good evening everyone. i am one of the event staff and i would like to welcome you to politics and prose. we have the honor the untold story of the pentagon agency

that changed the world. a couple of notes before i get started now is a good time to turn off your cell phone and other devices you might have. when we get to the question and answer part of the talk if you have a question which we do encourage, please step up to the microphone. we have c-span book tv and we would like to pick up your question for the recording. after the talk, books will be available behind the register in the back end of the line will start to the right of the podium. as you get up if you could unfold your chair against the bookshelf that would be a big help as we put the store back together. the imagine years of war i warse untold story of the defense advanced research projects agency also known as darpa federal agency founded as a response to sputnik. publishers weekly says the

archival material and interviews former officials of the defense advanced research project agent is revealing and organization with a mixed legacy into the account of the examples of technocratic arrogance to the allure of science fiction. sharon is a national security editor and over imaginary weapons a journey through the pentagon's world. she's written on military science and technology for the "washington post" and bbc among other publications. please help me in welcoming sharon weinberger. [applause] >> i want to start off by thinking politics and prose which is a great bookstore and washington, d.c. institution. this is the third time i've been here and it's always been a

great audience. it's important for me to be here because it is a book i've worked on for not only for years but in a way it is about the topics i've been thinking about for 15 years and more importantly how science conducted the national security state. so it is a chronicle of darpa and when i start telling people i'm writing a book about darpa i never know is if something they've heard of or never heard of. i had a friend of the treasury department has never heard of it buof isthat the negro to the wet of the south and people got a passing interest of technology one of the great deal about darpa. when people think of it they think of it as a science-fictin agency or a far out technology agency. they know it most closel if mosh things like stealth aircraft and the foundations of the internet. all of those are true but in writing this book i wanted to offend the narrative of what we think of as a science-fiction

agency and this tension between national security. i wanted to take a broad approach and one of the things that was important to me was the vietnam period because it has been swept under the rug in some ways because it was viewed as a disaster but it is so important to what the agency became today so rather than talk about the history of the agency i want to talk about a selection from the book blame it on the sorcerers and this takes us back before they were working in vietnam and to the period of 1966 when a new york psychotherapist was sent to a prison to interview a fighter and he gives the classic inkblot

test and shows him the first one and says do you see anything that reminds you and the fighters has no i don't. then he says what about the top part? no. he said can you see anything on this card that reminds you of a woman's vagina and this went on for several hours. neither man was in a particularly good mood. the viet cong fighter wasn't happy because he was in a prison in saigon became held by the south vietnamese government rather than running a suicide squad which is what he had been doing before. so the new york psychotherapist was employed by a firm that had sent him to vietnam in 1966 with the sponsorship to help the pentagon understand the insurgency there so much as take us back to where we are in mid mid-1966. at this point there's over 180,000 american troops which by

way of reference is as many as were deployed to iraq and afghanistan at the height of the koran for. the insurgency has grown from an estimate of tens of thousands in the 1960s to 280,000 fighters in thand the pentagon paper ests by 1966. there were terrorist attacks in saigon and roadside bombs or ied's and a buddhist uprising that included those that set themselves on fire so pentagon officials understood their visit growing disillusionment in the government more importantly for the backing of the government but they didn't understand why so they turned to the behavioral scientists to help them understand and walter was one of the people sent to vietnam and believed the test that was popular at the time could be used to help understand the reason behind the growing

insurgency and reasoned and against the united states and south vietnamese government. so far in his interview he wasn't getting very far. they go through and identify something sexual, nothing. he asked him to find something that reminded him but nothing again. they asked him to find a picture he liked or disliked that he had once led the squad and was reluctant to touch the card so i told this entire interview at the archives and inexact rendering of the translated interview when the fighters as i do not understand the picture so i do not know which ones i like and which ones i dislike. he ended up spending seven weeks on the payroll during which time he collected the data on the vietnamese.

