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October 24 - November 2, 2025
Flight International reported that the crashed plane was a “stealth” aircraft project led by Kelly Johnson, Lockheed’s famed aircraft designer, who had been developing secret planes for the CIA for years. This aircraft, in fact, was sponsored by the agency now known as DARPA, whose future hinged on the program’s success. At $100 million, it was one of the largest aircraft programs the agency had ever sponsored,
Myers was part of a self-described subversive group of military experts known as the fighter mafia, who battled the prevailing air force preference for technologically complex fighters. The fighter mafia had successfully lobbied for the development of a maneuverable, lightweight fighter that eventually became the F-16 Fighting Falcon.
Like James Stewart’s Harvey, no one believed in an invisible aircraft except Myers.
The lessons of Vietnam were reinforced in 1973, when Israeli pilots during the Yom Kippur War faced a barrage of these deadly Soviet-supplied missiles. Israel reportedly lost about a third of its combat aircraft. For a growing circle of military experts, the lesson was that even advanced aircraft were becoming increasingly vulnerable to air defense systems.
testing them at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida against a host of Soviet weapons, part of a secret arsenal of equipment that the American military had acquired through black market channels.
In 1975, as the idea of designing stealth aircraft was being discussed in DARPA, Lee Huff, a former DARPA employee, sat down with William Godel, the agency’s onetime deputy director. Huff had been hired to write a history of the agency and interviewed his onetime mentor and boss, who, after serving time in prison, made a career in private business. Reflecting on his time at DARPA, Godel said that program managers were a “dime a dozen,” but true innovators were rare. Asked what DARPA should be working on at the present time, Godel suggested an “unmanned non-detectable bomber.”
The pick to replace him was George Heilmeier, an engineer from RCA, who was working for Currie in the Pentagon. Heilmeier had already distinguished himself as the father of the liquid crystal display, a technology that would eventually be used in everything from cockpit displays to home alarm clocks.
Heilmeier, on the other hand, pored over every word of the orders, often sending them back for revisions. He also began to comb through the budget, weeding out programs he felt had limited relevance to the military. J. C. R. Licklider, whose vision of an “Intergalactic Computer Network” had been enthusiastically embraced by the likes of Herzfeld and Lukasik, suddenly found himself in conflict with DARPA’s new director.
“When I looked at the so-called proposals I thought, ‘Wait a second; there’s nothing here,’ ” Heilmeier said. “It was just, ‘Give us the money and we will go do good things.’ ” Heilmeier wanted to know how research would help a tank operator.
A good part of his philosophical approach to technology came from his time at RCA, where he felt the company had failed to recognize—and take advantage of—his invention, the liquid crystal display. He knew from personal experience that it was not enough to come up with an innovative technology; there needed to be a plan to take that technology to market, whether in the commercial world or with the military.
Heilmeier had little interest in science for the sake of science. He admitted there was resistance to his view, particularly from DARPA-funded researchers who had not needed to justify their work in the past in terms of an immediate military application. “Why don’t you try to perform an impossible sexual feat?” Heilmeier said was his response to them.
The air force was not interested in spending its money on a DARPA project. Currie, a fan of the stealth project, offered a deal. At a breakfast with General David Jones, the air force chief of staff, he laid his cards on the table: “I will support your lightweight fighter in Congress with everything I’ve got if you will establish stealth as a real air force program and put some money behind it and let us go to Congress with that.” Jones agreed and the two men shook hands.
In other words, if engineers wanted to reduce the range of detection for an aircraft by a useful amount, say by a factor of ten, they would have to reduce the radar cross section by a factor of ten thousand, something that key air force officials deemed impossible.
Its other advantage was that the Skunk Works division operated a bit like DARPA, meaning it was flexible, had minimal bureaucracy, and could quickly assemble a team of experts for a particular project.
in 1974, he could create a computer program to calculate the return for those flat panels based on physical optics but not for something extremely complex, like curves.
The translation of the Russian scientist Petr Ufimtsev’s paper “Method of Edge Waves in the Physical Theory of Diffraction” had gone unnoticed for several years until Overholser realized that it could help him calculate the radar cross section for the edges of the panels.
Have Blue did one more thing that most people never realized: it saved the agency from extinction, according to James Tegnelia, who was the deputy director when the stealth aircraft flew. “You can fail at a $10 million program,” he said. “When you’re putting in $100 million, you can’t afford to fail.” Tegnelia credited the sudden growth of “big” technology programs, like Have Blue, with protecting the agency from critics who wanted to shut it down. After the success of Have Blue, “no one questioned the value of DARPA’s investment,” Tegnelia said.
