When we get to the question and answer part of the talk, if you have a question, which we highly encourage, please check up to the microphone. We cspan book tv with us and would like to pick up your question on the recording. Also, after the talk sharon will be happy to talk and sign books. The line will start to the right of the podium. As you get up, if you could please hold up your chair and set it to one of the sides against the bookshelf, thats a big help for us. The imagine years of work by Sharon Weinberger is the untold story of the Defense Research project agency. Also known as federal agency founded in 1928 originally as a response to sputnik. Publishers weekly said weinberger. [inaudible] interviewed former officials of the Defense Advanced Research agency revealing a highly secretive organization. Her fascinating account about that example of enthralled to the allure of Science Fiction. Sharon is a National Security editor at the intercept. The author of imaginary weapons, a journey through a pentagon a scientific underworld. She is also written on military science and technology for the Washington Post and bbc among other publications. Please welcome Sharon Weinberger [applause] i want to thank politics and prose which is a wonderful bookstore. Third time ive been here and its been a great audience. Its important for me to be here the third time because the book ive not worked on for four years but its the topics ive been thinking about for about 15 years in science and National Security. More portly, how science is conducted in the National Security state. The imagine years of war is a chronicle of darpa, the defense and research agency. When i talk about darpa, i dont know if theyve heard about it and know a lot of about it. I never heard of darpa and i go to the west or the south and the passing interest in technology. Well know about darpa. When people know about darpa they think of it as a Science Fiction agency or a far out technology agency. The associated with self aircraft, drones and arpa. All of those things are true but in writing this book i wanted to write to look back at its true roots. And this chapter takes us back to a few years after darpa was working in vietnam into it. In 1966. The story starts in 1966 when walter was sent darpa to vietnam to a prison in psycho to interview and imprisoned the cone fighter. Gives this fighter the war shot test parity shows him the first inkblot and says do you see anything on this card to remind you of the penis . The fighter says no, i dont. Then he says what about the top part . No. He persevered and seducing anything the remind you of a womans vagina . No, the fighter reply to this went went on for several hours. Neither man was an particular good mood. He was frustrated because he was not being cooperative. The vietcong fighter was unhappy because he is sitting in a prison in psych on being held by the South Vietnamese government stirring it inkblots rather than running a suicide squad. Walter, this psychotherapist was employed by firm that had sent him to vietnam in 1966 with darpa sponsorship to help the pentagon understand the growing communist insurgency. Lets go back to a b. R. In mid1966 in terms of the vietnam war. There is over 180,000 american troops in vietnam which by way of reference is about as many as were deployed to iraq and afghanistan at the height of our current wars there. The vietcong insurgency has grown from an estimate of the tens of thousands in the early 1960s, to about 280,000 fighters. There were terrorist attacks in saigon, roadside bombs are what we today call ied is. There was an active buddhist uprising which included three monks who set themselves on fire. Pentagon officials understood that there was growing, that there was a growing dissolution with the South Vietnamese government and for the u. S. Backing at the government but they didnt understand why. Its out there on the site of good. They turned to sign to tell them understand. Walter was one of these people is sent to vietnam and he believed the rorschach test which apollo at the time among psychotherapist to diagnose personality traits could be used to understand the recipient the growing insurgency. In the growing resentment against the United States and they reckon back South Vietnamese government. But so far in his interview with the vietcong fighter he wasnt getting very far. He asked the fighter to go through all the cards and identify something sexual. Nothing. Then he asked him to find anything remind him of a person. Nothing again. He seemed puzzled. He asked the fighter john a picture that he liked or disliked. The imprisoned manhood once led the savages squad was reluctant to even touch the american card. I tell this entire interview in archives of mit, an exact minute of the translate interview with the vietcong fighter says i do not understand these pictures so i do not know which ones i like and which ones i dislike. He ended up spending seven weeks in vietnam on the payroll during which time he collected data on exactly for vietnamese. A french a kid water, a Student Activist uniting, senior Buddhist Monk, and the vietcong fighter. All harvard antiamerican feelings that were critical of the government of South Vietnam but he found the vietcong fighter particularly vexing. Even the antigovernment Buddhist Monk was more cooperative. You know ive never seen one except on a child. Except on a child. The slightest side of slot writing books as you can go down rabbit holes and this rabbit okay i think in 2014. Id come back, i was living in europe and come back to do research on the national archives. They were declassified records and he came back right in the middle of a Government Shutdown and dark eyes were closed. I interview is to do at mit