all four are harbored anti-american feelings critical to the government in vietnam but found them particularly vexing. he said i've never seen one except on a child. a slight aside about writing books is you tend to go down rabbit holes and i believe this one was in 2014. i was living in europe and i came back to do research on the national archives. i came back in the government shuts down. they wouldn't be particularly relevant. i was fascinated and i found the final report. the only time he came alive as

when he was telling them greater dignity but as soon as it passed he would go back into the apathy not precipitated by imprisonme imprisonment. if you imagine the situation this is not a very good time for him. so he wasn't interested in the vietnam politics. he quizzed them about their dreams and he decided after these interviews the problem with the people wasn't on the domination to include pete chinese imperialism and intervention. he decided it was the family structure. it is my strong impression that the sibling rivalry has and hostility that constitutes the psychological core of anti-americanism in vietnam.

what we get back to what fascinated me in this archival work. it was particularly in the payroll and more to the point of this book and what it means how and why did the agency best known for the internet and stealth aircraft involved in this escapade indigos back to the broad question that is fascinating about how science is conducted in a national security committee or national security state and does that matter. the book was finished over a year ago, so long before donald trump's election to president but the question came back to me even more in the past couple weeks when we've seen a budget proposal that cuts back the funding for the national institutes of health and climate research and what we have also seen as a proposal to increase the defensthe defense departmens out the details of the budget haven't come out yet but traditionally it's been tied to the budget so if the defense department budget goes up we'lle

will see an increase in the budget. so the science funding may go up or down but the implications for the national security are more relevant now than ever before if the budget proposal goes through. so, let me go back to what darpa is today and where it came from and how we got from there to vietnam. it was created in 1958 as a direct result on the first artificial satellite. it's hard to find yourself in this situation panic of 9/11. they were able to launch into the ballistic missiles. president eisenhower authorized the creation of darpa is the nation's first space agency so before mass. it was going to

consolidate all the programs into one agency and get us into space and it did that. and then to follow the quick narrative of darpa that grew from the great success into a 3 billion-dollar a year agency that it is today made up of about 140 technical personnel, and it is uniqu unique in govert in that it is anti-bureaucratic. there are no injury no permanent employees. people come in for three to five years to start projects. they are high risk. they often don't use peer review so you can look very quickly at things and as the story goes, it is a tremendous success and where i sort of coincide with that as i believe you could argue dark is the world's most successful government research agency certainly the most successful research agency and so many of the things they take credit for, driverless cars which are just coming into their own can be traced directly back as the weapons he added the

drones. so why talk about vietnam so much? how did they get to that point because i don't think it came from the space race. they have a panorama which is their story of the lobby and its basically filled with airplanes and all of the things we associate with today. and the only thing you see in the entire vietnam war is the m-16 standard issue weapon which darpa takes credit for not for creating that they send the predecessor in the early 1960s to demonstrate that it could be more effective and that became the m-16. that is the only mention which i always found fascinating because in the bucket i book it is the e conclusion which is vietnam was core to the agency's identity and almost everything that we associate with the success tod today, stealth aircraft drones

and to some extent computer networking came from the pure code that was involve it was ine counterinsurgency and more broadly, the way we fight about them today much of the technology goes back to the period. if you think about it for a second of the way we are prosecuting the wars in iraq and afghanistan are linked to the effort that might help explain where we are today so this period is called the imagine years of the war, people in the agency that thought about how we will wage the war in how you engineer solution to it. so let's go back to vietnam. what was he doing there? the researcher was part of a much broader effort that they were interested in and they spearheaded to use behavioral sciences to understand the insurgency. but defense officials, pentagon officials were not completely deluded. they realized it wasn't going

well. more so than the pentagon officials do today it was a phenomenon that they couldn't stop. you have to understand why people were joining an insurgency. and the way they got into this is part of a science-fiction agencscience fictionagencies toe time is yes they got america into space but within a year and a half basically by 1960, the space programs were taken away. nasa was created and they got the space programs. they were victorious in the war and got space programs back so you had this new agency that was just kind of floating adrift at sea but they had an intelligence operative who saw an opportunity. he even put it as the deputy director to represent the interest in the community and for him he always thought of the space race as a psychological war and the nuclear apocalypse however terrible that would be decided it was not very likely

