You are listening to the War on the Rocks podcast from Strategy, Defense, and Foreign Affairs.

My name is Ryan Evans.

In this episode I sat down with Dr. Mara Carlin, the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategy

Plans and Capabilities.

Mara is also the author of The Inheritance, America's Military for two decades of War.

I highly recommend it.

And I hope you enjoy the conversation. This is the sixth Secretary of Defense that I'm working for right now

and Secretary Austin, which is pretty neat.

So I've been in and out of the Pentagon for the last two decades and I'm really delighted to have the opportunity to be here.

I'm an avid reader of War on the Rocks and look forward to lots of hard questions from you.

You have a second job right now.

You're doing your other job so well.

They give you a second job, is that right?

It turns out that's accurate.

So last year I spent about seven months dual-headed

as the deputy undersecret of defense and I'm

now doing that again for another four months. All right how are you enjoying that?

It's great fun. Every job has kind of its own opportunities and I would say the neat thing with being dual headed

is it forces you to really seriously prioritize to make sure that you're over

communicating so you can empower your team because you can't have as much of a feel on topics as you might want to.

It also is a neat opportunity to sort of further refine the skill set of figuring out when do you know enough

which I think for any of us like defense wonky nerd policy types it's never enough.

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