DANGEROUS

DELUSIONS
A review of (& reaction to): “The Pentagon’s Brain: History of DARPA” by Annie Jacobsen (2015)
By H. J. Spencer © Nov. 2017
SUMMARY
This text is another book by an investigative journalist, who specializes in exposing US Government secret
activities; following her best-selling books (“Area 51”, “Operation Paperclip”) that exposed the military secret
test site in Nevada and the CIA’s illegal smuggling of Nazi scientists into the USA after 1945. Once again, the
author provides encyclopedic coverage of very many little known (previously hidden) details. This book also
describes the cultures of secrecy and deceit that characterize too much of US Government agencies and the
links to the other powerful institutions of military corporations and top universities. Once again we are shown
the corruption of patriotism into ultra-nationalism that is difficult to distinguish from Nazism. This book
shows how the US ‘Deep State’ pervades the senior management levels of government, corporations and
universities, all of this long-hidden under the sacred cloak of “National Security”. This frightening exposé is
based on many first-hand interviews with the original senior participants from 1954 through 2015.

Most readers will not be familiar with the ‘Defense Advanced Research Project Agency’, or better known by its
acronym: DARPA amongst the plethora of secret agencies and operations exploding under too many anonymous
Orwellian abbreviations. Founded in 1958, it has functioned ever since as the central Research and
Development (R&D) organization of the Department of Defense, headquartered in the Pentagon. Its $3 billion
annual (‘black’) budget makes it the most powerful military science agency in the world. As an agency, it does
not conduct any research itself. Its 120 elite managers hire defense contractors, academics and other
government organizations to actually perform the hundreds of projects. DARPA then facilitates the transition
of its successful results to the military for actual use. Thus, all risk is removed from the capitalist corporations
in the largest component of the US economy (the Military-Industrial Complex or MIC) that will end up (first)
in the largest organization in the world: the US Military and not much later with the armed forces of many other
countries around the world.

This conspiracy of very clever men suffers from the dangerous delusion that advanced technology can protect
the US Empire by inventing ever more powerful and dangerous weapons, believed to be the Roman Empire’s
reason for its success. Consequently, these intellectuals have brought the whole world to the precarious
situation, where a single failure will end humanity and most other life forms on this planet. This is not a
pleasurable book to read but necessary for readers who want to know how the modern world operates; so that it
was designated as ‘Best Book of the Year’ by Washington Post, Boston Globe and Amazon; it was also a
Pulitzer Prize finalist.
COLD WAR
Several US presidents have shared Adolf Hitler’s obsession with technology, so it should be no surprise to find
that hundreds of Nazi scientists, engineers, doctors and technicians were smuggled into the USA to boost their
own competition with their recent Soviet allies that had evolved into the fifty year imperialist competition later
called The Cold War. These ‘despicable men’ [see my review of Operation Paperclip] were quickly integrated
with native born scientists, who had made the infamous ‘Faustian Deal’ to build the first nuclear bomb at secret
sites like Los Alamos. These weapons were tested on Japan over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. These
secret facilities were not disbanded but continued to grow thereafter. Even when some, like Oppenheimer had
realized the terrible leap was being made, there were others, such as the Hungarian physicist, Edward Teller,
who always wanted to promote his fanatical anti-communism by building “more and bigger bombs”.

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This book actually begins in 1954 with the first test of Teller’s ‘brain-child’: the “Super” or hydrogen bomb
that was exploded on Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands, 2500 miles west of Hawaii. This first thermo-nuclear
bomb exploded with an equivalent power of 15 megatons (a million Hiroshima A-bombs); this was 3x larger
than expected, with huge amounts of surprising radioactive fallout. Teller and his mentor, Ernest Lawrence
were already planning for a 10,000-megaton weapon to “maintain US supremacy”. One year later, the Soviets
tested their own deliverable H-bomb. This encouraged President Eisenhower to seek a ban on nuclear testing
but he was opposed by all the ‘experts’, who all wanted improved (but useless) ‘Civil Defense’. This only
resulted in the secret construction of underground “government retreats”.

