Outside the Washington Beltway, what had cemented DARPA’s reputation for innovation was not necessarily drones or stealth aircraft but the Internet. The agency’s most important creation had ensured DARPA’s place in history, even if it had emerged from a tiny effort four decades prior. Whether the DARPA of 2008 was capable of producing the types of innovation that had emerged in 1968—when Robert Taylor had published plans for the ARPANET—was not something that was widely debated.
