Sunday Book Review: The Imagineers of War
By 
Sharon Weinberger’s The Imagineers of War: The Untold Story of DARPA, The Pentagon Agency that Changed the World is one of a few recent books to examine the intersection between science and the state’s pursuit of innovation in military technology. While states have been interested in how to develop and acquire innovative military technology for quite some time, the Cold War helped to institutionalize what amount to permanent bureaucracies dedicated to capturing scientific research in the service of military power. The Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency (DARPA) is one of the more consequential and interesting of those institutions, both in terms of its military impact and in its broader effects on the course of civilian technological development.
The History of DARPA
At the end of World War II, there was wide recognition within the US government that it needed to develop and integrate new technologies into its existing military organizations. The government wanted a civilian-oriented agency that would be able to work outside of the tightly silo-ed system of military procurement. The military services knew what they wanted, but what they wanted had a fairly short time horizon that did not tend to promote long-range, open-ended inquiry. ARPA’s (as it was first known) initial writ came from a belief that the United States was in danger of falling behind the Soviet Union in space exploration, and particularly in rocket technology. The division of ballistic missile technology development across the services had met with uneven success, and in the wake of Sputnik the US government was interested in centralizing military space technology within a single agency. ARPA was born with this writ, but didn’t keep it for very long. It immediately came into conflict with NASA, which would come to dominate civilian space flight.
But after NASA took space away, ARPA needed to find something to do with its time. One of the agency’s most important early achievements was the facilitation of a sensor system that has allowed scientists to detect nuclear explosions around the world, a system that was critical to enabling the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. It also entangled itself in the early years of the multi-decade drama that would become ballistic missile defense. But as Weinberger details, it turned its attention to Vietnam and the problem of counter-insurgency, where it could take advantage of ample funding and hopefully have an identifiable impact on the war. It succeeded in one of these goals. In addition to enlisting social scientists to better understand Vietnamese peasant culture, ARPA also attempted a variety of technological fixes designed to limit the mobility of the Viet Cong and the PAVN. Neither of these worked; the lessons of the former were not operationalizable in military terms, and none of the latter innovations were sufficiently robust to survive war conditions, or useful enough in practical experience. However, Weinberger argues that the concepts behind these systems helped lead to what would become known as “network centric warfare.”
Along the way ARPA (which became DARPA in 1972) dallied in a bunch of different projects, including various kinds of ballistic missile defense, along with a bunch of human subject stuff that combined social science, psychology, and biology. In the 1960s and 1970s, the agency was open-minded to a fault. It devoted significant resources to projects that had little or no scientific basis, including various manifestations of ESP, parapsychology, and telepathy. None of this panned out, of course, but in Weinberger’s narrative there’s something quintessentially ’70s about DARPA’s approach.
Some things did work out, though. the largest contribution came in the form of the internet, which ARPA research helped to underwrite. Much has been written about this, so I won’t belabor here, but Weinberger details how the personalities in ARPA contributed to almost accidentally producing a nation-spanning computer network. DARPA also had success with stealth. Driven by an appreciation of the increasing lethality of Soviet air defense systems, ARPA began to investigate the potential for aircraft with low radar profiles that might penetrate such defenses without being detected. It also did pathbreaking work on computer wargaming and simulation, likely increasing both the tactical and operational effectiveness of fielded US forces while reducing the costs of training.
More recently, DARPA has pioneered some of the research into driverless cars, sparking a great deal of interest among designers and entrepreneurs interested in solving the (potentially intractable) problems associated with autonomous vehicles. However, it also became embroiled in such projects as the Total Information Awareness project, the Orwellian effort to monitor ever broader aspects of American life.
Colorful Personalities
In large part because of the source material she has access to, Weinberger’s account is heavily personality driven. The fluid bureaucratic situation of the early Cold War meant that strong personalities could push institutions in interesting directions. ARPA had several such figures, some of whom ended up in prison after serving in official capacities (generally for offenses not directly related to their work). The personality driven nature of the institution allowed it to fill gaps in the broader defense bureaucracy, in cooperation with underexploited elements of the defense industrial bases. As noted, sometimes this worked, and sometimes it did not.
Weinberger is not precisely skeptical of the work that DARPA has done, although she is skeptical of the hype that has surrounded the agency. She’s very clear on the multitude of failures that DARPA has experienced over time, and takes care to note that future expectations should be considered in light of this spotty record of success. That said, there are important successes, and it’s worth pointing those out, even if they didn’t have the impact that their developers believed that they might. Whatever you want to say about the internet, it has clearly escaped the wildest imaginations of the people who first gave the go ahead to invest in the concept. With respect to ARPA’s institutional position, Weinberger suggests that the peculiar successes of the agency depend to great extent on its peculiar bureaucratic nature, and that it has become less innovative (and less useful) as it has become more tightly incorporated in the Pentagon’s system of technological innovation.
Evaluation
Weinberger may overstate the degree to which DARPA contributed to the Revolution in Military Affairs (and consequently Network Centric Warfare). There are many threads to pull in the history of the RMA, and to my mind the anti-submarine warfare complex of the Second World War and the Cold War deserve more attention as a example of systems integration than the counter-insurgency efforts that Weinberger highlights. I also wish that Weinberger had offered a bit more detail regarding ARPA’s (and DARPA’s) evolving relationship with the private sector. The nature of technology research and development has changed substantially over the past fifty years, to some degree because of the technologies that ARPA helped create and sustain. The shift to a “venture capital” approach in the 1990s was emblematic of this change, but apart from discussion of one of the scandals associated with public/private contracting messiness, Weinberger does not discuss contracting at any length, or intellectual property.
But these are quibbles. Altogether, the Imagineers of War is worth your valuable quatloos if you’re interested in how the state tries to turn research capital into military technology. There’s also an interesting bureaucratic angle although not, as noted, quite the one you’d expect; “thinking outside the box” often results in wandering into deep holes with steep walls.