spend a lot of time as an intelligence operative and solve the most likely way the u.s. was going to confront the soviet union was through the proxy war so he pitched president kennedy on an idea of which is let's have them create a compact development test center in saigon that will work with the south vietnamese and the military to help them fight this insurgency. the division was very expansive. he sent the first drone to vietnam and be psychological operations. but he also was interested in social is. another thing happened, they were assigned behavioral sciences and a hired a man to run the behavioral sciences office and it becomes another branch out of the behavioral sciences. he goes on to lay the foundations which i also discussed in the book but it

began to coincide so what begin to happen is a became an insurgency agency that was being flooded by strange proposals to basically help understand this insurgency. one of my favorites was from 1965 when general electric wrote suggesting that there company be given a contract that would allow the company to apply experience in technology and counterinsurgency and it was for the internal religious activity. so a massive lie detector. it was a modern version reimagined so they consider the following scenario. a high-security central government arrives by helicopter and is suspected of being under pressure. pressure. they are assembled by their local teams such that each can see every other villager.

so imagine you are all villagers. each individual is connected to a type of lie detector that manages the heartbeat of all simultaneously. a suspected supporter will be hauled up and hooked up to the lie detector machine and it would record a group responds alleviating the fear that any would be the informant. the process could be repeated. so it's 1966 and it's being flooded with proposals and it's just bad. people realized that it was a disaster so they brought in an engineer who was fascinated by the social sciences and he really looked at the programs are going on anthat were going t that it was a mess. but he did believe is an engineer people could be measuremeasured in the study ofd of their actions predicted the

way they measure and fight ballistic missiles and he looked at the social science work going on in the polygraphs like we need numbers, we need science. he said i determined early to try to orient the programs towards quantitative measurement analysis as possible. so, he thought his solution was this company that was a computer simulation company founded by a prominent mit professor and it kind of was after president kennedy protecting a state-by-state basis with an accuracy of 80% of the results. harper's magazine called it a people machine. the professor said this is the a-bomb of the social sciences.

they said as far as we are concerned, a group like this have impeccable credentials. it seemed like a perfect solution and it was going to be the biggest disaster. that started showing up in 1966 and one of the first studies with the psychotherapy study. study. and you would think like okay, shortly people mocked up at the time and some people did so, the official underground wrote and i found the archives it is methodologically deficient and a serious matter to impair my belief of its findings. but he was a very well respected defense scientist had worked for the defense analysis. the study was one of seven conduct in vietnam and i would like to say that it was done nuttiest but it wasn't. that was a weapon that included things like sending an american-style chain letter to the village and hoping that it would trick them into rallying.

they believed it was a vietcong trick. they also thought to use the prophecy and the power by publishing and distributing 5,000 copies of the book that prophecy the vietcong to see it but it came right before the tet offensive. there was the project which is how the chapter blame it on the sorcerers came about. it is going to enlist to sway villagers against the vietcong. vietcong. it failed without a hint of irony and debated and say what we told them to say. it just went on and on. he was an astounding daycare and people enjoyed talking to technocrats like me. he wanted to do good science and realized if he tried this was a disaster. by 1968 he canceled the contract and said it was a flooded to the integrity of the program and

ended it by saying burden this reading which apparently never happened. in 2012, when i interviewed seymour about the program he had written an entire book about the failure to conduct social science and it was published in 1976. we started the conversation about his experience in updating this book. it was published in 76 and he was being contacted by current military officials and pentagon officials because they were asked to start programs in iraq and afghanistan and they found this book so here they were running these programs and they had no idea the pentagon had done the same thing so he was updating the new prologue and at the same time that was happening

