Angry Planet - DARPA Is the Disney of the Defense Department

Episode Date: January 22, 2018

Without America’s Defense Advanced Research Project Agency there would be no internet, no GPS, no M16, and no Agent Orange. The mysterious group of scientists and soldiers created much of today’s military and civilian technology, but the average citizen doesn’t know much about them. That’s by design.This week on War College, Sharon Weinberger—the executive editor Foreign Policy—reveals the hidden world of the Pentagon’s mad scientists.The agency is the subject of her book Imagineers of War: The Untold Story of DARPA, the Pentagon Agency That Changed the World, which comes out in Paperback on February 20.Weinberger walks us through DARPA’s strangest and most savage projects—from it’s early days helping out the space program to its current foray into artificial intelligence and robotics.You can listen to War College on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. You can reach us on our new Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/warcollegepodcast/; and on Twitter: @War_College.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. In 2000, they started holding DARPA Tech, this sort of bi-annual conference, at Disneyland in California. And, you know, having office directors dress up in Disney suits. And it was what I call the Disneyification of DARPA. You're listening to War College.

A weekly podcast that brings you the stories from behind the front lines. Here are your hosts, Matthew Galt and Jason Fields. Hello and welcome to War College. I'm Jason Fields. And I'm Matthew Galt. Better weapons don't always mean victory in a fight. But if you're fighting with bronze and the other guys got steel, you're likely to lose. In 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik and the U.S. freaked out. Suddenly, our military might look like stone knives and bearskins.

What's a superpower to do? Enter the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. DARPA. Sharon Weinberger is a journalist who covers national security and the author of The Imagineers of War, The Untold Story of DARPA, the Pentagon Agency that changed the world. She joins us to talk about the secretive agency today. So thanks for joining us, Sharon.

Thanks for having me. Can we just start off with what exactly is DARPA? Is it a bunch of government scientists and lab coats in some secret underground bunker? Or how does it work? No, there's a misconception sometimes that DARPA does research. So DARPA itself is essentially a government funding agency, maybe even a research management agency. It does not have, and by design never had its own laboratories. The scientific, technical staff of DARPA who transition out every three to five years aren't typically doing research at DARPA. They are funding, organizing research projects outside, whether an academia, military, or private industry. There are some small exceptions, but that's for the most part what

it is. It is a research management agency, which sounds very unsexy, but it's done a lot of very sexy things. What are some of those sexy things that it's done? Well, I think what most people who follow DARPA, it sort of cemented its reputation are a number of a very notable innovation, the most famous of which is the modern internet, which grew directly out of a system called ARPA net that was created by DARPA then called ARPA at the time in the 1960s and 1970s. It's really the internet that has cemented DARPA's reputation today. But a number of other things that came out of DARPA are drones, unmanned aerial vehicles. Again, a direct result of DARPA's work going back as far. is the 1960s, but more notably in the 1970s and 1980s. Then there's stealth aircraft. The first

stealth aircraft prototype was the brainchild of DARPA, though jointly funded by the airport, but was really DARPA's management pushing forward. Precision weapons are also very much inherited out of DARPA programs. So if you think about it, the way that we prosecute our wars today, and also even the way we live our lives, on a daily basis as not members of the military are a direct outgrowth of some of DARPA seminal projects. So one of the things I wanted to ask you, you call them Imagineers in the title of your book, which makes me think of Disney.

Why did you pick that term specifically? Well, a couple reasons. One was that, you know, there's a tendency. There's a lot of books sort of about the wizards of, you know, the wizards of war, the wizards of Armageddon where wizards stay up late, which was a book about the creation of the internet and personal computing at DARPA. And I wanted this very much to be a critical history because as much good as DARPA has done

and as successful as it's been, I wanted this to be a candid exploration of its failures. And at the same time, I wanted to capture something that DARPA has struggled with over the years, which is its role in national security. I often ask the question, you know, is DARPA a science agency that does national security or is a national security agency that does science?