The surprise of Sputnik in 1957 led to the hysteria to respond with the idea for a top secret novel weapons R&D
agency with the president insisting that it cover all military branches (Army, Navy, Air Force). One of the most
notorious groups of top academic scientists self-assembled in 1960 called themselves “The Jasons” (alluding to
the mythic Greek Argonauts): two of its earliest members were John Wheeler and Murray Gell-Mann. One of
their earliest proposals was MIRVing the already unstoppable ICBMs, increasing the number of targeted cities
dramatically. Their only client throughout the 1960s was DARPA.
VIETNAM WAR
In JFK’s first two months in office (in 1961) he spent more time on Vietnam than any other national security
concern, so he soon approved DARPA’s request to establish a ‘field office’ in Saigon to determine effective,
new jungle-fighting technology against the communist insurgency with the name: Project Agile (as in flexible,
capable and quick-witted). Its most significant weapon was the AR-15 semiautomatic rifle, much lighter for the
smaller South Vietnamese soldiers than the standard US Army weapons; within two years it became the
standard issue rifle for the US Army. It quickly evolved for fully automatic fire when it was called the M-16
assault rifle. The next innovation was Agent Orange, a toxic defoliant kept top-secret as biological and
chemical weapons were banned under the Geneva Convention, so it was hidden under “anti-crop warfare
research” that was still legal! By November, President Kennedy had approved the chemical defoliation
program in Vietnam as a ‘secret weapon’ that eventually grew to using 19 million gallons of this noxious
herbicide.

The first and most infamous military think-tank was the Santa Monica based R&D Corporation (better known
as RAND), sometimes referred to as the brains behind the US Air Force, who developed the earliest reports on
nuclear weapons (e.g. Herman Kahn’s “On Thermonuclear Weapons”). By 1961, RAND’s president was eager
to cash in on studying Counterinsurgency (COIN) war, so he expanded his corporation’s prior obsession with
mathematics to include social science research. He soon landed a lucrative DARPA contract and opened a large
office in Saigon. Their first project, conducted by two eminently qualified anthropologists from Yale and
Dartmouth (who both spoke Vietnamese) involved examining the ‘Strategic Hamlet Program’. Their honest,
well-researched final report was directly rejected by the Pentagon and senior DARPA management, as being too
negative and pessimistic.

In 1965, Defense Secretary McNamara wanted to end the war quickly so the Jasons were asked to determine if
it would be effective to use nuclear weapons to destroy the Ho Chi Minh Trail. These nuclear experts decided
that ‘small’ (40 Kiloton or ‘tactical bombs’ like “ Davy Crockett”) could be used to block key passes but even
so, they estimated it might need a total of 3,000 per year to be effective. None-the-less, their final report argued
against their usage which might encourage China or Soviet Union to provide similar weapons to North
Vietnam, with unknown long-range consequences if other insurgents were encouraged to copy them. Ironically,
it was an anonymous tipoff that a nuclear expert had been seen visiting South Vietnam that led to rumors of this
report led to student protests at Princeton against the Jasons. This was accelerated by the Pentagon Papers.

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SMALLER WARS
There were several innovations that began during the Vietnam War but took years to later appear. Two of the
most dramatic were night-vision (for the army) and stealth technology (for the air force). More spectacular
inventions were laser-guided bombs and missiles. Another project with recent dramatic impacts was the
invention of the Internet that began as a small-scale Arpanet first implemented between four universities in
northern California. This was begun as a research project to ‘harden’ the military’s “Command and Control”
survivability if the USA were subject to wide-scale attack. This was given a global capability when the satellite
based navigation system, called Global Positioning System (or GPS), was introduced to direct weapons to exact
targets. From all this work, entire new large-scale industries were forming to replace America’s aging older
technology corporations. DARPA increased its political visibility in 1977 when President Carter appointed
Harold Brown as his secretary of defense. Brown was the first nuclear scientist (first head of the hydrogen-
bomb research at Livermore Laboratory in 1950) to move to the pinnacle of the Military Industrial Complex.

These aging Cold-Warriors did not slip into quiet retirement as shown by the Star-Wars saga. Edward Teller
had persuaded president Reagan in 1969 that his guys could build a space-based protection for all the USA
against incoming ballistic missiles. This super-tech project was to involve huge mirrors and ‘smart satellites’
but the heart of the system was the X-Ray laser whose beams would destroy the approaching warheads. The
major snag (apart from this being only an untested idea) was that this ‘directed-energy weapon’ was powered by
nuclear explosions. The problem was that Reagan had previously assured the public that his new project would
not involve nuclear weapons in space. The conniving enthusiasts tried to divert attention from the basic science
by saying that it only involve a “nuclear event”. Fortunately, Congress was deeply suspicious of its technical
feasibility and that it would trigger a dangerous new arms race with the Soviets but still allowed the project to
proceed. This “Strategic Defense Initiative” ultimately was to cost over $100 billion without it ever being
deployed.

The mutual support within the MIC was shown when Dick Cheney became secretary of defense to the prior
head of the CIA (George H. W. Bush). During 1995 through 2000, Cheney became CEO of Halliburton (the
giant industrial company). In 1991, he oversaw the first Gulf War (“Desert Storm”) where F-117A stealth
aircraft, as it was invisible to radar, knocked out the world’s second most heavily defended city of Baghdad.
The whole operation was controlled from 40,000 feet in a tech-laden Boeing 707-300 using the DARPA Joint
Surveillance Target Attack Radar System (JSTARS). This oversight system was able to direct US tanks to
attack the main Iraqi tank divisions using thermal imaging systems. The resulting massacre became known as
the “Highway of Death”; the war ended in 43 days. The US president was ecstatic, even triumphantly
declaring: “By God, we have licked the Vietnam Syndrome once and for all.” The final humanity-threatening
research was the secret funding of a whole new generation (sometimes genetically modified) of biological
weapons such as anthrax, tularemia and botulinum spearheaded by Jason biologists; these germs were to be
added to the growing arsenal of neurological toxins. The massive threat is that these Weapons of Mass
Destruction (WMDs) are much easier to replicate (say, by small organizations) than the hugely expensive
nuclear weapons: once the science is done, secrecy becomes impossible.

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WAR ON TERROR
This section begins with Vice-President Cheney watching the airplanes hitting the towers of the world trade
Center and declaring that this was a terrorist act, thus announcing the Century of Terrorism. This was followed
by the mainly forgotten incidents of anthrax attacks and alarms of possible botulinum threats against the White
House reported by the $50 million secret BASIS system that was sold on the promise of zero rate of ‘false
positives’. One day later, these were recorded as false alarms, as were 50 more in the first few years. Even so,
within four months of these attacks, Congress approved a $360 million budget for biological defense research in
the next 12 months. A further irony was that DARPA avoided the finger-pointing, with the public blaming the
CIA and FBI for failing to anticipate the 9/11 attacks. DARPA reacted by initiating a massive enhancement of
its surveillance capabilities under the umbrella of “Total Information Awareness” (TIA). This initially had
major features such as facial recognition software and expansion of personal identification called biometrics,
such as iris scanning, which have migrated to all US Border-Entry points.

This section contains a disturbing report on improvised explosive devices (IEDs). It begins with an ironic
contrast between President George W. Bush announcing ‘Mission Accomplished’ from the deck of the US
super carrier ‘Abraham Lincoln’ in May, 2003 and the death three weeks later of the first death from an IED in
Iraq. These weapons were cheap (about $25) and easy to make: only needing a fuse, a switch, a battery, a
container and explosives that were readily available in Iraq (one million tons). By the end of 2003, monthly
fatalities were double that by other weapons. DARPA responded with expensive jammers to block the wireless
detonations but were far too few and became easy to bypass. Eventually, the Pentagon spent more than $1
billion on ‘defeat-the-IED’ technology. This included a bizarre project to train honeybees to locate bombs but
the Army rejected the whole idea as implausible to rely on insect performance. There was also a huge classified
program in Iraq, where thousands of defense contractors drove around city streets capturing digital imagery
using techniques that later re-appeared for Google Maps.

One of the unintended consequences of the huge effort to ‘win in Iraq’ was to pull too many troops away from
Afghanistan, much too quickly. The Taliban had been effectively neutralized by 2002 but had returned with a
vengeance within five years. General Petraeus was an enthusiast for collecting biometrics in counterinsurgency
operations, so data was collected on more 1.5 million Afghan men (about one in 6 males) even though this had
not generated significant results on millions in Iraq (one in four males). Another innovative idea was also
introduced in Afghanistan called the Human Terrain System (HTS) that financially encouraged large numbers
of professional anthropologists (being paid up to $200,000 annually) to ‘assist’ the Army in “understanding the
local population”. Another aspect of DARPA’s TIA program was exposed when Edward Snowden blew the
whistle by releasing classified information on clandestine data-mining surveillance on millions of mainland
American citizens. This was complemented by the highly classified Nexus-7 program to monitor social media
networks that was first used in Afghanistan. This fits with rumors that the CIA had secretly funded the launch
of Facebook and other new social media digital companies whereby users provide vast amounts of useful data.
Even the explosion of text messaging is not safe as DARPA has got major funding from Congress for their
‘Deep Exploration and Filtering of Text’ (DEFT) program, so that algorithms could scour vast arrays of text-
based messages to “pull actionable intelligence” out of ambiguously worded messages. Just another example of
DARPA’s power to lure talent away from any academic department in US universities with its $3 billion annual
budget.

