The Imagineers of War: The Untold Story of DARPA, the Pentagon Agency That Changed the World

by Sharon Weinberger

A drinker, a practical joker, and a master bureaucratic negotiator, Godel was the type of man who could one day offer to detonate a nuclear bomb in the Indian Ocean to make a crater for the National Security Agency’s new radio telescope and the next day persuade the president to launch the world’s first communications satellite to broadcast a Christmas greeting.

Colleagues described him as someone you could drop in a foreign country, and a few months later he would emerge with signed agreements in hand, whether it was for secret radar tracking stations—something he did indeed set up in Turkey and Australia—or,

Founded in 1958 to get America into space after the Soviets launched the world’s first artificial satellite, ARPA had lost its space mission after less than two years. Now the young organization, hated by the military and distrusted by the intelligence community, was struggling to find a new role for itself.

The cash in Godel’s bag, and his list of proposals for Diem, would alter the course of events in Vietnam and more broadly lay the groundwork for modern warfare.

Within just a few months of that trip, Godel would bring over to Vietnam a new gun better suited for jungle warfare, the Armalite AR-15. He would also send social scientists to Vietnam, hoping that a better understanding of the people and culture would stem the insurgency. Some of Godel’s work became infamous, like a plan to relocate Vietnamese peasants to new fortified villages, known as strategic hamlets. That plan became one of the more resounding failures of the war. Similarly, ARPA’s introduction to Vietnam of chemical defoliants, including Agent Orange, is now held responsible for countless deaths and illnesses among Vietnamese and Americans.

Four decades before Petraeus made “counterinsurgency” a household phrase, Godel created a worldwide research program dedicated to insurgent warfare that dwarfed anything done in the years after 9/11.

just a month before Godel traveled to Vietnam, ARPA was handed a new assignment in command and control, which would in less than a decade grow into the ARPANET, the predecessor to the modern Internet. The following year, Godel personally signed off on the first computer-networking study, giving it money from his Vietnam budget.

the real key to the ARPA legacy lies in understanding how all these varied projects—satellites, drones, and computers—could come to exist in a single agency.

It is tempting to carve out unsuccessful work, like the counterinsurgency programs, by claiming this was an aberration in the agency’s history. This book argues, however, that DARPA’s Vietnam War work and the ARPANET were not two distinct threads but rather pieces of a larger tapestry that held the agency together. What made DARPA successful was its ability to tackle some of the most critical national security problems facing the United States, unencumbered by the typical bureaucratic oversight and uninhibited by the restraints of scientific peer review.

The Internet and the agency’s Vietnam War work were proposed solutions to critical problems: one was a world-changing success, and the other a catastrophic failure. That muddied history of Vietnam and counterinsurgency might not fit well with DARPA’s creation story, but it is the key to understanding its legacy. It is also the history that is often the most challenging to get many former agency officials to address. DARPA may brag about its willingness to fail, but that does not mean that it is eager to have those failures examined.

The key to DARPA’s success in the past was not just its flexibility but also its focus on solving high-level national security problems. DARPA today runs the risk of irrelevancy,

Conversely, if the stakes are not high, then neither the successes nor the failures matter, and that is where the agency is in danger of heading today, investing in technological novelties that are unlikely to have a significant impact on national security.

Most past directors share a very similar sentiment: DARPA continues to produce good solutions to problems, but the problems it is assigned, or assigns itself, are no longer critical to national security.

Along with a bomb, a second airplane flying over Nagasaki dropped canisters containing scientific instrumentation. The canisters also contained copies of a personal letter several Manhattan Project scientists addressed to a prominent Japanese scientist. “You have known for several years that an atomic bomb could be built if a nation were willing to pay the enormous cost of preparing the necessary material,” the letter, written by the nuclear physicist Luis Alvarez, read. “Now that you have seen that we have constructed the production plants, there can be no doubt in your mind that all the output of these factories, working 24 hours a day, will be exploded on your homeland.”

“We have spent two billion dollars on the greatest scientific gamble in history,” he said, “and won.”

Should we continue to fight, it would not only result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also it would lead to the total extinction of human civilization.”

The United States might have beaten the rest of the world in building an atomic bomb, but the Germans during the war had achieved something that the Americans, British, and Soviets had not: a guided ballistic missile. The V-2, a liquid-propelled rocket developed

“Hey, you,” an American woman snapped. “Come put this baggage aboard and I’ll give you a cigarette.” “Jawohl, gnädige Frau,” Godel answered, picking up her bag. As he carried it to the train, he walked with a slight limp—a war injury, something not uncommon to see in a German man his age in Frankfurt; Germany was flooded with crippled veterans.

