Transcripts For CSPAN2 The Imagineers Of War 20170717

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Our author this afternoon is Sharon Weinberger in the book is the imagineers of war the untold story of darpa this is sharons third book and also her third what i will call long form exploration of the practices of defense. She began her career as a defense analysts and became a journalist and author shifting her eye inward in which she has been working and she is now the executive editor on foreignpolicy that you confine on foreignpolicy. Com. The advanced Research Project agency has a pretty solid reputation especially for those who know its background especially like the birth of the background, but sharons book digs deeper exploring darpa from its birth to the present and some of its less successful work including Research Funded related atmospheric belt of radiation to deter Nuclear Weapons, counterinsurgency practices in vietnam and superhuman soldiers that could survive on bus food and sleep thats currently possible. Its a multifaceted story with a lot of fanciful failures in an agency in search of a mission, but whats the most impresses is if you get to the back of the book and look at the sources you will see when sharon wrote this history she did it without access to any of darpas classified material, but there is so much inside information in this history and you will wonder how she was able to figure this out without this access. I look forward to hearing more about this book from sharon. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Sharon Weinberger. Thank you, mark. I wanted to start off by thinking the gaithersburg book festival and politics and prose which are both great venues for writers and when you spend so many years in my case over four years working on a book and people actually want to hear you talk about it, i mean, not just read the book, but here about what motivated you to work on it and your passions and interests, thats wonderful and for me the opportunity to meet readers who want to share my interest is also a special opportunity, so thank you. Im here today to talk about darpa defense advanced Research Project agency and something thats more associated today with sciencefiction technology. People who have heard about it and a lot of people have, but some think of it in connection with things like self aircraft with drones responsible for the targeted killings of places like afghanistan iraq, yemen and elsewhere. They associate it most notably with the internet which indeed traces tracked the back to darpa lineage or perhaps Driverless Cars which are coming into their own door to siri, the app on your iphone for voice recognition. Im not here today to talk about so much the technology has the origins of how darpa became what it was and what i think made it at times successful and at times unsuccessful. Goes back to my career writing on pentagon funded science and technology, something that has fascinated me for over a decade and one of the questions i have asked is how is science funded by the National Security state and how is it different than that funded by civil institutions or academia or industry and why should we care about the difference. Well i think that question is even more relevant today. Ive given several versions of this talk over the past few months of the book came out and each time i give the talk ive been thinking more and more about whats going on today in the country and the relevancy relevancy of what i have examined. Irish a leash chose the selection because it up is our notion of darpa is a Technology Agency because it looks at eight to to of darpa history in the vietnam war when they were moving beyond technology to the social sciences and Behavioral Sciences and the role of the pentagon of the social sciences, but i think its especially relevant today as we see debates in the country about proposed cuts to science in this civilian Institution Meeting the National Institute of health and at the same time we see a proposal to increase funding for the military and Defense Department. Traditionally when funding for the Defense Department is increased funding for darpa has increased and what i propose today is what we see is not necessarily science, but similar to what happened in the cold war, shift from funding civil science to military science and rather than say its a good or bad thing what i would challenge is to think about the implications whether good, whether bad and what that means for science in our country. I also chose the selection today which is from a chapter called to blame it on the source because its a lot about truth of facts and manipulation of facts and most war. I think the question these chapter raises is more important than ever, so this takes us back to the vietnam war period which i argue is the most important period for darpas development origin of almost all the technology he today when we think about her, meaning aircraft, to some extent arpanet, the internet, and a slow period for the country and for darpa. The the story begins in 1966 in vietnam with the psychotherapist who was sent to a prison in saigon to interview a vietnam fighter they are. Part of the classic test of inks blotches. He asked the imprisoned fighter, do you see anything that reminda you that pms . No certified or replied. How about you in the picture . Anything there that reminds you of . No. Do you see anything here to remind you of a womans vagina . Now come a reply. Neither man is in a particularly good mood. They were going through cardiff were shot past to diagnose personality trait. He was sitting in a prison in saigon staring at inkblots rather than planting bombs and killing americans which is what he was doing before. An American Firm called the i cinematic corporation in cambridge, massachusetts under their processes, to help the pentagon understand and lets calibrate where we are in 1866. 