The man on the cover of IEEE Spectrum's May issue is not the soldier I expected. He is an architect who spent fifteen years inside an exoskeleton and kept telling its engineers what they had missed. What his story says about stakeholder elicitation, with a free worksheet at the bottom.

A humanoid robot named Bebop bought a plane ticket, boarded a Southwest Airlines flight in Oakland, and promptly had its battery confiscated on the tarmac. The flight left an hour late. The battery got overnighted to Chicago. And somewhere in that scramble is a systems engineering lesson that has nothing to do with robots and everything to do with how we design for the full system life cycle — not just the moment of use.

An IEEE Spectrum piece on the Ukrainian drone war quotes a German defense analyst calling for “very rapid iteration and testing cycles” from the West. That is nearly the verbatim definition of Agile Systems Engineering in the Fifth Edition of the INCOSE SE Handbook. It is also a question the Army Test and Evaluation Command was already answering in 2005, when I was teaching validation to a room full of working engineers.

Congress told NASA to build a new rocket out of old Shuttle parts. The INCOSE Handbook calls that a brownfield design problem. The cost difference between that approach and SpaceX's clean-sheet alternative is a systems engineering lesson worth $60 billion.

The electric vehicle supply chain stretches from a showroom in California to a cobalt mine in eastern Congo, and most of the people in between never appear on a requirements document. This piece starts with a classroom question about a cow and ends with a mine collapse, and the Systems Engineering lesson connecting them is the same one the INCOSE SE Handbook has been making all along: your stakeholders are everyone your system affects, not just the ones who are easy to find.