The Pentagon's Brain (25 page)

“There is a kind of chicken-and-egg problem in other words, in requirements and technology,” Rechtin explained. “The difficulty is that it is hard to write formal requirements if you do not have the technology with which to solve them, but you cannot do the technology unless you have the requirements.” The agency’s dilemma, said Rechtin, was this: if you can’t do the research before a need arises, by the time the need is there, it’s clear that the research should already have been done.

Rechtin had defended ARPA’s mission but wasn’t long for the job and would soon move on to a more powerful position higher up the ladder at the Department of Defense. In December 1970 he resigned his post at ARPA and returned to the Pentagon, to take over as principal acting deputy of Defense Department Research and Engineering
(DDR&E), the person to whom the ARPA director reports. The rest of the agency employees waited for the other shoe to drop.

Drop it did. On June 13, 1971, the first installment of the Pentagon Papers appeared on the front page of the
New York Times.
The classified documents had been leaked to the newspaper by former Pentagon employee and RAND Corporation analyst Daniel Ellsberg. The papers unveiled a secret history of the war in Vietnam—three thousand narrative pages of war secrets accompanied by four thousand pages of classified memos and supporting documents, organized into forty-seven volumes. Back in 1967, when he was secretary of defense, Robert McNamara had commissioned the RAND Corporation to write a classified “encyclopedic history of the Vietnamese War,” neglecting to tell the president he was undertaking such a project. The Pentagon Papers covered the U.S. involvement in Vietnam since the end of World War II. Revealed in the papers were specifics on how every president from Truman to Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon had misled the public about what was really going on in Vietnam. The classified documents were photocopied by Ellsberg, with the help of RAND colleague Anthony Russo, the individual who had worked extensively with Leon Gouré on the Viet Cong Motivation and Morale Project. Both Ellsberg and Russo had originally supported the war in Vietnam but later came to oppose it.

The papers revealed secret bombing campaigns, the role of the United States in the Diem assassination, the CIA’s involvement with the Montagnards, and so much more. With respect to ARPA, the papers revealed the extensive role of the Jason scientists throughout the war—specifically that they had designed sensors, strike aircraft retrofits, and cluster bombs for the electronic fence. The scientists had first been brought into the spotlight back in February 1968 when the scandal broke over the possible use of tactical nuclear weapons against the Mu Gia Pass. Like so many controversies during the war, that scandal came and went. But now, with the
revelations of the Pentagon Papers, the Jason scientists were caught in a much harsher spotlight. In the words of former ARPA director Jack Ruina, the Jason scientists were now portrayed as “the devil.”

All across the country, and even overseas, the Jason scientists became targets for antiwar protesters. The words “war criminal” were painted on the pavement outside Kenneth Watson’s house in Berkeley. Gordon MacDonald’s Santa Barbara garage was set on fire. Herb York got a death threat. The Jasons’ summer study office in Colorado was vandalized. In New York City, a consortium of professors at Columbia demanded that the scientists resign from Jason or resign from the university. In Paris, Murray Gell-Mann was booed off a stage. Riot police were called to a physics symposium in Trieste where Jason scientist Eugene Wigner was speaking as an honored guest. In New York City, Murph Goldberger was getting ready to deliver a lecture to the American Physical Society when a huge crowd interrupted his talk in a very public way. Goldberger had recently led the first-ever State Department–sanctioned delegation of American scientists to communist China, but as he began to speak, the demonstrators raised huge placards reading “War Criminal!” He tried to keep his composure and continue his talk about China, but the protesters kept interrupting him, shouting out questions about the Jason scientists and their role as weapons designers for the Vietnam War.

“Look, I’ll talk about China or I won’t talk about anything,” Goldberger told the crowd, but his voice was drowned out by boos. He tried a different tactic and said that he would discuss Jason and Vietnam after his speech if the protesters were willing to secure a venue where they could have a conversation somewhere nearby after he was done. The protesters agreed. As soon as Goldberger finished giving his lecture about China, he walked over to the East Ballroom of the New York Hilton hotel and politely took questions from a crowd of what was now more than two hundred people, including lots of reporters.

