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October 24 - November 2, 2025
More Eyes, another new program, equipped people with sensors. The people, or Afghans to be specific, would be given smart phones, which they could use to send back information about possible threats. More Eyes, according to Dugan, would use the “newest social networking” techniques to create “a civilian populace reporting capability.”
Dugan might not have realized it, but DARPA had just created a new version of Simulmatics’ 1960s-era “people machine.” Pentland called his version “computational counterinsurgency.”
Before Nexus 7 made it to Afghanistan, its creator, Peter Lee, abruptly left DARPA after less than a year to become the head of research at Microsoft. On the day he left for Seattle in September 2010 to start his new job, the Nexus 7 team, some members as young as their mid-twenties, was departing for Afghanistan. “I should have been with them,” he said regretfully. DARPA would eventually deploy more than a hundred people across Afghanistan, working on Nexus 7 and other technology programs.
By late 2010, DARPA was touting Nexus 7’s successes within the Pentagon, but it was not clear what it had accomplished, if anything. As members of the team worked on a base crunching numbers from military and intelligence data feeds, another team of contractors, the Synergy Strike Force, was working in the provinces of Afghanistan, swapping beer for data and using crowdsourcing techniques honed in the red balloon hunt. —
The members of the Synergy Strike Force at the Taj, some of whom blogged regularly about their experiences, never publicly mentioned the Defense Department, perhaps because many of the team’s hacktivists and technophiles found it difficult to reconcile their self-image as development workers with being military contractors.
“The More Eyes Team quickly learned that only 4 percent of the population had access and skills necessary to access and exploit the Internet,” he wrote. “Rural populations had even less.”
One thing was clear, however: like the McNamara Line, Nexus 7 did not change the course of the war.
science and technology have seemingly run amok and it is not at all clear that the volume of information has not, by itself inundated the Cray computers, confused the analysts, sacrificed credibility with the consumers, and virtually destroyed the capacity of the system to understand itself.
For several decades, visiting DARPA—at least the “white world,” or unclassified parts—was as simple as walking into the building and heading up to the office. That came to a halt in the 1980s, when a man walked in off the street and into one of the offices, dropped his pants, and mooned an unsuspecting DARPA official.
Instead, the guard took a piece of masking tape, placed it over the camera lens, and handed the iPad back to me.
asked her what she thought was DARPA’s current mission. “I think it is unchanged,” she replied. “It has been and will be to prevent and create technological surprise.”
The irony of DARPA is that even as its mandate has shrunk, its reputation has ballooned. The agency that created the foundation of the Internet and stealth aircraft is hailed today as the “gem of the Pentagon,” touted as a model for government innovation, and praised by Democrats and Republicans alike.
The question, however, is whether those novelties have successfully achieved what DARPA at one time intended: to create technologies that ensure the United States would not have to go to war and, if it did go to war, that it would achieve a swift victory.
Politicians, economists, and techies regularly exalt the “DARPA model,” even though it is unclear what the model is.
For the first few years, the staff directory fit on a standard index card. Today, the directory approaches the size of a small phone book. DARPA may tout a technical staff of only 140 scientists, but they are aided by an army of contract personnel, many who serve as the near equivalent of permanent employees, the very thing it is supposed to avoid.
The Department of Energy’s ARPA, or ARPA-E, has a budget merely a fraction of what DARPA receives. The intelligence ARPA, called IARPA, has been constrained by bureaucracy. None of them have approached the scope or ambition of their namesake.
Should organizations get rid of all their employees every three to five years, as DARPA does? Should science agencies do away with peer review, as DARPA often does, in order to pursue revolutionary ideas?
DARPA should not be treated as a black box management tool that can be dropped on top of any organization to make it more innovative.
Its successes—and failures—have always been a function of its unique bureaucratic form, which arose from its historical role as a problem-solving agency for national security.
DARPA, as one former director called it, is “140 program managers all bound together by a common travel agent.”
Notably absent are any books on management theory, a topic that Lukasik openly mocks, even though it is often what people want to discuss with a former DARPA director.
While some officials argue that DARPA is as good now as it has ever been—and that could be true in terms of the quality of science and technology—there is no denying that the agency has largely been absent from the past ten years of national security debates,
The wide-ranging exploration of human behavior that led to the hiring of J. C. R. Licklider seems unlikely today in an agency whose notion of social science is limited to computer programs that spit out predictions like a Zoltar Fortune Teller machine.
One can only guess what William Godel, who launched DARPA’s original counterinsurgency program, would have made of the current agency, whose press releases tout devices that can help soldiers scale glass skyscrapers, while American forces fight in a country dominated by mud houses. For Godel, technology was part of a larger strategy, not a narrow operational tactic.
Project AGILE failed, but it was, as Charles Herzfeld proclaimed it, a “glorious failure.” By comparison, Nexus 7 was a failure regardless, not even because the technology was faulty, but because the national security problem it was trying to address—insurgency—could not possibly have been solved by any algorithm, no matter how elegantly designed.
The potential for secret neuroscience work should give pause to anyone familiar with the Pentagon’s history of human testing. Moreover, though Sanchez and other DARPA officials downplay the potential for the agency’s neuroscience research to lead to weapons, it is impossible to ignore the reality that if the current work were successful, it would have applications in those areas. The world is still adapting to the drone revolution; is it really ready for brain-controlled aircraft?
The ultimate question with this research, as with so much of DARPA’s work, is whether the agency will be allowed—or should be allowed—to pursue something with such truly high risk. Like many ambitious areas that DARPA has pursued in the past, from counterinsurgency to computer networking, its neuroscience work could transform the world by revolutionizing medicine, and it could lead to weapons that change the way we fight in future wars. Whether that world will be a better place is unclear.