180,000 american troops in vietnam which is as many in iraq and afghanistan at the height of her worst bear. It had grown tremendously. The pentagon papers estimated 280,000 communist fighters byr 1966. About 1,001,862. The insurers and he was very rapidly growing. There was also an act that uprising in South Vietnam which included three monks who had set themselves on fire come images broadcast of americas living room. The u. S. Under the opposition to it was rising. But they understand why there is opposition to the u. S. Backed South Vietnamese regime. But they thought the behavioral scientists could help them in and peered so one of these people at the pentagon in vietnam was used among psychotherapist to help understand the reasons for the growing resentment of the United States in the u. S. Backed South Vietnamese regime. E. So f so far to ink blotches has failed to yield any insights in the viet cong fighter. They asked the viacom decided to go throw the cards cards andnd identify something. Then he asked anything that reminded him. Nothing again. Being interviewed by a man about a sex life in a separate dissent. They find pictures and they liked or didnt like. The imprisoned men most reluctant to even touch the car. Speaking of archives, i found the verbatim interview at the archives which goes to the question of how do you write history . Theres a lot classified in maryland in the National Archives of the Record Administration and private collections throughout the country. This is that the fighter implied according to the interview. I do not understand the picture so i do not know which ones i like and which ones i dislike. He spent seven weeks in vietnam during which time he corrected data before the vietnamese. A french educated writer and tho vietcong insurgent all for harbor deep antiamerican feeling that found the viacom fighter particularly frustrating. Even the antigovernment was morw cooperative. You know ive never seen one except on astonishment when asked if it resembled a sub one. His concluding conclusions were based on a dirt thoroughly dead man to the expressionist onion five. The only time was when telling of his exploits. His eyes were bright and he held himself with greater dignity. A pattern i am convinced is now pontificated by imprisonment. Just to remind you the entire interview at going on in prison. He is not interested in the vietnamese politics. Big dreams and a sex life or lack thereof. After interviews with thee vietnamese people was not amesep thousand years of domination to include french colonialism, chinese imperialism andm contemporaneous americanut the intervention. It was their troubled family structure, both my strong impression to try it in rivalry with unresolved dependency to central psychological form of antiamerican vietnam. Lets back up a bit. There is a question here that i ask myself when i was going through the darpa files, which is why as is why is the therapist ending up in vietnam and more importantly and relevance to the book, but what if this have to do with darpa . This goes back to the broader question he asked before, how had they conducted the state and what are the rules by the pentagon conducted in the service of National Security and quite obviously i think we do. Lets back up a bit and talk about what darpa is. It was created in 1950 as a direct response to the launch oe sputnik to the first artificial satellite with a political panic akin to the 9 11 attack here in 2001, meaning it represented two things at the time in 1957. The soviet union was ahead in the space researcherss psychological blow the United States but most importantly the technology in to launch an intercontinental ballistic missile. The idea the soviet union could launch a Nuclear Weapons attack really shattered the proposedonc world war ii era idea of visibility. Two months later in 1958, president dwight d. Eisenhower of what was then called are both committed Research Project agency. At the time it wasnt the nations first agency that predates the creation of all of the satellite in Space Programs have led military would go into the agency in the agency would do everything possible, her bureaucracy to the wind, cut red tape and get america into space. Darpa did this successfully in under a year and grew eventually into what it is today come the 3 billion to your agency of the technical personnel called program managers. It still bears some of that unique traits from its earlier days, like her bureaucracy to i move quickly. Unlike the National Science foundation it doesnt need to use peer review to review can mu products. It doesnt have employees from the scientific managers come in for a period of about two to five years to manage products that succeed in that time. And then they move on. It has the ability unlike other parts of government to fail and hopefully succeed as well. It is the originator of so many technologies that change the battlefield in our daily lives to include drugs, precision weapons, arpanet, Driverless Cars and you can argue