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Sharon Weinberger

The Imagineers of War: The Untold Story of DARPA, the Pentagon Agency That Changed the World Hardcover – Deckle Edge, March 14, 2017

by Sharon Weinberger (Author)

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The definitive history of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon agency that has quietly shaped war and technology for nearly sixty years.

Founded in 1958 in response to the launch of Sputnik, the agency’s original mission was to create “the unimagined weapons of the future.” Over the decades, DARPA has been responsible for countless inventions and technologies that extend well beyond military technology. Sharon Weinberger gives us a riveting account of DARPA’s successes and failures, its remarkable innovations, and its wild-eyed schemes. We see how the threat of nuclear Armageddon sparked investment in computer networking, leading to the Internet, as well as to a proposal to power a missile-destroying particle beam by draining the Great Lakes. We learn how DARPA was responsible during the Vietnam War for both Agent Orange and the development of the world’s first armed drones, and how after 9/11 the agency sparked a national controversy over surveillance with its data-mining research. And we see how DARPA’s success with self-driving cars was followed by disappointing contributions to the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.

Weinberger has interviewed more than one hundred former Pentagon officials and scientists involved in DARPA’s projects—many of whom have never spoken publicly about their work with the agency—and pored over countless declassified records from archives around the country, documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, and exclusive materials provided by sources. The Imagineers of War is a compelling and groundbreaking history in which science, technology, and politics collide.

Print length

496 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Knopf
Publication date

March 14, 2017
Dimensions

6.7 x 1.7 x 9.6 inches
ISBN-10

0385351798
ISBN-13

978-0385351799
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“Excellent… A warning worth heeding… Weinberger…has cracked much of the secrecy that surrounds DARPA. [She] is especially deft in tracing how drones went from their early days in spotting and tracking Viet Cong fighters in the jungle to today, where they are part of the foundation of modern warfare.”
—Ray Locker, USA Today

“Groundbreaking.... Provides a glimpse into the history of war itself through the lens of an agency that bills itself as trying to ‘prevent and create surprise.’.... The best kind of airport thriller.”
—The New Scientist

"Deeply researched and briskly paced."
—Fred Kaplan, the New York Times Book Review

"[A] defining behind-the-scenes look at the confluence of defense politics and technological prowess. Exploring silly schemes as well as sensible ideas, distinguished military science and technology expert Weinberger profiles the crusaders who thought outside the box in service to their country and their own limitless creativity."
—Carol Haggas, Booklist

"Her account is critical but not mocking…a well-researched contribution to the history of U.S. military technology."
—Lawrence D. Freedman, Foreign Affairs

"They are the wizards of war, the faceless scientists who fight the battles of the future in lab coats instead of body armor, turning insects into remote control cyborgs and designing warships without crews. In her new book, Sharon Weinberger has placed one of the government’s most secret laboratories, DARPA, under an electron microscope and discovered a world far beyond anyone’s imagination."
—James Bamford, bestselling author of The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA, from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America.

"From the Internet of today to the robots of tomorrow, DARPA has shaped not just the technology of war, but our day to day lives. Sharon Weinberger's The Imagineers of War lays out its untold history in an easy and informative read, along the way, reshaping the way you will look at events that range from the Vietnam War to the War on Terror."
—P.W. Singer, author of Ghost Fleet and Wired for War

"[A] fascinating and absorbing history… Weinberger’s account, based on extensive and meticulous research, reveals surprising twists in the recent history of the age-old entanglement between knowledge and power."
—David Kaiser, Nature Research

"A deep organizational history rather than a technological chronicle. [Weinberger] scours reams of archival material and interviews former officials…revealing a highly secretive organization with a fittingly mixed legacy."
—Publishers Weekly