and a travel there and a half a day because decide to go to the archive to look at these records that i thought would not be particularly relevant. I was fascinated and i found walters final report. He said the vietcong member was a thoroughly dead man, he stared into space. The only time he came alive in his telling of his exploits can his eyes were bright and and held himself in greater dignity. Yes, it is that fast he would lapse back into lethargic apathy, a pattern was lifelong not persisted by imprisonment. [laughing] if you imagine the situation that fighter is in prison. This is not a good time for him. Walter was not interested in the nuances of vietnamese politics. The quiz these men about their parents, dreams and her sex life or lack thereof. He decided after these four interviews that the problem with the vegan these people and the antiamericanisantiamericanism0 years of denomination. He decided through to the pub was the troubled family structure. It is my strong impression that the tribes one rivalry this collected hostility and dependencies constitute the central psychological core of antiamericanism in vietnam. So that is the walter story. This is just a funny anecdote. Let me get back to the questioned her how to do psychotherapist end up in vietnam at the click more to the point of this book entry history of darpa and what it means is how and why did an agency best known for the internet installed aircraft end up involved in this escapade . It goes back to the broader question that is on fasting me of how a site conduct in National Security committee with National Security state and does that matter . This book was finished over a year ago, so long before Donald Trumps election to president but this question came back to me even more come anymore for the way over the past couple of weeks when weve seen a Budget Proposal that cuts back funding for science agencies, the National Estimates of health, climate research. What was also seen a as a propol to increase the Defense Department budget. Details of a darpa budget did not come out yet but traditionally its been tied to the larger budget. It Defense Department budget goes up we will likely see an increase in the budget for java. Science funding may go up or down but it is going to call them go up in the national scary state. This question of what it means and what the implications of signs conducted for nas nationas could a more relevant now than ever. If this Budget Proposal goes through. Let me get back to what darpa is today and where it came from and how we got from there to vietnam. Darpa was created in 1958 as a direct result of the soviet launch sputnik. The launch of the first artificial snow satellite. This created a panic, something i cant get them or to septembe. The idea that the soviets were ahead of us in the space race, able to lunch and dinner cannot intercontinental ballistic missile. Resin eisenhower created darpa, or are about as the nations first agency. So before nasa. It was going to consolidate all the satellite programs and what agency and gives into space. It did that. Then if you follow the quick narrative of darpa it grew from that Great Success into a 3 billion figure agency that it is today made up of about 140 technical personnel, program and just come in and its unique in government and this antibureaucratically. There are entering a permanent employees. People come in for three to five years to start projects. These projects live or die in a time period. They are high risk. They dont always dont use peer review c can move quickly to do things. As the story goes from darpa, this is a tremendous success. And where i once had with it is deeply you can argue darpa is the worlds most successful Government Research agency. Certainly the most successful military research agency. So many of the things they take credit for our to come Driverless Cars which are just got a come into their own can be traced directly back to darpa as can precision weapons, drones, arpanet. Why talk about vietnam so much . What houston to do is look at how did darpa get to the point . I dont think it came from the space race. If you go into darpa is headquarters they have this panorama which is their story in the lobby. Its basically filled with weapons and a flint and all the nifty things darpa is associated with. The only nongc to the entire vietnam war is the m16, the standard issue weapon for the three military services which darpa takes credit for not for creating but they said the predecessor to vietnam and the early 1960s to demonstrate a could be more effective for jungle warfare. That became the m16. Thats the only mention of vietnam which i found very fascinating. In the book i come to the opposite conclusion which is vietnam was courted agencies identity and everything, almost anything with associate with the dark was successes today, stealth aircraft today. More critically and probably the way we fight our wars today much of a comes out of darpa technology is also linked back to the vietnam period. You think about the way were prosecuting our wars in iraq and afghanistan are linked to the most disastrous war effort which might ethics when we are today. This period at the agency is what i call the imagine years of war, people and agency who thought about how we wage war, how we will wage war and every engineer solutions to it. Lets take us back to vietnam. What was he doing there . Walter was a Research Come not in the gnome with the part of a much broader effort that the pentagon was interested in and that darpa spearheaded to help come at use behavioral science and social sciences to understand the insurgency. Defense officials, pentagon officials were not completely deluded. The war effort was not going well. They realized more so