DeLauer wanted Cooper, a former football player known for his forceful personality, to return to the Pentagon and take over two jobs. Cooper would work directly for DeLauer, as an assistant secretary of defense, while also heading DARPA, which, following the success of the stealth aircraft, was regarded as a hotbed of innovation, a sort of corporate lab that could quickly push out military technologies. And with Reagan in the White House, there was going to be a huge demand for new military weapons.
On March 23, 1983, President Ronald Reagan addressed the American people directly, warning of a grave threat of war and nuclear annihilation, balanced with a Hollywood message of hope. “The solution is well within our grasp,” Reagan assured the nation. That solution, it turned out, was one of the most expensive and technologically foolhardy projects ever undertaken by the Pentagon: a space-based missile shield to protect the United States and its allies from a Soviet nuclear attack.
Over at the Pentagon, DARPA’s director, Cooper, and other senior officials—including Secretary of Defense Weinberger—sat slack-jawed as they tried to digest the president’s address. The president had just made one of the most significant military technology decisions of the past few decades without consulting the key people in the Pentagon responsible for that technology.
In the end, Cooper decided to hand off DARPA’s missile defense programs. The Pentagon set up the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization in March 1984, sweeping up most of the Pentagon’s missile defense research, including DARPA’s laser programs. It was a smart decision; the laser programs, which were ballooning in costs, “were eating DARPA alive,” Cooper said later.
The Pentagon’s budget more than doubled, and Cooper over the next four years presided over one of the largest expansions in DARPA’s history, which fueled the agency’s image as a technology factory.
The Tactical Technology Office, the division created from the remnants of AGILE and Vietnam, was the largest beneficiary of that increase, becoming the agency’s new center of gravity. “We were spending money like it was going out of style,” Cooper later said. “I mean it was fantastic.” Ironically, the technology that would have the greatest impact on war was a DARPA project so small that many directors could not even remember its name.
The army eventually called its version the MQM-105 Aquila, which was supposed to be launched by a catapult and recovered in a net.
Less than ten years later, the agency bought another derivative of Karem’s work from General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, called the Predator. By that time Karem was not even involved in the company, though his work had led to a weapon that was about to change how the United States conducted war.
The aircraft, which in theory would be highly maneuverable, never went beyond DARPA’s investment, in part because the air force had no interest in it. “No, that’s too ugly an aircraft,” one four-star general told Atkins.
Secrecy and unbridled ambition were the hallmarks of aviation programs in the 1980s. DARPA had long managed classified programs, but secrecy seemed to be enveloping much of the agency as the black aerospace research burgeoned.
To this day, Atkins will not say precisely which project was the subject of the contentious meeting, but three decades later an army stealth helicopter flew navy SEALs into Pakistan on a mission to kill Osama bin Laden.
In 1985, the Pentagon chief approved Copper Canyon as a major project, which would soon be designated the X-30 National Aerospace Plane. It became one of DARPA’s best-known—and most disastrous—projects of the decade.
“You can’t say that,” Colladay said. “That’s just nonsense.” “Well, we’re going to,” Buchanan told Colladay. “We’ve got to relate this program to the American people and in a way that they can understand it.”
He then made the astonishing announcement that the government was “going forward with research on a new Orient Express that could, by the end of the next decade, take off from Dulles Airport, accelerate up to 25 times the speed of sound, attaining low Earth orbit or flying to Tokyo within 2 hours.”
In the fall of 1987, Williams broke all protocol by writing directly to the White House chief of staff, Howard Baker, to protest budget cuts to the National Aerospace Plane. As usually happens when a mid-level government official breaks protocol, the letter ricocheted back to the Pentagon’s senior leadership, working its way down the chain until it landed on the DARPA director’s desk. Furious, Robert Duncan, the director, immediately removed Williams as the head of the program. Watching from outside government, Bob Cooper, who had approved the space plane, was horrified. “When I saw that
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There was just one problem: DARPA had helped build a phantasmagoria of weapons to fight an enemy that was about to collapse.
the United States for more than a decade failed to win a NATO tank competition, called the Canadian Army Trophy, held in Germany. The implications were stark: If the United States could not even win in a mock battle against its own allies, what hope did it have in a real war against the Soviet Union?
The key to these simulators was that they were networked together, allowing soldiers to practice against each other, the way people would play against unseen opponents over the Internet years later in the world of online gaming. The networked simulators were the brainchild of Jack Thorpe, an air force officer with a PhD in industrial psychology. Thorpe had long been thinking about a way to get the air force to rely more on simulation.