and i do agree it is the most Successful Research agency ever created early from a successful militara agency and that doesnt mean it does not false. In writing a book about darpa, what i was trying to do was not count up how many projects succeed or fail to create a history of how the agency got to where it was. I think the presumption in a lot of darpas history is that it goes back to the space race or the truth is darpa was only a space agency for about a year and a half before nasa was created in the civil satellite programs in the military to back its other Space Programs. So what i look at is what i think its a seminal period of darpas existing and what made it what it is today, which was involvement in vietnam. I came to the conclusion that everything important associate to david darpa comes out of vietnam and the counterinsurgency and more critically to the extent with prosecutor words and specifically the experience in vietnam are most failed war efforts. If you think about that is an outgrowth of the previous failed war effort and that was what was made up of people who worked with developing technology andh. Imaginary war in how we fight them tomorrow in how we come up with a solution to those wars. Lets return for a minute to walter sloat, what was going on. Sloat research in vietnam they sound ludicrous today that that it was part of a much broader aa the time but arpa, darpa from a scientific vantage point. They realized that the war innd vietnam was not going well and they also realize phenomenon we dirty done a lot. So they turned researchers inside may be the softer sciences, social scientists and anthropologists, political scientist could help us understand whats going on. Darpa got involved in this because theres about to be shut down. 1959, 1960, no longer space agency, but they did have a creative individual by the name is bill goodale. He was in my mind sort of the original imagineering said i think that a nuclearnf confrontation with the soviet union however terrible is unlikely. What is more likely is that the worst fighting in places like Southeast Asia proxy wars. In 1961, bill goodale, the Deputy Director of darpa got permission from president kennedy to establish the combat Development Center in saigon i was going to work with the South Vietnamese forces to help them fight in the jungle. So they did everything from silent aircraft to its nomenclature agent orange, but they also started sending anthropologists. In 1961, in the Behavioral Sciences. And to run this program, that her command was a psychologist with computers. They went on to be the godfather of the arpanet in the modern internet. Thats another story from the vietnam war. By the mid1960s, all suggesting ways to use the social science is to help understand the increasing number of vietnamese rather than embracing u. S. Forces. They offered up the mix of solution. My favorite icon of the National Archive in general acted. They will be given a continuing openended type contract to apply science and technology in vietnam. First proposal is for a lie detector and security. The concept is like a modern witch dunking. Here is what it said. Consider the following scenario of the situation and method of operation. A highsecurity Central Government and take care arrives by helicopter in a village suspected of being under covert vietcong pressure. The villagers are assembled by their local team so each villager can see every otherer. Villager. Each connected to the new type of polygraph. Imagine for a moment you are all villagers. You are all hooked up to this mass polygraph lie detector. The suspected members of viacom would be called a before the assembled villagers who are also a polygraph in the machine would record a first response, alleviating the fear that any informant, the process can be repeated as desired. By early 1966, the programs and Behavioral Sciences for kind of the mass. Vietnam mark was a strange mix of technology with a smattering of social sciences. The pentagons senior technologist in 1966 are a really smart guy can the young era logical engineer and was an emerging member of Robert Mcnamaras technocratic lee and applying mathematical principles with largescale organizational challenges andatp there was no bigger largescale organizational challenge than prosecuting the vietnam war at the time. He was an Aeronautical Engineer fascinated by the social science. Or reportedly, he believed he could hurt the social sciences, meaning apply engineering to it. People could be studies and actions predicted the way they measure and track ballisticway e missiles. Vietnam was about to be a test that of what was called Human Behavior. He looked at the Darpa Program and said there is numbers here there is no science. Darpa had a prosecutor on staff. Because of the language in vietnam to help popularize the idea of game theory and proposed building a moat around saigon was antiinfiltration became so widely divided by the press that they complained about the geography in vietnam to work on it. A very sort of wellknown brands that he called the viet cong motivation and morale study. Youre telling dear for us what it wants to hear witches Strategic Bombing is not working. They cut off a lot of funding for things that are time dependent on what it wanted to hear. Pentagon needed the church. The solution they came up with is a company in cambridge. Cinematic that m. I. T. Professor, very wellknown at the pentagon and this company has risen to