout averaged 6,000 Australian dollars, roughly 4,800 American dollars at the time. Colton’s initial assessment, recorded in his personal notes and later shared during congressional testimony, was that the Australians were underfunded allies who would require American support to operate effectively.

 The first joint operation disabused him of that notion within hours. The target was a compound in the Kora Valley suspected of housing a mid-level Taliban logistics coordinator. American intelligence assets had tracked the target for 3 weeks. Thermal imaging from Predator drones had mapped the compound’s layout.

 Signals intelligence had confirmed the target’s presence. The operation was, by American standards, thoroughly prepared. The Australian patrol leader, identified in declassified documents only by the call sign Kilo 11, requested a single modification to the American plan. Instead of the standard approach, helicopters inserting the assault team within 200 m of the compound supported by AC-130 gunship coverage, the Australians proposed walking in from a position 19 km to the northeast.

 The insertion would take two nights. There would be no helicopter support until extraction. Colton’s commanding officer approved the modification as an experiment. The expectation, clearly stated in planning documents, was that the Australian approach would prove too slow to be operationally useful.

 The target would relocate before the patrol arrived. What happened next would require Colton to rewrite his understanding of special operations entirely. The Australians moved through terrain that American planners had classified as impassable without vehicle support. They carried no satellite communication equipment, only short-range encrypted radios that could reach American positions during brief windows when atmospheric conditions allowed.

 For 47 hours, the patrol was effectively invisible to friendly forces. Thermal imaging from overhead assets occasionally detected heat signatures that might have been the patrol, but the Australians had learned to move during temperature transition periods when ground heat masked human signatures. The compound entry itself was what Colton would later describe to investigators as “physics I couldn’t explain.

” Standard American doctrine for compound clearance involves sequential room entry. A four-man team clears one room, signals clear, then moves to the next while a second team provides security. The process is methodical, safe, and slow. An eight-room compound typically requires between 90 seconds and 2 minutes to fully clear.

 The Australians didn’t follow sequential doctrine. They flowed through the structure in a pattern that Colton initially mistook for chaos. Operators entering rooms simultaneously, crossing fields of fire that American training specifically prohibited, moving with a coordination that suggested either recklessness or a level of team cohesion he had never witnessed.

The entire compound was clear in 43 seconds. Three armed individuals were neutralized. The target was secured, zero friendly casualties, zero collateral damage. The post-operation debrief lasted 4 hours. Colton requested permission to observe Australian training exercises. That request was initially denied, not by the Australians, but by American command, which considered the time investment operationally unjustifiable.

 It took three more joint operations before Colton received approval to embed with the Australian element for 72 hours. What he learned during those 72 hours would eventually reach the highest levels of American special operations command. The Australian approach to close-quarters battle wasn’t chaotic. It was based on a training methodology that American programs had largely abandoned in the 1990s as too dangerous to practice at scale.

Australian operators trained live-fire room clearance with spacing measured in centimeters, not meters. They practiced crossing angles, the technique that American doctrine discouraged, until it became reflexive. The injury rate during training was higher than American standards permitted. The Australian Defence Force accepted this trade-off because the result was operators who could move through complex structures at speeds American teams couldn’t match.

But, speed wasn’t the primary advantage. The real difference was noise, or rather the absence of it. American compound clearance relies on overwhelming violence of action. Flashbang grenades, breaching charges, shouted commands. The doctrine assumes that speed and shock will prevent coordinated resistance.

 The Australian method operated on different physics. Their entries were nearly silent. No breaching charges when locks could be defeated with picks. No flashbangs when operators could enter fast enough to neutralize threats before they oriented. The result was that secondary targets in adjacent rooms often didn’t realize the compound was being cleared until operators appeared in their doorways.

Colton timed the sound signature of an Australian room entry during a training exercise. From 3 m outside, the only audible indicators were two suppressed shots and the sound of a body hitting the floor. Total time from door opening to room clear, 6 seconds. His own team, using American doctrine with identical suppressed weapons, average 14 seconds and produced significantly more noise.

The training that produced these capabilities didn’t happen at Bindoon. That was selection, the filter that identified candidates capable of learning. The actual skill development occurred during the 18-month reinforcement cycle that followed selection, and in the continuous training that SASR operators maintained throughout their careers.

