DARPA

• 1. A Pay Cut for the Future

  ›

  DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, began with a pay cut. Roy Johnson walked away from a $160,000 management job at General Electric to become its first director at $18,000. His new employer was a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense. Its assignment was to develop emerging technologies for the military, often reaching beyond what the military itself said it needed. The agency is credited, at least in part, with technologies as different as GPS and the internet. Its track record has inspired governments around the world to launch similar agencies.

  Why would a government build an organization whose job is to look past its own immediate requirements? What happened when its first big mission was taken away within months? How did a small office funding missile defense and nuclear test detection end up nurturing networks that now connect the world? And why did Congress once shut down one of its offices over fears of mass surveillance?

  14734

• 2. Sputnik Shock

  ›

  On the 7th of February 1958, President Dwight D. Eisenhower created the Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as ARPA. The spark was the Soviet launch of Sputnik 1 in 1957. The President's Scientific Advisory Committee suggested the new agency at a meeting called after the launch.

  Two measures gave it legal footing in February 1958. One was the Supplemental Military Construction Authorization for the Air Force, Public Law 85-325. The other was Department of Defense Directive 5105.15.

  The agency's creation was directly attributed to a hard realization in Washington. The Soviet Union had shown it could rapidly exploit military technology. ARPA was placed within the Office of the Secretary of Defense and counted roughly 150 people. Its initial funding was $520 million.

  Herbert York, hired from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, served as Johnson's scientific assistant. Both men were keen on space projects. That enthusiasm was about to collide with a new civilian agency, NASA, which was established later in the same year.

  56101215

• 3. Far Out Research

  ›

  When NASA was established in 1958, all of ARPA's space projects and most of its funding moved over to it. Johnson resigned. ARPA was repurposed to do research described as "high-risk", "high-gain", and "far out". The nation's scientists and research universities enthusiastically embraced this posture.

  Brigadier General Austin W. Betts became the second director and resigned in early 1961. Jack Ruina followed him and served until 1963. Ruina was the first scientist to run ARPA, and he managed to lift its budget to $250 million.

  During 1960, the civilian space programs went to NASA and the military ones to the individual services. That left ARPA free to concentrate on three efforts. Project Defender worked on ballistic missile defense. Project Vela worked on nuclear test detection. Project Agile covered counterinsurgency research and development. The agency also began work on computer processing, behavioral sciences, and materials sciences.

  Defender and Agile became the foundation of DARPA's sensor, surveillance, and directed energy work. That meant studying radar, infrared sensing, and x-ray and gamma ray detection.

  In 1959, ARPA played an early role in Transit, also called NavSat. The Navy sponsored it, and Richard Kirschner led its development at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. Transit was the first satellite positioning system, and a predecessor of the Global Positioning System.

  1617182022

• 4. Networks and Hypertext

  ›

  J. C. R. Licklider was hired by Ruina as the first administrator of the Information Processing Techniques Office. That office played a vital role in creating ARPANET, the basis for the future Internet. ARPANET was the first wide-area packet switching network. DARPA also supported the Packet Radio Network and the Packet Satellite Network.

  Before networks came time-sharing. DARPA funded Project MAC at MIT with an initial two-million-dollar grant. The money supported Multics, built through a cooperation among Bell Labs, General Electric and MIT. All modern operating systems rely on concepts invented for Multics.

  In artificial intelligence, the agency backed research on speech recognition and signal processing. This included parts of Shakey the robot.

  Douglas Engelbart's NLS computer system was one of the first two hypertext systems, and DARPA funded it. DARPA also funded The Mother of All Demos. Later came the Aspen Movie Map, developed in 1978. It let a viewer virtually tour the streets of Aspen, Colorado, and it is generally seen as the first hypermedia system. It is also an important precursor of virtual reality and the earliest predecessor of products like Google Street View.

  The VLSI Project of 1978 produced offspring that include BSD Unix and the RISC processor concept. It also produced many CAD tools still in use today.

  In the mid-1990s, the agency's work on onion routing produced a technique for anonymizing communications over a computer network. Tor would later employ it.

  1926272124

• 5. The Brain Drain

  ›

  The Mansfield Amendment of 1973 expressly limited defense research appropriations, including DARPA's, to projects with direct military application. The resulting "brain drain" is credited with boosting the fledgling personal computer industry. Some young computer scientists left the universities for startups and private laboratories such as Xerox PARC.

  The agency's name moved around too. It changed from ARPA to DARPA in March 1972. It changed back to ARPA in February 1993. It reverted to DARPA in March 1996.

  In the early 1970s, the agency emphasized direct energy programs, information processing, and tactical technologies. Between 1976 and 1981, its major projects were dominated by air, land, sea, and space technology. They included tactical armor and anti-armor programs, high-energy lasers for space-based missile defense, antisubmarine warfare, and advanced cruise missiles.

