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Return to Surveillance Valley, History of the Internet and History of Silicon Valley, Bugging the Battlefield

“In the weeks after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, McElroy cooked up the perfect public relations project to save the day. He called for the creation of the Advanced Research Projects Agency — ARPA — a new, independent military body whose purpose was to bridge the space gap and to ensure that embarrassing technological defeat like Sputnik would never happen again.14 McElroy was a businessman who believed in the power of business to save the day.15 In November 1957, he pitched ARPA to Congress as an organization that would cut through government red tape and create a public-private vehicle of pure military science to push the frontiers of military technology and develop “vast weapon systems of the future.”16” (SrvlValy 2018)

The idea behind ARPA was simple. It would be a civilian-led outfit housed within the Pentagon. It would be lean, with a tiny staff and a big budget. Though it wouldn’t build or run its own laboratories and research facilities, it would function like an executive management hub that figured out what needed to be done and then farmed out the actual work to universities, private research institutes, and military contractors.17

The plan appealed to President Eisenhower, who distrusted the cynical jockeying for funding and power of various arms of the military — which he believed bloated the budget and burned money on useless projects. The idea of outsourcing research and development to the private sector appealed to the business community as well.18 The military brass, on the other hand, weren’t so pleased. The air force, navy, army, and Joint Chiefs of Staff all balked at the idea of civilians sitting above them and telling them what to do. They feared losing control over technology procurement, a lucrative center of profit and power.

The military pushed back against McElroy’s plan. The conflict with the military loomed so large that it made a cameo in Eisenhower’s 1958 State of the Union address: “I am not attempting today to pass judgment on the charge of harmful service rivalries. But one thing is sure. Whatever they are, America wants them stopped.”19 He got his way. On February 11, 1958, a month after the State of the Union and just five months after the Sputnik launch, Congress wrote ARPA into a US Air Force appropriations bill, giving it $520 million in initial funding and a plan for a gigantic $2 billion budget.20

McElroy chose Roy Johnson, an executive at General Electric, to head the new agency. An internal Pentagon report described him as an “utterly confident, calm, strikingly handsome individual who looked every inch like a Fortune cover tycoon.” It also noted that his only concern with taking the job was potentially losing a lucrative tax loophole: “Johnson was also a very wealthy man, leaving a $158,000 job to accept an $18,000 post at ARPA. For tax reasons, he took the ARPA job on condition that he would be permitted to be physically present in Connecticut for a minimal number of days. This meant he usually left Washington on Friday and returned Monday or Tuesday. He frequently used a private plane.” Protecting America against the Soviet Union was important. But a man had to mind his tax bill.21

In the first few years of its existence, ARPA took on a range of important projects. It had a space division developing ballistic missiles. It worked on spy and weather satellites as well as satellite tracking systems and did early prep work on putting a man in space. It also helped run nuclear tests like Operation Argus, which involved the detonation of several small nukes in the upper reaches of the atmosphere above the South Atlantic in a radical attempt to create an invisible charged-particle shield that would fry the electronics of any nuclear warhead that flew through it.22

With all these projects, it seemed like ARPA was off to a glorious start, but the excitement did not last. Pentagon infighting and the creation of a demilitarized NASA — National Aeronautics and Space Administration — sucked money and prestige out of the agency. Less than a year after it was created, ARPA’s budget was slashed to just $150 million — peanuts compared to the $2 billion budget it was promised.23 Over the next several years, it went through three directors and fought to stay alive. Everyone was convinced that ARPA was on its way to the grave.“ (SrvlValy 2018)

“Yet one man had a plan to save it: William Godel.”” (SrvlValy 2018)

Fair Use Sources:

• B01N809DBM (SrvlValy 2018)