Customer Reviews

The Department of Mad Scientists: How DARPA Is Remaking Our World, from the Internet to Artificial Limbs

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First, this is a "people" book more concerned with the personalities that created DARPA than what has come through the doors of DARPA that has contributed to the technological advancements for both the department of defense and the public-at-large. He seems concerned that the reader not only understand the individuals but how clever he has been in being able to gain access to those personalities who know what is happening behind the walls.

Second, it is clear that Belfiore gained considerable knowledge about rockets from his previous book. He is more comfortable in writing about this area of DARPA rather than about the game-changing world of computers and artificial intelligence or the larger DARPA agenda. He frankly admits his lack of understanding and seems willing to let that lack of knowledge ride in exchange for defaulting to the personalities working in these arenas.

He points out that much of his information comes from DARPA contractors who aren't veiled in the same "secrecy" or opaqueness of DARPA itself. Yet he has not taken the time to explore the breadth of this contracted research but limits himself more to the historic, the visible and his personal zone of comfort.

What Belfiore hits by accident and dismisses in order to retain his narrow focus is that while DARPA is "edgy" it is only the tip of a very large iceberg of military research by each of the various branches, some of which are of a similar nature to what DARPA is doing. One would think, from this book, that DARPA represents where the defense industry's research and development's edge is today.
It's not sufficiently technologically detailed, and does not significantly clarify what is currently going on behind the closed doors. It is more a personal tale of travel through the corridors of history and personalities than the essence of what makes DARPA a force on the frontiers of research today and for the future. It should find itself abridged in Readers Digest.

Michael Belfiore, author of the trail-blazing insider's view of the "NewSpace" industry Rocketeers: How a Visionary Band of Business Leaders, Engineers, and Pilots is Boldly Privatizing Space and its extraordinary and occasionally self-funded entrepreneurs, has now produced something similar for the hidden world of DARPA. I've read many articles on the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, but this author walks with us down these paths to see how these extraordinary projects come to life, the amazing characters who pursue them, and their powerful outcomes in terms of societal benefits. Belfiore has a special talent for explaining technology development in the context of a compelling tale that is wonderful. He makes these technical advances not only accessible, but truly fascinating and that works like a black hole pulling the reader into another world. If you want to understand how almost impossibly advanced technologies are actually being developed behind the scenes, read this book.

A number of years ago for an online encyclopedia, I wrote a definition for something rather mysterious called "DARPA" (and then another definition for its earlier name, "ARPA"). Most people familiar with IT history know that this U.S. government agency was the instigator of what we have come to know as the Internet. But few of us have known much else. Now, with Michael Belfiore's new book, I was able to learn just how important the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is. Since the agency's projects are typically secret, the author shares with us the challenges he faced in gaining access to the information the agency was willing to reveal. Because the projects are farmed out and scattered geographically, the book also reads somewhat like a science travelog. And this is what we learn: even though their primary mission is to serve the U.S. military, DARPA and the people they hire are responsible for perhaps a third of the technological breakthroughs that change our world. Belfiore takes us into the laboratories and workshops where artificial arms are being developed with microdevices implanted in existing muscle that communicate wirelessly with chips in the prosthetic, where robots are being built that may do life-saving operations on the wounded as they are being transported to hospitals, and where vehicles with visual systems can move without a human driver. From DARPA came the stealth aircraft that changed politics as well as warfare; today, DARPA is working on hypersonic aircraft that can travel at many times the speed of sound, perhaps someday available for civilian transport. Work on reducing the size of batteries for soldiers in the field and for solar resupply is leading to blends of material that will convert the sun's energy to electrical energy much more efficiently than at present. Non-food bio-fuels are being developed as a substitute for petroleum. All projects that, while immediately addressed to solutions for the military, portend benefits for everyone. In writing the book, Belfiore interviewed many of the companies and people who work for DARPA, all of whom seem to sense the importance of their work for the future. The reader also learns where scientific and technological breakthroughs come from and why so many of them come from DARPA. Both private industry and university researchers tend to be forced to invent for the short term. DARPA's project managers while driven to come up with solutions that are urgently needed are also allowed to take the chance to fail and to entertain bigger leaps of the imagination. For anyone interested in what wonders DARPA will bring us, this is the book to read.