than a pentagon officials do today this is a phenomenon the bullets and bombs on couldnt stop your you might understand why people were joining an insurgency. The way darpa got into this is part of this myth of darpa is a sciencefiction agency. What happened during that time. Was it got america into space but within a year and half of agencies creation basically by 1960, the Space Programs were taken away. Nasa was created and they got the civilian Space Programs. The military was victorious in their bureaucratic wars and because Space Programs got. You had this new agency that was just floating adrift at sea. What they did it with an intelligence operative by the name of william godowns on opportunity. He put it darpa deputy director. For him it was thought the space race was a psychological war. Nuclear apocalypse however terrible that would be he dissent was not very likely. He spent a lot of time as an intelligence operative in asia and he really saw the most likely way to use was going to confront the soviet union was through proxy wars go to these insurgencies. By 1962 he pitched president kennedy on an idea which is lets have darpa create a combat development and testing in saigon that will work with the South Vietnamese can work with the American Military to help them fight this insurgency. And his vision was very expensive. He sent the first drawn to vietnam to construct a Chemical Program picky start a psychological operations. He also was her interest in social sciences and sent the first anthropologists to be there. Another thing happen, arpa was assigned Behavioral Sciences. Hired a man named the collider to run the Behavioral Sciences office. This becomes another branch of darpa out of Behavioral Sciences. He goes on to lay foundations for arpanet which i discussed n the book but it began to coincide with the vietnam war. What we can happen is arpa became darpa begin the counterinsurgency agency has been flooded by strange proposals to basically help understand this insurgency. One of my favorites was from 1965 when General Electric wrote suggesting the company be given a quote open into that contract which is a landscaper type. That would allow the company to a Flight Experience in technology to counterinsurgency. Its first proposal was announced polygraph. So a mass lie detector. The concept was a modern version of reimagined. Consider the following scenario has been typical of the type of situation and method of operation. A high secret his Central Government Antiterror Police contingent arrived by helicopter to those suspected of being under vietcong pressure. The villagers are assembled so they can see each other. Imagine you are all villagers. Each individual is connected to this type of mask polygraph lie detector which measures skin response, heartbeat of all simultaneously. I suspected support of the vietcong, could be me, would be hauled up among the assembled villagers were hooked up to lie detector machine. The machine would record a Group Response only bidding the fear of any single villager was informative. This process could be repeated to test as many members as desired. Its 1966, darpa is flooded with proposals like this. Its just bad. People within darfur realized this was a disaster and within the pentagon so they brought in a new guide to clean up this mess and business name was seymour he was an engineer who was passing by the social science. He would it that the programs a quote on andy thought it was a mess. He did believe as a good engineer that people could be measured and stated and actions predicted what engineers measure and track the fight of ballistic missiles. He looked at the social science work within darfur, mass polygraphs and he said we need numbers, we need sons. I want to harden the social sciences. He said i determine early during my darpa tour to try to orient this program as much towards quantitative measurement and analysis as possible. He thought his solution was this Company Called simone maddox, a computer can be found by a prominent mit professor. It most of them at election of president kennedy by predicting on a statebystate basis allegedly with action of 80 the final results. Harpers magazine and 61 called it a people machine site where you could devise a mathematical model of the American Public and feed into the computer . A professor said this is the abomb of the social sciences. So he said as far as we at darpa concert a group like this had impeccable credentials and help avoid many problems. It seemed like a perfect solution is going to be the biggest disaster that disaster start showing up in vietnam in 1966 and one of the first studies with walters psychotherapy study. You would think we are mocking this picture of people bought it at the time. Some people did. I darpa official wrote in a letter i found i find the report so methodologically deficient as a series of medicine. My belief in its findings. But a very wellrespected withn scientist who worked for the institute for defense analysis called the report faceting, and foreign paper. It went both ways. The study was one of seven and conducted in vietnam and i to say the study was noticed, and it wasnt. [laughing] it got worse. There was one for psychological weapons that included physics in an americanstyle chain letter to a village in hostess read it to trick vietnam at a rally. The villagers falsely distribute in the letter believing it was a vietcong trip. They sought to use prophecy and the power of appointment by poaching to 75,000 thousand copies of booklet the prophecy they vietcong defeat. This can read before tet offensive. Most dismal perhaps was the sources project which is how the chapter came about. This project was going to let the sorcerers to sway villagers against the vietcong. The