Following up on last month’s newsletter, which asked who was going to generate the big-scale innovations required for a growing world, I recently read Sharon Weinberger’s 2017 study of DARPA entitled The Imagineers of War. The effort was well worthwhile, if only for the nuanced explanation of the origins of the Internet. Paul Baran’s famous mesh diagram of a survivable communications architecture for command and control of the US nuclear forces is only part of the story. J.C.R. Licklider, a key figure in the history of human-computer interaction, was also involved: he saw far earlier than most of his contemporaries how having access to computing can change how we think, so his connection of computing to psychology was significant.
More generally, psychology was a hot area of defense and intelligence research in the late 1950s and 1960s, in part because of the interest in and fear of “brainwashing,” that is, some form of mind control. The bestselling book The Manchurian Candidate was but one manifestation of this fascination; Stanley Kubrick’s still-brilliant Dr. Strangelove also captures many aspects of the era with searing insight: mine-shaft gaps, purity of essence, and of course Peter Sellers’ brilliant one-sided phone conversations with his Soviet counterpart on the hotline.
Thus we have in some ways come full circle as the Internet was successfully used for psychological manipulation by Russian entities and surrogates in the 2016 election. History in this case did more than rhyme. For all the historical interest I had in the book, there are some concrete lessons: for all the attention DARPA gets for its successes — Stealth aviation, GPS, drones — the organization is likely to spawn few imitators. I posit that there are at least seven reasons for this.
1) Your organization isn’t motivated by defense of American interests
Being charged with preventing future surprises like Sputnik means that very little subject matter is out of bounds. Budgets are much bigger than private industry typically can mobilize. Patriotism can motivate devotion and behavior that cannot be simply hired.
2) Your organization doesn’t pursue enough whackadoo ideas
When it was first proposed, stealth aviation did not sound much more plausible than ESP between mother rabbits and their bunnies (the former were thought to know when harm befell the latter, even at a far geographic remove), telepathic spoon bending (accomplished by none other than Uri Geller), or antennas mounted on elephants to aid in radio communications through Vietnamese jungle foliage.
3) Your organization has short time horizons
Notwithstanding the common critique of corporate focus on quarterly numbers, even a 5-year plan is sometimes too short. GPS took 20 years between theoretical proposal and first satellite launch. ARPAnet was more than 5 years in the making when one of four connected computers sent the message “lo” to a second unit (it was supposed to be “login” but the system crashed), and the World Wide Web launched another 30 years after that.
4) Your organization can’t bury failures as secretly
The author of the DARPA book noted in the endnotes that classification has obscured both successes and failures from being publicly viewed. A box of documents related to a James Bond-like jetpack remains classified many decades later. DARPA hasn’t undertaken an institutional history since 1975, when it was about 18 years old.
5) Your organization has more moral prohibitions
ARPA was deeply connected to the US war in Vietnam, attempting to use everything from fortune-tellers and soothsayers (who were paid to predict a Communist defeat) to Agent Orange (one of an entire family of air-sprayed chemicals designed both to cut off the food supply and deprive the guerrilla forces of jungle cover). GE proposed a mass galvanic polygraph to be used on entire villages. John Poindexter’s Total Information Awareness project, mass surveillance with little human or institutional oversight (AI was supposed to protect privacy), ran on DARPA money. Somewhere in the DARPA robotics budget there most likely exists a human-out-of-the-loop autonomous robot with lethal capability.
6) Your organization has more conventional hiring processes
Related to 2), Darpa has a long history of hiring rogue, unconventional, or outlandish individuals, then giving them long leashes. In the age of post-Sputnik fear, one Greek physicist proposed creating a defensive shield of high-energy electrons trapped above the earth’s atmosphere in the magnetic field. Multiple nuclear explosions were detonated high above the earth’s surface to try to validate the concept, which of course did not work in practice. One former DARPA director held the biannual agency conference at Disneyland not once but on multiple occasions. Program managers in the parapsychology field held the beliefs and credentials you might imagine for such a post.
7) Your organization has some nominal and procedural objectives
DARPA rarely gets too specific on what its mission and objectives are. Over the institution’s history, they have ranged from investigating counter-insurgency to counter-terror to space-based weapons to lots of secret stuff the public can’t see. Regimes have been supported with cash, expertise, and other assets, scientists (and psychics) have been funded, and numerous contractors have been generously enriched. Most of this activity is only loosely connected to an overall remit.
As Weinberger notes in her conclusion, “the dilemma for DARPA is finding a new mission worthy of its past accomplishments and cognizant of its darker failures.” (p. 371) After failing massively in trying to win the hearts and minds of Vietnam’s people with as few US ground troops as possible, and after 30 years of a bi-polar (US-USSR) world order, the age of Al Qaeda and related entities has proven more difficult to fight with technology. After tens or hundreds of millions of dollars of investment, for example, the best weapon for fighting against improvised roadside bombs remained . . . dogs’ noses. Very few of our civilian or even DoD organizations would be allowed to spend so much and come up with so little.