“Jason made a terrible mistake,” Goldberger said in a voice described by the
Philadelphia Inquirer
as “anguished” and fraught with moral guilt. We “should have told Mr. McNamara to go to hell and not become involved at all,” said Goldberger.

No Jason scientist was spared defamation. A group of antiwar protesters learned the home address of Richard Garwin in upstate New York and showed up on his front lawn with hate signs. Another time, when Garwin was on an airplane, a woman sitting in the seat next to him recognized him, stood up, and declared, “This is Dick Garwin. He is a baby killer!”

An Italian physicist at the Institute of Theoretical Physics in Naples, Bruno Vitale, spearheaded an international anti-Jason movement. Vitale saw the revelations in the Pentagon Papers about the Jason scientists as a “perfect occasion to see bare the hypocrisy of the establishment physicists; their lust for power, prestige; their arrogance against the people.” In a monograph titled “The War Physicists,” he charged that the scientific world had become divided into insiders and outsiders. “Jason people are insiders,” Vitale wrote. “They have access to secret information from many government offices.” On the opposite side of the coin, “those who engage in criticism of government policies without the benefit of such inside access are termed outsiders.” Vitale argued that scientists needed to stand together in their outrage and not accept what he called phony arguments. “When a debate arises between insiders and outsiders, invariably the argument is used that only the insiders know the true facts and that therefore the outsiders’ positions should not be taken seriously.”

Vitale’s crusade garnered international support, and in December 1972 a group of European scientists, three of whom were Nobel Prize winners, wrote a very public letter to the Jason scientists, which was published in the
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
The land mines that formed part of the electronic fence “have caused terrible wounds among Vietnamese civilians,” they charged, and asked the
Jasons to respond. In the weeks that followed, in letters to the editor, other scientists demanded that the Jason researchers “explain how they could justify to their consciences” the work they had done designing land mines. Famed British physics professor E. H. S. Burhop wrote: “The scientists became, to some extent, prisoners of the group they had joined…. At what point should they have quit?” In
Science,
a reader wrote in to say that the Jasons “should be tried for war crimes.” The Jasons did not collectively respond. Looking back in 2013, Goldberger said of the group he co-founded, “We should never have gotten involved in Vietnam.”

By 1973, ARPA’s new director, Stephen Lukasik, felt it was time for the agency to distance itself from the Jason scientists. For years the group had been at the “intellectual forefront of everything we were trying to do to prevent technological surprise,” Lukasik later remarked. But he also felt that the Jason scientists suffered from an intellectual superiority complex. “The word ‘arrogant’ [was] associated with Jason,” Lukasik acknowledged. He had worked with the Jasons for a decade, going back to the time when he was head of ARPA’s Nuclear Test Detection Office, which handled the Vela program. On more than one occasion, Lukasik felt that the Jasons had displayed a “pattern of arrogance.” That they were a self-congratulating group. “They picked their members. And so they had in 1969 the same members they had in 1959.” Lukasik wanted new blood. The Jasons still “didn’t have any computer scientists. They didn’t have any materials scientists. They weren’t bringing in new members.” Lukasik notified the Jason scientists, through their oversight committee at IDA, that it was time for them to move on. “I probably was seen as an enemy of the Jasons,” Lukasik admitted. In the winter of 1973, without any resistance, the Jasons departed IDA for the Stanford Research Institute, in California. “It was an agreeable move,” Goldberger recalled. Before leaving IDA, the Jason scientists had had only one client, the Advanced Research
Projects Agency. Now, said Goldberger, the Jasons were free to work “for whomever we pleased.”

Not all those affiliated with ARPA were feeling liberated. In their new office building away from the Pentagon, ARPA employees were at a crossroads. Feeling banished from the center of power and with budgets slashed, they feared that the future of ARPA was more uncertain than it had ever been. Who could have imagined this precarious time would give way to one of the most prosperous, most influential eras in the history of the Advanced Research Projects Agency?

