The Pentagon's Brain

Somewhere between wide-eyed optimism about the potential of human ingenuity and skepticism about technology’s ability to save us from ourselves lies Annie Jacobsen’s book. It covers DARPA’s founding and the first fifty years before reporting on projects active at the time of the book’s writing (it came out in 2015).

The result is a balanced mix of history, analysis, and you-are-there reporting in a highly readable narrative. The book contains the best explanation I’ve seen of DARPA’s controversial, post-911 Total Information Awareness program and raises important questions about when, how, and why governments should conduct research and development in secret.

DARPA has been the gold standard for research and early-stage development since its inception in 1958. DARPA's accomplishments have included the development of the internet, stealth technology, global position system (GPS), night vision, and unmanned drones, to name a few.

The book lays out an extraordinary record of accomplishment—DARPA has developed a “secret sauce” that few have been able to emulate. I first picked up the book when I was leading the Department of Homeland Security’s equivalent organization, the Homeland Security Advanced Research Project Agency (HSARPA). 

In this book, Annie Jacobsen does the (almost) impossible by documenting the history of DARPA (full name: Defense Advanced Research Project Agency), which has been key to technological advancement within US national security operations since the height of the Cold War.

Jacobsen does this by drawing on documents from the US Official Record and interviews to evidence DARPA's role and history. As a result, she shows that, while it has not carried out research itself, it has acted as a crucial hub for cutting-edge research by academics, defense contractors, and other parts of the US government, with the insights of… show more.