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Whatsapp 'What used to be a science fiction idea of cyborgs—part animal, part machine—is actually reality at DARPA,' Annie Jacobsen tells Late Night Live.

DARPA is best known for inventing the internet. Less well known is its work in the social sciences, psychological warfare, and brain control. Journalist Annie Jacobsen tells Late Night Live what she's learned from her investigation into the military research agency.

Many stories about the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) highlight the remarkable technology it has invented: the internet, GPS, and faster supply chains to provide vaccines for swine flu and Ebola. It can be easy to forget DARPA is a military research agency: above all else, it's tasked with keeping the American war machine supreme, as investigative journalist Annie Jacobsen puts it.

DARPA's movement is towards coupling man and machine, so putting neuro-prosthetics in the brains of soldiers so that they can have what is called augmented cognition.

DARPA's budget—at least the declassified part—is roughly US$3 billion annually. The agency has received a similar amount, adjusted for inflation, from the US government since it was created as ARPA in 1958. Its 120 program managers have an unusual degree of authority, initiating and overseeing hundreds of research projects across America and overseas, with the power to start, continue or stop research with little outside intervention.

'Is DARPA to be admired or feared? Does DARPA safeguard democracy, or does it stimulate America's seemingly endless call to war?' Jacobsen asks in her latest book, The Pentagon’s Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency.

By poring over declassified documents, and interviewing retired DARPA scientists, captains, colonels, a Nobel laureate and a four-star general, Jacobsen uncovers a story that's not just about technology, but also DARPA's work in the social sciences, psychological warfare and brain control. The agency that invented the internet has also been heavily involved in devising US counterinsurgency policy from Vietnam through to Iraq and Afghanistan, and is preparing for the wars of the future.

'Many of these scientists and engineers who dedicate their lives to national security, the great majority of them, certainly the ones I interviewed, are inherently wise people, with grandchildren—and they also want the world to be well,' Jacobsen tells Late Night Live.

'They don't want a dystopian future of cyborgs fighting cyborgs from underground bunkers. And so the openness that I have found is part of the territory.'

Science fiction writers might set that kind of cyborg warfare in a distant future. But as Jacobsen writes, at any given time, what DARPA scientists are working on—especially in the agency's classified programs—is 10 to 20 years ahead of the technology that's out in the public domain.

Read more: DARPA and the biological face of future conflict

For some of the scientists Jacobsen interviewed, concerns about cyborgs stem from DARPA's research into putting computer chips inside people's brains. Hundreds of thousands of veterans of recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have returned to the US with traumatic brain injuries, and many are volunteering for surgery to restore their cognitive faculties.

This biomedical research has been promoted as having wider societal benefits. As neurologist and former combat surgeon Dr Geoffrey Ling, now head of DARPA's Biological Technologies Office, told Future Tense last year: 'Whenever you are in the biomedical space, I believe that you are doing it for the beneficence of mankind.'

But Jacobsen suggests this kind of cutting-edge technology has a closer link to DARPA's stated goal, advancing weapons technology, than the agency might admit.

'What used to be a science fiction idea of cyborgs—part animal, part machine—is actually reality at DARPA. They've created cyborgs, at least two that I know of, one with a rat that DARPA scientists are able to control—it has an implant in its brain—and the other with a moth,' she says.

'DARPA's movement is towards coupling man and machine, so putting neuro-prosthetics in the brains of soldiers so that they can have what is called augmented cognition. They can become super-soldiers ... Ultimately [the Pentagon is moving] toward robots taking over the job: self-governing drones, drones that are often called hunter-killer drones.'

But, she says, this has encountered resistance at the Pentagon, from both senior officers and drone operators who are speaking out.

'What I found is that DARPA, right around that same time, initiated this program called narrative networks. What it deals with is how humans respond to stories, how humans respond to what they're told.

'Buried inside the narrative networks program is another program that has to do with trust, and specifically it has to do with DARPA's interest in being able to manipulate a chemical in the human brain called oxytocin, which is what man bases his trust instincts on.

'When you consider that most of the opposition in the Pentagon against robotic warfare has to do with individuals saying "we don't trust robots" then you look at DARPA running a program that deals with the possible manipulation of trust, I see a connection.'

DARPA as 'a double edged-sword'

Jacobsen says she doesn't see DARPA in black and white terms. 'I see it as a conundrum. I see it as a double-edged sword. I recognise that this agency is tasked with keeping the American war machine supreme. That's its job.'

As she learned from retired social scientist Joseph Zasloff, there have been times when the agency presented uncomfortable critiques of the US government's policies.

Zasloff ran ARPA's 'Viet Cong Motivation and Morale' program during the Vietnam War, which was set up to answer a question that apparently plagued then secretary of defence Robert McNamara: What makes the Viet Cong tick?

Zasloff told Jacobsen about preparing reports for his superiors with the assistance of Vietnamese-speaking anthropologists who had been tasked with finding out exactly what was behind support for the Viet Cong.

'What they discovered was what made them tick was this deep hatred toward the South Vietnamese government, then President Diem, who was incredibly corrupt, who the Americans were supporting,' Jacobsen says.

'When the ARPA social scientists took this information to the Pentagon, and said here's the problem, there was a very poignant scene ... the man to whom all scientists had to report, Harold Brown, who later became secretary of defence, literally turned his chair around, so that his back was facing the social scientists, let them finish, didn't say anything, and had them shown the door.

'In their place DARPA got social scientists who would tell the Pentagon exactly what they wanted to hear, which was, "We can win this war, we just need more technology."'

Repeating the same mistakes

Zasloff, who died earlier this year, felt it was important to talk about the DARPA programs he worked on, even though by the time they were unclassified many people had moved on.

'What Zasloff said was interesting, because he followed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and he too was stunned,' says Jacobsen. 'He said, "It seems to me that instead of having gained experience from the failure of many of the programs that we tried in Vietnam, the Pentagon has now suffered amnesia, and they have simply repeated the same actions without having looked at what went wrong decades before."'

When Dwight D. Eisenhower gave his farewell address as president in 1961, he cautioned against the potential influence of the military-industrial complex. 'Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry,' he said, 'can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defence with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.'

Jacobsen says that idea is even more important today in light of how fast technology is moving. 'Things can get away from us very quickly ... I think that there needs to be a pause and a discussion and a debate.'

And yet, with Russia and China investing research similar to that done by DARPA, cyborg warfare could be part of the future, whether the US gets to it first or not.

'When you consider that double-edged sword, you really have to think—and this is what many of the scientists I interviewed said to me—how would you feel if a Russia or a China or a dark horse like Saudi Arabia, is the first nation to break some of these technological barriers like artificial intelligence or human cloning? Will you say DARPA has failed?'

The Pentagon's brain Listen to Late Night Live's full interview with Annie Jacobsen.

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