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FUTURE WAR
President Obama had learned how Washington works when he gave a speech at the local National Defense
University when he deliberately gave the appearance that he was worried about the War on Terror. He quoted
the warning made by the fourth President, James Madison, who warned that: “No nation could preserve its
freedom in the midst of continual warfare.” This was true irony because it was only 55 years earlier that 22
defense scientists met there to prepare ARPA Study #1 outlining which weapons would best serve the USA in
coming wars. This launched the political and financial mechanism for consolidating the MIC. These early
futurists would probably have approved of DARPA’s decision to base future weapons systems to be based on
drones and ‘artificial intelligence’ (AI), so wars could be fought by unmanned vehicles in the air, on the ground,
on and below the ocean surface, so as to minimize casualties and increasing payroll and pension costs. More
and more of these systems will be ‘bio-hybrids’ – part animal and part machines. Miniaturization and soon
nano-biology meant that many of these systems were similar to insects (‘biomimetics’), at least in size. At the
opposite end of the scale, DARPA commissioned work on hypersonic stealth drones, with the Falcon HTV-2
able to fly anywhere in the world at Mach 20 (13,000 miles per hour). The logical conclusion of these projects
were autonomous drones: the ultimate hunter-killer robot, intelligent enough to kill a designated target without
direct human control.

DARPA’s serious intention to fund and promote AI can be judged by the fact that the Los Alamos National
Laboratory has continued to grow way beyond its historic nuclear mission to include AI, such that within its 36
square mile security campus, there are now over 10,000 employees and contractors, half of whom have PhDs.
Publicly, much of this research is to help the many people with traumatic brain injuries (when over 10% of the
300,000 military in Iraq suffered these devastating injuries). We can take some comfort for the giant steps
needed for successful AI to consider face recognition: a task we all do unconsciously from an early age but still
beyond the range of the most powerful AI. Some of the world’s leaders in limb regeneration research are
working under DARPA and Army contracts in the laboratory of the Biological Sciences at University of
California (Irvine). They are investigating the DNA of aquatic salamanders that are able to regenerate lost body
parts as adults. There is even speculation that success here might lead to selective immortality.

Doubts about the future of AI to even augment (never mind replace) human cognition were expressed in a 2008
reports by the Jason scientists. This was not the view that DARPA wanted, so this might have been the final
straw that led to their relationship being terminated; some even viewed them as “too arrogant”. Their role as
senior scientific advisors was replaced by the permanent Defense Science Board (DSB). Unlike the Jasons, who
were mainly scientists and fulltime university professors, the majority of the 50 DSB members are defense
contractors, often board members of defense contracting giants, such as Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics,
IBM, Northrop Grumman, etc. Author Jacobsen says that: “If DARPA is the Pentagon’s brain then the DSB are
its beating heart.”
CONCLUSIONS
This book illustrates the technocratic mindset displayed in all its self-serving rationality (“we know best”) with
no impact of morality on their actions and plans. These very educated men are true sons of America’s ruling
families; they never doubt that what is best for their class is best for the country: the power of patriotism offers
sufficient justification for the culture of secrecy easily covered by invoking the blanket of National Security.
Three of the worst offenders moving readily between politics, the Pentagon and major corporations were Robert
McNamara, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. A famous film director was so deeply worried by the
militarization of America that he illustrated in his marvelous 1964 movie, “Dr. Strangelove”, wherein the
eponymous scientist was reputedly based on either Edward Teller, John von Neumann or Werner von Braun.

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Author Jacobsen rarely raises these embarrassing questions: Is the world transforming into a War Zone and
America into police state – and is it DARPA that is making them so? Are we entering a world of immoral
rationality where any use of intelligence can be justified by ‘Patriotism’ and sufficient cash? In fact, while
some admirers call DARPA the Pentagon’s brain, many critics (probably including Jacobsen) view it as
stimulating America’s endless regression to war. Worse, once DARPA’s latest advances are revealed in battle,
other nations inevitably acquire (sometimes by espionage) the science that DARPA pioneered; armed-drones
are a perfect example of this spread of technology, first appearing in Afghanistan in 2001 but by 2014, 87
nations had their own military-grade drones. This turns the irreversible crank increasing the risks of war. If we
give machines autonomy, the potential for unintended consequences is unparalleled. Worse, DARPA’s
strongest promoter of this vision, Ashton Carter became President Obama’s secretary of defense in 2015.

After finishing this long book (500 pages) I was struck by the following thought. American universities are
now at a high risk of disappearing. Administrators demand that researchers seek out grants to fund their work.
DARPA and the Department of Energy (fronting for the nuclear industry) fund a huge fraction of the scientific
and engineering research and (increasingly) medical and humanities areas, for many US universities. More and
more of the successful researchers will bypass the funds being drained to their university administrators and will
set up their own businesses and keep 100% of the contract fees. No civilization can withstand this loss of talent.