I had high hopes to learn about a lot of cool stuff that DARPA is working on. Perhaps that was a misguided expectation given that most of their stuff is Top Secret. The book turns out to be very boring - I can barely get through it. Way too much discussion of who's running the agency and not enough about what they are doing - but that would be a difficult (perhaps impossible) book to write. The title led me to believe that their projects would be discussed but they really aren't.

It is easy to form the opinion nowadays that government bureaucracies become entrenched, that keeping power once it is gained is the way to play the game, and that red tape keeps agencies from doing their jobs. It might be true in some parts of government, perhaps many. Thus it is all the more important to examine the parts of government for which it is not true. There's one that has produced world-changing benefits, and it is the subject of the engrossing book _The Department of Mad Scientists: How DARPA is Remaking Our World, from the Internet to Artificial Limbs_ (Harper) by Michael Belfiore, which is not so much a summary of the remarkable things the agency has accomplished but a look at just what it is doing now. Much of the work is secret; after all, DARPA is the _Defense_ Advanced Research Projects Agency, even though its projects have plenty of civilian overlap. Some of what Belfiore has to tell us is how difficult it was sometimes to get admission to see projects in action or to get the DARPA eggheads to chat. He is an accomplished writer on technological themes, though, whose previous book _Rocketeers_ was about entrepreneurs and private space travel, and he got access. The resulting report is an invigorating look at tomorrow's technologies being born.

DARPA didn't originally have that "Defense" D in front of it (that came in 1972). ARPA was born from the shock that came from the 1957 launch of Sputnik. ARPANET was originally a network of a small number of computers at universities and research labs which had to share data about seismograph readings quickly, and electronic transfer was much faster than sending tracings in the mail. Along the way, ARPA funded research about analyzing the data, which turned into fundamental starters toward artificial intelligence and neural networks. Working on data input, DARPA invented the computer mouse. DARPA sparked an early version of the Global Positioning System. The old joke goes, "But what have you done for me recently?" For DARPA, that's antiquated; Belfiore's book answers the question "What are you going to do for us in the future?" They have been working on the perfect artificial limb, controlled by brain signals, powered by a battery that will last and last, and light in weight. DARPA is thinking about a "Trauma Pod", an automated, self-contained surgical suite. Buddies would load a wounded comrade into the pod and the hatch would close. As the pod was loaded onto a helicopter or truck, the robots inside would do MRI scans and perform basic stabilizing surgery to keep life going until arrival at the main hospital, which (at least nowadays) has human surgeons for detailed work. If you don't want a robot surgeon, how about a robot chauffeur? DARPA has sponsored contests for teams that make robot cars. The teams build upon systems already in place, like GPS and lane guidance, but let the car make decisions on the systems, without human intervention. The cars had to stop at stop signs, signal turns, yield to oncoming cars, stick to the 30 mph speed limit, and lots of other decisions, and they got no human input once the competition started. Like Samuel Johnson's dog walking on two legs, it is not a wonder at how it was done well but that it was done at all. There were limited successes, but there were also confused robots, resulting in accidents like one which a witness said "looked like kind of a slow-motion train wreck."

All the gadgetry is fascinating, as is the prospect that some version of it will be used by most of us not long from now. Belfiore, however, writes extensively about what makes DARPA tick so well. It takes on tasks, like prosthetic arms, which are needed in numbers too small to make them commercially attractive. It tends to get basics done and then turn the task over to other commercial or government agencies: "We never really finish anything," says one director, "All we really do is show it can be done." Despite the book's title, Belfiore describes not mad scientists, but engineers, "mavericks and mad dreamers operating on the barely respectable fringes of Pentagon culture, the only place where truly creative thought could thrive." DARPA is happy to have foreign engineers enter its ranks, if they can get the jobs done. One of the keys to DARPA's success is a sense of urgency. The engineers are there to get things done; one of them compares the delight at prospects of working there to a trip to Disneyland. There are enormous resources the scientists can call upon, but there is also a sense of immediacy; program managers all have limited tenure. In fact, their DARPA badges bear the month and year in which they have to leave the agency; get the job done by then, or else. The core DARPA operation is small, although it farms out research all around the country, and the costs (compared to the rest of the Pentagon's budget) is minuscule. Belfiore has an engaging curiosity about DARPA's philosophy and its gadgets. If you need a heartening lesson about how sometimes government really can do things right, this will be a refreshing book.