  Many successful programs moved on to the Services. Foundation technologies in automatic target recognition, space-based sensing, propulsion, and materials went to the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization. That body later became the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization and is now the Missile Defense Agency.

  A personal recollection, without a published citation, describes an odd Vietnam-era arrangement. In the 1960s, the Office of Special Development monitored insurgent trails in Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam from Bangkok. The office was ostensibly set up to catalog and support the Thai fishing fleet, and it published two volumes on the subject.

  During the 1980s, the Strategic Computing Program helped DARPA rebuild and strengthen its relationships with universities after the Vietnam War.

  2556241821

• 6. Total Information Awareness

  ›

  In 2001, DARPA established the Information Awareness Office with a stated mission of applying surveillance technology to target terrorists and other threats. The effort was called "Total Information Awareness". It involved creating enormous computer databases to gather and store personal information about everyone in the United States. The sources would have included personal e-mails, social networks, credit card records, phone calls, and medical records. No search warrant would have been required.

  In 2003, after public criticism that this would lead to a mass surveillance system, Congress defunded the office. Several of its projects persisted under different names. They stayed out of public view until Edward Snowden revealed them in the 2013 mass surveillance disclosures.

  On the 4th of February 2004, the agency shut down its so-called LifeLog Project. Its aim would have been "To gather in a single place just about everything an individual says, sees or does".

  Other programs pushed similar boundaries. Combat Zones That See aimed to "track everything that moves" in a city by linking a massive network of surveillance cameras. The Policy Analysis Market evaluated trading information futures contracts on possible political developments in several Middle Eastern countries. That was an application of prediction markets.

  Silent Talk was a planned program to identify EEG patterns for words and transmit them for covert communications.

  3031323334

• 7. Inside the Agency

  ›

  About 220 government employees work at DARPA, spread across six technical offices. Nearly 100 of them are program managers, and together they oversee about 250 research and development programs. The agency is independent of other military research and development and reports directly to senior Department of Defense management.

  The Economist has called DARPA "the agency that shaped the modern world".

  The Biological Technologies Office was created in April 2014 by then Director Arati Prabhakar, who took programs from two existing offices. Those were the Microsystems Technology Office and the Defense Sciences Office. Regina Dugan had created the Adaptive Execution Office in 2009 to connect the agency with the soldier community. In 2010, a reorganization merged the Transformational Convergence Technology Office and the Information Processing Techniques Office into the Information Innovation Office.

  An earlier reorganization in 1991 created offices that included a Land Systems Office and an Undersea Warfare Office. The Undersea office worked on submarine stealth, counter-stealth, and automation.

  The agency has had 24 numbered directors. Anthony J. Tether served from June 2001 to February 2009. Stephen Winchell took the role on the 19th of May 2025.

  On the 28th of October 2009, the agency broke ground on a new facility in Arlington County, Virginia, a few miles from the Pentagon. In recent years, officials have contracted out core functions. In fiscal year 2020, Chenega ran physical security, System High Corp. carried out program security, and Agile Defense ran unclassified IT services. General Dynamics runs classified IT services.

  Program lists on the agency's website change constantly, because programs start and stop based on the needs of the U.S. government.

  860614354

• 8. Machines and Contests

  ›

  In 1981, engineers Robert McGhee and Kenneth Waldron began developing the Adaptive Suspension Vehicle at the Ohio State University, under a DARPA research contract. Nicknamed the "Walker", it was 17 feet long, 8 feet wide, and 10.5 feet high. Six legs supported its three-ton aluminum body, which was designed to carry cargo over difficult terrain. DARPA lost interest after problems with cold-weather tests.

  Other legged and wearable machines followed. BigDog and the Legged Squad Support System arrived in 2012. The agency also backed Atlas, a humanoid robot, and Warrior Web, a soft exosuit to ease the strain of heavy loads on soldiers. XOS, a powered military exoskeleton, was a $226 million technology development program. It was cancelled in 2013, before its notionally planned 2015 launch date.

  In April 2024, DARPA and the U.S. Air Force announced that the Air Combat Evolution program had conducted the first-ever in-air dogfighting tests of AI algorithms. An AI-flown F-16 went up against a human-piloted F-16. Manta Ray, an uncrewed underwater vehicle built by Northrop Grumman, was designed to be broken down and fit into 5 standard shipping containers.

  Prize competitions also drive the agency's work. Between 2014 and 2016, the Cyber Grand Challenge brought top computer security experts together for the first machine-to-machine security competition. Entrants had to find vulnerabilities, exploit them, and patch them in a fully automated fashion. The AI Cyber Challenge ran in partnership with Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI. Its finale was held at DEF CON in Las Vegas, Nevada.

  In fall 2011, DARPA hosted the 100-Year Starship Symposium to get the public thinking seriously about interstellar travel. One program looks further out still. The Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Operations aims to demonstrate a nuclear thermal rocket in orbit by 2027, working with NASA on the engine and the U.S. Space Force on the launch.

  2829397682