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This is Kickass News, I'm Ben Mathes.

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I'm Ben Mathes.

I'm Ben Mathes.

I'm Ben Mathes.

For over 35 years, Ash Carter served in numerous jobs in the Department of Defense, most recently as the 25th Secretary of Defense under President Obama.

He currently serves as the Director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University's Kennedy School and as an Innovation Fellow at MIT.

He's written a new memoir titled Inside the Five Sided Box, Lessons From a Lifetime of Leadership in the Pentagon.

And today he joins me on the podcast to talk about it. Ash Carter, welcome.

Thanks Ben, good to be here with you.

I described Inside the Five Sided Box as a memoir, but beyond that, you give readers a fascinating organizational tour of the Department of Defense and how it operates.

You say in here that no institution in the world is as big, complex or consequential as the DOD. Can you give us some numbers that put that in perspective?

Sure, and you're absolutely right. This is not about me. This is a book about the Pentagon and how it works and it kind of takes you inside the five-sided box and gives you a peek down in the engine room at the mechanics.

And about the size, I mean, let me just give you a few metrics here. We have more employees in the Department of Defense, direct and indirect than Amazon, McDonald's, Federal Express, Target and GE.

We do more R&D than Apple, Google and Microsoft combined. We're the largest real property managers in the world, managing the territory, the size of the state of Pennsylvania.

And so this is the largest enterprise on earth by a substantial measure. It is managerially speaking because I was the number one, but I was also the number two that is the CEO.

She's operating officer, the defense department, and then I was the number three, the top weapons buyer and R&D manager.

And by in all three of those jobs had to run what is the world's largest enterprise and its budget is half of the federal government.

Wow. It's budget is larger than that of most countries. It's about the size of the country of Sweden.

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