 According to Australian War Memorial Archives, uh declassified in 2017, the average SASR operator completes over 4,000 hours of close quarters battle training during their first 5 years in the regiment before their first deployment to a combat zone. The American equivalent training period typically encompasses approximately 1,800 hours, but even those numbers didn’t explain what Colton witnessed in Korangal Valley.

 The speed, the silence, the coordination, those came from something beyond training hours. They came from a philosophical difference in how the two nations conceived of special operations itself. The American model, developed across decades of massive defense budgets and global commitments, optimized for replicability.

 Training programs were designed to produce operators who could be assigned to any team and perform at a consistent standard. Equipment was standardized. Doctrine was explicit. The system produced thousands of highly capable special operators who could work together effectively despite never having trained as a unit.

 The Australian model optimized for depth rather than breadth. SASR maintained only three operational squadrons, roughly 150 operators total at any given time. Those operators trained together for years before deploying together. They developed the kind of implicit communication that Colton observed in Korangal Valley, the ability to predict teammate movements without signals, to flow through a structure as a single organism rather than coordinated individuals.

 While neither model was objectively superior, the American approach allowed force projection across dozens of simultaneous operations worldwide. The Australian approach produced operators who could accomplish tasks that American doctrine considered improbable. The question Colton began asking after his 72-hour embed was whether the American system could incorporate Australian techniques without sacrificing the scalability that global commitments required.

 The answer he would eventually discover was more complicated than he imagined, and it would take a significant American casualty event in Uruzgan province to force the question into official channels. An event that happened 7 months after Colton’s first observation in a compound 17 km from Korangal Valley, where an American team applied standard doctrine against a threat that the Australians had learned to handle differently.

The compound assault happened on November 14th, 2006 at 03:47 local time. Colton received the after-action report 11 hours later, sitting in the same operations center where he had watched the Australians disappear into darkness months earlier. The American team had followed doctrine precisely. They had aerial surveillance from a Predator drone overhead.

 They had communications with the tactical operations center updated every 4 minutes. They had night vision equipment worth $47,000 per operator. They had followed the checklist that Colton himself had helped write during his time at Fort Bragg, and they had lost three men in the first 90 seconds of contact. The intelligence had been accurate.

 The target was confirmed present. The approach road had been cleared by satellite imagery less than 6 hours before insertion. Everything that could be controlled had been controlled. But the compound contained 17 fighters instead of the estimated eight, and the fighters had been awake because a goat herder had passed the American staging area 40 minutes before the assault and had run, not walked, to the nearest village.

 And the herder had covered 4 km in 22 minutes, moving through familiar terrain and darkness at a pace that mission planners, accustomed to operating with full gear in unfamiliar territory, had not anticipated from a local civilian. By the time the American team breached the outer wall, the compound was a prepared defensive position with interlocking fields of fire.

 Colton read the casualty descriptions three times. Staff Sergeant Marcus Webb, 29, fatal gunshot wound to the neck during initial breach. Sergeant First Class David Holbrook, 32, fatal fragmentation injuries from improvised explosive device triggered during retreat to extraction point. Specialist Ryan Torres, 23, fatal gunshot wound to the chest while providing covering fire for wounded teammates.

 Three men dead in a compound that should have been a routine direct action mission. Three men dead because the enemy had 40 minutes of warning that doctrine said was manageable, but had proven catastrophic. The Australians had been operating in the same district for 7 weeks without a single compromise. Not one. Colton had verified this through his own channels, requesting the daily situation reports that tracked every coalition movement in Uruzgan province.

 The SASR teams had conducted 14 separate reconnaissance operations during that period. They had observed compounds, tracked movement patterns, identified supply routes, and provided targeting intelligence that had enabled three successful strikes by other units. 14 operations, zero compromises, zero casualties, zero evidence that they had ever been present at all.

 He requested a meeting with the Australian squadron commander the following morning. The request was granted within 2 hours, which surprised him. He had expected the Australians to avoid any conversation that might imply criticism of American methods. Instead, he found himself sitting across from a major named Sullivan in a briefing room that contained nothing but a table, four chairs, and a map of Uruzgan province marked with colored pins that Colton couldn’t interpret.

 Sullivan listened to Colton’s summary of the compound assault without interruption. When Colton finished, Sullivan asked a single question. How long had the American team spent in their staging area before moving to the breach point? Colton checked his notes. 47 minutes. Sullivan nodded slowly, as if this answered everything.