Godel was accustomed to being given orders by Americans in the train station, and the woman’s request to carry her bag was a relief; it meant that he was passing for what he was meant to pass for: Hermann Buhl, a former member of Germany’s Wehrmacht, and not an American covert operative. The young American was posing as a German veteran so he could slip across Soviet-occupied areas in Germany and Austria, and even into the Soviet Union, recruiting Russian and German scientists, engineers, and military officers to work for the United States.

York, along with holding the title of “chief scientist,” served as the head of a technical division of about two dozen personnel contracted from the Institute for Defense Analyses, a federally funded nonprofit research center. Those personnel, all essentially on loan to ARPA, were the scientific talent. By contracting them through an outside institution, the agency could afford to pay them more than their normal government salaries while also avoiding the red tape involved in hiring full-time government employees.

Beyond the technical personnel, there was minimal bureaucracy, in large part because ARPA did not even issue its own contracts, instead using the military services to handle the paperwork.

Because it was decided from the outset that ARPA would not have its own contracting staff, paperwork was limited to brief memos, known as ARPA orders. Policies and procedures were ad hoc, largely a result of ARPA having Johnson as its head, according to Donald Hess, one of ARPA’s first employees.

Indeed, one of the most enduring features of ARPA—and not necessarily something that was intentional in its creation—was its ability to avoid bureaucracy. ARPA could immediately fund projects that the military services might take months, or even years, to start.

The decision to use the mechanical mice was made after two sets of live mice had died, raising the ire of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. In one launch, the mice died prior to liftoff after they ingested bits of paint sprayed on their cage (believing the mice might be asleep, engineers went up and banged on the capsule, even mimicking a cat’s meow). Killing mice in a program that was ostensibly supposed to demonstrate a life-support system was, in general, rather bad publicity,

ARPA was an expedient solution born in the midst of crisis, and as 1959 came to a close, its brief but chaotic life seemed to be almost over. In less than two years, it had taken the mantle of the country’s first space agency and had pushed its agenda for advanced technology aggressively. Yet it had lost more battles than it had won, and it still had neither its own offices nor any permanent employees. That ARPA survived much beyond 1959 could be credited, not completely, but in large part, to Godel, who understood how badly ARPA had bungled relations with the White House and the scientists who held sway there.

The Defense Department’s internal study of the war, known as the Pentagon Papers, would later claim Robert Thompson, head of the British Advisory Mission, was the one who proposed and persuaded Diem in December 1961 to pursue strategic hamlets. But by the time Thompson showed up, Godel had already spent months laying the groundwork.

Taylor, who made his reputation in World War II, “was at best quizzical about partisan warfare, even when he was reminded that the French and British underground had done good work for his 82nd Airborne Division in France and Germany,” Godel wrote. “He was also convinced that the 82nd Airborne could solve the problems of Vietnam with one hand tied behind his back.”

Godel brought some of the more benign counterinsurgency gadgets home for a commonsense evaluation. One time, for example, Larry Savadkin, a navy officer assigned to work with Godel, bought sporting pontoons, essentially water shoes, from Abercrombie & Fitch, hoping they might be useful in Vietnam, and Godel let his daughters try them out on the lake. The pontoons would in theory allow a soldier to glide down Vietnam’s water canals. Godel’s daughters called them “walking on water shoes” or “Jesus shoes.” But even in Lake Barcroft, thousands of miles away from Vietnam, it was easy to see they would not work.

Godel was, quite simply, experimenting with technology and weapons to see what would be effective in the jungle. His most basic premise, which he frequently argued with government officials, was that providing advanced technology, like jet aircraft and helicopters, to developing countries was nearly useless.

Godel and his team gathered technology from wherever they could find it. For example, he used ARPA funds on a trip to Australia to buy a small, jet-powered drone and gave it to Brundage, in Saigon, making it the first unmanned aircraft deployed in Vietnam.

The new rifle, designed by Eugene Stoner, was lightweight, “something the short, small Vietnamese can fire without bowling themselves over,” a summary description of Godel’s trip recounted.

Godel and Ruina did not feud so much as simply avoid each other. Ruina, a PhD electrical engineer, wanted ARPA to be a scientific institution and despised everything about Project AGILE and the agency’s involvement in Vietnam.

Ruina, a disciple of Herbert York’s, wanted to create a science agency that served national security, while Godel wanted to build a national security agency served by scientists. The battle over those competing visions would characterize the agency’s future.

A little more than two weeks after Kennedy moved into the White House, his defense secretary, Robert McNamara, thinking he was speaking off the record, inadvertently revealed to the nation that there was no missile gap at all.

