The Pentagon's Brain

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is the most powerful and secretive military science agency in the world. Established by Congress in 1958, it operates with roughly $3 billion annually and approximately 120 program managers. The agency does not conduct research itself but hires defense contractors, academics, and government organizations, then transitions results to the military. Drawing on interviews with 71 individuals, investigative journalist Annie Jacobsen traces DARPA from its Cold War inception to present-day programs in autonomous weapons and artificial intelligence, framing the narrative around whether the agency safeguards democracy or fuels endless warfare.

The story opens on March 1, 1954, at Bikini Atoll, where the Castle Bravo hydrogen bomb exploded at 15 megatons rather than the predicted six, sending deadly fallout over inhabited atolls and a Japanese fishing trawler whose chief radio operator died of radiation poisoning. President Eisenhower downplayed the event while privately reviewing a classified map showing that such a bomb detonated over Washington, D.C., would kill millions. Jacobsen traces the backstory: after the Soviets detonated their first atomic bomb in 1949, an advisory committee unanimously opposed building a hydrogen bomb, with physicists Enrico Fermi and Isidor Rabi calling it "necessarily an evil thing" (22). Edward Teller and Ernest O. Lawrence lobbied President Truman to authorize a crash program. At a new weapons laboratory in Livermore, California, Teller protégé Herb York articulated the philosophy central to DARPA: the United States must push technological frontiers aggressively, even at the cost of accelerating the arms race.

Jacobsen introduces the intellectual milieu from which DARPA emerged. At the RAND Corporation, a Pentagon-funded think tank, mathematician John von Neumann was the most revered defense scientist of the 1950s. He applied game theory to nuclear strategy, built one of the world's first stored-program computers, and calculated the optimal detonation altitude over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. His minimax theorem, a principle for minimizing a player's maximum potential loss, and the Prisoner's Dilemma, devised by RAND analysts Merrill Flood and Melvin Dresher, suggested the arms race would be driven perpetually by distrust. Von Neumann died of cancer in 1957, leaving an unfinished manuscript theorizing that computers would one day outperform the human nervous system.

The Soviet launch of Sputnik on October 4, 1957, triggered national panic. The leak of the Gaither Report, a top-secret assessment of U.S. versus Soviet military capabilities whose most alarming estimates proved wildly inaccurate, compounded the hysteria. Secretary of Defense Neil McElroy proposed a new agency, the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), despite opposition from every military branch. Eisenhower authorized ARPA in January 1958, with York as chief scientist. Early programs included Operation Argus, a classified test of nuclear explosions in space as missile defense, and the Vela detection programs, designed to monitor compliance with a potential nuclear test ban.

A near-catastrophe on October 5, 1960, at a radar facility in Thule, Greenland, illustrated the stakes: The Ballistic Missile Early Warning System reported a Soviet attack with 99.9 percent certainty, but a human commander overruled the alarm after learning Soviet Premier Khrushchev was at the United Nations. Technicians discovered the radar had detected the moon. Physicist Marvin "Murph" Goldberger co-founded the Jason scientists, an elite advisory group that studied ballistic missile defense and proposed penetration aids leading to MIRVs (multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles). Simultaneously, ARPA official William Godel, a former Marine intelligence officer, championed counterinsurgency doctrine based on his firsthand experience of guerrilla warfare in Vietnam.

President Kennedy's arrival in 1961 transformed ARPA. Kennedy authorized Project Agile, establishing a Combat Development and Test Center in Saigon for jungle warfare technologies. The most consequential program was herbicidal warfare: a 2012 congressional report determined that between 2.1 million and 4.8 million Vietnamese were directly exposed to Agent Orange. RAND anthropologists Gerald Hickey and John Donnell discovered the Strategic Hamlet Program was causing widespread suffering, but Pentagon officials dismissed their findings. Meanwhile, psychoacoustics expert J. C. R. Licklider arrived at ARPA and conceived the "Intergalactic Computer Network," the foundational idea for the Internet. Under RAND's Viet Cong Motivation and Morale Project, researchers interviewing prisoners found insurgents driven by nationalist grievances, concluding they "could only be defeated at enormous costs, if at all" (172). RAND replaced them with analysts who told the Pentagon what it wanted to hear. The Jason scientists rejected tactical nuclear weapons for Vietnam and instead designed an electronic sensor barrier along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The $1.8 billion fence had little effect on the war but pioneered the concept of unmanned sensors feeding data to computers for targeting.