About the Author

SHARON WEINBERGER is Executive Editor at Foreign Policy and the author of Imaginary Weapons: A Journey Through the Pentagon's Scientific Underworld. She is currently a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and a Global Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. She has also held fellowships at MIT's Knight Science Journalism program, the International Reporting Program at Johns Hopkins Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, and Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism. She has written on military science and technology for Nature, BBC, Discover, Slate, Wired, and The Washington Post, among others.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Knopf; 1st Printing edition (March 14, 2017)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 496 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0385351798
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0385351799
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.9 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.7 x 1.7 x 9.6 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #903,412 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #353 in Engineering Patents & Inventions
- #4,417 in History & Philosophy of Science (Books)
- #9,993 in American Military History

Customer Reviews:
104 ratings

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Unfair, uneven, and mostly wrong-headed

Reviewed in the United States on April 27, 2017

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As a former director of DARPA's Microsystems Technology Office, I could easily be accused of being biased. And to some extent maybe I am. But I found this book infuriating, on many levels. Weinberger is the champion of cherrypicking, for starters. Big successes, she pays lip service to; big failures, she describes in detail, as though she agrees that DARPA should be taking massive risks but that those risks ought to all pay off. What she never seems to grasp is that failures, other than those stemming from incompetence or malfeasance, are inevitable, and often teach more than successes do. Looked at one way, DARPA spends a lot of the taxpayers' money, to achieve these learnings. But compared to the alternatives of never learning at all, or having the DoD err on its considerably more massive scale, it's a highly efficient machine. Weinberger ignores thousands of technology contributions that DARPA has provided (I counted 17 such technologies in every smartphone without even trying very hard), presumably because she believes that DARPA should be striving to get back to its "essential to national security" status from the good old days that she spends most of this book describing. In her interview with Arati Prabhakar, which I found superficial and annoyingly dismissive, Dr. Prabhakar pointed out that the world Weinberger remembers has changed, an observation of much greater profundity than Weinberger appreciates. Finally, Weinberger makes no attempts whatsoever to cover DARPA's program managers, the heart and soul of the agency. What motivates people to go to Arlington VA and spend a few years, knowing there's no chance for long term employment there and that whatever programs they initiate, they won't be around to take credit for? Many of them take significant pay cuts at considerable personal sacrifice. Would you sell your house and move your family, knowing that no matter how effective you are, you'll be out of a job in 3 years? But if you don't move, you'll only see your spouse and kids on weekends, and you may have to drive long distances even then. Weinberger only even discusses PMs when she finds a particularly colorful one. This is unfair to the PMs, unfair to the agency, it's critical to understanding why DARPA has never become just another Washington bureaucracy, and essential to the agency's nimbleness and ability to infuse new ideas continuously. If this book had been intended to be an objective, comprehensive look at an agency well worth analyzing, the role of the PM would have been front and center. Instead, Weinberger ended up with an uneven quasi-history, slanted to the "good old days", which evaluates cherrypicked examples of DARPA programs against an implicit writer's bias of what Weinberger believes DARPA ought to be doing. Finally, it isn't DARPA's job to prevent war, Ms. Weinberger. If that's what you really want, write a book about politicians and the people who voted them into office.

184 people found this helpful

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An in-depth study of Pentagon research that has changed our history -- and our lives

Reviewed in the United States on July 18, 2017

Verified Purchase

Many of the products of the Pentagon's in-house research facility, DARPA, are widely known. The Internet. GPS. The M16 rifle. Agent Orange. Stealth aircraft. What is less widely known and understood is the story of the scores of scientists, engineers, and bureaucrats who sired these and many other innovations over the nearly 60-year history of the agency. Now, journalist Sharon Weinberger has brought that history to light in a captivating account, The Imagineers of War: The Untold Story of DARPA, the Pentagon Agency That Changed the World, her third book about America's defense establishment.

What is most distinctive about Weinberger's study of DARPA is the wealth of information and insight she gained from interviews with dozens of current and former employees of the agency as well as with those who observed it in action over the years. Prominent among her interviewees were many of the men (and a couple of women) who served as DARPA's directors. In the process, and in extensive archival research, Weinberger turned up a great deal of information about the agency in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s that has been ignored or even suppressed for many years.

