"The Imagineers of War: The Untold History of DARPA, the Pentagon Agency that Changed the World"

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is typically thought of as the source of such high-tech wizardry as the Internet and stealth aircraft, but, as Sharon Weinberger argues in this engaging new history of the Pentagon’s oldest and most prominent effort to promote transformative technological change, DARPA’s greatest contributions to national security have come when it goes beyond researching and developing clever new gadgets and seeks to address important national security problems. Weinberger’s book, which draws on research in thousands of pages of documents, many recently declassified, and hundreds of hours of interviews, is the first widely available systematic history of DARPA. It is also a roaring good read filled with vivid scenes and peopled with interesting characters, many of whom are still well-known within national security circles.

One of the central themes of the book is that the same characteristics that made DARPA successful also contributed to its most significant difficulties. For example, when the Advanced Research Projects Agency (Defense was added to the name in 1972) was first created in 1958, it had an open-ended charter with no specific research areas or projects identified. DARPA’s expansive role enabled it to adopt a broad perspective as it tackled big problems that bridged strategy and technology. The early Arpanet computer network, which grew into the modern Internet, was the product of the agency’s interest in important but loosely defined military problems and a research manager whose solution went beyond the narrow interests of the Department of Defense.

Yet DARPA’s wide-ranging interests also meant that it lacked a consistent mission. Out of sheer expediency, it emerged as the nation’s first space agency to demonstrate that the Eisenhower administration was taking the launch of Sputnik seriously. By 1959, however, NASA was created to oversee civilian space and all of DARPA’s military space projects were transferred back to the services. By 1961, DARPA was just a collection of science and technology programs that no one wanted with no clear mission. Over the decade that followed, it sought to support U.S. counterinsurgency efforts worldwide with little success. By the early 1970s, it was once again in search of a mission. Throughout the remainder of book, Weinberger often describes the agency as adrift.

While DARPA’s ambition and broad approach sometimes produced dramatic successes, it also resulted in embarrassing failures. In some cases, those failures were the product of trying to solve problems not amenable to technological fixes, such as DARPA’s repeated efforts to apply quantitative approaches to counterinsurgency and the prediction of conflict. On the other hand, the same attitude that allowed investigation of paranormal activities also led to support of useful new areas of science such as biocybernetics.

Similarly, although DARPA’s lack of bureaucracy enabled it to hire talented staff more quickly, pay them better salaries, and fund projects more rapidly, the same methods that helped DARPA innovate occasionally embroiled the agency in controversy. The lack of peer review and bureaucratic oversight of DARPA projects meant that programs such as the effort to develop a particle beam for missile defense, code-named Seesaw, ran for over a decade even though most thought it would never work.

Weinberger concludes by highlighting the tension between open-ended, high-level research with possible strategic implications and applied research focused on short-term assistance to forces in the field. She warns that DARPA now risks irrelevance by investing in technological novelties that are unlikely to have a significant impact rather than taking on important but risky national-level problems. The Imagineers of War is a fascinating examination of the benefits and costs of lofty goals and limited oversight in defense-related research and development.