Systems engineering

It's being an engineer of systems.

It's not systems engineering, engineering systems.

Now, what's fascinating about that is, so how do you engineer a transportation system? You have to know electrical engineering.

You have to know mechanical.

Thank you so much for joining me, Dr. Shiva.

I really do appreciate you coming in to share some of your time.

We talked a lot about health care and your background on systems engineering and how to revisit A lot of things that are happening in government and changing them because where we sit in 2026 is not the same U.S. government that we had in 2020 and 1990 and 1960 or 1800.

It's a lot different today.

Okay, last question.

I've sort of framed it in a way that takes the composite of several interlocutors about systems engineering and its importance.

in that ultimately it's the way of war now, but it's a way of war forever.

What is systems engineering? And we're going to keep this super simple.

Systems engineering is the interdisciplinary wizard in the fabbing world.

They design, they integrate, and they manage complex multi-component systems across their entire life cycle from beginning to end, from the requirements and solution set up all the way over to retirement of said systems after they've seen a lifetime of work.

Now, how does this apply to the military? The reason it applies to the military is that when you think about it, I have often said that complex adaptive systems, which is one antagonist, when it goes up against another antagonist, is what war is all about.

Inevitably, through Clausewitzian fog and friction, things go awry, plans go awry, systems are in place so that those systems can be used and relied upon to execute in the absence of the plan working.

So we don't really- Well, I would argue we do actually have some tools that allow us to model mission.

INCOSE, the, you know, the chief architect of all things system engineering, the National Coalition, whatever it is, for System Engineering, advocates behavior modeling for this kind of thing, because when I m- model behaviors, I get after the totality of what I'm trying to do.

So for example, if I were to define a behavior as an actor-

Mm-hmm