fame in the election of john f. Kennedy by predicting an eight by state basis accuracy of 80 . In 1961 had called people machines that could predictbe Human Behavior and a very wellknown professor called the avon of the social sciences comparing it to the atomicomic weapons. He really thought they could solve their problem. A group like this had impeccable credentials that could solve many problems. In fact, it would be darpas biggest disaster in vietnam. He is showing up in 1966, one of the first of these was thest arthur slote study. We can laugh at the psychotherapy study and affect some people did. They wrote the memo and a friend report so methodologically deficient as to impair my belief in the findings. On the other hand, a wellknown pentagon scientist said the idea of the executioners brilliant with the respective leaders of groups. He called it amazing deeper. The time in vietnam i would like to say that it was then that he is. It was sent. One by a Boston College professor looking that vietnam. They have included things like an americanstyle chain letter that would be spread with trips to vietcong rallying. Distributing the letter they found strange and believe to be a contract. They were using vietnamese state and the power of holy men. Distributing 5000 copies had been fortunate coincidence, the books were distributed just as it was starting and the prophecy did not proceed. Several of the products for quite a bit of a failure that using folksingers to spread progovernment messages. The incentive mobilize folksingers. Most of all these projects was the sorceress project which have vietnamese sorcerers against viacom. They wrote a report without a hint of irony because the sorceress did not say what theyw were supposed to say. The overlapped controller with the chores and sorcerers. Darpa officials were not all that happy with it. There were, you know, he rapidly realized it wasnt working and he ended the contract. He was certainly a very honest scientist, realizing he tried the experiment failed. In his book years later he said it filled for ministry in the official declassified course, i found over 400 memos failure of fraud and incompetence. One memo declassified, i didnt have any. The integrity of darpa and the cinematic that never get another penny of money. And what was clearly not followed through with income i found this memo years later in the archives. He asked, please bring this after reading. [laughter] in 2012, 2013 as i was working on this book, you know, days later. He was in the process ofwa updating his memoir from the. Out of print which talked about the failure in vietnam. He was being contacted who are interested in doing social science work insanely at the miss work in vietnam. Who knew. I was interviewing in having an ongoing conversation about afghanistan because part of my work from the darpa book was looking at revised social science work that darpa and the pentagon were funding in afghanistan and iraq. One of the people i was interviewing and i ended up in the archives for the psychotherapy report was without funded by darpa luke and was lucky not by the people machine, but what he called social physics, and he then behavior. Itd called the day peoplenfront machines and counterinsurgency appeared that m. I. T. Doingng interviews with this professor is stumbled across the archives of the failure decades later. It was really struck by these comparisons. I. E. I see more about the failures because in his book he just said its sales for administrative reasons. Ns i didnt like to talk about personality. He wanted to concentrate on what he viewed as a failure of the overall effort in making to a very nuanced conclusion. He said the social research that came to the uncertainty principle appears to operate the fact the means in observation being observed. If even if they begin supporting the government view, researchert will have insight in foreign new points and want to change them. The population by the Government Program is subject to the research and becomes the type issued by the very fact that he e sensitized by the issue. In the week or so after i went to mit to look at the archives i started getting emails from him and he was 89, dying of Heart Failure and hispano work west to update his own memoir, so he was sending me random notes from his private vietnam, and one of the final emails i got from him said how his temple in the message line and it read one weekend day that general and i decided to take time off and visit a temple on the outskirts of saigon. We got to a temple and inside spotted a vietnamese fortuneteller. The general decided to have his fortune told in the fortunes applies and told him he would be appointed to a important position which was true because he just got his first start and he said the general was expecting a great event which was also true because he was about to see his family for the first time in months of and the fortuneteller said as for the reason youre here in vietnam it will be like scissors cutting water. What out marvelous simile i thought at the time, but i did not believe him, not then. How right he was. The month after he wrote meme that email he died. He was 90 years old ticket just finished updating his memoir best laid schemes in vietnam come republish regeneration of very wellmeaning pentagon officials and helpful social scientists who are cutting water with scissors in iraq and in afghanistan. Thank you. [applause] i dont know how much time