How war’s ‘Imagineers’ gave birth to the Internet
Virtually anyone who reads news or buys clothes or books online has the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to thank for it. The agency, known as DARPA, created what became the Internet as a way for missile sites to communicate with one another during a possible nuclear war.
DARPA has led the charge, for good and ill, in finding ways to locate and kill people, author Sharon Weinberger shows in her excellent The Imagineers of War: The Untold Story of DARPA, the Pentagon Agency That Changed the World (Knopf, 372 pp.,
Since its creation by President Eisenhower in 1958, DARPA’s role has shifted with the passions of the times. At first, it competed with NASA as the United States rushed to catch up with the Soviet Union after the launch of the satellite Sputnik. Then it shifted to developing new technologies and weapons for the Vietnam War. Now it looks for ways to counter the growth of China’s military and the threat of terrorism.
Weinberger, an editor at the The Intercept, an intelligence website, has cracked much of the secrecy that surrounds DARPA. Through official sources and interviews, she has put on the record many of the classified and hidden parts of DARPA’s record, including some of the agency’s embarrassing failures.
It was DARPA that gave the U.S. military napalm, the flammable gel responsible for an untold number of deaths in Vietnam, and Agent Orange, the chemical defoliant that poisoned Vietnamese civilians and U.S. troops alike.
“Agent Orange,” Weinberger writes, “became synonymous with the entire chemical defoliation program and, for many people, symbolic of the flawed war effort.”
From the failures of Vietnam came one of DARPA’s main contributions to modern warfare: the unmanned drone aircraft. Weinberger is especially deft in tracing how drones went from their early days in spotting and tracking Viet Cong fighters in the jungle to today, where they are part of the foundation of modern warfare. The U.S. antiterror fight would be lost without them.
Other DARPA victories include the development of “stealth” aircraft invisible to enemy radar. The stealth program, known within the agency as Have Blue, helped save DARPA from extinction, Weinberger writes, and gave DARPA the big research victory it needed to justify its existence.
If there’s a flaw here, it comes in the proliferation of code names and secret projects. They can be hard to keep track of, even with a scorecard.
Most of the time, however, Weinberger scores as she shows how DARPA embodies the American faith in science and technology and the belief that the United States can rely on science to put fewer Americans in harm’s way while still vanquishing the enemy. That faith contains risks.
“The allure of applying the wizardry of science and technology to warfare seems only to have made the temptation to engage in armed conflict more inviting and to have entangled the United States in a ‘forever war,’ ” she concludes.
That scary vision is one Weinberger backs up with the sheer weight of the evidence accumulated here. It’s a warning worth heeding.