At the beginning, when the Agency was established, Gen Eisenhower who was by then President was profoundly insightful with his warnings to the country about the perils of the military industrial complex. These have always been keen words and words most American’s I know who work within this massive bureaucracy, take seriously. Jacobsen uses these words not as a warning but as a spring board into the conspiracy. However, the military industrial complex is not self-aware. It is not, in the words of Black Sabbath, a collective where “General’s gather in their masses, just like witches at black masses. Evil minds that plot destruction, sorcerers of death construction”. The author appears to think so, or she is delusional, or she is guessing—trying to make sense of something she doesn’t understand. The US military industrial complex, let alone DARPA, is not a consortium of war pigs, as the basic tone of her writing would have the layman believe. To be clear, Black Sabbath was protesting the War in Vietnam. A fair criticism. But to blame DARPA for the manifestations of war being, not just hell, but evil, is akin to believing in aliens. Strangely, as I write this, yet another kook has come forward with a conspiracy theory about aliens. Turns out I knew the guy. I’ll save that commentary for another time. It’s surprising that kook hasn’t brought DARPA into his fantasy. He did work at DARPA for a few years. Good thing Jacobsen didn’t know about that. Conspiracy theories need to focus on facts and physics and less on conspiracy and we would have more truth. As it stands, Jacobsen is mostly conspiracy. Believe one conspiracy not based on anything real, like facts or physics, and you might as well believe them all.
In the opening Chapter she gets something right. And that’s about the only thing. You can stop after the first chapter and you will know all you need to know about DARPA. It is the culture of DARPA that makes it the world class organization of innovation that is the envy of any research engineer. The secret to DARPA’s success is the rotating over a hundred brilliant, high energy, PMs through their doorway, empowering them, funding them, and getting management out of their way. They are empowered to move quickly, empowered to fail, and empowered to fail fast—yes, that a thing, and a good thing. Fail often and fail fast. And of course, the true objective of DARPA for the country is to avert strategic surprise, and she does say this…but that’s no secret, it’s in the DARPA mission statement. What Jacobsen misses is that if each PM has 2 -3 concepts and 2 -3 programs going at the same time. That means at any given time there are 400-500 active programs going on at DARPA. Over the course of several decades that means DARPA has done research into 10,000 or more major topics. It’s probably double that. I have no way of knowing, nor did she, but the numbers hold up. Sadly, she reports on a tiny few. Less than a handful. And she culls that handful into the few that shed a negative, and seemingly sinister light, on an organization attempting to predict the future in order to keep the United States ahead of our adversaries. If DARPA gets credit for being the Pentagon’s Brain, that is where they rule, in technology. Not, seemingly, as a nefarious puppet master, charting the course of our wars. It is not the nightmare organization of Ozzy Osborne’s dreams. There are no war pigs at DARPA, only researchers, technologists, engineers, and scientists of every sort. Also, on the Org chart for the Pentagon, not reported in her book, but easily researched, DARPA tucks up as an Agency under OSD/R&E. DARPA does not sit near the top of the Pentagon food chain. They don’t even have a say in the Military Strategy of the United States. As in, the Military Strategy of the United States, doesn’t even show up in their office for coordination.
Has DARPA invented things that do harm…yes. As a necessary component of defense related work, DARPA builds technology that will kill people and break things. The military is in the business of executing violence upon those who would do us harm. The necessity of agent Orange to destroy foliage so that the electric fence observing the Ho Chi Minh trail, was perhaps a great travesty and tragedy, owing to a lot of uncertainty in how to prevail in a conflict that we probably shouldn’t have been a part of. That’s the mistake of history, not a mistake of DARPA trying to respond to a warfighting requirement. Generally speaking, DARPA works outside of the acquisition process. Building technology in advance of any requirement to do so. That’s an uncertain area of acquisition. But one that is necessary if innovation is the priority. There is no conspiracy just because there is no requirement. Jacobsen seems to think DARPA is coming up with nefarious things outside of the military’s requirement to do such things, thereby pinning the ugly nature of things that go bad, on some premeditated urge to do harm. It’s wrong, it’s misleading, and it’s really insulting to the American’s who work for DARPA, pouring in their energy to be of value.