we have left, but i certainly welcome any questions. Is there a mic . Okay. Was the massive lie detector ever built . I can think of a lot of uses for it today. [laughing] no. The funny thing is, i outlined a lot of failures in the book, but darpa did so many comments fail a lot and did so many things right. One of the heroic things it did, it was getting pressure at the time from the pentagon to look into polygraphs and a lie detector technology. O polygr so this file i found it in was their correspondence look at what was available. Actually darpa turned down the proposal a number of others and vote in the memo none of things things worked. A lot of history sadly darpa advices been ignored. They said dont to the polygraph. We should be studying psychological issues in vietnam, how to interrogate better come not how to hook people up to th device that will spit out answers like an old fortuneteller. These were not stupid people. They made mistakes but they were trying hard. Another amazing thing, the archives, the National Archives, the best use of government taxpayer money ever. Just amazing when you look at correspondence officials were writing at the time decades earlier. Darpa also at the time looked at improvised explosive devices which are never very can we know the word never they were very esoteric at the time and a commissioned a report that said dont spend a lot of money trying to counter these devices. Its a black hole. Theres no good way to do it. You need to stop the underlying conflict. That report was sitting in the archive some early 1970s, years later weve spent billions on organization to counter this roadside bombs. So lots of good advice sadly just gets ignored. Any other questions . Could you speak briefly about the origin of the [inaudible] so the origins of the arpanet are fascinating. I didnt want to get intuitive it since that sometime i will. T there is to miss about arpanet, which became the internet. There is truth in both of them. Story number one is it was a commandandcontrol Communications System in case of nuclear armageddon. That is false although theres truths obama. The other method is had nothing to do with nuclear war. Had to do with simply academics wanting to connect computersthre around the country. Thats also not true. In reality its very complex. Coe the pentagon had given to assignments to darpa in the early 1960s. One was behavioral science assignment that he spoke about, which was to look at everything brainwashing the idea that communists were brainwashing prisoners of war, was at the concern at the time. The behavioral science has encompassed all of that. Social science, propaganda come brainwashing, psychological operation. That was one assignment. The second assignment was commandandcontrol. I spoke to the pentagon official harold brown who begin secretary of defense, still very much alive and i said what were you thinking when you gave darpa this commandandcontrololth assignment . And he said i wanted better command and control of Nuclear Weapons. What happened was that they have used to assignments that were sort of different. Really quite different. O but they hired j. C. R. Licklider, the psychologist who specialized in psychoacoustics within interesting computer to commit to darpa. He had worked on air Defense Computers after world war ii which basically, computers used to be these exotic creatures that lived in laboratories and you would walk in, put in a punch card and it would spit out an answer. After world war ii, a system had tonsils for the first time with operators and the computers helped the operators track the radar track soviet bombers. It seems obvious step of the id sit in front of a computer and you use a device, and that gave a light pen, to interact with the computer age of multiple people doing it at the same time was quite revolutionary. So look later took his expense without any came into darpa, and what he said was he when he wasnt that interested in the social sciences. He was interested in computers. So i focused his funding on thi idea of personal computing. Network computing. He had this meeting at a Marriott Hotel by the pentagon to show people what the future of computers would be like, like something you beveled access recipes off the computer. People were like he would want to do that . [laughing] so they were so missing to at the time. There was the cuban missile crisis which also prompted interest in the committee control of Nuclear Weapons. Had a control your forces collide you pass information . So he was aware of all this but he had this messianic mission. He said yes commandandcontrol newco reference is important but i want to change the very way that people operate with machines. That computers will become an extension of our thought process. The very idea, i remember thatex restaurant name im going tomemt google it, the way that google and computers extend our thought process, he foresaw in some of his writings back in and it just puts a very far forward. So no, arpanet was not a nuclear commandandcontrol system, but the thinking behind to come hiring of licklider at it has to do with Nuclear Weapons. It had to do with the cuban missile crisis that the fact a hard a psychologist also to do with concerns about brainwashing and psychology. All of these factors come together. But what may darpa so important in this role was again this idea of the imagination of what that it was hiring people, givenn product assignments by the pentagon