And at times, you know, DARPA has crean towards a myth about itself that it does science fiction. And it's creaned so far to that myth at times that in the 2000s, they started holding DARPA Tech, this sort of bi-annual conference at Disneyland in California and, you know, having office directors dress up in Disney suits. And it was what I call the Disneyification of DARPA. And so this title, the Imagineers of War,

Wars was very purposely coined from the Disney term of Imagineers. That's the term that Disney uses for its people that dream up things. And I purposely took that because in a sense, that is what DARPA at times has imagined itself, only it's not imaginary, you know, Mickey Mouse and Pluto. It's a imaginary war. So it captures sort of the complexities of DARPA in the 2000s, but also what DARPA was in the 1960s. in 1970s, but I think it's not as much today, which is the original sort of strategic thinkers

of DARPA. We're thinking not about science fiction per se, but they were imagining war. They were thinking, how do we fight in wars today? How do we fight in wars tomorrow? And how do we engineer solutions to war, whether it is keeping peace or fighting wars? So that is the sort of the long explanation of the imaginers of war. It was the one term I could come up with that I could. I felt captured the complexity of DARPA, both of its successes and its failures and of the

controversy within it. I am now stuck on thinking about the DARPA officials dressed as Disney characters in Disneyland. I think there's pictures online. One of the things that I point out in the book is in recent years, one of the more notable failures, and I'll sort of use it in quotes, because what you consider a failure depends on your point of view on it. But I think the biggest controversy that DARPA was involved in in the years after 9-11 was a program called Total Information Awareness that was headed by retired Admiral John Poindexter,

famous from the Iran-Contra controversy and then hired into DARPA to run this program, which was the first really controversial domestic surveillance program and just blew up in the press after the New York Times covered it. This program and John Poindexter's introduction of it was rolled out at Disney. land. If I remember right, that was the program that was supposed to make sense out of all of the data that was being collected already and make us aware of the information we already had, right? Yes, which seems so innocent in the years after Edwards noted, but it was, of course, it wasn't. I mean, you know, what they were talking about was combining credit card transactions with classified

data, with a sort of a database of everything. It was incredibly controversial. And it was, and it led to congressional hearings, and eventually Congress stepped in and closed the program. You know, when I interviewed John Poindexter for the book, you know, he kind of chuckled at the end of the interview with a sort of, well, look what happened after. And his point was that, you know, he at least had a part of the program that was researching privacy and was looking at a privacy protection device. And when Congress, quote unquote, shut down the program in reality what they did was they moved all of the surveillance, data analysis, data mining programs over to the NSA, and look where those went. And the one thing that really got truly shut down was the privacy protection device.

I think Admiral Pointexter has a point about, you know, they took a white program, an unclassified program, and just made it black. But I think his idea of what privacy is never squared with privacy advocates or even how most of us, quote unquote regular people think of privacy. But his point was well taken. Can you elaborate on that point? What was his version of privacy versus what most of us would think of as privacy? It would be fundamental difference. You know, John Pointexter thinks a lot.

You know, his idea of privacy was it's when a human being looks at your data. You're, you know, you went and rented a hotel room with someone not your spouse. And that's a violation of, you know, it's. It's not illegal and someone looks at that data and has violated your privacy. I mean, he didn't use that example. I'm using that as the extreme case. I mean, this is, you know, we worry about the government having access to our lives, not just the things we do wrong, but even the things we do right, our political views.

And in a, what I've noticed is people within the national security world who work in these issues, they think it's a violation when someone sees it. They see your selfies. They see, you know, whatever pictures people are sending out. But, and so his privacy protection tool was going to anonymize all the data so that basically you put everyone's data in a black box and the computer algorithms run through it. And it's only when you identify a pattern that could be plans for a terrorist attack, that you would, in his conception, go to some sort of FISA court and say, do we have permission to uncover just that data that was recognized in the algorithms? And that was his conception of the privacy protection. So I may be simplifying it, but I think that's a pretty good encapsulation of it.