Ruina called the briefing “The Earth Is Round,” because that is literally where it started, explaining that the earth was a globe, which meant ground-based radar could only detect a missile within a few thousand miles, providing precious little time to launch another missile to intercept it.

Kennedy changed that, giving the scientists at ARPA what was arguably the world’s most important problem: nuclear warfare.

One proposal called for orbiting battle stations—large armed satellites—that would shoot out pellets enmeshed in a giant net meant to perforate enemy warheads.

BAMBI illustrated the fine line ARPA had to walk in many areas of technology: If its missile defense solutions were too conventional, then there was no point pursuing them. After all, the idea was to come up with technological solutions that were significantly better than what the military had already done with Nike Zeus. On the other hand, if the solutions were too unrealistic, like BAMBI, then ARPA would be accused of throwing money at science fiction.

Marvin “Murph” Goldberger, a former student of Enrico Fermi’s, headed the group, which included Murray Gell-Mann and Steven Weinberg, both young physicists who would go on to win Nobel Prizes. Members of the group would meet for several weeks over the summer and then report back to ARPA. With help from Charles Townes, who would also later win the Nobel Prize for his work on the maser, the group was established under the auspices of the Institute for Defense Analyses, the research institute that had been supplying much of ARPA’s technical talent.

From the start, the JASONs, as the members were known, were unique among scientific advisers: They were granted top secret clearances, which allowed them access to information that ordinary academics could never have had. Because they were not government scientists, they also had the independence to criticize projects. Though funded by ARPA, the group ran its own affairs and selected its own members. They were brilliant, patriotic, and eager to make some money, a reputation that earned JASON the sarcastic moniker of the “golden fleece.”

Projects like Seesaw raised a fundamental question: Was ARPA a science agency with a focus on national security, or was it a national security agency with a focus on science? Just as Jack Ruina hated Godel’s Project AGILE, Godel despised Ruina’s favorite research projects, which often had only a tenuous link to national security. Godel’s main vitriol was directed at the Arecibo Observatory, a radio telescope funded by ARPA under the auspices of the Defender program. Arecibo was ostensibly for use in research related to ballistic missile defense, but everyone in ARPA from Ruina on down to the rank-and-file staff acknowledged it really had nothing to do with national security. It was simply an excellent science facility that would be used by academics to study the ionosphere.

ARPA got the work, quite simply, because President Eisenhower did not trust his spooks and wanted an assessment that was independent of the CIA and its assets.

The military’s need to distinguish earthquakes from nuclear tests brought seismology “kicking and screaming” into the twentieth century, according to Frosch. At one point, he said, he funded almost “every seismologist in the world, except for two Jesuits at Fordham University” who refused to take money from the Pentagon. Frosch’s ambitious idea for advancing both seismology and nuclear test detection was to build a novel system that would identify the vast majority of Soviet earthquakes, resolving once and for all the debate over distinguishing earth tremors from nuclear tests.

Nuclear war was averted, but the standoff also demonstrated the limits of command and control. With the complexities of modern warfare, how can you effectively control your nuclear forces if you cannot share information in real time? Unbeknownst to most of the military’s senior leadership, a relatively low-level scientist had just arrived at the Pentagon to address that problem.

Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider, who went by the initials J.C.R., or simply Lick to his friends, spent much of his time at the Pentagon hiding.

In fact, Hess recalled Licklider inviting ARPA employees to a meeting at the Marriott hotel near the Fourteenth Street Bridge, between the Pentagon and the Potomac River. Licklider had set up equipment to show how someone in the future would use a computer to access information. As Hess recalled, there was a demonstration of how people would have a computer console in their kitchens and use it to access a recipe from a network of connected computers.

Licklider was trying to demonstrate how, in the future, everyone would have a computer, people would interact directly with those computers, and the computers would all be connected together.

There is little debate that Licklider’s reserved but forceful presence in ARPA laid the foundations for computer networking—work that would eventually lead to the modern Internet. The real question is why? ARPA was a military agency, so surely the network was not intended just to exchange casserole recipes.

Though the Pentagon treated ARPA’s command-and-control and behavioral sciences assignments as distinct, the archives of the Smithsonian panel make clear that its members viewed the areas as deeply related: both were about creating a science out of human behavior, whether it was humans interacting with machines or with other people. Who better to lead those twin efforts than a psychologist interested in computers?

Years later, as people began to explore the origins of the Internet, a debate emerged over who could rightfully be considered the originator of the idea. The problem with pinning the Internet to any one person, or idea, is that a number of people were thinking about networking computers in the 1960s. The real question is who was in a position to actually translate this vision into a nuts-and-bolts reality. Rand was a possibility: