This is Sirens, a new but actually not terribly new series brought to you by the ladies of bombshell, where we dissect the institutions of American power.

Join us as we sound the alarm in technology, governance, and national security, and maybe

lure some end to their deaths. I'm Lauren DeYoung Schulman. I'm Roda Plum. And we are here

with Dr. Mara Carlin, who we are enormous fans of here in the Sirens bombshell extended universe.

She is currently a professor at Sysa at Johns Hopkins, a visiting scholar at Brookings,

a former strategy guru at the Department of Defense and just an all-around amazing person.

And we are actually doing something different this week.

We're bringing her into

the question of the week and it's a drill in addition to our warning signs of interview. So I'm

going to start off by picking on RADA and then go to Mara of if you could delete one buzzword

from current use, what would it be? Rada. Anything that starts with the word agentic. I'm using air quotes. You can't see it.

But I live my world with people believing that agentic solutions are going to fix all of the

things with all of their AI magic. They're not, friends. They're not. They can do some

things, but they're not the magical solution to agentic procurement, agentic enterprises,

agentic, blah, blahs. Just, I feel like it's, agentic is like something we just started using as a you thought you were starting to understand AI but let me throw agentic into it and you don't yet you should. Mara what about you?

I would like to delete the word requirements. Oh, okay. So when you do like defense budgeting and strategic planning in the Pentagon, there's this whole

effort involving requirements.

But the thing is, it assumes that you know what you actually need and that it is exactly

the answer to what you need.

And so it's always driven me nutty that folks will say my requirement is this or the requirements

process, whereas there's like a number of different ways you might be able to meet the need

and you got to try to figure out what the, you know, how you might best do that.

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