Well, what privacy advocates say is no, no, no, it's not. I mean, yes, that's a violation as well when someone looks at your private data. But the very act of collecting it, having your credit card receipts, your medical information, you know, your telephone calls, your metadata, that even having the government collect it and trial through it with algorithms is a violation. of privacy. And we see this in the post-Snowden debate as well. You know, the government says, well, if you're not a terrorist, you have nothing to worry about. And privacy advocates say that the collective, you know, the sort of collect everything. It is the collection of it and the storage of it

that is in itself a violation. And that's the disconnect. I got to say, point extra, when you move it forward 10 years, actually sounds to me like the ACLU. Well, that's, you know, the amazing thing about it is when you look back at the articles about total information awareness, it seems like such innocent days, you know, because DARPA wasn't even, I mean, Pointexter had created this thing called Vanilla World. And Vanilla World was a simulation that was going to be used in total information awareness, because he said, I don't want real data at this point, because I realize that collection of domestic data is very controversial. So they set up Vanilla World to test total information.

awareness and it was made up with avatars, with, you know, fake people and fake addresses. And the idea was that it would eventually become, you know, cherry vanilla world. And I forget what the next iteration was. Basically, you would add more complexity to the simulations. But no data was ever collected. But when you, what he didn't understand, and part of this is he just didn't understand the press was, you know, when the controversy started going, it was portrayed as if they were already collecting all this data. And he's like, this is just a research. And he's, and he's, he's, right on that. It was just research, although the eventual goals of the program were to use data for domestic counterterrorism. But now that we know all of the different programs, the

National Security Agency was and in some cases still is doing, yeah, what Darba was doing back in the 2002-2003 time frame seems in some ways, you know, innocent in its conception at least, in some respects. I think you just touched on something that I'd like to dig into if we can. You said they were just doing research. How much of what they do is just research? And at what point do other people come in and take it away from them as the NSA did after 9-11? Like, how does that work? Is there a concrete workflow there? Yeah. So there's an exception to every rule. So in theory, DARPA is only doing sort of prototypes that, you know, once it develops a something to demonstrate that you can do it. And then the idea is the military services will do it. So, for example,

back in the 1970s when they worked on the first stealth aircraft, it was called Have Blue, and Lockheed Skunk Works was the contractor for it. Have Blue was never going to fly in combat, and nor would it be DARPA's rule to build those. Have Blue was a prototype to show that you could build an aircraft that could evade Soviet radar. And once they did that, then the Air Force ran away, not ran away, but they ran off and developed the F-117, you know, something that actually was operational. And that in theory is how a lot of DARPA programs were going to go. And so, for instance, another example was DARPA funded development of the, what was called the Amber drone, developed by Abe Karam and Israeli-born aeronautical engineer. Amber wasn't ever going to be used in

combat, but its successor down the road, the predator, of course, was used. And so that is the way DARPA is supposed to work. Now, there's exceptions to every rule. A lot of what my book covers, for instance, is the Vietnam years, which a lot of which I wrote about because it had been classified for so long and only recently declassified, where DARPA was actually deployed in war zones. It was in Vietnam, and then it had field offices in Bangkok in Bangkok, in Tehran Iran, in Beirut, Lebanon, where it was actually developing things and buying things, for instance, like the AR-15, that were going to be used by troops in war. What else were they doing in Vietnam?

Was there anything that kind of came of that research that we would know today? What were they not doing in Vietnam? So one of the things that DARPA would very much like to forget today, what's the old phrase that, you know, success has a thousand fathers and failure as an orphan? Well, DARPA very much is, unfortunately, the father, mother, and everything else of Agent Orange. It was DARPA and a specific person at DARPA who first suggested doing experiments with chemical defoliation in Vietnam in the early 1960s. They did initial work and they developed it into a full program funding and sending over what were known as the Rainbow Agents, because there was Agent Rose, there was Agent Purple, Agent Orange.