The war's aftermath brought crisis. The Pentagon Papers, leaked by former RAND analyst Daniel Ellsberg in 1971, exposed the Jasons' role, making them targets of antiwar protesters. The Mansfield Amendment barred the Pentagon from funding research without direct military application, and ARPA was exiled to Arlington, Virginia. Renamed DARPA in 1973, the agency reinvented itself. Stealth aircraft evolved from quiet gliders to the F-117 fighter, whose Have Blue prototypes were tested at Area 51 before the F-117 operated from Area 52 near Tonopah, Nevada. The ARPANET grew through Robert Kahn and Vint Cerf's TCP/IP protocols into the foundation of the Internet, and GPS satellite navigation became operational. Strategist Albert Wohlstetter identified the fusion of these technologies into a "system of systems." In 1983, President Reagan announced the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) to intercept Soviet missiles, with DARPA as the lead agency; more than $100 billion was eventually spent on SDI technologies. Air Force captain Jack Thorpe conceived SIMNET, a networked combat simulator that became the world's first massively multiplayer online war game.

The 1991 Gulf War showcased DARPA's revolution. F-117 stealth fighters destroyed 31 percent of Iraqi targets in the first 24 hours, Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System (JSTARS) aircraft provided real-time surveillance, and GPS-guided forces defeated Iraqi tanks in the Battle of 73 Easting in under half an hour. But the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu, where 18 Americans died fighting irregular militias, forced DARPA toward robotics, drones, and urban warfare.

The defection of Soviet bioweapons scientists in the early 1990s revealed Biopreparat, a massive illegal program developing antibiotic-resistant plague, weaponized smallpox, and chimera pathogens, hybrid organisms combining genes from multiple species. DARPA recognized its "blind spot" in biology. At the Defense Sciences Office, Michael Goldblatt pioneered military transhumanism, the use of technology to enhance human capabilities for war: pain vaccines, sleep-elimination research, exoskeletons, and brain-machine interfaces.

The September 11 attacks transformed DARPA again. Former national security advisor John Poindexter conceived Total Information Awareness (TIA), pitched as "A Manhattan Project on Countering Terrorism" (339-340), to monitor 285 million Americans' data daily. Public outrage forced its defunding, but the programs were quietly transferred to the NSA, CIA, and Department of Homeland Security, later revealed in the 2013 Snowden disclosures. In Iraq, improvised explosive devices (IEDs) became responsible for 63 percent of coalition deaths. The Pentagon revived Vietnam-era social science, embedding anthropologists with combat brigades through the Human Terrain System. In November 2008, team member Paula Loyd, a 36-year-old anthropologist, was set on fire by Abdul Salam while interviewing Afghan villagers and died two months later. The American Anthropological Association condemned the program as "dangerous and reckless."

Jacobsen concludes by connecting the book's opening to its close. DARPA's drone programs have evolved from insect-sized surveillance devices to autonomous weapons, and Department of Defense Directive 3000.09 mandates that "autonomous and semi-autonomous weapon systems shall be designed." The Defense Science Board's 2012 report calls for rapid acceleration, while its chairman simultaneously serves as a director of General Dynamics and chairman of RAND. In the 1950s, scientists debated whether the hydrogen bomb was an "evil thing" with no defense; now they debate whether autonomous robots will outsmart their creators. Unlike the hydrogen bomb decision, made in secret, the push toward autonomous weapons is visible. "Destiny," Jacobsen writes, "is being decided right now" (452).