Annie Jacobsen - The Pentagons Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, Americas Top-Secret Military Research Agency

Operation Paperclip

Area 51

The best way to predict the future is to create it.

Erich Fromm

T he Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA as it is known, is the most powerful and most productive military science agency in the world. It is also one of the most secretive and, until this book, the least investigated. Its mission is to create revolutions in military science and to maintain technological dominance over the rest of the world.

DARPA was created by Congress in 1958 and has functioned ever since as the central research and development organization of the Department of Defense. With an annual budget of roughly $3 billion, DARPA is unlike any other military research agency in the United States. DARPA as an agency does not conduct scientific research. Its program managers and directors hire defense contractors, academics, and other government organizations to do the work. DARPA then facilitates the transition of its successful results to the military for use. It acts swiftly and with agility, free from standard bureaucracy or red tape. DARPA maintains an extraordinarily small staff. For six decades now the agency has employed, on average, 120 program managers annually, each for roughly five years tenure. These entrepreneurial leaders, the majority of whom are accomplished scientists themselves, initiate and oversee hundreds of research projectsinvolving tens of thousands of scientists and engineers working inside national laboratories, military and defense contractor facilities, and university laboratoriesall across America and overseas.

DARPA program managers maintain an unusual degree of authority in an otherwise rigid military chain of command. They can start, continue, or stop research projects with little outside intervention. Once ready for fielding, the resulting weapons and weapons-related systems are turned over to the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines, and to intelligence agencies including the CIA, NSA (National Security Agency), DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency), NGA (National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency), NRO (National Reconnaissance Office), and others.

DARPA carefully controls its public persona. Stories about DARPA as Americas cutting-edge science agency appear regularly in the press, while the bulk of DARPAs more consequential and sometimes Orwellian programs go largely unreported. Tiny DARPA implants could give humans self-healing powers, headlined CBS News in the fall of 2014. That same week, Business Insider ran the headline DARPAs Incredible Jumping Robot Shows How the US Military Is Pivoting to Disaster Relief. These and other DARPA stories angle toward health and wellness, when in fact DARPAs stated mission is to create weapons systems. This book reveals why. Many news stories remind readers that DARPA created the Internet, Global Positioning Systems (GPS), and stealth technology. But to describe DARPA this way is to describe Apple as the computer company that built the Macintosh 512K. These DARPA milestones are forty-year-old inventions. Why has so much else about Americas most powerful and most productive military science agency been shrouded in mystery? This book shines a light on DARPAs secret history.

Until 1972, DARPA was located inside the Pentagon. Today the agency maintains headquarters in an unmarked glass and steel building four miles from the Pentagon, in Arlington, Virginia. DARPAs director reports to the Office of the Secretary of Defense. In its fifty-seven years, DARPA has never allowed the United States to be taken by scientific surprise. Admirers call DARPA the Pentagons brain. Critics call it the heart of the military-industrial complex. Is DARPA to be admired or feared? Does DARPA safeguard democracy, or does it stimulate Americas seemingly endless call to war?

DARPA makes the future happen. Industry, public health, society, and culture all transform because of technology that DARPA pioneers. DARPA creates, DARPA dominates, and when sent to the battlefield, DARPA destroys. We are faced with huge uncertainties and shifting threats, DARPA director Arati Prabhakar stated in a press release in 2014, but we also have unparalleled opportunities to advance technologies in a way that can provide the nation with dramatic new capabilities. But what if some of these dramatic new capabilities are not such great ideas?

To research this book, I interviewed seventy-one individuals uniquely affiliated with DARPA, going back to the earliest days of the agency. The list includes presidential science advisors, DARPA program managers and scientists, members of the esoteric and highly secretive Jason scientists, captains, colonels, a Nobel laureate, and a four-star general. In interviewing these individuals, I heard stories about pushing known scientific boundaries in the name of national security, about weather warfare, social science experiments, and war games. I heard about brilliance and hubris, about revolutionary triumphs and shortsighted defeat. One concept stands out. DARPA, by its mandate, pioneers advanced military science in secret. A revolution is not a revolution unless it comes with an element of surprise. Once DARPA technology is revealed on the battlefield, other nations inevitably acquire the science that DARPA pioneered. For example, in the early 1960s, during the Vietnam War, DARPA began developing unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones. It took three decades to arm the first drone, which then appeared on the battlefield in Afghanistan in October 2001. By the time the public knew about drone warfare, U.S. drone technology had advanced by multiple generations. Shortly thereafter, numerous enemy nations began engineering their own drones. By 2014, eighty-seven nations had military-grade drones.