We now associate chemical defoliation with Agent Orange because Agent Orange ended up being the most, I don't know, popular is not the right word, but the most widely used defoliant in Vietnam. That was true and true a DARPA experiment that the Air Force had an operational program for, but started out with DARPA. So that is one DARPA program. Another one that DARPA does tout today, because DARPA does not put Agent Orange in its history, books is the AR-15, where ARPA took over first about a dozen AR-15, later put in order for 100, which was originally for the South Vietnamese military. They wanted a lightweight gun

that could be used in the jungle for the South Vietnamese soldiers. But when the initial reports came back positive on it, there were a group of people who pushed it for the army, which for those of you then familiar with the very sort of controversial history of the AR-15, which became the M16, whether or not it was really a superior weapon is a debate that probably still goes on today. I take no position in that. But that was something it started off because it was a DARPA project to introduce a lightweight gun for jungle warfare for the South Vietnamese. Other things that came out of DARPA's work in Vietnam was the first armed drone. Took a Navy project, a little sort of a weird-shaped drone called the QH-50 that was going to be used for anti-submarine warfare,

DARPA put weapons on it, and they were going to use it on the DMZ in Vietnam to target incursions on it. So that didn't develop directly into the Predator drone, but it was the first DARPA project looking at can you merge a sensor with a shooter and create an armed drone. That particular project didn't work out very well. What I argue in the book, which is something that I still argue with current DARPA people, is that actually almost everything we associate today with DARPA, like stealth aircraft, like drones, like precision weapons,

came out of DARPA's work in Vietnam. So, for instance, DARPA introduced a quiet aircraft into Vietnam. Its drone work also led to the eventual stealth aircraft. In fact, what happened is after the end of the Vietnam War, when DARPA was being criticized, along with every other part, the Pentagon involved in the Vietnam War,

the director of DARPA quietly renamed. There was a Vietnam office called Agile. And so the director renamed it, the overseas defense, research office, and then a couple years later, renamed it again. He renamed it the Tactical Technology Office. Well, that tactical technology office, a direct recreation of the Vietnam War office, is today the largest office in DARPA and is the one that is touted as the creator of drones, stealth aircraft, precision weapons, all of the military programs that we associate today

with DARPA. I think the one truly big innovation that DARPA takes credit for today, that didn't come out of Vietnam War per se, but out of that time period is ARPANet, the predecessor to the Internet. Now, ARPANet was not an outgrowth of the Vietnam War, but in fact, it was an outgrowth of a time period in DARPA when they were going after these big ambitious projects. And in fact, the very first funding for computer networking was carved out of the Vietnam War Office's budget. All right, the War College listeners, we're going to pause there for a break. we are on with Sharon Weinberger and we are talking about DARPA. Thank you, War College listeners.

You are just back from a break. We are on with Sharon Weinberger and we are talking about DARPA, the Pentagon's Imagineers. Jason, back to you. How does DARPA decide what they're going to fund and which projects they pick overall? Well, the model has changed over the years. You know, DARPA has a myth about itself because DARPA doesn't know its own. history. Because the nature of the agency is that people transition

out every three to five years, people who think they know what DARPA is really only know the time period that they were at the agency. So in DARPA's early days, the projects were very much top down, that either they were assigned things, sometimes by the president himself, or by at least

by the executive branch, sometimes by the Secretary of Defense, or by the director of DARPA, and then they carried out those programs. But as the years went... Like basically saying, like, Go build me a laser. Yeah. Let's look at, exactly.

Let's look at DARPA's first year in existence. Its assignment was to get America into space. Not like, you know, what do you want to do for us? But like, get America into space. That was what DARPA did for its first year and to some extent for its first 18 months. Its other major project was missile defense. It was told to go do missile defense, which is where some of the initial laser projects came out of. It was told to detect nuclear.

tests. So it built a network of seismographic sensors around the world to detect Soviet underground tests. These were the projects it was assigned. Now, it also had this larger mandate to sort of, you know, what is now called to stop technological surprise. I think that's a bit of a misnomer, but to think about, I think the phrase that were used was to think about the unimagined weapons of the future. So it also at the same time started sort of developing this bottom up approach of ideas based. So there was a bit of both of top assigned programs and then bottom assigned programs. I think where DARPA has evolved to today, there still are programs that it's assigned to do, but it's much more that program managers are recruited based on the ideas they bring in. So you're a potential program

manager at DARPA and you meet with a director for an interview and he says, what would you do at DARPA? And you pitch them. You say, these are the five projects that I would develop, you know, a drone that will fly for, you know, a hundred weeks or a, you know, a weapon that will do X, Y, or Z. And that is, you know, I don't know what the percentage would be, but I would say that's the majority of what DARPA does today is self-directed projects that they aren't assigned. And, you know, there's good and bad in this. The good is it certainly sort of gives a lot of leeway to creativity and good ideas. The downside of it, and this is what I also bring up in the book, is that DARPA has become so protective of its independence

