Angry Planet - DARPA brought us the internet - mind control could be next

Episode Date: May 27, 2016

For a group of scientists working on weapons — some of which could end the world — DARPA has a surprisingly good reputation. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is credited with creating the Internet and runs public contests for human-looking robots and self-driving cars. This week on War College, we look at DARPA and some of the projects that still being carried out under the cover of official darkness.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast? Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. The opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the participants, not of Reuters' news. One of the first tasks that DARPA did was to determine the precise number of minutes that it took for a nuclear war had to get. from the Soviet Union to the United States, this information is technically still not releasable by the Defense Department. In other words, they will not officially release it

by located it in the DARPA records, and it is 23 minutes. You're listening to War College, a weekly discussion of a world in conflict focusing on the stories behind the front lines. Here's your host, Jason Fields. For a group of scientists working on weapons, some of the people. which could end the world, DARPA has a surprisingly good reputation. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is credited with creating the Internet, and it also runs public contests for human-looking robots and self-driving cars. This week on War College, we look at DARPA and some of the projects that are still being

carried out under the cover of official darkness. Hello and welcome to War College. I'm Reuters opinion editor, Jason Fields. And I'm Matthew Galt with War is Boring. America's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is the U.S. military's secretive team of super scientists. The agency has had its hand in everything from the Internet to stealth planes, but most Americans know little about the agency or how it operates. Annie Jacobson is our guest today, and she'll help us to pull back the curtain.

Jacobson is the author of the book The Pentagon's Brain. which is a fantastic title. And that's a history of DARPA, and it's been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, which I wouldn't mind having myself. So Annie, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much for having me. So just to get the basics out of the way,

what is DARPA, who created it, when, and why? DARPA stands for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. It is the most powerful and most productive military science agency in the world. And what I found so interesting when writing this book is that it's one of the least known, and I think until my book, one of the least revealed. It was technically started in 1958 after Sputnik went up. And so its purpose within the Defense Department and the military structure was to never be taken

by surprise by an enemy nation again. But really, if you look at DARPA, you can see how it's origin. go back to the development of the thermonuclear weapon, because that is really what DARPA was started out to defend against. That was the whole threat of Scutnik, certainly not this 23-inch sphere rotating around the world, but rather the idea that one day the ICBM could carry a thermonuclear weapon to the United States from Russia. So can you talk a little bit about their early work?

Yes, it's fascinating because DARPA, which was actually then called ARPA, but I'll call it DARPA, just to keep it simple, the agency started out as America's first space agency. Very quickly thereafter, NASA was created and took over, but DARPA was originally in charge of all the missile technology and satellite technology. And, you know, if you go back in time to the mid to late 50s, it's interesting. to remember that then these intercontinental ballistic missiles did not yet exist. And so if a nuclear war was going to happen, the aircraft would be dropping the bombs as opposed to ballistic missiles. And so that whole, you know, threat level changed once the ICBM was introduced and the reality was that war could happen in a matter of, or rather the apocalypse, so to speak, could happen in a matter of minutes. One of the first task the DARPA scientists did was to determine the precise number of minutes that it took for a nuclear warhead to get from the Soviet Union to the United States. So guess how many minutes it was?

How many? And by the way, I will tell you, this information is technically still not releasable by the Defense Department. In other words, they will not officially release it because I located it in the DARPA records, and it is 23 minutes. 238 minutes, 1,600 seconds was the precise number of seconds that those DARPA scientists whittled it down to it. And when you think about that, you know, there's kind of a mythology that it takes when people talk today about, like, well, could North Korea really attack us with nuclear weapons? Whether or not they have the capability is a different story. But people often say, well, either way, it would take 90 minutes.

And then this so-called shield would kick in. Well, neither of those mythologies are true. You mean the length of time we'd have and the ability to knock those missiles out of the sky? Exactly, exactly. And those are the kind of technologies that DARPA is responsible for, and those are the kind of things that I talk about in my book. But, of course, what is fascinating is none of these weapon systems exist by themselves. They're all part of a greater developing system of weapons that is born of technology,

all of which was born after World War II, most of which goes back to DARPA. And so DARPA becomes this agency when you look at it that is responsible for both the best and the worst of technology that many of us have today. I mean, things that carry around in our pocket. The iPhone, for example, most elements of the iPhone can be traced back to early DARPA technology. How big is DARPA? How many people work there? What kind of budget do they have?