but then it was hiring people with these visions. Periodically to change the entire way people interact with machines. And out of that and out of hismh vietnam war when the agency was led to anything and everything, grew arpanet and internet. Now the downside of that and what i tried to bring it in my book is that the price of success is failure, and the price of an important success like arpanet and the internet is important failures like counterinsurgency and agent orange. So this era of darpa with extern an entire contract vietnam and thailand into human laboratories for science, which they did in the social sciences, they also did it with chemical come serve atop a project you like to not talk about so much today, the idea like led to a chemical does for insurgent warfare or less to see the computer networking. You have tremendous successes like arpanet and then you have tremendous failures like the Counterinsurgency Program or like agent orange. Going back to the question i pose at the beginning, people cannot personal opinions about whether military funded science is good or bad. I certainly have opinions onon that, but what i would rather focus on, people, probably will not change their opinion. I want people to understand the implications of military funded sites. So the implications are that military funded sites have been very successful in some areas like computers, like artificial intelligence, like the arpanet but the price are also important failures like the counterinsurgency experiment which grew to be worldwide. Darpa open offices in tehran, iran, in panama come in beirut. Theyre going to open up an office in north africa. At one point there was a proposal to counterinsurgency experiments in the united for cn states. It was certainly global in its ambition. So in look at the legacy of darpa and its successes you alsl have to take count its failures. Wait, we have a mic. Yes, what is the current budget of darpa . How many employees does it have come and where are its headquarters . Ill start with that. So darpa today has a budget of about 3 billion. It goes up and entered it usually been tied to the overall Defense Budget and the overall Defense Budget over the past 60 news has been going up and up and up. So its about 3 billion a year and you can say that about 10 of the budget but only its all discretionary. Nasa has projects that it has to fulfill. Darpa can move funding around in a very agile manner. That 3 billion is very powerful. It has a think about 140 program managers. One of the other myths of darkness that i dont togglet switch darpa is a gets the nittygritty on the butt of knowledge of the people care is these employees are all temporary. Technical personnel which is true. They come in for periods of two to five years, but the dirty secret of darpa is the increasingly have Contract Personnel that stay on for decades. Its not like darpa on his 140, 160 people. It also is of this on the contractors who stay on for quite a long time. I asked one darpa director in the 1990s, maybe this isnt the best thing and he says when i was startled Director Director tried to get i count of how many Contract Personnel we had and no one could give me the number and on the director. Where are its headquarters . Northern virginia. Its location is very interesting as well. When it was created in 1958 it was in the prestige ring at the pentagon just a few doors down from the secretary of defense. That was no idea. It was the thing in 1958. Newspaper headlines and allegedly with a direct line to secretary of defense evenpaper president eisenhower. And it has over the years and this a part of what a chronicle in the book been pushed further and further out of the pentagon. It was actually in 1967 that darpa official lost its officesa in the pentagon and distorted its retreat as i call it into northern virginia. I believe first into the architects building on wilson boulevard, maybe that was the second one, basically its moved i think four times and each time it is further away from the pentagon which is symbolic actually. It matters because its reflection of where darpa has gone. It has enjoyed this tremendous reputation right now. As this ef innovation and a model we should follow, but its becoming increasingly removed from the pentagons leadership, so during the vietnam war they were being called in front of congress to ask for their opinion on the war gd talk about their programs. Ive gone to a lot of the darpa hearings, sort of annual event and it is so marginal and so marginal to the things that are going on in the wars that we fight today and darpa tries to argue that is a good thing. Where the agency that thinks about the future. Thats how they see themselves today, but that was not the darpa of 1958 when they got america into space in less than a year. They developed a detection system that allowed president kennedy to enter the arms control. Even the arpanet, it wasnt science fiction, i mean, it was laying the groundwork quickly, so i worry sometimes that darpa, i mean, some of the crazy projects it was going to create killer electrons by launching Nuclear Weapons into the atmosphere to create a shield that would fry Nuclear Weapons, basically a piece of shield, so it had its share of crazy secrets. There were wild ideas. It was always part of darpas heritage, but in some ways i think the wild ideas are now sort of more prevalent in what darpa sees itself as doing, i mean, Driverless Cars which started in the