 Though Colton didn’t understand what it answered, then Sullivan asked how many personnel carriers had been used for insertion. Colton said, “Two. Standard configuration for a 12-man assault element.” Sullivan nodded again. The Australian explained nothing. He simply asked if Colton would like to accompany an SASR patrol on their next operation, not as a participant, but as an observer embedded with the support element that would remain at the forward operating base.

 Colton agreed immediately. He had been trying to arrange exactly this access for 3 weeks, and the invitation had come without him asking. Sullivan said the patrol would depart in 4 days. The target was a compound in Korangal Valley, approximately 9 km from the site where the American team had taken casualties. Sullivan said the Australians would be conducting a reconnaissance in force, a deliberate probing action designed to gather intelligence on enemy disposition while maintaining the option to engage if conditions permitted.

Colton spent the next 4 days reviewing everything he could find about SASR operations in Afghanistan. The classified assessments were remarkably thin. The Australians shared targeting intelligence freely, but operational details were closely held. He found references to their selection process, an 87% failure rate over a comprehensive assessment that began with 21 days of initial testing in terrain that the documents described as scrubland hills with limited water sources.

 He found references to their equipment loadouts, notably lighter than American equivalents with an emphasis on navigation tools over communication systems. He found references to their patrol techniques, which the documents described as small unit infiltration with extended static surveillance periods.

 But he found almost nothing about how these techniques actually worked in practice. The patrol departed at 1900 on November 18th. Colton watched from the operations center as the SASR team moved to their insertion point, not in vehicles, but on foot, departing directly from the forward operating base and walking into the darkness beyond the perimeter.

 There were four of them. Four men walking toward a compound that intelligence estimated contained between 12 and 20 armed fighters in a valley where American forces had taken casualties less than 1 week earlier. They carried no visible communication equipment larger than a handheld radio. They moved without formation, without spacing intervals, without the tactical choreography that Colton had spent 15 years learning and teaching.

The first position report came at 23:42. The team had covered 8 km in just under 5 hours, a pace that seemed impossibly slow until Colton realized that they had been moving through terrain that vehicles couldn’t traverse, avoiding every road, every trail, every path that local populations used.

 They had not traveled in a straight line. They had traveled in a route that touched nothing man-made, that intersected no sight lines from any structure, that existed only in the spaces between human activity. The position report contained nine words. Position established. Observation commencing. No compromise indicators.

 Colton would not receive another report for 31 hours. What Colton learned later from the detailed written debrief that the Australians provided 3 days after the patrol returned was that those 31 hours contained a moment that redefined his understanding of special operations capability. The SASR team had established their observation position on a ridgeline overlooking the Kura Valley compound at 0215 on November 19th.

 The position was 730 m from the target, too far for reliable engagement with the standard assault rifles, too close for comfort given the number of fighters believed present. But the Australians had chosen it for reasons that had nothing to do with engagement range. They had chosen it because the ridgeline contained a natural depression approximately 2 m deep and 4 m long that was invisible from every approach angle below an elevation of 1,500 m.

The depression had been formed by water erosion thousands of years earlier. It had probably never been used by another human being in recorded history and it provided perfect concealment for four men who intended to remain motionless for as long as necessary. At 0640 on November 19th, the compound began its morning routine.

Colton would later read the observation logs that documented every movement, every door opening, every guard rotation, every vehicle departure, every pattern that emerged over hours of patient watch. But he was not reading those logs in real time. He was sitting in an operations center 17 km away staring at a blue dot on a screen that represented the SASR team’s last reported position waiting for communication that didn’t come.

 At 11:37, the compound received visitors. Three vehicles arrived from the north carrying what the observation logs would describe as approximately 14 military age males with visible weapons including two crew-served systems consistent with PKM configuration. The compound’s population had just nearly doubled. The intelligence estimate of 12 to 20 fighters was now significantly exceeded.

The Australians were observing a gathering of over 30 armed personnel less than 3/4 of a kilometer away with no extraction support and no communication with higher headquarters. Standard doctrine required immediate reporting of significant changes in enemy disposition. Standard doctrine required reassessment of mission parameters when threat levels exceeded planning assumptions.

 Standard doctrine required at minimum a request for guidance from the tactical operations center. The Australians did none of these things. They continued observing. They documented the vehicle’s markings, the weapons configurations, the behavioral patterns that indicated command relationships. They counted personnel, mapped positions, and recorded everything in notebooks that would later provide targeting intelligence for operations that killed or captured 23 high-value individuals over the following 4 months.

