The Wild Weapons of DARPA

[BridgeTheGap]

When, in October 1957, the USSR launched the first man-made earth satellite, the basketball-sized Sputnik, it caught the United States off guard and sent the government into fits. Not only had the Soviets exploded an atomic bomb years before the Americans predicted they would, but now they were leading the "space race." In response, the Defense Department approved funding for a new U.S. satellite project, headed by former Nazi SS officer Wernher von Braun, and created, in 1958, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to make certain that the United States forever after maintained "a lead in applying state-of-the-art technology for military capabilities and to prevent technological surprise from her adversaries."

Almost half a century later, what's left of the USSR is a collapsed group of half-failed states, while the U.S. stands alone as the globe's sole hyperpower. Yet DARPA, the agency for an arms-race world, seems only to be warming up to the chase. There may be no country left to take the lead from us, the nearest military competitor being China which reportedly had $65 billion in military expenditures in 2002 (compared to our $466 billion according to GlobalSecurity.org) and which, only in 2003, put its first "Taikonaut" into outer space. Undaunted, DARPA continues to develop high-tech weapons systems for 2025-2050 and beyond -- some of them standard fare like your run-of-the-mill hypersonic bombers, others more exotic.

In an August 2003 article, Los Angeles Times reporter Charles Piller noted that DARPA has put forth some of the "most boneheaded ideas ever to spring from the government" -- including a "mechanical elephant" that never made it into the jungles of Vietnam and telepathy research that never quite afforded the U.S. the ability to engage in psychic spying.

As former DARPA Director Charles Herzfeld noted in 1975, "When we fail, we fail big." Little has changed. According to DARPA's current chief, some 85%-90% of its projects fail to meet their full objectives. Still, Piller points out, DARPA "has been behind some of the world's most revolutionary inventions" -- "the Internet, the global positioning system, stealth technology and the computer mouse."

http://www.truthout.org/article/the-wild-weapons-darpa

[whistle]

1. Interesting video of the DARPA Grand Challenge 2006

http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=DARPA&emb=0#q=DARPA&emb=0&start=0

If you can get past the Dr. Strangelove comparison it is a neat 49 minute watch :shrug: