Annie Jacobsen: Inside DARPA: The Pentagon’s Brain
The internet, GPS, voice recognition programs like Siri – many of the technologies that we use today were developed with national security in mind. These inventions and many others began as projects of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Defense Department’s secretive military research agency. For more than fifty years, DARPA has held to a singular and enduring mission: to make pivotal investments in breakthrough technologies for national security. The genesis of that mission and of DARPA itself dates to the Cold War and the launch of Sputnik in 1957, and a commitment by the United States that it would be the initiator and not the victim of strategic technological surprises. Working with innovators inside and outside of government, DARPA has repeatedly delivered on that mission, transforming revolutionary concepts and even seeming impossibilities into practical capabilities. The ultimate results have included not only game-changing military capabilities such as precision weapons and stealth technology, but also major innovations in modern civilian society.
How do they do it? What makes this military organization such fertile ground for invention? What technologies with useful daily applications have failed to enter into civilian use? Can Silicon Valley learn from DARPA, or vice versa? Drawing on extensive interviews, declassified memos and inside sources, investigative journalist Annie Jacobsen will share insights into this top-secret organization.
Speaker Annie Jacobsen is an Investigative Journalist and Author [of The Pentagon’s Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America’s Top-Secret Military Research Agency].
The conversation is moderated by Andrew Becker, Reporter, The Center for Investigative Reporting.
DARPA has nothing to do with the creation of GPS. See my website for more details.
I think she’s talking about the Transit Satellite:
http://www.darpa.mil/about-us/timeline/transit-satellite
Agreed. See my article in The Space Review for additional details. http://www.thespacereview.com/article/2886/1
Thanks for the link and the link to the other review as well.
The problem with Jacobsen is that she is neither an academic nor a specialist. I appreciate that she is a good writer though and her ability to score interviews (and get them to talk) is something that historians often overlook in favor of archival sources. She teases a lot of information from real people that just isn’t available in any official record. That’s a significant contribution and make’s her investigations worthwhile – and besides, any egregious errors of the historical record can and will be addressed through critical reviews.