sorcerers did not say what we told them to say. It went on and on. An astounding figure for people who enjoy talking to technocrats like me, like he wanted to do good sites in vietnam and he realized if he tried this was a disaster. By 1968 he canceled the contract. He said in one or he called it an affront to the integrity of the Darpa Program and ended a memo by saying burn this after reading. Since it was in the archives apparently never happened. In 2012 when interviewed seymour about the program, he was updating coming benatar book about the failure of vietnam of the pentagon to conduct social science in vietnam. The book was published in 1976 and is called best laid schemes. What he found was that we start this conversation notches editor for the book but about his experience and updating this book. It was only in 1876 and this book published 40 years ago and has been contacted by current military officials and pentagon officials because they are asking, as to starch content start social Science Programs in iraq and afghanistan. Guinness. They found his book. They know i get the pentagon had done the same thing 40 years prior. He was updating with the new prologue. The same time that was happening and i found his archives, the way i found them was being at mit interviewing a Computer Scientist working on a quantitative social Science Program to study the insurgency in afghanistan. Instead of a people machine he called it social physics. See more and i started conversation back and forth. His view of what a social sense work was a disaster, had Different Reasons for it. In essence he said the problem is you cant really ask the questions i asked the question will dictate the answer. His conclusion was in social research on september crush the phenomenon akin to the heights of uncertainty principle. What he meant was the second you have to social scientist to do the work they change their opinion. People being steady change of use. It affected everything. You couldnt do a study. I never got the chance to ask deitchman about the disaster because they like hundreds of memos and our cousin almost became a person for everyone involved. In his book on said about it was failed for administrative reasons. The week after i visited this mit professor and a crew working came across this work is archives i can email from cmo. He was dying of heart. At the time. He was 89 and he i was trying to finish the prologue to the rebuilding of his book and also to give me as much information as he could. I was getting branded email from about different programs and sometimes personal remembrance of the time of vietnam and the one that struck me was titled the temple turkeys that honorably get weekend agenda and i decide to take time off and go visit the temple on the outskirts of cycle. We went there on a cycle. Spotted an agent dignities behind a table who was a fortuneteller. The general decides he wants to this fortune told. The fortuneteller told the general they did just been informed, important function employed to an up or position. Youre expecting an important event which is also too because that jenna was about to see his family after months of not seeing them. Then finally the fortuneteller said the reason youre here, it will be like scissors cutting water. Seymour and it is emailed to me saying of such a marvelous. I didnt believe him. I can believe is true. Not then but how right he was. The month after he sent me the email he died. He was 90. He just finished updating his book, best laid schemes, republish in 2014 for a generation of wellintentioned military and pentagon officials who were once again in iraq and afghanistan cutting water with scissors. Thank you. [applause] tell people to walk him use a microphone . Yes. If you have any questions, please feel free to step up to the mic. So where was mcnamara and all of this . Macular was a great believer in quantitative stuff. I remember a presentation that was made at the state department i was an intern there in summer of 1969. Where someone was present on the cia told us about a map that was updated every two or three weeks of security showing all the hamlets in South Vietnam and they were supposed to be a security measurement for each one, that they were supposed to determine. Nobody he said is going to go out into these hamlets just to get a number. So they sat in the provincial capital and they just mark them up and send all that information into a computer and it appeared on this chart. But he wasnt stupid. It doesnt sound like, it sounds like he would see through these things. So Seymour Deitchman was a disciple of that school. He was part of that technocratic elite in believing in organizational research. These were not stupid people. You cant blame them for coming in and saying we are trying to understand whats going on. We are not winning. Lets try to do this in a mathematical quantitative way rather than collecting anecdotes. Darpa had been funding a study by the Rand Corporation called the vietcong motivation and morale study, and Seymour Icann minute cut the state of because rant was going to back to nursing Strategic Bombing is working great and deitchman knew this was bad information. So everyone knew the problems with the problems were twofold. In my view. One is your using technology in sex assault was apparently a human problem which is probably the bigger issue. That the data collection, you can measure the flight of a ballistic missile. There are ways to do that. You can use writer. Try to measure Human Behavior, actually collecting the data is hard. Its not done well and its not done what any country that you dont understand, you dont have the expertise. A little bit beyond your question but the pd at the original darpa Counterinsurgency