I have read perhaps one hundred books in the last year. This is easily the best. My only qualm: It should be titled the Department of Inspiring Visionaries. If I had known when I was going to high school in the early 70s that a technological revolution was going on around me, I wouldn't have wasted my time playing baseball. I would have jumped into computers with all fours. Anyone with adolescent children or grandchildren needs to put this book in their hands so that the next generation of dreamers can start thinking big thoughts. Knowing that I owe the pioneers at DARPA for the means to type this review online on the "Intergalactic Computer Network," I can only conclude that "DARPA is really a national treasure." (p. 133). Get it; read it; enjoy it.

The book is well-written if a little drawn out. Buy this if you are intrigued by the inner workings of DARPA; skip it if you don't know what DARPA is or dont care what they do. The author spends a little too much time throughout the book explaining how he gained entre to the agency. We get it, they are protective of their work. No need to point it out in every other chapter. I read it on a Kindle. No problems reading this way versus a paper book.

I have been a principle investigator or program manager on the contractors side of 9 DARPA research contracts and so I know a fair amount about the agency and therefor was interested in this book. I was not disappointed. I learned a lot that I did not know, particularly the early history of the agency. Before I read the book, I had know idea who Neil McElroy was and now he is my hero. The anomaly that is DARPA, an amazingly efficient organization surrounded by a sea of inefficient bureaucracies, can be understood as the legacy of people who don't believe much of anything is impossible and just want to get things done. While Belfiore takes a scatter gun approach to covering the wide array of technologies that have been and are being worked on at DARPA, he manages to capture the crazed dedication of the program managers, the political whimsy that they and the agency must deal with and the amazing impact this relatively small group of people have had and most likely will continue to have on our security, society, science, technology, and culture.

I still have yet to read this book in great detail, but I am reading the Jetpack history book with slightly greater priority. So far I have skimmed "Dept."; recognize people I know in various chapters (from work), and checked for a couple of important references. The organization isn't chronological. It's what I call "scattered topical" which means the author chose or his hosts chose.

Actually, this is not the first attempt at a DARPA History. Alex Roland's Strategic Computing should also have been cited and read (a flawed book project (MIT Press) funded in part by DARPA <ran out of money>). I first heard about Department as part of an NPR author interview. The NPR Review was good in that the author had the chance to admit DARPA kept "50%" from him for reasons of classification. Certainly, other fine books are references (e.g., Hafner and Lyons), but Roland was a major oversight.

In some ways, this is likely to be the best kind of history due to DARPA's deliberate turn over. It's not clear to me that a complete and good history would be possible. I'm not a DARPA Program Manager, but work with many, nor do I have a security clearance to see DARPA's classified work, but my career was deeply influenced by ARPAnet exposure very early giving me an amazing edge over colleagues in certain topics. I have not plunged into the bowels of their building offices (came too late for a going away party).

The problem that I can tell with the book is the bias toward the Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO), because IT people tend to be more forthcoming when it comes to information. The book appears weak in non-IPTO history. The book also appears not to relate or explain DARPA's relation with the uniformed services and the independent DOD internal agencies very well.

It's not a bad book, it's just that the reporter/author does not appear to have captured history unless it makes for eye-opening text. It does appear to cover controversies such as Total Information Awareness (TIA) {misunderstood from many community people's opinions}.

Additionally, in the 1980s, when Japanese 5th generation advocates were asked about funding models, and they pointed to the US DOD, most Americans didn't connect that to meaning DARPA. The people who work for DARPA, get DARPA funding, and are a part of the wider science community seem to have a tight knit way of thinking. I get along with many of them better than many of my own agency's co-workers.

The book is a low 4-stars in my incomplete, flawed opinion. I think DARPA deserves a little better book (perhaps a later edition). I don't have problems with the title or other packaging, and most of the work they do is important to the DOD, but we aren't likely to see the complete context anytime soon.

I would look for a chronology of org charts (I know this sounds boring, and the current one can be found online) and other factual information in a 2nd edition. DARPA has funded a few not necessarily productive areas. Some people would claim that "applied research" is an oxymoron, but let me keep this brief. Get this book if you are interested in the topic, but keep a skeptical view of this reporter's work. And get Roland's book, too. This is still the DOD bureaucracy being read here.

I had no idea how many creations that we use today began as a DARPA projects. That office truly is a land of visionaries and a national treasure! The book is well written, easy to read and is full of fascinating information. I enjoyed every page!