mid to thousands had decades of research that darpa funded. Thats tremendous. I dont know quite what it does for the military, but for science its a tremendous excess success. When i asked darpa officials when they challenge me, they argue with me about today. These are dedicated people coming they give up their academic careers, but that doesnt mean you cant be skeptical or critical and my problem with darpa today is an darpa, its that the pentagon is not giving it big enough challenges to challenge. Its not a math asking it how to solve war its asking it to do things on the margin. When you look at the wars we have been fighting an part of them is that war particularly the past 16 years is not something we can sort of evolved our way out of woodside said technology. Its a human problem, but at the same time thats something darpa once did. Im not advocated they should necessarily do that again, but its such a tremendous resource for the country and to say we are just going to give it small problems to work on, what a disappointment. I think it should work on big problems, bubut the question is are you willing to allow it to have the next successes and are you willing to live with the big failures and thats a question for the white house as for the pentagon and i dont know what the answer to that is. Its quite interesting that the Current Administration that we know is sort of focused on other issues and theres an acting director of darpa right now. Darpa has always been more than its director. Advisor to run his Antiterrorism Program at darpa. This program was called total information awareness and this was right after 9 11. I do was you could create a centralized database of classified information, commercial data transactional data, put it all in one database and youre going to use pattern analysis to sort of detect terrorist plots before they happen. The New York Times oped came out calling this an orwellian big brother system and certainly an concept in some respects it was if the counter argument was conscious of research program. Congress moved in. They canceled the program, sort of. It just got moved to the National Security agency becameg classified, and so the lesson of that we are now in 2003, maybe we will not allow darpa to havee big failures. Im not defending that program but again if you want darpa to have take successes, you have to in some senses let it risk the big failures. And i worry that it doesnt have that mission, it doesnt have its we would. Going back to the Current Administration, you know, the interesting thing that darpa, its first director wasnt a scientist. The person who set the stage for darpa flexibility redtape cutting was actually dp at General Electric was brought in, roy johnson. And he was the only sort of nontechnical person ever to lead darpa, but it was he who started the Saturn Rocket Program which then went to nasa and took the Apollo Mission to the men. Yet some very good ideas. What im saying is its hard to guess first of all what they appoint a new darpa director, and who makes a good darpa director . I think traditionally the ones who have been good, and it was a good darpa director but certainly roy johnson the present very powerful in creating the agency. There were people like steve in the 1970s who sort of listed darpa out of the mess of vietnar and rebuilt the agency. Theres tony and the 2000s and others, but its hard to guess what makes a good darpa director of the prince salman with a broader vision. Someone who sort of says im pretty think about the problems of warfare and how we solve that warfare. Please. [inaudible] talking about the human factor and big projects. So has darpa anticipated the russian hacking and misinformation campaigns that are doing all over the world . No, no, i dont think darpa anticipated it. There were certainly a lot of darpa officials who thought about the irony that the internet, the creation of darpa has led to this entire new way of warfare. That is part of the problem. That should be a program. That should be a problem that darpa could tackle. Something about scale. And you dont see, im sure darpa has low programs it argues on the side really think about this as a major threat, i dont see darpa doing that today. Im sure that might argue otherwise but but i just see te scope of the ambition that are changing warfare like that. [inaudible] is it what makes. [inaudible] darpa . No. I think the National Security agency, this is a malware we read so much about, the ransomware that, no, i think the National Security agency gets a lot of credit for that. Is there one more quick question . Really quick. Why did the United States not use atomic weapons on vietnam . It was considered. So oddly i darpa funded group looked at that question. Yeah, i think there were a lot of reasons that was going to be disastrous. Dont forget part of the problem in vietnam was we were trying to win hearts and minds. Pentagon officials are really confuse like were trying to help this government and people hate us to why . I think dropping tactical Nuclear Weapons were looked atat by the group. First of all that were not going to be militarily effective and probably wouldve done even worse for the wear. Im out of time. Thank you so much for coming. I love question. I love seeing readers. Thank you. [applause] [inaudible conversations] booktv takes hundreds of author programs of the country all year long. Heres a look at some of the events we will be covering this week