Program is the entire id was not to help the u. S. When the war at the beginning. It was help the local government govern better come conduct military operations so that the u. S. Would not have to fight. That got overtaken by politics in washington. There was a lot to talk with hearts and minds. I graduate from high school in 1965. I was in was in college during the vietnam war. Why wasnt there more analysis of hearts and minds, instead of peoples sex life . Well, that was part of, you go to the archives, theres boxes and boxes of hearts and minds but you doing it first of all, i get its the way you ask the question. Sort of like heck we make america intervention more palatable to the vietnamese . What if the answer is there is no way to make that palatable. No one asked that question. The social science questions are dictating are always asked in a way that is going to get an answer that you want it its never going to be we shouldnt intervene. Its good to be how do we make this intervention go better . You see a lot of hearts and minds today when you talk about the wars in iraq and afghanistan. Its like saying how we make targeted killings of drone strikes more palatable to local populations . Thats the wrong question to ask. I a physician and i work for the military at bethesda Naval Hospital sisal a lot of military people. Theres been a lot here. Ill ask because no one else is asking. There are now many military historians who look at insurgencies, past and present. There are many who ar have writn books and made presentations that are very convincing. They have a very sophisticated history and Political Science model at the various schools for generals around the country and at west point and the naval academy. They even have they didnt have those . What. Was a political analysis and the military analysis, very sophisticated stuff. People studying history and the pentagon is a very curious institution. I mean that in the best since. The pentagon doesnt decide to go to war. Its told to go to war. It goes to one place awaits not working out very well and people dont like them, and a step back and ask how can we do it better . The problem is, so lets take iraq and afghanistan. When the social sciences reinvented itself around 2004, a f apologist said wait a minute, why not a state Department Conduct this . Why not a National Science foundation . The pentagon said because they are not and when you this information. The problem is the way the pentagon, the pentagon is an interest in genera general studn iraq or afghanistan. They are interested in how to study things so they can fight better or pacify better. Maybe those at the wrong questions to ask. That he can come to my central question, do you want the National Security state to be the driving institution so many scientific questions . In some cases may be yes. Social science the answer is probably not based on the track record they have to date. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I find your talks fascinating. It said the generals always fight the past wars, and the title of your book is the imagineers of war. So im wondering you look backwards. What can you do to help us look forward and understand how darpa is looking at how wars are going to be fought in the future and what they can be doing to facilitate that . My argument is, thats a great question. My argument in the book is that there is been a pretty giant structural change in darpa and people within darpa will disagree but i think its a very defensible what i base this on. The darpa up until about the mid1970s was filled with officials who thought about that. I had directors were thinking about warfare and strategy. I shift happened basically around 75 or 76 when new leadership came in and said we dont want a darpa, we want a a corporate laboratory. We what weapons and bombs and in Artificial Intelligence and will help us fly planes. That created a shift. The argument, darpa fashioned itself as a Science Fiction agency. My favorite press release, i hate to pick on darpa today but they put at this press was about how they were developing this climbing spiderman like suction cups where soldiers would be able to climb up class buildings. Where the heck are we fighting today where soldiers need to climb up this is what youve got . I dont think darpa today thinks about warfare because think they think about nifty gadgets and cyborg insects. They do a lot of good science. They do some very Good Technology biting my argument they are irrelevant to the larger National Security visited. So they are inspector gadget not across the board but that is, theyve got in the direction of what one former director called me up, tactical irrelevance. Thank you. They wont like that. So most of us know next to nothing about darpa, do know it as the inventor of the internet. I wonder what light you can shed on the whole story and what surprises were in store for you as you develop the information for the book . My favorite surprise about the development of the arpanet, there are two competing narratives that are not necessarily mutually exclusive. One is you often see and it is a misnomer, the idea that the arpanet was developed as an armageddon commandandcontrol Communication System to basically two medications that could survive nuclear war. That is a myth. The alternative, the historical provisions and there is Computer Scientist who had nothing to do with nuclear war, that it was that academics, of institutions one network computers. Those stories are little bit wrong and that the collider was considered the godfather of the arpanet, when he came into early 1960s, he was think about commandandcontrol of nuclear weapons. Thats why the assignment was given to darpa. It were thinking about how to survive. He