DARPA, the US military's primary research and development agency, is spreading out to other nations, including Australia, South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, China, Germany, France, Britain, Italy and the European Union itself. What's the allure?
The easy answer is gizmos. We've all seen it over and over again in James Bond movies, Q, the head of Q Branch, coming up with exotic gadgets for the spy, including his gazmo-laden Aston Martin, that will eventually get him out of a jam in a close encounter with the enemy, a moveable feast from film to film, but often engaging Russians and Orientals, our economic arch enemies. The Klingons and the Romulans. F*ck 'em. Don't get Scotty going.
Dan Ellsberg says in The Doomsday Machine (2017), his must-read memoir of how he might have started the Cuban Missile Crisis back when he was a Dylan-hated Master of War for the Rand Corporation, that the plans were to nuke both of them, in the event of war, even if we only have a beef with one of them. (Ideology, hmph.)
DARPA, of course, is famous for gifting to the world the Internet. It was a knee-jerk reaction to the Russian launch of the Sputnik satellite. When the mo ment passed Americans -- mostly academics, such as Stanford and UCLA -- began enjoying the product designed to establish a secret, secure communications channel in case of war. (It became apparent, however, that ARPANET was probably an overreaction, given the overwhelming nuclear missile advantage -- especially the 10-1 ICBM lead in 1957 and the fact that the US knew where Russia's four missiles were located, according to Ellsberg in Doomsday,p.191.)
More recently, the Internet has been largely re-possessed by the Department of Defense, which has unofficially (sometimes more so) declared it a battlefield, making it eligible for comprehensive and intrusive surveillance by the military (and by its abetters, the social media, such as Google and Facebook who build profiles on us all, and put those data streams into fusion database containing an electronic dossier on each of us, as described in Ed Snowden's must-read, aptly named memoir, Permanent Record.) The Internet giveth and the Internet taketh away. (They'll steal your soul if you let them.) This repo has led "hostile" nations to consider establishing their own internets.
So far, DARPA's neverending preparations for technological advantages in warfare have gifted Americans (and much of the world) all kinds of goodies and bad Q toys: GPS, BigDog, Cyborg Insects, GUI, Onion Routing, SIRI, HAARP, and stealth technology. This brings up the concept of "dual use." See, these all sound good, right? Nuh-uh.
Take GPS: For months, I got a report in my inbox from Google telling me every place I had been last month, and imagined what if the cops or spooks had such intel (not that I had anything to hide anymore). And BigDog appears to have inspired the robodogs that will terrorize BLM in Seattle from now on, and will perhaps pack heat in the future: Freeze, punk, woof, ban g! Cyborg insects make one queasy, like reading one of Octavia Butler's stories (think: "Blood Child"), and DARPA has them mind-controlled, which makes you even queasier after you read about their recent advances in human brain-computer interfaces (what must DARPA think of the teeming masses?) And, who knows, maybe you could be sued the next time you smack! a DARPA-modeled bloodsucking "mosquito" there to collect a lab sample of your DNA. Onion Routing, Tor being the most famous, is supposed to keep prying eyes from intercepting your communications -- cool on the battlefield, where end-users are anonymous, but pointless if you are in a 'profiled dissident' fusion database and they have rootkit working your OS already.
The dual use concept is problematic at its root. It's built on the same paranoia that responded to the Sputnik launch. DARPA's mission has always been: to make sure America was never again beaten by technological surprise. It's a warfare mentality. It leads to crazy ideas and crazy thinking -- and sometimes enormous risk-taking. Take, for instance, DARPA's insistence on creating a super virus to be ready for the worst should the Russians or Chinese beat them to it. I'm not saying that they created Covid-19, for that would be a conspiracy theory for which I could be pilloried (and rightfully so!), but only that they (or the DoD) fully intended to create such a monster before their enemies did by bringing Jake LaMotta out of retirement to beat the fudge out of a Coronavirus until it was bad sh*t crazy and so manly virile it needed release like the animated Tasmanian Devil. If they didn't, then the Chinese or Russians might first.
It can get crazier. The quasi-DARPA division of the Air Force once got so loopy that they came up with the idea of dropping a Gay Bomb on their enemy. The dropped bomb would release an aphrodisiac that made the soldiers so fuckin horny for each other that they gave up war and gave piece a chance. Harvard awarded Wright Laboratory the Ig Nobel Peace Prize for the idea in 2007. But where did they get the idea? Did someone misread Enola (backwards, alone) Gay? Was it original -- or did they flat out steal the idea from Abbie Hoffman?
The week before Abbie was to levitate the Pentagon in October 1967, he called New York Daily News reporter John Garabedian and told him of a plan to seduce warriors with a squirt gun. As Garabedian recalls the incident in Larry Sloman's must-read oral history of the 60s counterculture, Steal This Dream:
It was the week before the march on the Pentagon. I was at my desk in the city room and there was a message to call Hoffman. When I called him back, he let me know that hippie chemists had invented a new wonder drug which combined the best properties of LSD with a drug called DMSO, a legitimate skin-penetrating agent used to treat certain kinds of arthritis. And therefore on the day of the march to the Pentagon ...which, by the way, by magic was going to be levitated... hippie chicks would fill squirt guns full of this love potion, which consisted of LSD and DMSO, and squirt them on the soldiers or anyone else of an evil or warlike frame of mind, thereby causing them to want to stop making war and immediately make love. [p.96]
Maybe they should rename it the Abbie Bomb. Fuckin thieves. Steal this finger. In any case, we sure could have used the Bomb in Ukraine, not caring which way the wind doth blow. By the way, which one is Pink?
The Business Model
What the expanding roster of nation-states likes most about DARPA is its business model. The Bing chatbot goes:
DARPA does not directly perform research or operate any research laboratories, but rather executes its R&D programs mainly through contracts with industry, universities, non-profit organizations, and federal R&D laboratories. DARPA's high-risk, high-reward R&D funding approach inevitably results in many unsuccessful projects. DARPA is a relatively small agency with around 220 employees, including approximately 100 program managers overseeing about 250 programs. Its website notes that 'DARPA benefits greatly from special statutory hiring authorities and alternative contracting vehicles'. DARPA is remarkable for both governments and corporations because of its consistent track record of radical breakthroughs with modest resources.
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