There was a fascinating twist. By the mid-1970s, Lockheed had already achieved major milestones in stealth technology, having developed the highly classified A-12 Oxcart spy plane for the CIA. (The A-12 later became the unclassified SR-71 reconnaissance aircraft, flown by the Air Force.) Knowledge of the CIA’s classified stealth program was so tightly controlled that even DARPA director George Heilmeier did not have a need to know about it. In 1974, when management at Lockheed Skunk Works learned of DARPA’s “high-stealth aircraft” efforts—and that they had not been invited to participate—they asked the CIA to allow them to discuss the A-12 Oxcart with Heilmeier. After the discussion, Lockheed was invited to join the competition and eventually won the DARPA stealth contract.
The first on-paper incarnation of what would become the F-117 stealth fighter was called the Hopeless Diamond, so named because it resembled the Hope Diamond and because Lockheed engineers were not initially certain it would fly. “We designed flat, faceted panels and had them act like mirrors to scatter radar waves away from the plane,” remembers Edward Lovick, who worked as a lead physicist on the program. After the Hopeless Diamond went through a number of drafts, the project became a classified DARPA program code-named Have Blue. Two aircraft were built at the Lockheed Skunk Works facility in Burbank, California, and test flown at Area 51 in Nevada in April 1977. Satisfied with the low observability of the aircraft, the U.S. Air Force took over the program in 1978. Stealth technology was a massive classified endeavor involving more than ten thousand military and civilian personnel. The power of this secret weapon rested in keeping it secret. To do so, the Air Force set up its own top secret facility to fly the F-117, just north of Area 51 outside Tonopah, Nevada. The base was nicknamed Area 52.
The 1970s were a formative time at DARPA from a historical perspective. Away from the Pentagon, DARPA came into its own. Congress remained averse to ARPA’s former herd of social science programs, which it criticized in post-Vietnam oversight committees as having been egregiously wasteful, foolhardy, and without oversight. Any mention of the phrase “hearts and minds” in the Pentagon made people wince. To avoid the “red flag” reaction from Congress, ARPA programs that touched on behavioral sciences were renamed or rebranded.
ARPA’s social science office (which actually existed during the Vietnam War) was called Human Resources Research Office, or HumRRO. But in the post-Vietnam era, HumRRO programs focused on improving human performance from a physiological and psychological standpoint. Two significant ideas emerged. The first was to research the psychological mechanisms of pain as related to military injuries on the battlefield. ARPA scientists sought to understand whether soldiers could suppress pain in combat, and if so, how. The second major project was a research program on “self-regulation” of bodily functions previously believed to be involuntary. The general, forward-thinking question was, how could a soldier maintain peak performance under the radically challenging conditions of warfare?
It was a transformative time at DARPA. The agency already had shifted from the 1950s space and ballistic missile defense agency to the 1960s agency responsible for some of the most controversial programs of the Vietnam War. And now, a number of events occurred that eased the agency’s transition as it began to change course again. Under the direction of the physicist Stephen Lukasik, in the mid-1970s the agency would take a new turn—a new “thrust,” as Lukasik grew fond of saying. In this mid-1970s period of acceleration and innovation, DARPA would plant certain seeds that would allow it to grow into one of the most powerful and most respected agencies inside the Department of Defense.
“The key to command and control is, in fact, communication,” said Stephen Lukasik shortly after he took over the agency. Command and control, or C2, had now expanded into command, control, and communication, or C3, and this concept became the new centerpiece of the DARPA mission under Lukasik. The advancement of command, control, and communication technology relied heavily on computers. Since 1965 the power of microchips, then called integrated electronic circuits, had been doubling every year, a concept that a computer engineer named Gordon E. Moore picked up on and wrote about in Electronics magazine. In “Cramming More Components into Integrated Circuits,” Moore predicted that this doubling trend would continue for the next ten years, a prescient notion that has since become known as Moore’s law. Doubling is a powerful concept. In 2014, Apple put 2 billion transistors into its iPhone 6.
In 1974, DARPA’s supercomputer, ILLIAC IV, now up and running at the Ames Research Center in California, was the fastest computer in the world. Its parallel processing power allowed for the development of technologies like real-time video processing, noise reduction, image enhancement, and data compression—all technologies taken for granted in the twenty-first century but with origins in DARPA science. And Lukasik’s C3 program also relied heavily on another emerging DARPA technology, the ARPANET.
It had been more than a decade since J. C. R. Licklider sent out his eccentric memo proposing the Pentagon create a linked computer network, which he called the “Intergalactic Computer Network.” Licklider left the Pentagon in 1965 but hired two visionaries to take over the Command and Control (C2) Research office, since renamed the Information Processing Techniques Office. Ivan Sutherland, a computer graphics expert who had worked with Daniel Slotnick on ILLIAC IV, and Robert W. Taylor, an experimental psychologist, believed that computers would revolutionize the world and that a network of computers was the key to this revolution. Through networking, not only would individual computer users have access to other users’ data, but also they would be able to communicate with one another in a radical new way. Licklider and Taylor co-wrote an essay in 1968 in which they predicted, “In a few years, men will be able to communicate more effectively through a machine than face to face.” By 2009, more electronic text messages would be sent each day than there were people on the planet.