She reports on so few programs and she stretches the involvement that DARPA may have had specifically in the involvement of nuclear weapons and strategic nuclear policy. Ironically, whereas DARPA might have had some involvement, at the end of the day, there but for the grace of God go us, the country has averted nuclear war. Cooler heads, smarter heads, have always prevailed in our nuclear enterprise. The admonishments of Dr. Strangelove, won the day. That is our reality, not the crazy antics of the military general who unleashed the power of the atomic bomb. Adults remain in charge. Adults, and not conspiracy theorists, should write the history papers. Not misinformed journalists with an anti-war sentiment and certainly not Hollywood.
Jacobsen get’s the VELA Incident completely wrong. Somehow she’s twisted the mystery of possible nuclear test in the deep southern hemisphere, observed from the on-orbit VELA Satellite in September, 1979 with actual exo-atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons which occurred, by both sides, during the Cuban Missile Crises in October, 1962. Since most of her history is taken from the transcripts of interviews she did with senior officials, perhaps this is just someone’s faded memory. I’d didn’t stop to look into this gaff any further.
She wildly speculates about technology that remains classified, she claims successful, but for those in the know, has failed. Fail often and fail fast. That's what you need to know about DARPA. Sometimes technology doesn't work and those programs go away...they don't get handed over to the "Men-in-Black" to employ from the secret organizations. Wink Wink, Nod Nod. (said with as much snarky sarcasm as I can muster). Enough about that subject.
She seemingly believes the sole drive of DARPA is to build warfighting automatons...we do not want to help veterans who are amputees with robotic limbs, for instance, DARPA just builds a war machine. The job is to build a sky net. To fight wars with robots. On the one hand, what’s wrong with that? What’s wrong with trying to build systems that keep Americans from dying in our wars? That seems far more noble than sinister. What she fails to realize is that we already have robots that fight in our wars. The big lie, has always been that, the USAF, for instance, is only interested in manned systems. At least one CSAF and SECAF were fired for this ignorant belief (William Gates when SECDEF did the firing) Right or wrong, the USAF has been in the business of building unmanned systems since their inception in 1947. Missiles, rockets, target drones, autopilot, satellites, and unmanned aircraft have been in the USAF inventory. Sure DARPA has helped that along but it has been the USAF who brought this technology to the Department of Defense and the world, in a useful fashion. Certainly, many times, DARPA had a role in early research, but so did other centers for technology. The research labs at each of the services, the intel organizations, and of course external development at NASA, and major commercial companies doing engineering in areas such as Boeing, for instance, building commercial airliners it’s pretty evident that aircraft building expertise, can exist, well outside of DARPA’s hallways. The Skunk Works at Lockheed Martin as a stellar example. Without these industry research centers we would certainly be living in the technological dark ages, still. And losing to our adversary’s…maybe. In the case of China, without our advanced technology to steal, they would still be in the dark ages.
Finally, Jacobsen, had an annoying fixation on cost. She reports cost in the year and current year dollars for the programs she discusses on almost every page. These cost numbers are tiny in comparison to the DoD budgets at the time, and exist for her to simply write an extra, irrelevant paragraph in every chapter, expanding her book, and the garbage it contains, into something that many, might deduce as well researched and factual. Program budget numbers are probably the only factual thing she could obtain in her research and Freedom of Information requests. The rest is conjecture at best and pure conspiracy theory at worst. This book is fundamentally flawed. It should never have reached best seller status. That merely builds its credibility and adds to the conspiracy theory we all should be dismissing as not true, except in the movies. Too many inaccuracies for this book to be made into a movie…by any Hollywood director, short of Oliver Stone. And I hope he’s too old to take on this kind of a project. DARPA, as an organization, deserves credit and praise, not criticism of its science, and certainly not conspiracy.
Drawing conclusions and asking questions to suggest answers amount to full on manipulation at worst and or shoddy journalism at best. DARPA deserves a better historian and a better recorded history. I give her 2 stars for this crappy history, and that’s generous.
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