“It was Eisenhower who said these two concepts can live together - democracy and military industrialization - but the real key factor is people maintaining an awareness of what is going on in their own country. “What is at issue here is the military-industrial complex,” she said. Many of her information requests were rejected or ignored, but she was able to unearth fascinating - and occasionally chilling - details, including one document about plans for “robotic swarms of hunter-killer drones” to be used in future warfare. “My job as a reporter is to inform the public,” Jacobsen said, but that’s not in the job descriptions of DARPA staff and scientists.

So whatever it’s working on must be, or should be, looked at through the point of view of weapons development.” (Oct.Yet, she added, while DARPA innovations have often benefited citizens and society, it’s “ important as an alert and knowledgeable citizen to realize that DARPA’s primary job is to create weapons systems. Agent: Jim Hornfischer, Hornfischer Literary Management. Annie Jacobsen, contributing editor at the Los Angeles Times Magazine, discusses her book, 'The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's T.

Jacobsen’s ability to objectively tell the story of DARPA, not to mention its murky past, is truly remarkable, making for a terrifically well-crafted treatise on the agency most Americans know next to nothing about.

Jacobsen walks a fine line in telling the story of the agency and its innovations without coming across as a cheerleader or a critic, or letting the narrative devolve into a salacious tell-all. Startling revelations, including the fact that four nuclear weapons were detonated in space during the Cuban Missile Crisis and that insect-shaped drones hovered above American antiwar protests in 2007, pop up through Jacobsen’s narrative as she relays how the agency’s innovations incorporated mechanical, psychological, and anthropological efforts to wage war. The modern computer, the AR-15 semiautomatic rifle, the Internet, unmanned aerial vehicles (aka drones), and even massive multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) all began as DARPA projects. Though many Americans may not be familiar with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which was created by Congress in 1958, they’re undoubtedly familiar with the fruits of its organizational labors. Journalist Jacobsen ( Operation Paperclip) draws on interviews with 71 individuals affiliated with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to paint a fascinating and unsettling portrait of the secretive U.S.

The Pentagon's Brain by Annie Jacobsen