D
uring the Korean War, when Allen Macy Dulles left the trench at Outpost Bunker Hill and headed down to check the fence, he was doing what soldiers have done for millennia. He was going out on patrol. The moment when Dulles saw someone had cut the fence, he likely sensed danger was near. But before he had time to notify anyone of the incursion, the twenty-two-year-old soldier took enemy shrapnel to the head, suffered a traumatic brain injury, and was rendered amnesic. Like millions and millions of soldiers before him, he became a war casualty. The Vietnam electronic fence, conceived and constructed hastily during the war, created the opportunity to change all that. Technology could do what humans had been doing all along: patrol and notify. The fence required no human guard. It guarded itself. From ARPA’s research and development standpoint, the concept of the electronic fence was a sea change. It set in motion a fundamental transformation of the battlefield. This change did not happen overnight. By 2015 it would be irreversible.

By the winter of 1973, almost no one in America wanted anything more to do with the Vietnam War. On January 27, the Paris Peace Accords were signed and U.S. troops began fully withdrawing from Vietnam. On February 12, hundreds of long-held American prisoners of war began coming home. And in keeping with the Mansfield Amendment, which required the Pentagon to research and develop programs only with a “specific military function,” the word “defense” was added to ARPA’s name. From now on it would be called the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA.

If the agency was going to survive and prosper, it needed to reinvent itself, beginning with the way it was perceived. Any program associated with the Vietnam War would be jettisoned. Project Agile became the scapegoat, the punching bag. In internal agency interviews, three former ARPA directors, each of whom had overseen Project Agile during the Vietnam War, spoke of it in the most disparaging terms. “We tried to work the counter-insurgency business,” lamented Eberhardt Rechtin, “and found we couldn’t. All the things we tried—radar systems and boats and whatever”—didn’t work. “Agile was an abysmal failure; a glorious failure,” said Charles Herzfeld. “When we fail, we fail big.” Even William Godel, now freed from federal prison for good behavior, spoke candidly about failure. “We never learned how to fight guerrilla warfare and we never really learned how to help the other guy,” Godel said in a rare recorded interview, in July 1975. “We didn’t do it; we left no residue of good will; and we didn’t even explain it right.” Still, Godel insisted that the problem of counterinsurgency was real, was multiplying, and was not going to go away anytime soon. “We did a goddamn lousy job of solving those problems, and that did happen on my watch,” he said.

But for DARPA, Vietnam was far from a failure; it could not be spoken of in any one way. The enormous sums of money, the volumes of classified programs, the thousands of scientists and
technicians, academics, analysts, defense contractors, and businessmen, all of whom worked for months, years, some more than a decade, to apply their scientific and industrial acumen to countless programs, some tiny, some grand, some with oversight, others without—the results of these efforts could by no means be generalized as success or failure any more than they could be categorized as good or bad. Granted, the results of the Viet Cong Motivation and Morale Project, with its thousands of hours of interviews of prisoners, peasants, and village elders—allegedly to determine what made the Vietcong tick—amounted to zero, that mysterious number one arrives at when everything gained equals everything lost. The Strategic Hamlet Program, the Rural Security System Program, the COIN games, the Motivation and Morale studies: it is easy to discount these as foolhardy, wasteful, colonialist. But not all the ARPA Vietnam programs could or would be viewed by DARPA as failures. Among the hardware that was born and developed in those remote jungle environs, there was much to admire from a Defense Department point of view.

Testifying before Congress in 1973, director Stephen Lukasik said that DARPA’s goal was to refocus itself as a neutral, non–military service organization, emphasizing what he called “high-risk projects of revolutionary impact.” Only innovative, groundbreaking programs would be taken on, he said, programs that should be viewed as “pre-mission assignments” or “pre-requirement” research. The agency needed to apply itself to its original mandate, which was to keep the nation from being embarrassed by another
Sputnik-
like surprise. At DARPA, the emphasis was on hard science and hardware.

Project Agile was abolished, and in its place came a new office called Tactical Technology. Inside this office, components of the electronic fence were salvaged from the ruins of the war. The program, with its obvious applications in the intelligence world, was highly classified. When asked about the sensor program in an agency review in 1975, acting director Dr. Peter Franken told colleagues
that even he was not cleared to know about it. “It was most difficult to understand the program,” Franken told the interviewer, attributing the inscrutable nature of sensor research to the fact that “special clearance requirements inhibited even his access to the sensor program.” In keeping with the mandate to develop advanced technology and then turn it over to the military for implementation, sensor programs were now being pursued by all of the services and the majority of the intelligence agencies. All born of the Vietnam War.

