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.
