The Imagineers of War: The Untold Story of DARPA, the Pentagon Agency That Changed the World

Fascinating. An extensive, meticulously crafted account of DARPA’s 60+ year history that I would recommend as essential reading for those seeking to understand the bureaucratic and structural underpinnings of America’s development and deployment of advanced technologies.

It is staggering to see the diversity of work DARPA underwent throughout its early life-cycle, from the space race and nuclear age to Vietnamese War, the creation of ARPANET, counterinsurgency to big data and so much more. DARPA’s major failures, its offsetting successes, their political translation into funding and policy, and how all of these stimuli contributed to the Agency’s standing in the beltway over the decades, was endlessly interesting to me. Weinberger does a stellar job, especially considering the fact that this is not only an unauthorized biography, but also because she had to contend with so many logistical challenges navigating through the barriers of classified information.