and so determined to do its own thing that it runs the risk of being irrelevant to the Pentagon, of being irrelevant to national security. To a certain extent, Darpa was created, and its initial directive was very vague, basically to do those projects as directed by the Secretary of Defense. And that's what made DARPA important that it had things that the Secretary of Defense

or even the president cared about. But if the Pentagon, I don't think Mattis, for instance, spends a lot of, of his day thinking about DARPA or what DARPA can do or how he can you. I don't think it ever, ever really comes up in his mind in the course of the day. And what a shame is that's not the way DARPA was in the 1960s or 1970s. However disastrous, some of its projects were in the Vietnam War, it was front and center. The directors were being hauled in front of Congress to talk about nuclear weapons detection,

about Vietnam, about missile defense. You know, hearings that involve DARPA today are standard budget hearings. and I don't think people pay much attention to them. DARPA is not as important, I are, due to national security as it was 20, 30 years ago. And given its track record, I think that's something of a shame. Is it interested in making itself more important? Or is it happy to fly under the radar right now?

So it depends a bit on the director. For instance, you know, Craig Fields, who was a director in the early 90s, very briefly, until he was terminated. You know, he looked at that as a good thing. I remember I foyer had some transcripts of interviews with him, and he said it was a great thing, you know, Pentagon didn't know what we were doing. But it also, well, he was fired, among other things.

But it also, again, it makes you like, who are you transitioning thing? You know, you may have the greatest gadget in the world, but if you cannot impress upon whether it's OSD or the military services, why that thing is good, then it dies on the vine. And what good have you done? The reason why have blue, the stealth prototype, why we know about it today and why it's not sitting as a mopball in some museum, maybe the original prototype. But the reason why that transitioned was because then the director of DARPA drove a hard bargain with the Air Force. He said, I'm not going to do this project unless I have Air Force buy-in. Tony Tether, who was the director of DARPA, for over eight

years at the early 2000s, from 2001 to, I think the beginning of 2009, he very much wanted to have good connections with the Pentagon and made a lot of progress on that. He had some setbacks as well. So it depends very much if the directors come out of the national security world or if they come out of more of the science and technology world. You know, there's benefits to both. What I always say about DARPA, it's almost good that it's not one thing or the other. You know, you've had directors who really want it to be a science agency and don't care so much about transition. And then things that have percolate up. And then you get a director in who says, that is the one thing I care about is transitioning these technologies.

And to a certain extent, maybe that's a good thing that you have sort of a bounce between, you know, different directors and different views. it helps get things going, but then it also helps push things forward. If DARPA isn't the one creating weapons, let's say, are there other either government agencies or other ways that new weapon systems get developed? Is anybody else thinking about the same kind of thing that DARPA is supposed to be doing? Well, yes. I mean, of course the military services who are responsible, you know, by statute for their own acquisition, they very, you know, Army, Air Force, Navy are always thinking about the future and they have acquisition, you know, they have programs, submarines, tanks, whatever in the pipeline that they're developing, some of which are futuristic

by the fact that they take 20 years longer than they should, not on purpose. But yes, I think the services think about the future, but they think about it in a different way. There are much more, as you know, tied to requirements. What do we need to do? So what DARPA does is it sort of stands back to a certain and says, we're untethered to any requirements. We don't have to think of. about acquisition in that way. We can think about new ways to do things, new technologies to develop. And again, there's a bit of a myth that it's a science fiction agency. You know, certainly there was always an element of futurism in DARPA. You know, one of its first projects back in 1958 the year it was created was Operation Argus, where they were going to create a force field for the entire

planet to protect against ballistic missiles. And they even carried out the experiments for this. They launched nuclear weapons and the upper atmosphere that were going to create killer electrons that would fry, you know, that would create this force field. That was very futuristic. Did it work? No. I think the chief scientist at DARPA at the time, he wrote later in his memoir that the particular atmosphere of the United States, basically the killer electrons decayed too quickly. But he said, perhaps there could be another planet where this idea would work. Oh, my God.