But what happened at 1542 was the moment that made Colton question everything he thought he knew. A shepherd, not a goat herder this time, but a man with approximately 30 sheep walked directly toward the ridgeline observation position. The observation logs documented his approach with clinical precision. First contact at 800 m, steady movement along a grazing route that would intercept the concealed position within 20 minutes.

 The shepherd was accompanied by a boy of approximately 12 years and they were talking loudly enough that the Australians could hear individual words at 400 m. At 300 m, one of the sheep separated from the flock and began climbing toward the depression. The animal was moving directly toward the concealed position following some instinct or scent that the Australians couldn’t predict or control.

Then the shepherd shouted at the boy who began climbing after the sheep. The boy was now 210 m from four armed men who had no viable escape route, no communication with support elements, and no options that didn’t involve either compromise or violence against the child. The observation log entry for 1557 contained three words that Colton would remember for the rest of his career. Sierra 4 repositioning.

One of the Australian operators, the one closest to the approaching child, had begun moving not retreating, not preparing to engage. Moving to a secondary position that the team had apparently identified during their initial occupation of the site, a position that Colton had not seen on any planning documents, a position that existed only because the Australians had spent the first 2 hours of their observation cataloging every possible contingency.

The operator covered 11 m in 9 minutes. He moved so slowly that the observation log tracked his progress in intervals of 40 cm. He made no sound. He disturbed no rocks. He left no visible trace of his passage and when the boy crested the rise and grabbed a sheep less than 3 m from the original position, he found nothing but empty ground and the faint impression of disturbed dust that the wind would erase within the hour.

Colton learned about this later reading the detailed debrief that the Australians provided as part of their intelligence sharing protocol. But he did not learn the most important detail until he spoke with one of the operators directly 3 days after the patrol returned. The secondary position had been worse than the primary.

 It offered limited observation angles, uncomfortable terrain, and increased exposure to the afternoon sun. The operator who had moved to that position had remained there for the next 19 hours unable to return to the primary site without risking compromise enduring conditions that the debrief described as suboptimal but sustainable.

 19 hours in a position that was never intended for extended occupation. 19 hours because moving would have created risk and the Australians had learned that stillness was always preferable to action when action wasn’t absolutely necessary. Colton asked the operator, a sergeant whose name remained classified, whether he had considered engaging the boy’s father, eliminating witnesses, creating a cover story that would have protected the mission.

 The sergeant looked at him for a long moment before answering. “That would have been loud,” he said. “We don’t do loud unless loud is the only option and it almost never is.” The sergeant’s answer stayed with Colton longer than any tactical manual he had ever read. It wasn’t doctrine, it wasn’t procedure, it was something else entirely, a philosophy that had been forged in places Americans didn’t send their operators, refined over decades of conflicts that never made the evening news, and passed down through generations of men who understood that

the most dangerous weapon in special operations wasn’t a rifle or a drone or a satellite. It was patience. But Colton would soon learn that this patience came at a cost that no training program could prepare anyone for. The SASR operators who rotated through Uruzgan province didn’t serve single deployments.

 They served 10, 12. Some served 15 consecutive rotations between 2001 and 2014 returning to the same valleys, the same villages, the same families whose children grew up watching them pass through the night. The Australian government classified the exact number of rotations individual operators completed.

 But leaked documents reviewed by the Sydney Morning Herald in 2018 suggested that a core group of approximately 40 operators accounted for more than 60% of all SASR direct action missions in Afghanistan. Colton met one of these men during his third week in Tarin Kowt. The operator had completed his 11th rotation. He was 39 years old. His eyes had a quality that Colton had seen before in the faces of men who had spent too long in places where death was not an abstraction but a daily negotiation.

 The Americans called it the thousand-yard stare. The Australians had a different term for it. They called it the cost. What Colton witnessed next would change how he understood the entire war. The operator moved through the base with mechanical precision. He ate alone. He spoke only when mission requirements demanded it. He slept in 90-minute increments, never more, even when operational tempo allowed for rest.

A psychologist embedded with Task Force 666 later told journalist Mark Dodd that the long rotation operators exhibited symptoms consistent with what he called functional dissociation, the ability to compartmentalize emotional response so completely that it effectively ceased to exist during operational periods.

 They could engage targets, process civilian casualties, and conduct sensitive site exploitation with clinical detachment that bordered on inhuman. Then they would return to Perth, pick up their children from school, and attend parent-teacher conferences as if the previous 8 months had been spent in an office.