wasnt interested in building an armageddon can education system. He wanted to more broadly change the relationship between manic computer. He had come out of the old air defense world where for the first time people were working basic it was to track incoming soviet bombers. Theresa may bombers and radar tracks you need a way to interact. For the first time people were at computer consoles working with the computer. That was revelatory. That is sort of the genesis behind the arpanet. What was most interesting of his interest in computers at how did he get hired for this . I came across these files in the smithsonian whove been given at task by the pentagon to look at basically psychology research. They were inspired by brainwashing. They were very, very concerned about soviet brainwashing particularly after the korean war. They came up, studied come to look at everything from brainwashing, document to interact with machines and licklider was identified by this panel so that brainwashing someone became a part of the narrative of arpanet which for me vers for supposing that the d point is that i rarely one thing leads to another. You cant say the arpanet was just about Nuclear Command and control because about brainwashing because about commandandcontrol, about involving sites in computers. Its many different strands that are brought together. That to me was really surprising. Thanks for a very interesting presentation. I guess this is sort of a twopart question. First, kind of simply stated though, is there anything in the realm of social Science Research that darpa is undertaken that is kind of turned out well . Anything that we would be familiar with now that we can sort of trace . The second, ill describe and give this whole thing and you can weigh the one against the other in terms of how much time you want to spend on it. The other one is, i wanted to ask about the term social science versus a particular aspect of it, psychological science or whatever. Has darpa been involved in any other aspects of social science, sort of directed specifically to, well, psychological science . I dont know, economics would be kind of the other somewhat of the other extreme, and is or anything useful thats come out of that . Right. Seems like one of the problem, they been successful in the hard science part of things, mechanical parts of the fence and warfare. But in the Human Behavior side is where you are saying that problems have come. Its hard to be predictive, harder to be predicted i guess in many respects in social sciences than the harder scientist. But a whole lot of work has gone into trying to become more predictive in the social sciences. Maybe the least progress made has been made in the psychological or individual behavior side of things. So just wondering about social science in general and hasnt been anything good come out of good as a relative term ive learned with darpa. Lets get some specific examples. There was an anthropologist, gerald hickey, who is probably the leading american anthropologist on vietnam who sent my rant but always under darpa contract to vietnam. The body of work you produce on vietnam from that. Was extraordinary and a ruined his career. He could get an academic appointment when he came back because he had worked for mr. Kirk it worked for the imperialist. For him it was like i just did this extraordinar extra to worky else was doing. He was a big advocate of the hill tribes, and advocate for protecting him, protecting them from the South Vietnamese government, from the americans who wanted, cia wanted to use them to fight the vietcong. But his career was ruined over it. Sometimes theres Little Things like one of the things darpa produce, i dont know if you could call it social science, they created the junk bluebook and it was like a bluebook, it was, collected information on every junk, every sea vessel in vietnam. People today still cited as this extraordinary cultural record created by darpa. At the time for military purposes to identify was a threatening boat, what was not. In the broad area of what i did try to look at, im not academics i was curious, could darpa take credit for the development of computational social sites . Which some people argue is a fruitful field in some ways. There early funding of it was a watershed for that field. If you consider computational social sites a successful field then darpa can take a good amount of credit for it. Where computational social science has run into problems when it tries to sort of coop is a right word, really go to the predictive of Human Behavior. Not the amazon what book are you going to buy but predictions of insurgency, of roadside bombs, a peoples beliefs and is become very problematic. Thank you. In 1994 and 1995 i was the analyst and office of the secretary of defense who reviewed darpas budget. Excuse me, arpa. They changed the name and drop the d which was later added back by the bush of administration. The cold war had ended. The conflict in the middle east had not yet begun. There was almost no social science in those budget that i reviewed, and i had the director of the agency sitting next to me for three days straight for two years in a row i went to that Budget Program by program by program. The focus seeme to be on unmannd aerial vehicles. Yes . At that time didnt really work. And arpa was time to fix that and on a lot of other gadgetry, not the spiderman stuff yet, but seen equally not applicable to the warfare that we might be engaged in, which was some interesting conversations. But the number one issue for them was will use technologies. They were partnering with the National Institute of science and technology of the department of commerce which used to be a mile down the road here and it is now out in the maryland