Yeah, no, that didn't work, but we don't have a force field. I don't know. Unfortunately, fortunately, I don't know what to say. What you found in recent years is that, you know, new secretaries of defense come in. And this is part of, I think, the unfortunate part of DARPA sort of moving away from the Pentagon. And they want to demonstrate change. And rather than using DARPA as that agent of change, because DARPA is so resistant to doing certain things, they create their own. So to give some examples, you know, and they're just, you know, and they're just, you know,

days of Secretary Rumsfeld, so I'm dating us back now to the early 2000s, he came in and created something called the Office of Force Transformation headed by Admiral Sobrowski, who has since passed away, which I don't think they would have considered it, but it was a little mini DARPA, you know, it had funding and it did experiments with bouncing lasers off aerostats and some other things to demonstrate new technologies. I believe it was the original progenitor of the idea of the littoral combat ship. I'd have to double check that, but I'm pretty sure it was. And I guess my question is, well, DARPA is kind of tasked to do that same thing. So Office of Force Transformation is gone, but fast forward another 10 years.

And what do we have now? We have something called the Strategic Capabilities Office, which actually lives in the basement of DARPA, which was a creation of the last administration of the previous Secretary of Defense to again demonstrate new technologies, new technological developments. We also have something called DUX, which is also sort of a technology incubator that the Pentagon funds to work with Silicon Valley. Again, all things that in theory DARPA could do or even has done in the past. We also have more traditional agencies like the Office of Naval Research and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research.

They, I mean, they do some far-reaching research, but they're less about projects, you know, building technologies that will transition, I would say. I mean, they're much more on the research. So, yes, I mean, the short answer is there are other agencies that think about new technologies and about the future. but I would say none quite as ambitiously and certainly not as successfully as DARPA has. And DARPA seems to stick around and these other agencies not right. They tend to fade away long term. Exactly. I mean, DARPA has a lot of staying power.

Some of that is legacy. But much more, it's also, it's no, at this point, what's sort of amazing about the DARPA story is that it still exists. Because what I found based on the archival records that I looked at was that nobody. ever, it was a quick fix. It was a political fix. That Eisenhower was taking a lot of flack for not handling Sputnik that we were behind. And so it was a quick way of consolidating all of the space programs originally and getting America into space. But then that DARPA was strict. I mean, that was its prestige mission. And it had, when NASA was created later, and by later, I mean, like eight or nine months later, the civilian space programs went over to NASA. And

DARPA still had the military space programs, but by 1959, it was strict of even those responsibilities. And I think there was pretty much an idea, yeah, you know, we're going to shut it down. But what DARPA had, and its first director, was so furious about this, he left DARPA in a hub, and it asked what he was going to do next. He said, I'm going to be an artist. It's amazing. And what DARPA was left with was actually an Intel guy, instead of a covert ops guy, who had been put at DARPA to watch after the interest of the intelligence community. And he kind of looked around and said, this is not bad. We've got like a freewheeling agency that I can use to like do my projects.

And one of his projects was Vietnam. So he kind of convinced the Secretary of Defense in the White House to keep DARPA alive, which then evolved again into more projects, more diverse over the years and sort of had this lasting legacy. Whereas these other little mini DARPA agencies have sort of popped up as sort of a pet of one secretary of defense or the other and usually faded away. DARPA keeps going because when it may have failures, but it has enough successes to point to you. The danger for DARPA, and this is again sort of the point that I bring up in the book of being isolated from the Pentagon in some respects, is that people will ask, what have you done for me lately? Like, okay, you had the internet, but you know,

that was some decades ago. You had stealth aircraft. You had drones. What have you done for me lately? If I were to look back at DARPA's last, big, lasting success, I would say it is the grand challenge, which were the series of robotic car races in the desert, which deserves absolutely credit for the advent of driverless cars that are just now over a decade later, it's starting to come to fruition. But, you know, that's a decade ago. You have to be able to consistently show that you have successes. I don't know what consistency is. I don't know if it's three years, five years, or ten years, because there are a lot of people in the Pentagon who would happily take Darba's money. You say they changed the world.