Sutherland and Taylor began asking DARPA contractors at various university research laboratories around the country what they thought about the networked computer idea. The feedback was unanimous in favor of it. In general, scientists and engineers were frustrated by how little access to computers they had. This got Sutherland and Taylor thinking. Why not try linking several of these university computers together so the DARPA contractors could share resources? To do so would require building a system of electronic links between different computers, located hundreds of miles apart. It was a radical undertaking, but Sutherland and Taylor believed it could be done.
Bob Taylor went to DARPA director Charles Herzfeld to request enough money to fund a networked connection linking four different university computers, or nodes. Herzfeld told Taylor he thought it sounded like a good idea but he was concerned about reliability. If all four computers were linked together, Herzfeld said, when there was a problem, it meant all four computers would be down at the same time. Thinking on his feet, Taylor said he intended to build a concept into the system called network redundancy. If one connection went down, the messages traveling between the computers would simply take another path. Herzfeld asked how much money Taylor thought be needed. Taylor said a million dollars.
Herzfeld asked, “Is it going to be hard to do?”
“Oh, no. We already know how to do it,” Taylor said, when really he was guessing.
“Great idea,” said Herzfeld. “You’ve got a million dollars more in your budget right now.” Then he told Taylor to get to work.
Taylor left Herzfeld’s office and headed back to his own. He later recalled the astonishment he felt when he looked at his watch. “Jesus Christ,” he thought. “That only took twenty minutes.” Even more consequential was the idea of network redundancy—making sure no single computer could take the system down—that emerged from that meeting. It is why in 2015, no one organization, corporation, or nation can own or completely control the global system of interconnected computer networks known as the Internet. To think it came out of that one meeting, on the fly.
The first f
our university sites chosen were Stanford Research Institute in northern California; the University of California, Los Angeles; the University of California, Santa Barbara; and the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. In 1969, ARPA contractor Bolt, Beranek and Newman became the first east coast node. By 1972 there were twenty-four nodes, including the Pentagon. The person largely responsible for connecting these nodes was an electrical engineer named Robert Kahn. At the time, Kahn called what he was working on an “internetwork.” Soon it would be shortened to Internet.
This network of ARPA nodes was growing, and Kahn wanted to devise a common language, or protocol, so that all new nodes could communicate with the existing nodes in the same language. To do this, Kahn teamed up with another DARPA program manager named Vint Cerf, and together the men invented the concept of Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and Internet Protocol (IP), which would allow new nodes seamless access to the ARPANET. Today, TCP/IP remains the core communications protocol of the Internet. By 1973 there were thirty-six ARPANET nodes connected via telephone lines, and a thirty-seventh, in Hawaii, connected by a satellite link. That same year the Norwegian Seismic Array became connected to the ARPANET, and J. C. R. Licklider’s vision for an “Intergalactic Computer Network” became an international reality.
In 1975 DARPA transferred its ARPANET system over to the Defense Communications Agency, and in 1982 standards for sending and receiving email were put in place. In 1983 the Pentagon split off a military-only network, called MILNET. Today the ARPANET is often referred to as “the most successful project ever undertaken by DARPA.”
Between the advances in computer technology, networking power, and the ARPANET, DARPA was primed for the development of an entirely new C3-based weapons system. Sometime in 1974, DARPA commissioned several classified studies on how the Pentagon could best prepare itself for a Soviet invasion of western Europe. The strategist leading one analysis was the former RAND mathematician Albert Wohlstetter, author of the nuclear second-strike doctrine, or NUTS. Wohlstetter, now a professor at the University of Chicago, sought “to identify and characterize” new military technologies that would give the president a variety of “alternatives to massive nuclear destruction.” Wohlstetter assembled a study group, called the Strategic Alternatives Group, to assist him in his analytic efforts. In February 1975 the group completed the generically titled “Summary Report of the Long Range Research and Development Planning Program.”
In the report, Wohlstetter concluded that several Vietnam-era DARPA projects merited renewed attention. Topping the list was the effectiveness of laser-guided bombs and missiles. In the last year of the Vietnam War, the U.S. Air Force sent 10,500 laser-guided bombs into North Vietnam. Roughly one-half of these bombs, 5,100 in total, achieved a “direct hit,” with another 4,000 achieving “a circular error probable (CEP) of 25 feet.” Compared to the success rate of unguided “dumb” bombs of previous wars, including World War II, Korea, and most of Vietnam, these statistics were to be interpreted as “spectacularly good,” wrote Wohlstetter. The best example was the bombing of the Thanh Hoa Bridge, a 540-foot steel span across the Song Ma River, roughly seventy miles south of Hanoi. The bridge was an important supply route for the North Vietnamese during the war, and they kept it defended with garrison-like strength. The bridge was surrounded by a ring of three hundred antiaircraft systems and eighty-five surface-to-air missile systems. A wing of Soviet-supplied MiG fighter jets was stationed nearby. For years in the 1ate 1960s, the Air Force and the Navy tried to destroy the bridge but could not. By 1968, eleven U.S. aircraft had been shot down trying to bomb the bridge. Then, in May 1972, after a four-and-a-half-year bombing halt, fourteen F-4 fighter bombers equipped with newly developed laser-guided bombs were sent on a mission to bomb the bridge. With several direct hits, the bridge was destroyed. “It appears that non-nuclear weapons with near-zero miss may be feasibly and militarily effective,” Wohlstetter wrote in praise of these new “smart” weapons.
