The ARPANET was a blue-sky research project that, ostensibly, would allow for greater (and more resilient) communications among decision-makers during a nuclear strike. While they sold their project to the generals this way, the academics behind the ARPANET then spent the next twenty years evolving the network into a system that better suited their own needs: a distributed, nonhierarchical computer and communications network that facilitated discussion and exchange among the research and scientific community.
