Oddballs and their transformative power

Book review of 'The Imagineers of War'

THE IMAGINEERS OF WAR 

The Untold History of DARPA, the Pentagon Agency That Changed the World 

Sharon Weinberger 

Alfred A Knopf

475 pages; $32.50

Few have heard of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, but this small Pentagon enclave has spawned some of the transformative inventions not just of modern war but of modern life: The Saturn rocket, stealth aircraft, armed drones, biofeedback systems and — biggest of all — the internet.

Yet Darpa has also devised some of the most disastrous fusions of science and war, including Agent Orange (the defoliant that disabled thousands of American troops, as well as untold numbers of civilians, in Vietnam) and myriad other projects that treated the world as a giant laboratory but neglected to notice the people inside. In The Imagineers of War: The Untold Story of DARPA, the Pentagon Agency That Changed the World, Sharon Weinberger, an executive editor at Foreign Policy and the author or co-author of two previous books about the military-scientific complex, traces the ups and downs of this agency, with its “mix of geniuses and mediocre bureaucrats” and the “procession of nuts, opportunists and salesmen” who pitched wild ideas and often won contracts to pursue them.

The agency was established, originally as ARPA, in 1958, to get the United States into space after the Soviets beat us to the punch with the Sputnik satellite. Within a year, a new civilian agency, NASA, assumed that mission. So ARPA, “struggling to find a new role for itself,” turned to the escalating war in Vietnam. President John F Kennedy, an enthusiast of counterinsurgency, funded ARPA’s Combat Development and Test Center, which put in motion Project Agile, a “covert-operations shop” run by William Godel, a veteran spy who helped recruit former Nazi rocket scientists in the late 1940s, then took on various roles in the NSA and the Pentagon’s special-operations directorate.

It was Godel who turned ARPA into a forum for ideas that were “completely screwball,” in Weinberger’s words, but got funded anyway because they were “bold and scientifically interesting.” These included a plan to control Vietnamese villages through mass hypnosis, an acoustic sniper-detection system (which produced 5,000 false positives in field tests), an interplanetary spaceship powered by thousands of nuclear explosions and a magnetic force-field to repel incoming Soviet warheads, among others.

With access to Godel’s unpublished memoir (from his daughter), Weinberger paints him as not only the driving force in this story — “more than any other ARPA official,” she writes, he “shaped the agency’s future” — but also a colourful character. His house was filled with gadgets straight out of James Bond’s Q lab. He travelled the world with cash-stuffed briefcases and, in connection with that, was sentenced to five years in prison on fraud-related charges in the mid-1960s. After leaving ARPA, he ran guns to Southeast Asia. Some suspected he was a security risk. 

The book — deeply researched and briskly paced — saunters down a gallery of oddballs apart from Godel. There’s Nicholas Christofilos, a flamboyant Greek, whose ideas were “scientifically sound but required technological miracles to make them work” and whose charisma stemmed from his lacking “any self-awareness that the concepts he proposed were outrageous.” There’s Herman Kahn, the ur-strategist of nuclear war and the probable model for Dr Strangelove, who proposed building a moat around Saigon to keep out the Vietcong. Anthony Tether, a more recent Darpa director, told Weinberger that the agency’s best program managers “have inside them the desire to be a science fiction writer.”

Yet a desire to write science fiction could lead to inventions like the internet. And who could have judged, when they were first pitched, that armed drones or brain-controlled prosthetics were any less the stuff of fantasy than many of the projects dismissed here, in retrospect, as “lunatic” or “comical”?

The key to Darpa’s successes and failures, apparently, was that it operated “below the radar,” as Weinberger writes, “unencumbered by the typical bureaucratic oversight and uninhibited by the restraints of scientific peer review.” The initial $1 million Budget for a cross-country computer network — the beginnings of the internet — was given the go-ahead after a 15-minute conversation.

That was in 1965, when the agency was ensconced in the elite E Ring of the Pentagon. In later years, as it lost favour and was moved out farther into the suburbs, it also lost some of its élan and autonomy. In her final chapter, Weinberger laments the current Darpa’s focus on narrow “technical problems” and all but pines for the days when it “sought to understand the fundamentals of society and the causes of insurgency.” Yet a recurring theme of her book, up to this point, has been the fallacy of believing that technology can win a war for hearts and minds and the “arrogance” of “treating nations as living test beds.”

Just a few pages before her concluding nostalgic dip, she condemns the “allure of applying the wizardry of science and technology to warfare,” which makes wars “more inviting” and has “entangled the United States in a ‘forever war.’” This is a cogent (though not original) critique, worthy of a separate book, but it’s a bit overstated for this one. Darpa invented the armed drone, but, as she notes, a quarter-century passed before it came into wide production and use. “The agency has largely been absent from the past 10 years of national security debates,” she observes. The question, which she leaves uncertain, is whether that’s good or bad.
 

©2017 The New York Times News Service