the way that i found of them was interviewing a computer scientist working on a quantitative program to study the insurgency in afghanistan at mit and he called this social physics so we started this conversation back and forth in his view of why the work was a disaster he had different reasons and said you can't ask the question. how you ask the question will dictate the answer. his answer was the fact end up means of measurement and the observed in all the participants. what he meant is when you ask them to do the work they change their opinions and views. i never got the chance to ask about the disaster because there

were hundreds of memos and it almost became personal for everyone involved. the week after i visited the professor and came across the work it out and e-mail dying of heart failure at the time he was 89 and was trying to finish the prologue and to get as much information as he could and i was getting e-mails and the one that struck me he said on a weekday we take some time off to visit a temple and we went and got to the temple an and cited m but behind a table. the general decided he wanted to have his fortune told and so they told the general he then deployed to an important position which was true he got

his star than he said you're expecting an important event which was also true because he was going to see his family after months of not seeing them and finally as to the reason you are here or i it will be like scissors cutting water. he ended his e-mail that he thought it was a marvelous assembly. i didn't think it was true then. after he sent me the e-mail he died at 90-years-old and just finished updating his book for the well-intentioned officials who were once again in iraq and afghanistan cutting water with scissors. >> thank you. [applause] >> if you have any questions please feel free to step up to the microphone.

where was mcnamara in all of this he was a great believer in quantitative stuff. i remember a presentation made at the stat state department ine summer of 1969 when someone was presumed and told us about a map that was updated every two or three week and if there was thes supposed to be a security measure meant for each one. they sat in the capital and just marked them up and sent all thee information to a computer and it appeared.

>> he was a disciple of the school and the technocratic elite and these were not stupid people. you can't blame them for coming in and we are trying to understand what is going on. we are not winning. let's do this in a mathematical way super instance they had beee been funding a study by the corporation. seymour came in and cut it off saying strategic bombing is working great but he knew this was bad information so everyone knew the problems but they were twofold iranian in my view. you were using technology and science to solve what is a human problem and you can measure the

site of a ballistic missile. you can use radar. measuring human behavior for all the reasons you said eloquently that collecting the data is hard and it isn't done well in a country you don't have expertise or understand. going beyond your question the pity of the original counterinsurgency program is the entire idea wasn't to help the u.s. win the war at the beginning it was to help the government conduct military operations so that they wouldn't have to fight and that was overtaken by politics in washington. >> i graduated from high school in 1965 and i was in college. why wasn't there more analysis in hearts and minds?

>> you go to the archives and there's boxes and boxes. again it's the way that you ask the question like how can we make american intervention more palatable to the vietnamese. what if the answer is there is no way to but no one asked this question so that social science questions you are dictating is always asked in a way that isn't going to get an answer that you want. it's going to be how to remake the intervention no better. you see a lot about hearts and minds today when you talk about iraq and afghanistan like how can we make the dru wrong striks more palatable to the local populations i as that's the wrog question to ask. >> i worked at the military and i saw a lot of military people. there've been a lot here. nobody else is asking.

there are now many military historians who look at insurgency's past and present and there's many who've written books and presentations that are convincing. they have a history and political science model at various schools for generals around the country and at west point and the naval academy. ..

>> >> and the pentagon said we need this information but the problem is the way the pentagon will acted is not interested in the honorable steady back to study things to fight better or pacify better mendez the wrong question to ask the really want to national-security state being used as usual scientific question? the answer is probably not. >> a fine your talks fascinating. he said the general always fights the past four so if

hewlett-packard's what can you do to help us look forward to understand how dark that is looking if it will be fought in the future to facilitate that. >> is a great question my argument in the book there is a giant structural change now people will disagree with me in the government that up until the mid-1970s was filled with officials flu thought about to warfare and strategy basically 75 4/7 bremer when new leadership's said we wanted corporate laboratory with weapons and bombs and artificial intelligence. that created the shift with darpa. today is fashioned itself

and with that press release with this spider-man suction cups that could climb up glass buildings i don't think that darpa thinks about warfare. so it is larger to the national security institution. >> but to go into the direction that is called technical irrelevance.