it's a great question because DARPA exists outside of this idea of military bureaucracy, but it almost stands in opposition to it. And because of that, DARPA is really highly regarded among not just, you know, defense officials, but also intelligence officials. And there's usually a rivalry there. But I think everyone agrees that DARPA gets the job done where so many other military science agents, fail because of the bureaucracy. So with its annual budget of $3 billion a year,

now that's the White World budget, we have no way of knowing what the Blackwell budget is, but $3 billion are handled by roughly 100 project managers. So if you do the math, you can realize how much power each of those individual DARPA project managers, program managers they've called have. And they, in turn, create these kind of like mini institutes where they outsource work. DARPA by itself does not have any research going on, certainly not in its headquarters,

a couple miles from the Pentagon. Rather, it outsources work to agencies or commercial businesses, academic research institutes, military institutes throughout America and also around the world. Wow. It's a very secretive organization, right, Annie? It is. It absolutely is. And interestingly, this is one of the arguments I have ongoing with DARPA Public Affairs, which is both interesting and also telling that this would be the one area that DARPA Public Affairs wants to correct me and tell me that it's not secretive. So right there, it tells you that it is secretive, almost by default. And the reason I say that is not because I'm a conspiracy theorist, but rather because I've interviewed 75 DARPA sciences, many of whom are in their 90s, going back to the earliest days of DARPA.

And everyone agrees that the programs that DARPA works on that are the most interesting, most powerful and ultimately most destructive are all classified secret when they're going on. Later, they become revealed. So DARPA as an agency is a public agency. You can Google it and find out about it, unlike, say, a national, the NRO, for example, which was classified and no one knew it existed until it was revealed by the Clinton administration. So DARPA is a public agency with a public budget and public going on. But the details of what it is doing are classified until they become unveiled. And it would have to be that way.

Does it work now sort of the way Bell Labs used to work, which was that they are just trying a whole bunch of different things and they're not necessarily sure what the applications are? Or are they more focused in a military vein right from the beginning? The job of DARPA is to create, and this is literally in its mandate from 1958, to create vast weapon systems. of the future. And so whenever anyone suggests to me that DARPA is out there working for the good of society, I pause because the results of what DARPA works on benefits society tremendously as we see. But that is absolutely not the goal of DARPA. DARPA's job is to create weapon systems.

And so when we look at some of what I would call the more controversial programs of today, for example, the chip in the brain programs that I've been quite vocal about, it is impossible for someone like me to accept the fact that these programs do not have a bigger picture end game in the weapons world. Because that is not what DARPA's job is and the brain chips are invented by DARPA. What are they saying the brain chips are for? How are they selling it? Well, the brain chip programs are being sold a number of ways. I mean, in concert with the Obama administration's sort of White House program,

they're calling it the decade of the brain, certainly not for the first time, but this idea of the brain initiative that we will solve everything from schizophrenia to Alzheimer, which may or may not be accurate. But, again, to suggest that that is what DARPA is working on, is just not plausible. DARPA specifically discusses its unclassified brain programs as being part of an effort to help what they called brain-wounded warriors, the individuals who have come home from Iraq and Afghanistan with extreme traumatic brain injuries, mostly from IED, and the pilot programs

that are unclassified right now with acrony. like repair and remind. These programs alleged to place a neuro prosthetic inside the brain of a brain-rooted warrior in order to help doctors learn how to stimulate certain parts of the brain to potentially restore memory, restore cognitive functions. Bit by bit, DARPA reveals or as a journalist like me learns that DARPA is also working, on programs for augmented cognition, for example, programs to make, whether it's imagery, analysts, or trigger pullers on the battlefield to act and react faster.

You know, then you start to get a sense, and again, this is speculative of where these brainship programs are going, which are to augment the cognition of war fighters so that they can be faster than the enemy soldiers. And this is, of course, where the idea of, you know, super soldiers. comes into play. Which sounds like science fiction, but I would remind our listeners that militaries throughout time have always kind of chased this. And they've usually typically done it through drugs up until the modern day.

So it's not that out of the left field, really. Well, the DARPA director herself said everything is science fiction until it becomes real. And that is very much the modus operandas of DARPA, because many of ideas that have been developed were imagined before they became real. Are they working on any other kind of, for lack of a better word, cyborg technology, maybe with animals? Absolutely. Let's hold back for a moment.

Maybe people listening would be interested to hear about where all this comes from. So much of the technology that we have at our fingertips today was born in Vietnam. by DARPA scientists, I was fascinated and began to understand two important concepts. One, everything that we have today goes back, you know, 30, 40, 50 years to military science and not everything, but most technology elements. And two, that the individual technologies, what DARPA calls blue sky technologies, that are sort of tried out, some fail and others succeed, and those are all built upon. So if you go back to the Vietnam War, that is where the first sensor technologies were developed.

And so when I say sensor technology, if you think about what you have at your disposal today, maybe you, the last time you drove in the rain, for example, your windshield wipers, if you have a brand-new car, your windshield wipers probably went on without you turning them on. accurate? Yeah. Okay. They go back to Vietnam, and the best description I can give you of this is something that DARPA hired a group of scientists. They always had the smartest scientists in the world, by the way, working for them.