suburbs. And the white house had an extreme focus on that with grants being issued. There was i think 100 million and arpa budget and another 100 point in this budget. I left dod silver years after that. Never really figured out that anything could ever come of all that . No. I didnt think so. I didnt think at the time either. I have a whole chapter John Deutscher didnt want to hear that. I have a whole chapter deputy secretary of defense before he was gary denman . One of the directors. He left and larry lynn took over after that. So to answer the first part of your question, social science work was pretty much dead. Congress passed the man pseudonymity getting rid of a lot of those basic directed every single Darpa Program had to be strictly tied to a defense goal, a pentagon goal. After the vietnam war which it wasnt. The field offices were called down, the social science work was ended by the early 1970s and darpa, the whole agency was transformed as was the pentagon by the vietnam experience. It was sort of like the thing we do not mention anymore. They renamed, they rename the vietnam office. Persons overseas Defense Research and then they just renamed it the Technical Technology office. Forget about vietnam. By the 80s was a different. I recount in the book. By the time to get to the 1990s and the of the cold war darpa is like what we do . What is your mission . This dual use program came up and i remember anything gary. Can you tell me what was something they came out about dual use program . He had a long pause and there was like a propeller, part of the propeller. He was laughing, like there was nothing. Darpas success what has been successful is it a problemsolving agency that comes up with solutions to military problems. Thats its success. When it was a forced into doing use, what problem are you trying to solve . People imagine darpa as an engine of economic innovation but thats almost incidental. Its success has been it has a customer and the customer happens to be the pentagon. When darpa has not had a customer, it just sort of like is adrift. You cant just say do good things in dual use. Darpa has no expertise in data. It has to have a goal and that program speedy what was the proposal . [inaudible] so much was classified to people did know what to bid on. The dual use the drone work start out in a classified side. The Transit Administration was some of the bidders. So how do you transitioned that to the commercial world has always been, when darpa has to do those things, for instance, siri was a spinoff of a darpa sponsored program took it didnt work out for the military. There it is. Their district if darpa woken up one day and said will create a Voice Recognition technology for the iphone, with phil. Its darpas abilit ability to d something at the military, a customer, that has enabled it success over the years and it has a goal, something extra to do. A customer was a deep pockets to find it. So my host at arpa was there comptroller, now they would call the cfo, and the first time i visit him at his office, and he did what my former bosses many years earlier in the pentagon, he started talking to his laptop, desktop computer. They didnt have laptops in the states any data siri like function. I remember asking what good is this . Without i will get out of here. [laughing] thanks for your talk. Very fascinating. You mentioned that darpa began as an agency that is interested in sort of fundamentally rethinking conflict or engagement with the world and with political change became more about as you put it technical irrelevance or moving into these gadgets that may be attract bidders but are really challenging frameworks about how to do engagement. Where has that thinking gone, that earlier thinking about how to change these concepts of conflict . Did that move to other departments . I wish it did. I remember one defense scientist told me the pentagon gets the darpa it wants. What he meant by that is darpa could be anything you wanted to be, so if you wanted to solve big strategic problems, then you have two tell it thats what youre going to do. If you tell it just to be a sciencefiction agency its going to go do that. The interesting turning point for me is you look at when ie deese became a wellknown word, improvised explosive. In vietnam darpa was the counterinsurgency agency. I dont know what were here now, 2004, four, 2005, the pentagon created a new agency. Why did you create all the agency to spend billions of dollars when you have an agency with scientific and Technical Expertise in this area . Part of that is when the ship started happening of darpa being more of a corporate laboratory, the agency became insular what he wanted to protect the projects. They always have worked best they believe without oversight. The problem is literally there were physically separating from the pentagon. During the vietnam war there pushed out and attend went further and further down the macro scale. They became irrelevant to the pentagon leadership. There were no longer solving the problems that the pentagon needed so. By 2005 nobody thought darpa was a type of agency that would work in current wars that were dupont fighting technology. That went to an organization. So yes those questions with other parts of the pentagon and not always very effectively. Are right. I think were good. Thank you. [applause] books are available behind the register. The line will start appear, and please fold up your chairs. [inaudible conversations] this weekend on booktv Ohio Governor john kasich reflects on his 2016 president ial run on after words. Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren offers her thoughts on the current state of the middle class. Enter
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