DARPA’s early work, going back to 1958, had fostered at least six sensor technologies. Seismic sensors, developed for the Vela program, sense and record how the earth transmits seismic waves. In Vietnam, the seismic sensors could detect heavy truck and troop movement on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, but not bicycles or feet. For lighter loads, strain sensors were now being further developed to monitor stress on soil, notably that which results from a person on the move. Magnetic sensors detect residual magnetism from objects carried or worn by a person; infrared sensors detect intrusion by beam interruption. Electromagnetic sensors generate a radio frequency that also detects intrusion when interrupted. Acoustic sensors listen for noise. These were all programs that were now set to take off anew.

In the early 1970s, the Marine Corps took a lead in sensor work. The success of the seismic sensors placed on the ground during the battle for Khe Sanh had altered the opinions of military commanders about the use of sensors on the battlefield. Before Khe Sanh, the majority opposed sensor technology; after the battle, it was almost unanimously embraced. Before war’s end, the Marines had their own sensor program, Project STEAM, or Sensor Technology as Applied to the Marine Corps. STEAM made room for sensor platoons, called SCAMPs, or Sensor Control and Management Platoons. Within SCAMP divisions there were now Sensor Employment Squad Sensors, called SES, and Sensor Employment
Teams, called SETs. The Marines saw enormous potential in sensor technology, not just for guard and patrol, but for surveillance and intelligence collection. These programs would develop, and from the fruits of these programs, new programs would grow.

Two other technologies that would greatly impact the way the United States would fight future wars also emerged from the wreckage of Vietnam. Night vision technology expanded into a broad multi-tiered program as each of the services found great strategic value in being able to see at night while the enemy remained in the dark. So did stealth technology, a radical innovation originally developed by the CIA for reconnaissance purposes, starting in 1957, when the agency first tried to lower the radar cross-section of the U-2 spy plane. ARPA’s original work in audio stealth began in 1961 with William Godel’s sailplane idea, one of the four original Project Agile gadgets, along with the AR-15, the riverboat, and the sniffer dogs. During the course of the Vietnam War, Project Agile’s sailplane had developed successfully into the Lockheed QT-2 “quiet airplane,” a single-engine propeller plane that flew just above the jungle canopy and was acoustically undetectable from the ground. Dedicated to surveillance and packed with sensor technology, the QT-2 would glide silently over Vietcong territory with its engine off. In 1968 ARPA turned the program over to the Army, which made modifications to the aircraft, now called the Lockheed YO-3 Quiet Star. After the war, DARPA sought to expand its stealth program from acoustically undetectable sailplanes to aircraft that were undetectable even by the most sophisticated enemy radar. In 1974 DARPA’s Tactical Technology Office began work on a highly classified program to build “high-stealth aircraft.” The following year, DARPA issued contracts to McDonnell Douglas and Northrop, considered by DARPA to be the two defense contractors most qualified for the stealth job.

There was a fascinating twist. By the mid-1970s, Lockheed had already achieved major milestones in stealth technology, having
developed the highly classified A-12 Oxcart spy plane for the CIA. (The A-12 later became the unclassified SR-71 reconnaissance aircraft, flown by the Air Force.) Knowledge of the CIA’s classified stealth program was so tightly controlled that even DARPA director George Heilmeier did not have a need to know about it. In 1974, when management at Lockheed Skunk Works learned of DARPA’s “high-stealth aircraft” efforts—and that they had not been invited to participate—they asked the CIA to allow them to discuss the A-12 Oxcart with Heilmeier. After the discussion, Lockheed was invited to join the competition and eventually won the DARPA stealth contract.