Do you think they've changed the way we fight war or who we're fighting? I think they've changed the way we fight wars, which perhaps then changes who we're fighting. So, I mean, again, look at how we have prosecuted the war on terror in all of its iterations and name changes over the years. of the use of armed drones. That is, again, a direct outgrowth of DARPA programs. One of the critical things that happened in the early 1970s as the Vietnam War was winding down, and the director of DARPA was, as I mentioned earlier, was thinking about how do I sort of salvage all of

this technology and science that we did in Vietnam, but sort of get rid of the stink of the Vietnam War. And so one of the things they did was they did a study jointly with the defense nuclear agency, what is now called the Defense Threat Reduction Agency. Defense nuclear agency used to be much more important than in the 1970s and it is now. Now it's a bit of a backwater. And they called it, I'm going to mess up the acronym. It was like the LRDDP study, which the long range something something research project study. And the director of DARPA at the time, which worked with me said, the reason I gave it that long, unrememberable acronym is I wanted something so obscure that it would never show up in the front page of the Washington Post.

He's like, you know, I knew if I called it Operation Smart Kill, we were doomed. So we gave it this obscure acronym. And the goal of the study was to think about how do you use all of these things, command and control from computer networks, drone, stealth aircraft, sensors, all of the things that DARPA developed in the Vietnam War and take it to sort of the European battlefield to sort of the traditional U.S. Soviet conflicts or how we would fight. against the Soviet Union. That study led to a host of programs of technologies, again, out of DARPA programs that were adopted by the military and changed the very strategy. The biggest one of which was the idea that we had to rely on nuclear weapons on the European battlefield because DARPA was

hell-bent on demonstrating that with enough precision, you could use conventional weapons as a deterrent and you wouldn't need tactical nuclear weapons. You wouldn't necessarily need the nuclear deterrent. That changed U.S. strategy. It changed the way that the military plan to fight in Europe. And I think it had a lasting effect on the world. There's science fiction and then there's horror, right? And it seems like they may have gone the horror route a few times. Can you talk a little bit about some of the things they studied and how seriously they might have actually taken them?

So I get two different versions of this. So I enjoy the paranormal stuff and I have a chapter on it because. Because this is a story that where DARPA could have gone off the deep end very much, and instead they were the heroes. So the story of DARPA's involvement in the paranormal, the story I was told by Steve Lukasik, who was the director of DARPA at the time. This is the 1970s. It was just great. You know, so he was friends with this guy, Sidney Gottlieb, who is famous in his own right. Sydney Gottlieb was the head of the Office of Technical Service, sort of the science and technology arm of the CIA.

Gottlieb did things like he developed the exploding cigar, you know, poisons that were going to be used on Fidel Castro. Gottlieb was also behind the very infamous M.K. Ultra program, the LSD experiments that the CIA did, including on unwitting subjects. And Gottlieb, perhaps not surprisingly, it was very interested in the paranormal. So, you know, in a way, Gottlieb's division was kind of the CIA's version of DARPA. So it's kind of natural that Gottlie would know and be interested in talking to the director of DARPA. So Gottlieb invites Steve Lukasik, the director of DARPA, over to his office and says, you know, Steve, we're really interested in what the Soviets are doing with bunny rabbits. So, you know, the Soviets had been doing paranormal experiments. And one of their experiments was looking at whether there was a psychic link between mother rabbits and their babies.

And so they would take a mother rabbit, take the babies, kill a baby in a room, far away from the mother, and then see a point. the mother reacted, if there was this psychic link that the mother would recognize her baby had been killed. I know this is terribly gruesome. And the Soviets thought that there was and that this could be used for, I kid you, not submarine communications because one of the dilemmas to today with submarine communications is that when a submarine armed with nuclear weapons or anything else is deep underwater, there's no effective way to communicate with it. So, you know, they've looked at different things like extremely low frequency over the years. I mean, there are different ways you could, but at least at the time there were not effective ways.

