Charles Herzfeld’s argument to Congress in the late 1960s had been that ARPA was doing valuable work that no one else was doing, and sometimes he was right. In 1971, the Beirut office was asked to look into the little-known threat of “improvised explosive devices,” the technical name for homemade bombs. More than forty years before IEDs entered the popular lexicon and became the leading killer of American and coalition troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, ARPA hired a contractor to study them and prepare a comprehensive report,