The first on-paper incarnation of what would become the F-117 stealth fighter was called the Hopeless Diamond, so named because it resembled the Hope Diamond and because Lockheed engineers were not initially certain it would fly. “We designed flat, faceted panels and had them act like mirrors to scatter radar waves away from the plane,” remembers Edward Lovick, who worked as a lead physicist on the program. After the Hopeless Diamond went through a number of drafts, the project became a classified DARPA program code-named Have Blue. Two aircraft were built at the Lockheed Skunk Works facility in Burbank, California, and test flown at Area 51 in Nevada in April 1977. Satisfied with the low observability of the aircraft, the U.S. Air Force took over the program in 1978. Stealth technology was a massive classified endeavor involving more than ten thousand military and civilian personnel. The power of this secret weapon rested in keeping it secret. To do so, the Air Force set up its own top secret facility to fly the F-117, just north of Area 51 outside Tonopah, Nevada. The base was nicknamed Area 52.

The 1970s were a formative time at DARPA from a historical perspective. Away from the Pentagon, DARPA came into its own. Congress remained averse to ARPA’s former herd of social science programs, which it criticized in post-Vietnam oversight
committees as having been egregiously wasteful, foolhardy, and without oversight. Any mention of the phrase “hearts and minds” in the Pentagon made people wince. To avoid the “red flag” reaction from Congress, ARPA programs that touched on behavioral sciences were renamed or rebranded.

ARPA’s social science office (which actually existed during the Vietnam War) was called Human Resources Research Office, or HumRRO. But in the post-Vietnam era, HumRRO programs focused on improving human performance from a physiological and psychological standpoint. Two significant ideas emerged. The first was to research the psychological mechanisms of pain as related to military injuries on the battlefield. ARPA scientists sought to understand whether soldiers could suppress pain in combat, and if so, how. The second major project was a research program on “self-regulation” of bodily functions previously believed to be involuntary. The general, forward-thinking question was, how could a soldier maintain peak performance under the radically challenging conditions of warfare?

It was a transformative time at DARPA. The agency already had shifted from the 1950s space and ballistic missile defense agency to the 1960s agency responsible for some of the most controversial programs of the Vietnam War. And now, a number of events occurred that eased the agency’s transition as it began to change course again. Under the direction of the physicist Stephen Lukasik, in the mid-1970s the agency would take a new turn—a new “thrust,” as Lukasik grew fond of saying. In this mid-1970s period of acceleration and innovation, DARPA would plant certain seeds that would allow it to grow into one of the most powerful and most respected agencies inside the Department of Defense.

“The key to command and control is, in fact, communication,” said Stephen Lukasik shortly after he took over the agency. Command and control, or C2, had now expanded into command, control,
and communication, or C3, and this concept became the new centerpiece of the DARPA mission under Lukasik. The advancement of command, control, and communication technology relied heavily on computers. Since 1965 the power of microchips, then called integrated electronic circuits, had been doubling every year, a concept that a computer engineer named Gordon E. Moore picked up on and wrote about in
Electronics
magazine. In “Cramming More Components into Integrated Circuits,” Moore predicted that this doubling trend would continue for the next ten years, a prescient notion that has since become known as Moore’s law. Doubling is a powerful concept. In 2014, Apple put 2 billion transistors into its iPhone 6.

In 1974, DARPA’s supercomputer, ILLIAC IV, now up and running at the Ames Research Center in California, was the fastest computer in the world. Its parallel processing power allowed for the development of technologies like real-time video processing, noise reduction, image enhancement, and data compression—all technologies taken for granted in the twenty-first century but with origins in DARPA science. And Lukasik’s C3 program also relied heavily on another emerging DARPA technology, the ARPANET.

It had been more than a decade since J. C. R. Licklider sent out his eccentric memo proposing the Pentagon create a linked computer network, which he called the “Intergalactic Computer Network.” Licklider left the Pentagon in 1965 but hired two visionaries to take over the Command and Control (C2) Research office, since renamed the Information Processing Techniques Office. Ivan Sutherland, a computer graphics expert who had worked with Daniel Slotnick on ILLIAC IV, and Robert W. Taylor, an experimental psychologist, believed that computers would revolutionize the world and that a network of computers was the key to this revolution. Through networking, not only would individual computer users
have access to other users’ data, but also they would be able to communicate with one another in a radical new way. Licklider and Taylor co-wrote an essay in 1968 in which they predicted, “In a few years, men will be able to communicate more effectively through a machine than face to face.” By 2009, more electronic text messages would be sent each day than there were people on the planet.