DARPA's shifting mission

DARPA's mission has shifted sharply over the years. At its inception in 1958 and for a short while afterward, DARPA was the nation's first space agency. DARPA's focus quickly shifted to missile defense. "By 1961," Weinberger writes, "ARPA was spending about $100 million per year, or half of its entire budget, on missile defense." The Cuban Missile Crisis and President Kennedy's subsequent emphasis on achieving a nuclear test ban accelerated the process. Along the way, this research "modernized the field of seismology" in the agency's effort to detect underground nuclear tests. Around the same time, the agency became involved in counterinsurgency in Vietnam (and later in many other countries). The counterinsurgency work involved social science research as well as the development of new weapons such as the M16. DARPA's most famous product, the Internet (originally ARPANET), was an easily ignored, low-priority project in the face of the billions spent on the war. During the 1970s, the agency turned its attention to what the Pentagon and the White House deemed the country's gravest threat: the potential of a Soviet invasion of West Germany with a massive tank attack that could not be stopped with nuclear weapons alone. Within less than two decades, that threat evaporated. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union shocked DARPA's leadership, as it did everyone else in the US government. The agency only gradually found its way forward with a primary focus on precision weaponry and the electronic battlefield. In Weinberger's opinion, DARPA's work today is aimed at much lesser problems than it has tackled in the past. It's much more focused on solving specific problems posed by Pentagon brass rather than delving into genuine scientific research, which had been the case in earlier decades.

"Today," Weinberger writes in her conclusion, "the agency's past investments populate the battlefield: The Predator . . . Stealth aircraft . . . Networked computers . . . precision weapons . . ." But it's unlikely anything as disruptive as the Internet is ever likely to come again from DARPA.

Revealing DARPA's many huge failures

The history of DARPA in its early years in The Imagineers of War is especially strong. By burrowing into obscure declassified documents and interviewing many of those who were active in the agency's first years, Weinberger uncovered the seminal role of William Godel. It was Godel who "managed to use the power vacuum at ARPA [following the loss of space programs to NASA] to carve out a new role for the agency in Vietnam." Following the lead of the British in Malaya, where many of the tools of counterinsurgency were first developed, Godel built what ultimately became a multi-billion-dollar program in Vietnam. His aim was to make it unnecessary for the US to commit troops to the war, and in that he obviously failed miserably. It was Godel who promoted the notorious strategic hamlets and introduced Agent Orange and other defoliants as well as the combat rifle that came to be known as the M16. Because much of his work was clandestine and involved cash payments to undercover agents, Godel became enmeshed in an investigation into his program's financial reporting and later spent several years in prison as a result of a colleague's misappropriation of funds. Probably because of this intensely embarrassing chapter in DARPA's history, and his later turn to gunrunning in Southeast Asia, Godel's role has been deeply buried. There is not even a Wikipedia page for him.

William Godel was by no means the only DARPA executive to darken the agency's history with outsize failures. Others squandered billions of dollars in sometimes lunatic schemes, such as a plan to explode nuclear weapons in the Van Allen belt in the upper atmosphere in hopes of destroying intercontinental missiles launched from Russia. The agency spent almost $2 billion in a failed effort to develop a prototype of a "space plane" that would travel at Mach 25 ("one of DARPA's costliest failures"). Another embarrassing episode involved extensive research into mind control. An even bigger embarrassment loomed as a possibility in 1983 when Ronald Reagan announced his plan for the Strategic Defense Initiative ("Star Wars"). Luckily for the agency, the work was shifted to a new Pentagon department that eventually blew a total of $30 billion on an effort that scientists had almost universally said was impossible with contemporary or foreseeable technology.

An earlier history of DARPA

In December 2015, I reviewed a then-new book, The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency, by Annie Jacobsen. Jacobsen is the author of three other studies of the Pentagon: Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America, Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base, and, most recently, Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government's Investigations into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis. All four books were published by prestigious mainstream firms. I've cited all these titles to convey a clear sense that Annie Jacobsen is an accomplished and trustworthy source of information about the Pentagon. She has spent years researching the American military, with a focus on its activities in research and development. But it's clear to me that Sharon Weinberger's more recent study, The Imagineers of War, does an even better job of laying bare the truth about DARPA's checkered history.