Back in 1978, Thorpe had circulated a white paper to colleagues, speculating on what simulation might look like some twenty years in the future. In it, he predicted, “Significant breakthroughs in numerical processing will provide the resource of computational plenty. Cheap, powerful computers will proliferate training systems and their associated inter-connecting networks.”
Just a few years later, in 1981, Craig Fields, a longtime scientist at DARPA, recruited Thorpe to join the agency to work on simulation. The ARPANET, at that point, was in full swing, networking together computers across the country, allowing people to interact virtually. Fields, who was heavily involved in the agency’s computer science work, realized that the same technology could be used to link Thorpe’s simulators together.
In the end, however, it was the army, not the air force, that signed onto DARPA’s idea. Rather than aircraft, the first networked simulators would involve tanks. That year, DARPA, together with the army, launched SIMNET, or Simulation Networking, a $300 million research project that used packet switching and computer networking—DARPA innovations—to link tank simulators in a virtual environment.
Craig Fields, who had been at the agency since 1974 and helped create SIMNET, was tapped to be the head of DARPA. The new director had a way of evoking strong reactions—both positive and negative. “Brilliant” was the word most often used to describe Fields, who would often dazzle military and intelligence officials with his command of science and encyclopedic knowledge of DARPA’s programs. “Abrasive” was typically the second most common word used to describe him. Fields did not suffer fools gladly, and he saw fools all around him: in the Pentagon, on Capitol Hill, and in the White House.
“There is a basic conflict between Japanese and American interests notwithstanding that the two countries need each other as friends—and it would be better to face it directly than to pretend that it doesn’t exist,” the journalist James Fallows argued in The Atlantic Monthly.
Senator Al Gore, a Democrat and a technology enthusiast, was a forceful advocate for having the government invest in key areas, like supercomputers, while Republicans blasted attempts to “pick winners and losers.”
A New York Times article from March 1989 compared DARPA to Japan’s Ministry of International Trade and Industry, even though the latter had nothing to do with the military. “At a time when more industries are seeking Government help to hold their own against Asian and European competitors, DARPA is stepping into the void, becoming the closest thing this nation has to Japan’s Ministry of International Trade and Industry, the agency that organizes the industrial programs that are credited with making Japan so competitive,” the article said.
The new director wanted to place DARPA at the vanguard of industrial policy, pursuing dual-use technology to give the United States an edge in the global economy, even if it was a vision that ran counter to the White House. Congress, at DARPA’s request, approved plans to spend $20 million to help the domestic high-definition television industry.
His undoing was a technology known as gallium arsenide, a potential replacement for silicon chips. Gallium arsenide chips were costly to make and the manufacturing base was still nascent, but compared with silicon, these new chips would be faster and more efficient and have properties, such as hardening against radiation, that made them particularly attractive to the military. DARPA had funded gallium arsenide in the past, but Fields wanted to use the technology as a test case for his ideas about supporting industry: DARPA, he decided, should invest in a gallium arsenide firm.
Soon, Congress gave DARPA legal authority to enter into something called “other transactions,” which was, in the simplest sense, a way for the Pentagon to fund research companies, skipping the volumes of government regulations that accompany typical military contracts.
Arati Prabhakar, a DARPA scientist in charge of the contract, sat in on company board meetings. “She operated in a completely different manner than a normal program manager. She was on the inside of that company,” Dunn recalled.
Prabhakar hailed the award as a new way of doing business for DARPA. “Gazelle is typical of the companies we couldn’t work fruitfully with in the past,” she said. When The New York Times picked up the story, however, the deal was cast as an investment, as Fields had been advocating.
“President Bush loves you but you just spit right in his face.”
Among other changes, a newly created undersecretary of defense for acquisition would become the “weapons czar,” while the director of defense research and engineering was downgraded to a second-tier job. Donald Hicks, who held the position at the time, resigned in protest. The change was not cosmetic; it meant DARPA reported to a lower level of the Pentagon. Herzfeld was supposed to be DARPA’s direct link to the Defense Department’s leadership, but he found himself frozen out of major decisions and with no access to the defense secretary. “Did you hear Craig got fired?” Herzfeld’s military
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The agency once again had no agreed-upon mission, no political support, and, for the moment, no director. Even as its Cold War innovations were making their way to the battlefield, DARPA was edging away from war, or perhaps being edged out of it.
