The Pentagon's Brain

The Book in 1 Sentence

A detailed technical background of the science that DARPA has been a part of since its inception.

Brief Review

Annie Jacobsen does a great job, for the most part, of describing the work, science, and inventions that DARPA took part in as wars ravaged US service members. Where I think this book doesn't excel as much as Operation Paperclip is the almost repetitive nature of the descriptions of science and people to the point of the overwhelming feeling of injected conspiracy theories.

Why I Read this book

I loved Operation Paperclip and First Platoon which were both written by Annie Jacobsen, so I am going to read the rest of her work.

In-Depth Review (Favorite Quotes)

The idea that DARPA has to build, invent, test, and implement something before it becomes a problem is an idea that you would not and does not really survive today. The development that they have done is riddled with both heavy achievement and heavy loss of freedom and life.

I am not going to say that everything they have done is worth the cost or even used. Their prosthetics is my biggest frustration as they have shown for years these mind control prosthetics and then never released them. Thankfully companies like Open Biotics are doing things just like that, but with actual uses in the real world. However, there are some interesting puzzles that are needed to be solved.

For instance, during the Vietnam War, the Ho Chi Minh trail was used by both the Vietcong and simple farmers to move across Vietnam. The military was working to identify what was happening and stop the Vietcong from traversing. The ideas that DARPA came up with were sensors or bombs. What a combination, but that is what they had. The sensor idea was ruled out due to not being able to determine who was walking the trail. However, this idea has helped with the protection of military bases and places like the ocean. A mesh of sensors that can help display real time information about what is going on. We have lots of commercial applications that use this same idea which came from DARPA. Oh yeah, all of these sensors, we call them the "Internet of Things" which live on DARPA's best invention. The internet. No it was Al Gore.

Rating

This was an interesting book, my biggest complaint was just how much was talked about this people rather than the science. I know that this book is more of an exposé rather than a technical assessment, but I feel that there was just so much time spent bouncing back and forth that you can't keep track of the people or the technology. This made the book feel more like a slog to get through. It is a 7.

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