This is Sirens, a 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 on technology,

governance, and national security issues, and maybe lure some men to their deaths. This week,

Lauren and Rada sat down with Valerie Insina, a reporter with Breaking Defense, and a longtime Pentagon

Press Corps member, to discuss recent events in the Pentagon Press Corps and what makes the overall Pentagon Press Corps unique.

We've been mentioning over the past several weeks, various things that are going on between Secretary Hegsef, the media, the increasingly hostile or tense or stressful or kind of bizarre relationship that we see going on between the press

and the Department of Defense or actually right now, Department of War, which, how do you even

say that Dow? Like, that's just like ridiculous acronym. And we wanted to spend some time with

an amazing longtime friend of the show, friend of ours, who has been with spending a lot of her career

working on covering the Department of Defense, the military, the industrial base, and many things

related to this, and talk through what does this mean not only for like the near term in terms

the relationship between the Department of Defense and the media that covers it, but also what does it mean for democracy or institutions and the ability to hold the Department of Defense and the media that covers it. But also,

what does it mean for democracy or institutions and the ability to hold the Department of Defense

accountable based on what a Democratic military should look like? So we are just so excited to welcome

Valerie Insina, who is a congressional and industry reporter with breaking defense back to the show.

I say back to the show because prior bombshell guests delighted to have her back in this conversation.

And for today, we want to kick off with a first question for you, Val,

which is a really basic one that you have experience with, of like,

let's think about the before times

when when you had a Pentagon badge of what tell us up what you would describe as a typical

if there is one day in the life of a Pentagon reporter do you just like wander around the

Pentagon and like run into the Secretary of defense in the hallway. Do you meet

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