
Control-Alt-Quagmire
The customer is always right. In 1961, working to support the government of Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam, American military officials launched a new effort to understand their task. The organization then known as the Advanced Research Projects Agency—it has since added the word “Defense” to its name, becoming DARPA—decided to fund new programs in social-science research. The agency “needed studies performed that could answer questions that were confounding defense officials at the Pentagon,” Annie Jacobsen writes in her sprawling history of all things DARPA. “Who were these people, the