With the nature of war changing fast, what goes on in the Pentagon’s most secretive research agency, asks the first insider to lift the lid in The Imagineers of War

The game-playing computer in the film War Games was not all fiction AF Archive/Alamy Stock Photo

SHORTLY after arriving at the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) in April 1958, the new chief scientist presented a plan to the agency’s director. Four months later, nine ships set off for the (mostly) uninhabited Gough Island deep in the South Atlantic, carrying 4500 personnel and three small nuclear weapons to launch into the magnetosphere.

This was Project Argus. The idea had germinated in the panic after the launch of the Soviet Union’s Sputnik satellite. In light of these surprising new capabilities, the US had a problem: how could it protect the country from an incoming nuclear warhead?

Armed with some wild physics, Nicholas Christofilos hatched an equally wild plan: turn the upper atmosphere into a force field across the US that would fry the electronics of incoming missiles. How? Explode nuclear weapons in Earth’s magnetosphere to create a long-lived radiation belt that would degrade the missiles.

The first atomic detonation set off a luminous fireball, triggering a staggering blue-green aurora that captivated its audience. But beyond the pretty lights, it was a failure. The bombs did indeed produce many high-energy electrons, but it turned out that Earth’s magnetic field wasn’t strong enough to keep the electron shield from decaying.

Christofilos’s ill-fated “death belt” is probably not what you think of when you think of DARPA (“Defense” was only added permanently in 1996). If you have heard of this Pentagon agency, you will know it as the place that brought you the internet, the laser and the stealth fighter. Sharon Weinberger’s groundbreaking book The Imagineers of War, however, reveals how that mythology is the result of some pretty tight PR control by DARPA, exposing as much as she can of a far more uncomfortable truth.

DARPA likes to present itself as a uniquely nimble outfit. Unbound by the usual red tape, it can do the kind of “high-risk, high-reward” research way beyond the purview of other branches of government. It has been so successful in propagating this view of itself that it has spawned two other agencies in its image: ARPA-E and IARPA, specialising in energy and intelligence respectively.

But beneath lies an altogether messier story. Weinberger paints a picture of an agency that long struggled to establish its identity among competing entities – including the US army, the air force and at one point even NASA. Today, as military contracting expands inexorably into arenas that were previously civilian, the nature of war would be unrecognisable to people like Christofilos. Just what sort of role is there for an organisation that aimed to win wars, when the US defence department spends more than the entire GDP of many countries on military contracting?

“The plan was to turn the upper atmosphere into a force field over the US to fry any incoming missile”

Weinberger is uniquely placed to ask – and to answer – that. A former defence analyst, she became editor-in-chief of leading defence magazine Defense Technology International, and then co-founded Wired‘s Danger Room blog during the “war on terror” years of George W. Bush. The Wired blog quickly became required reading, garnering praise across the political spectrum.

Weinberger also has plenty of experience writing about military boondoggles. Her first book was an investigation of the fringe science pursued by some of the shadier wings of the defence establishment, including remote psychic viewing and antimatter bombs.

She has a long history with the right people and knows what to ask them. And, to judge by a sources and notes section that runs to 85 pages, she also seems to have dug into reams of redacted reports. Yet somehow, miraculously, Weinberger has fashioned her material into the best kind of airport thriller.

This is just as well, given all those crazy projects that keep stealing the show. Project Argus, she tells us, was far from alone. Among many more was Project Orion, a 20-storey egg-shaped starship whose escape from Earth’s gravity would have been powered by about 200 nuclear explosions.

Over several decades, these kinds of comical technological projects were winnowed with deadly precision, their progeny morphing into the sleek drones that whine over US targets in the Middle East today.

Weinberger finds a congruent evolution in how war itself is theorised, and in what counts as a battlefield. DARPA’s role in the Vietnam war has been hugely under-reported, and one of her book’s major contributions is that it exhumes the agency’s involvement in everything from Agent Orange to ill-fated counterinsurgency efforts.

During Vietnam, DARPA irritated Congress with its increased meddling in world affairs and its sponsorship of social science research. The agency had realised that beyond creating technology to kill people or protect them from being killed, you had to go further upstream if you wanted to end wars, never mind win them. You had to rethink “weapons supremacy” to include psychological weaponry.

The subsequent efforts to manipulate people were as Strangelovian as you might expect given the times, full of ham-fisted Western chauvinism. For example, the agency enlisted a psychoanalyst to help the military understand the “Vietnamese psyche”. He administered a Rorschach test to four Vietnamese people, and then extrapolated from the results to make recommendations about an entire nation.

This spawned the Simulmatics Corporation, which, echoing the bombast of Argus, promised to deliver, as Weinberger quotes Simulatics’ precise wording, “the A-bomb of the social sciences”, a way Americans could “predict and control human events in Vietnam” and thus manoeuvre the population in the way that they wanted.

The immediate results were disastrous, but again, evolution winnowed these ludicrous first steps into something fearsomely effective. “Technologies of human manipulation” based on shoddy science and incomplete thinking evolved into the kind of data mining, relationship monitoring and tactical use of the internet now in use today.

Imagineers is required reading for defence nerds. It will stock their pub conversation arsenal with finely wrought weapons. For example, there is more than you could ever want to know about the machine that inspired the game-theorising computer in the cult teen movie War Games. And there is an eye-popping account of the only underground nuclear test ever done in Mississippi. It took the government two years of pumping fresh air into the cavern just to get its temperature down to 150°C.

Robot competitions are part of the image DARPA like to project Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

But Imagineers isn’t just for nerds. It 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”. Over DARPA’s lifetime, war has moved from weapons to kill individuals, to weapons to manipulate individuals, to weapons that manipulate relationships.

“War has moved from weapons to kill individuals, to weapons that manipulate relationships”

This means that there is an important question hanging unanswered over the book: is DARPA irrelevant? That may seem like an odd question as the agency’s reputation is burnished today by breathless reportage of the applications of its technologies, with driverless cars, robot challenges, advanced prostheses and even neuroscience applications that seem tailor-made to meet civilian preoccupations.

But while Weinberger paints a clear picture of how all the techie gadgetry evolved into DARPA’s current projects, she offers less clarity on where all that counterinsurgency work led. Beyond a shortish few anecdotes on the growing appreciation of big data and the power of manipulating social networks, that tale seems to end abruptly around 2009.

The consequences of military dabbling can have a long tail. Gough Island might have been largely uninhabited by humans, but 50 years later, residents of nearby islands raised questions about the unusually vicious mice that now roam the island (50 per cent heavier than wild mice anywhere in the world) and devastate the bird population.

It is worth asking just what unintended consequences lie in store for today’s secret counterinsurgency projects.

The Imagineers of War: The untold story of DARPA, the Pentagon agency that changed the world Sharon Weinberger Alfred A. Knopf

This article appeared in print under the headline “War by any means”