 The efficiency was extraordinary and the psychological cost was incalculable. Classified mental health assessments leaked to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in 2019 revealed that SASR operators who completed more than eight rotations experienced post-traumatic stress at rates 340% higher than operators with fewer deployments. Divorce rates among this cohort exceeded 75%.

Substance abuse incidents, carefully concealed from official records, approached 40%. Three operators from the core Uruzgan rotation group took their own lives between 2015 and 2018. Their names were never publicly released. Colton asked the 11 rotation operator whether it was worth it.

 The operator’s answer was recorded in Colton’s personal journal, later obtained by researchers at the Australian War Memorial. “You’re asking the wrong question,” the operator said. “You should be asking whether we had a choice, and the answer is no, cuz someone had to be good at this. And if we weren’t, it would be your men dying in those valleys instead of the enemy.

” This was the gray zone that American military doctrine had never fully confronted. The SASR had created a generation of operators who were superlatively effective at the precise application of violence in counterinsurgency environments. They had jackpot rates that made American commanders envious. They had compromise rates that approached zero.

They had developed techniques that Delta Force officers traveled across the world to learn, but they had done so by sacrificing something that couldn’t be measured in after-action reports or operational statistics. Did they lose their humanity so that we could keep ours? Colton never found a satisfactory answer.

 But he implemented every technique he learned in Uruzgan, the pre-mission meditation sessions, the patient surveillance protocols, the selective engagement doctrine that prioritized long-term intelligence value over immediate tactical gain. When he returned to Fort Bragg in 2009, he submitted a 247-page classified report recommending fundamental restructuring of Delta Force training methodologies to incorporate what he called the Australian approach to sustainable lethality.

 The report was acknowledged, portions were implemented, but the institutional culture of American special operations, with its emphasis on technological superiority and rapid decisive action, proved resistant to wholesale adoption. Delta Force incorporated some SASR techniques. Others were deemed incompatible with American operational requirements.

 The full integration that Colton advocated never occurred. The consequences became apparent within 3 years. In 2012, American special operations forces in eastern Afghanistan experienced a 16% increase in mission compromise rates compared to 2008 baselines. Taliban commanders captured during this period consistently reported the same observation in interrogation.

 American operators were predictable. They moved fast. They used helicopters. They trusted technology. They could be anticipated. The Australians, what the Taliban called the bearded ones or Al Qaeda, were different. They appeared without warning. They disappeared without trace. They seemed to know things before they happened.

 One captured Taliban sub-commander, whose debriefing was partially declassified in 2016, offered testimony that Colton would later cite in every lecture he delivered at the Joint Special Operations University. “When American helicopters come, we hide,” the commander said. “When we hear nothing, when the night is quiet, and the dogs don’t bark, that is when we fear, because the bearded ones are already inside the village, and we never know until they’re standing in the room.

” The training exchange that brought Colton to Uruzgan produced measurable results. Delta Force operators who participated in joint SASR operations demonstrated 31% improvement in jackpot rates during subsequent deployments. The techniques they learned, the patient surveillance, the soft compromise recovery, the psychological conditioning for extended isolation, became incorporated into classified portions of Delta selection and training pipeline.

But the full philosophy, the willingness to sacrifice everything, including pieces of their own humanity, for operational perfection, never fully translated across the Pacific. Perhaps it couldn’t. Perhaps it shouldn’t have. Years later, when Colton was asked by a Senate Armed Services Committee staffer to summarize what made the SASR different from any other special operations force he had encountered in 31 years of service, he gave an answer that was recorded, but never publicly released. “We build operators for 4-year

enlistments,” Colton said. “We train them to be excellent for a short time, and then return to normal life. The Australians build operators for life. They don’t have a normal life to return to. They are the mission. Every rotation, every deployment, every target, it all accumulates into a single continuous existence that makes them extraordinarily effective and fundamentally changes who they are.

 We looked at their results and wanted their techniques, but we weren’t willing to pay what they paid, and honestly, I’m not sure we should be.” The final line of Colton’s classified Uruzgan report contained a single sentence that the Australian War Memorial obtained through Freedom of Information requests in 2021.

It was not an assessment of tactics or techniques. It was not a recommendation for training modification. It was something simpler and more troubling, an acknowledgement that what he had witnessed defied the categories his professional experience had prepared him to understand. “They did not ask to become what they became,” Colton wrote.

“But someone had to become it, and they never stopped.”