>> most of us know next to nothing about darpa what light can you shed and what surprises word in store in the information so there are two competing narrative is it not mutually exclusive it was with the armageddon control and command but that this a myth but those historical revision to argue it had nothing to do with nuclear war so in fact, those stories are raw and so in the early '60s he was

thinking about command and control of nuclear weapons. they were thinking of how to survive and wanted to broadly change the relationship. coming out of the of all defense world of m.i.t. for the first time basically to track the soviet bombers. and so for the first time and working with the computer so that is khodzhent says because so i came across the files in the smithsonian institution that looks at psychology research.

they were inspired by a brainwashing particularly after the korean war. selected everything from brainwashing and working with machines and that was part of the narrative. there is very rarely one thing but it wasn't just nuclear command and control many different strands brought together by. >> thanks for interesting presentation of first is

anything in the realm of social science research that what we could trace? and second, i want to ask about the social science with that nuclear aspect with those psychological ties. has darpa been involved with that aspect of social science? >> with the psychological science and that the other extreme but to see if anything useful has come out of that. been with the hard science part of things with those

mechanical parts and that human behavior side it is hard to be predictive in the social sciences but a lot of work has gone into that maybe with the psychological or individual behavior side of things. so wondering how social science in general. >> so that is a relative term. so give a specific example there was an anthropologist probably the leading anthropologist on vietnam

and the body of work produced during that period was extraordinary economic at that academic appointment because he worked for the military and the imperialists. so leading to this extraordinary work as an advocate for protecting them from the americans but the carrier was ruined over it. one of the things that darpa produced they created did jump playbook it collected information on every vessel in vietnam with this extraordinary cultural record for what was a

threatening vote. so could darpa take credit? people would lead argue is fruitful but the early funding but when it tries to coopt or go into the predictive of human behavior . not like amazon what book will you buy and it has become very problematic.

>> 1994 and 1995 those the reviewed darpa budget they changed their name they drop of water deeper than additive back with the bush a penetration -- of ministrations the middle east tad not yet begun. and we had the director of the agency going on that from program by program in the program was the unmanned aerial vehicles and darpa was trying to fix that with a lot of other gadgetry that seemed applicable they might

be engaged in. they were preparing with the national astute with the department of commerce and the white house had an extreme focus of the grants with a 100 million of the darpa budget i left dod several years after that but never really figured out did anything good happen? >> know. >> didn't think so and i did not think so at the time either. >>. >> one of the directors he

left and then larry to over after that such is the first part they passed a the mansfield amendment with every single darpa program had to be tied to a defense goal. so after the vietnam war to see if the field offices were closed down in the late agency was transformed and then to name the vietnam office so the '80s was a different period by the time it gets to the 1990's and the cold war darpa what do

we do dryexx what is the mission? so tell me something that came out of that there was a long pause and something about a propeller and he was laughing there was nothing. it is a problem-solving agency that comes up with solutions to military problems. so when it was forced into dual-use. so with that economic innovation that customer happens to be the pentagon. other wise it is a draft. and then to have no expertise.

>> so people know what to bid on. >> but that technology started off classified with the washington metropolitan area. so how you transition back to the commercial world? so with us spinoff and the let me tell you to sit there be a voice recognition technology that darpa ability that would enable the success over the years that the deep pockets to fund it at the time the

comptroller was one of my former bosses started talking to his laptop notes and had a series like function and i thought what good is this? [laughter] >> you mention that darpa is rethinking conflict with political change with technical irrelevance that might attract bidders better not really challenging.

where has that thinking gone i remember one defense scientist said is that it could be anything that you wanted to be but if he won strategic problems then tell is it bad as we wanted to do of a design inspection agency it will do that. and also the counterinsurgency agency with 2005 and there is other

organization that said why did you create to agree billions of dollars so when the ship started to happening and then they wanted to protect their projects. but then they were pushed out to and then they could have lent further down there were no longer solving the problems nobody thought that darpa was the type of agency that went to the new organization and not always effectively.

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