Also of interest to Wohlstetter were DARPA’s early efforts with mini-drones, which had played a major role in advancing laser-guided weapons technology—a fact largely underreported in military history books. DARPA’s Vietnam drone program had grown out of DDR&E John Foster’s love of model airplanes and remote control. Two of the mini-drones, called Praerie and Calere, caught Wohlstetter’s eye. Praerie and Calere were exceptionally small at the time, each weighing seventy-five pounds, including a twenty-eight-pound payload that could be a camera, a small bomb, or an “electronic warfare payload.” Each was powered by a lawnmower engine and could fly for up to two hours. Praerie carried a TV camera and used laser target technology. It was the first drone to direct a cannon-launched guided projectile to a direct hit on a tank, a milestone achieved at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, during an undated field test. The Calere drone was equally groundbreaking. It carried forward-looking infrared, or FLIR, another Vietnam-era invention, which allowed the drone to “see” at low altitudes in the dark of night.
DARPA also developed another, much larger, “more complicated” drone that interested Wohlstetter, as revealed in an obscure 1974 internal DARPA review. Nite Panther and Nite Gazelle were helicopter drones, “equipped with a real time day-night battlefield reconnaissance capability including armor plate and self-sealing, extended-range fuel tanks.” The drone helicopters were deployed into the battlefield, starting in March 1968, in response to an urgent operational request from the Marine Corps. To create the Nite Panther drone, DARPA modified a Navy QH-50 DASH antisubmarine helicopter—originally designed to fire torpedoes at submerged submarines—and added a remotely controlled television system, called a “reconnaissance-observation system,” which could transmit real-time visuals back to a moving jeep, acting as a ground station. The jeep was loaded with racks of telemetry and television equipment, antennae, and a power supply. The drone operator sitting in the jeep was able to operate and monitor the drone helicopter from takeoff to touchdown. Images captured by the drone, flying over enemy territory, were recorded by the equipment on the jeep, then relayed back to a shipboard control station, where commanders could send high-performance strike aircraft to bomb targets identified by the drone. This was groundbreaking technology during the war. In 1974 Wohlstetter recognized its future potential. Conceivably, as computers got smaller and were able to process data faster, a drone could be sent deep behind enemy lines to photograph targets and send the images to commanders in real time.
Another significant DARPA technology that allowed these Vietnam-era systems to converge was a satellite-based navigation technology called Global Positioning Systems, or GPS. GPS began as a classified military program, the purpose of which was to direct weapons to precise targets. DARPA’s pioneering GPS program was called TRANSIT. It began in 1959, when ARPA contracted with the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory to create the first satellite positioning system, using six satellites, three for positioning and three as spares.
After several failed launches, TRANSIT finally took up residence in space in June 1963. To deny enemy access to this kind of precise targeting information, the system was originally designed with an offset feature built in, called selective availability (SA). If an individual were able to access the GPS system with a private receiver, the information would be offset by several hundred feet.
Over the next ten years, the Navy and the Air Force developed their own satellite-based navigational systems, but each system was incompatible with the other. In 1973 the Pentagon ordered DARPA to create a single system shared by all the military services, and a new DARPA program called NAVSTAR Global Positioning System emerged. It was a herculean effort filled with technical stumbling blocks and failed rocket launches. Finally, starting in 1989 a constellation of twenty-four satellites, each fitted with atomic clocks to keep them in sync, was sent aloft and began orbiting the earth. The U.S. military now had precise navigational coverage of the entire world, in all weather conditions, in real time.
During the 1990s, interest in satell
ite-based global positioning technology grew, and European companies began developing GPS-like systems for civilian use. In an effort to keep the United States at the forefront of the burgeoning new industry, in May 2000 President Clinton discontinued the selective availability feature on GPS, giving billions of people access to precise GPS technology, developed by DARPA.
To Albert Wohlstetter, working on the DARPA analysis in the mid-1970s, the fusion of various Vietnam-era technology systems—sensors, computers, laser-guided weapons, the ARPANET, drones—offered great promise and potential in the development of what he called a “system of systems.” The following year, on the basis of suggestions made in the “Summary Report of the Long Range Research and Development Planning Program,” DARPA initiated a new weapons program called Assault Breaker. A series of once disparate technologies could come together to fulfill Lukasik’s vision to “command, control, and communicate.” Using technologies that also included radar tracking and camera confirmation, Assault Breaker would one day allow commanders to precisely strike targets—even moving targets—deep behind enemy lines. Imagining a system in which this kind of weaponry and technology could work together was unprecedented. All of it had emerged from the Vietnam War.