And during Vietnam, it was a group of scientists called the Jason scientists who were actually still active. And the Jasons were told to come up with an idea to lay down sensors along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. It was the Ho Chi Minh Trail that was being. blamed for us losing the war because it's how all the guerrilla fighters were able to travel down from the north to the south on this little footpath and they would bring with them literally in ox carts and you know backpack the technology the weapons that were needed to fight in the south and no matter what we did we could not stop you know these fighters from coming down the trail and so the sensor technologies that were developed were something called the ad cid which stands for

air-delivered seismic intrusion detector, okay? And it was basically a big sensor the size of a, let's say, a parking garage cone. And soldiers would throw these ad cids, which kind of were shaped like a dart, out of helicopters on these incredibly dangerous missions, flying in low on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, in order to have these sensors ejected out of the aircraft and then land on the trail, and they would kind of work like these mini acoustic radar systems. And imagine that for all of the different visual, optical, seismic, and audio. And then you flash forward to what we were talking about earlier with the sensor technology in your car.

But in between all of that was the Defense Department building up its sensor technology, which is now used in aircraft, and was first made up. public in the Gulf War. You have the sensor technology in the Vietnam War. You have supercomputers, which we talked about earlier with JCR Licklider, the ARPANET, another DARPA development, drones, which were developed in the Vietnam War. GPS systems, which were originally, you know, bomb targeting technology, also developed by DARPA and the Vietnam War. All of these systems coming together to create a cyber battlefield, which was first prosecuted in Gulf War I. And then you can see how it advances when another few decades passed and we move toward

the current war on terror, where we now have these drones that are the size of beetles. And sensors that are so small that they're fitted into the helmet of a soldier or dropped in a drone that has treads that can travel along the desert floor. And all of this moves together toward this DARPA bigger weapons system, which soon will include some of the spookier things we've talked about, the drones that will be biomimetic and biohybrid, which is the mixing and merging of an animal and a machine. I guess I have a couple of different questions based on what you just said. So you say that they have the best scientists, at least in the country, maybe in the world working for them. how do they get the scientists to do that? Do scientists have moral qualms about working for DARPA, or does DARPA just pay enormously well?

What do you think? Well, again, if you look at the history, you can understand the present, I believe. And so in looking at how DARPA came to be with this idea that we needed to defend against the nuclear weapon, you realize that, or you learn rather, that DARPA's first three directors were all thermos. nuclear weapons engineers from the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in California. And the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory was created after the war, specifically to create a competition among scientists. So the atomic bomb was created by the Manhattan Project scientists who were at Los Alamos. And very quickly, the American defense establishment learned that the only way

to push science faster than the enemy, yet at this time was the Soviet Union, was to make scientists in America compete with one another, because there was the problem with Oppenheimer, who had led the bid to build the atomic bomb, having exactly those thoughts that you're talking about after the war. Oppenheimer decided that he didn't want to build bigger nuclear weapons and eventually lost his security clearance and was ostracized from most of his fellow scientists because of it. And so the government created Livermore. And the idea was, you guys compete against each other to see who's best. And that was a very successful model. And that is how the thermonuclear or hydrogen bomb was created. And the first science director of Livermore, Herb York, became the first science director of DARPA. You can see how the idea, you know, among the scientists, is either you're in the competition

or you're out. Slightly different, tech. There's the gadget that we talked about that have come into everyday life, the sensors in your windshield wipers, the iPhone that I'm recording this on. How does stuff make its way from DARPA and being classified and then into the wider world? Well, I'll give you one anecdotal example and sort of how DARPA innovates and how it problem solve, something that people can really relate to you, which is a rifle, an assault rifle, okay? After World War II, the different military services argued, you know, ad nauseum about what rifle soldiers were going to carry.

They were busy arguing for 20 years, almost 20 years. The Vietnam War happened, and DARPA found itself trying to provide weapons, you know, rifles essentially to the Vietnamese soldiers who they needed to, you know, be active out in the field. And the problem was these Vietnamese soldiers were smaller in stature than the average American soldier by several inches. And so these larger rifles were not working. And so then head of ARPA's program in Vietnam, a program called Project Agile, was a guy named William Goodell. And he cut through all the red tape, went straight to Secretary of Defense McNamara and said, I want 1,000 AR-15 rifles, prompt, though, because I need them for the Vietnamese soldiers. And those rifles appeared metaphorically overnight.