10 people found this helpful

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FrankP

Interesting book, but limited in what it covered

Reviewed in the United States on September 6, 2017

Verified Purchase

The author uses material that is either readily available to reporters or has been declassified. There is a significant amount of work done by DARPA that has never been declassified and she apparently had no access to what may be the majority of DARPA's programs. Occasionally she will mention that there were very expensive programs that were not available. Her phrasing in several places has a liberal slant to it, but I do believe she tried to be as objective as possible given the amount of information available in the unclassified world.

5 people found this helpful

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Maggie

Fascinating

Reviewed in the United States on August 24, 2018

Verified Purchase

It beats Area 51 for intriguing events participated in by our government. The book has taken me a very long time to read but overall it is completely worth the effort. When my friends on either end of the spectrum rant about our military spending or lack of initiative, I can usually think of some program or development that has a basis in fact.

One person found this helpful

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SALR

Exhausting

Reviewed in the United States on May 31, 2018

Verified Purchase

I was very impressed with the image of DARPA before I read this book. Now, faced with the reality of their blundering over the years, I think differently. The vast money wasted, the bloated income so many “experts” made from writing endless useless reports, and the largely crackpot ideas that DARPA largely trafficked in, make for a sobering and exhausting read, even if it’s well done.

2 people found this helpful

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Kris

I'm still reading this book, but thus far it's ...

Reviewed in the United States on May 19, 2017

Verified Purchase

I'm still reading this book, but thus far it's very enjoyable, and filled with interesting tidbits and rich with history. I heard the author in an NPR interview and she's incredibly impressive. It is what prompted me to buy the book.

3 people found this helpful

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Lewis Shepherd

Eye-opening on Vietnam era DARPA

Reviewed in the United States on June 30, 2017

Verified Purchase

Learned several new episodes from DARPA's surprisingly deep engagement in theater during the Vietnam conflict. Kudos to the author for an even-handed but rigorous peek behind the gauzy veil of past PR. Still love the mission of DARPA, but good to be clear-eyed in assessing its performance over the years.

One person found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

Andrew Cole

Augmented Cognition.....such a cool term!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 9, 2020

Verified Purchase

Have been a fan of Weinberger since 2007, enjoy the way she writes and love the subject matter. This book is highly interesting full of ideas, experiments and revelations that perhaps, the general public would be unaware of, if it wasn’t for her tenacity.

The, “Jewel in the Crown”, for me has to be “augmented cognition”, simply because the implication of such technology is immense for the whole of humanity. Additionally the existence of such technology has in March 2020, been publicly acknowledged by Joseph Makin of the University of California.

On a personal level her writings bring a feeling of peacefulness, acceptance and understanding, as did her article in The Washington Post of the 14th January 2007. Having been the subject of the development of this technology, I hope one day she chooses to read my book on the experiment.

Finally, “The Imagineers of War”, is an excellent read that would be appreciated and enjoyed by anyone with an interest in covert Government activities and I highly recommend this book to all.

Jolo

Wait, DARPA did that?

Reviewed in Canada on July 27, 2018

Verified Purchase

I really enjoyed this look into DARPA, an agency that doesn't get enough credit, or vilification for what they have done. Weinberger made it feel less like a history of DARPA, and more like a trip through crazy science, hail marys and some shattered dreams.

Stefano Gazziano

The beginning of modern, digital, world ? Here.

Reviewed in Italy on November 13, 2020

Verified Purchase

Absolutely well documented. The history of DARPA by an insider, evidently. All we live today: Trump, digital economy, www began with a vision: here is how.

Carlos Sandoval

Good

Reviewed in Canada on April 28, 2020

Verified Purchase

I just start reading the book really interesting

manisha ciddu

This is first copy. Dont buy.

Reviewed in India on May 12, 2021

Verified Purchase

This is a first copy. I hate amazon for doing this. Why sell first copies in the name of original. They should seriously rethink their business model.

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