DARPA should focus on its founding values. It is the ultimate playground for academics with big dreams: $3 billion to do whatever you want, as long as it's in the interests of defending the United States. An open chequebook, and no peer review, has meant great success for the Pentagon's research wing, the 250-strong Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Over the past half-century, it has been the place where the best and the brightest gather to crack some of the toughest nuts in the defence community: how to build radar-defying stealth aircraft; how to detect hostile missile launches; how to build the best satellite-navigation system so that soldiers can find their way. 'DARPA hard' is the phrase that's used — if it's not hard enough for DARPA to do, it's not worth the agency doing it.
展开▼