Because those weapons got fielded, they suddenly became the chosen weapon because that was the opportunity. And within a number of years, that AR-15 rifle was adapted to an automatic fire, and it became the M-16 assault rifle, which today is used more than any other military service by soldiers and sailors and airmen. So it gives you an idea of how DARPA kind of caught through the red tape, takes the lead, and then many others follow. When you were interviewing the older DARPA scientists, did any of them express any kind of regret? Oh, absolutely. And that's something that I really value about interviewing older scientists, because you're talking about when

you're a defense scientist for decades, you know, you're a patriot. You have been working on programs that have aided national security, and there's a confidence and an acceptance there, which is important. There is also a sense, I gather, from many of the scientists I interview, of an ability to reflect and an ability to be honest about mistakes made. And this is perhaps not something that we younger people have as a capacity, but maybe grows within us as we get older, because I have found that to be true of many of the defense scientists. And one, for example, was a scientist I worked with named Joseph Zaslock,

who was in charge of one of the social science programs in Vietnam, whereby Vietnamese farmers and civilians were interviewed, witnesses would be interviewed, and reports would be put together to give the Pentagon an idea about how the hearts and minds on the ground were feeling about the war. And, of course, you probably now know what I'm talking about when you consider, ah, the hearts and minds campaign of the Vietnam War, which actually repeated itself in the war on terror.

What Zazloss explained me being one of the leaders of this program and one of the regrets he had was that at the time, the Pentagon only wanted to hear that the hearts and minds of the average Vietnamese civilians was with the U.S. government, was brought. pro-democracy and was saying, keep up the good work, guys. When in fact, that's not what the average Vietnamese civilian was saying. What they were saying instead was, you know, in many ways, these communists are offering us something better, which is an alternative to the corrupt Vietnamese government

that we have to deal with that you American support. And what Zanzoff explained to me with with remorse, was that the reports that revealed this tragic truth did not make their way to the Pentagon. And the reports that were sort of jerry-rigged to suggest that did make their way to the Pentagon. Most interestingly, of all, a number of people on Zazlov team actually went to the Secretary of Defense Office at the Pentagon. They sit with him and they tell him the truth. And he turns his back to them, literally. and stares out the window.

And when they are finished, he says, thank you. That will be all. Well, so can we ask you one final question, which is, do you see anything that DARPA is working on currently that is going to really have an impact on the world? Is there anything that either they're keeping under wraps or that they're working on or releasing now that will change things for us? Most certainly, and I would argue that that is in the realm of artificial intelligence.

Artificial intelligence I'm talking about is real sentient thinking machines, which we are by no means capable of envisioning in the next few years, but which the Pentagon, led by DARPA scientists, is absolutely envisioning for the next 20 years. the Defense Department's desire to create autonomous weapons, weapons that can act on their own, is part of the plan for warfare for the next 20 to 25 years. These are unclassified documents. The programs that are enabling these to happen are very murky, and many of them are classified. I visited one of the programs to create a synthetic brain, it's called, at the Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico.

and I have many very interesting discussions with the scientists who were working on this. Some of them agree with me that the suggestion that this two-fold effort by DARPA to build a synthetic brain using supercomputers and to place neuroprosthetics inside the brains of humans, in this case brain-roounded warriors, for research purposes, when you look at those two technologies, running paramedic, And you keep in mind the Defense Department goal of true autonomous weapon systems that can think for themselves. You can see and perhaps worry that the end goal is to create humans that are augmented, that is step one, augmented humans, humans augmented with machines, to become more like machines to ultimately move toward autonomous weapons. Now, if this sounds like a crazy conspiracy, which it might, I took the question to the Jason

scientists who I had been interviewing and was shown that they, too, had this concern and had this question and had written a report to the Defense Department where they said they believe that these brain ship programs are a very bad idea. And specifically, they said they believed that it could lead to high-quality brain control. And so here, and when I say here, I mean in the end of my book, I get into this very uncomfortable arena where the reader has to take all of this information and ask themselves the question, what exactly is the Pentagon doing? What exactly is the Defense Department planning on doing with augmented cognition, brain ship technology, and autonomous weapons? And those are the questions I let the reader answer. Well, and I guess we'll leave our listeners to answer them too.

Annie Jacobson, thank you so much for joining us. And just to mention the book again. It's called The Pentagon's Brain. And it's been a pleasure talking with you. Thank you so much for having me. Thanks for listening to the show. We love to hear your comments on iTunes, and you can follow us on Twitter.

At War underscore College. War College is hosted by myself, Jason Fields, and Matthew Galt. It was created with Craig Hedick and produced this week by Jamila Knowles. And remember to check out other Reuters podcasts on SoundCloud and iTunes. Next time on War College. The AC130's normal operating profile was to fly almost exclusively at night. They're large, and they would be otherwise potentially vulnerable to even more basic surface-air weapons such as anti-aircraft cannon and shoulder-fired missiles because they have to fly

so low and so slow, part of what makes them so accurate in attacking the targets that they go after. They fly in the dead of night with all their lights off and then suddenly, you know, just all hellbreaks lose.