So if you could even get a message to this, you know, basically nuclear war is happening, please come up and launch your nuclear weapons. That would be a way to do it. And you could do this through psychic communications. I mean, even describing. So kill one bunny for yes, kill two bunnies for no. Yes. You keep the mother rabbit on a submarine.

It's, yeah. Point being, Sidney Gottlie was he was interested in a ray of these. ESP parapsychology and he was funding stuff, including at the old Stanford Research Institute, now known as SRI International, a very respected institute. So, you know, basically what he wants is he wants DARPA to fund some of the work to, and he wants sort of affirmation of the work. And Steve, the director of DARPA, Steve Kasich was an open-minded guy. And, you know, his version to me when he told me this story was, you know, I thought it was bullshit, but why not investigate it? And I think Steve is right.

But when I looked back at the contemporaneous correspondence, he certainly, the correspondence was with a straight face, you know, when he was writing this back in the 1970s. So they assigned a program manager basically with an open-ended mandate, you know, go look at what the CIA is funding out at SRI in California, but also look at the whole field of parapsychology. And, you know, the program manager took it over, thought this was great. He was just going to travel around the world for a couple of years, which he did. and meet wizards and witches and parapsychology experts. But one of the things he did was he went out to SRI to meet with these physicists who were doing

the work, and they were doing work with Yuri Geller, the famed Israeli showman magician, Spoonbender, as many people know him, who was part of this CIA program who claimed to have these paranormal skills. You know, he could, you know, in theory, people with paranormal skills could imagine Soviet bases and draw them, all sorts of things. And anyway, this program manager went out to SRI. He brought with him two other academics, one who believed in a lot of this stuff and sort of premonitions and one who was skeptical. And they went out to SRI and the DARPA program manager just said, it's all bullshit.

You know, he was like the guy's a magician and dismissed all of it. Although he still went around and, you know, met witches for better part of a year. So he didn't, but he basically came back to DARPA at the end and said, there's nothing here. worth investing in. I've looked at it all. I've looked at everything. It is all just bullshit in his view. And that was, you know, there was this description of one final meeting in the DARPA director's office with some folks from the CIA, the DARPA program manager. And so the CIA people, you know, turn and say, you know, see, see how good all this is. And the DARPA guy just said, no, it's just all crap. It really is. And so DARPA was sort of, you know, I guess if you believe

in this stuff, then DARPA was played a bad role. But if you believe that this was a waste government money, then DARPA were the heroes in this, saying, like, no, we shouldn't be funding it. Now, the CIA did continue to go on and fund these things for years. What's really interesting is if you saw the New York Times article that came out, I think it's a couple weeks ago about the secret Pentagon office that was looking for aliens and UFOs, basically these people come up. But again, one of the people involved in that project is the same SRI guy who was being funded by the CIA to look at parapsychology.

So, you know, a lot of my career are looking at the underworld of national security and what you'll find is the same people come up again and again. It could be UFOs. It could be parapsychology. It could be, you know, LSD experiments, but it's like the same group of people.

Just keep coming back for government cash. Yeah, I mean, look, some of these, I mean, you know, I don't want to say these are, a lot of these people, they believe deeply in what they're doing. Some of them do it with greater integrity than others. There's something to be said about having an open mind. I personally don't think it should lead to parapsychology, but there's nothing wrong with saying we can have an office that explores unexplained things.

But the second it's done secretly, I personally become very suspicious of the integrity of the research. And I think time and time again, we see that these offices are hidden because of embedding, embarrassment factor and not because they're doing classified research. And that's a... I think that's a good place for us to wrap up. Jason, do you have anything else?

No, Sharon, thank you so much for talking us through this. Thanks, guys. I enjoyed this. I hope it was useful. Absolutely. It's a fascinating secret world. That's it this week, War College listeners. We hope you enjoyed the episode. If you did, please pick up Sharon Weinberger's book, The Imagineers of War, the Untold Story of DARPA, the Pentagon Agency that changed the world. War College is me, Matthew Galt, and Jason, Jason Fields. If you like the show, please like and subscribe on iTunes.

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This really should help everyone with some depth to answer current issues facing diplomacy and foreign policy narratives. Keep up the good work. Thanks, Tom. We will. Keep listening. If you want to talk to us or drop us a line,

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