As President Obama continues to push for new domestic spending initiatives on healthcare and alternative energy, can DARPA’s pet projects continue to be justifiable uses of tax-payer money? And if so, what exactly will the next generation of innovations mean for American society?

As its name suggests, DARPA’s focus is on projects with military applications. While innovations such as the Internet can later find civilian application, they often spend years in secret development and exclusive military use before society at large is able to extract any meaningful gains. These programs are funded through the Pentagon’s “black budget,” a classified appropriations process that has little of Obama’s touted accountability or transparency and thus invites the creation of all sorts of R&D money pits that have made DARPA infamous, from psychic CIA agents to dimension-bending wormhole-builders. The Pentagon’s proposed “black budget” for 2010 is over $50 billion, the largest its ever been, according to Bill Sweetman, a long-time black budgeteer, and equivalent to the entire defense budgets of Japan, France or the UK.

An Open Letter

As Obama’s Hudson Valley speech reveals, DARPA in particular stands to benefit from this budget request, creating the potential for millions more in research misadventure. These drastic increases in democratically unsupervised spending come at the expense of the regular Army which will experience drastic budget cuts for procurement and research under this scheme, down 17 percent from current levels. Some may question the wisdom of this budgetary re-jiggering at a time when it is the Army which is largely responsible for the prosecution of America’s two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. As the federal deficit reaches mammoth proportions and the American economy begins an uncertain recovery, why does Obama tout virtues of a spending strategy that seems to either distract from or directly contradict the promises of accountability and transparency that have been the cornerstone of his domestic initiatives?

The answer may lie in an open letter by Pedro L. Rustan, a director of the National Reconnaissance Office. Titled “Dear Mr. President: Use Darpa To Rebuild,” the letter outlines many of the arguments about creating new innovations and growing a domestic base of math and science degree professionals that Obama included his speech. The letter also gives ominous hints of what direction this research might take. As much as we might fret about good money thrown away on technical pipe-dreams, the truly disruptive possibilities lie in the tectonic changes that the successful creation of new military technologies might bring to society.

Today, the Internet is largely regarded as a positive development across a broad spectrum; it stimulates economic growth, enables communication and has created the possibilities for collaboration and even works of art that were previously unimaginable. But consider a counter-factual: what if instead of such wide-ranging benefits the Internet had been a horribly destructive agent of malaise and addiction, spreading through society much in the same way as opium use did in nineteenth-century China? While the benefits of the Internet seem obvious in retrospect, technological innovation often wreaks unpredictable and irreversible changes upon social organization that can only be judged as good or bad after the fact. While new technologies certainly offer huge promise for economic and social growth, one is only in a position to evaluate those costs and benefits after the genie is out of the bottle and cannot be put back in.

We can glean some understanding of where this intensified research effort will be directed from Rustan’s letter, which specifies biotechnology, nanotechnology and information technology as DARPA’s immediate frontiers. While there are certainly positive developments in each of these fields, extensive research to their military application may make some queasy. At times it can even be difficult to separate the paranoia from legitimate ethical concerns. For example, in 2003 Chris Floyd of the Moscow Times and Counterpunch reporting on DARPA’s classified “war-fighter enhancement program” wrote that the initiative “will involve injecting young men and women with hormonal, neurological and genetic concoctions; implanting microchips and electrodes in their bodies to control their internal organs and brain functions; and plying them with drugs that deaden some of their normal human tendencies: the need for sleep, the fear of death, the reluctance to kill their fellow human beings.”

Scary stuff, right? The article quotes and names government officials and DARPA insiders, and yet many readers will find its rhetoric overly speculative and its dark prophecies overblown. But how accurate is it? The problem with Obama’s plan to have DARPA lead the research-driven charge towards economic recovery is that the speculations over DARPA projects are difficult to confirm or deny, and given the agency’s track record, anything seems possible. In a democratic nation whose society and economic growth are so tied to new technologies, it seems strange that the direction of these developments is set to be determined in such a profoundly undemocratic way.

The DARPA issue falls in a strange way between the safeguards of adversarial partisan gridlock. Republican political character is often defined by a mistrust of government initiatives, except of course when it comes to the military, which they wholeheartedly support. Democrats, who trust the government enough to do right by many of their social programs, can easily exploit this blind-spot as a way to fund their initiatives without Republican backlash, and as a way to recover credibility on military issues when many of their supporters are rabidly anti-war. While the Levin-McCain defense acquisitions bill, which limits over-budget defense spending and which was signed into law earlier this year, is certainly a step in the right direction, the defense spenders have figured out that they can compensate through an expansion in classified projects.

A Mixed Bag

The incentive for research with a military application is already overwhelming, and its results are certainly a mixed bag. Recent studies on the feasibility of erasing traumatic memories are a perfect example. On the one hand, if feasible these methods could provide permanent treatment for sufferers of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), many of whom are veterans. On the other hand, it could create soldiers who act as remorseless killing machines, unhesitant in their ability to carry out any order regardless of its brutality with the full knowledge that they would never be forced to relive their actions or hold themselves to account.

The prospects of military psychology and neurobiology can seem even more disturbing when one considers how banal evil often resides unselfconsciously in the ordinary chain of command. One need look no further than Guantanamo Bay for such evidence, where the head of neuropsychiatry, Dr. William Henry Anderson became convinced of the necessity of exterminating thousands of Muslim “zealots”, arguing in a 2004 medical review article for such action on the grounds that their “brains that are structurally and functionally different from us.” Many of us may shudder to imagine such a latter-day Mengele at the helm of a multimillion dollar research budget of taxpayer money, with latitude to follow his inspiration or delusional racist paranoia as he liked.

Ultimately the only way that Americans can weigh the costs and benefits of future research and its tremendous impact on our society is if we know what that research is. As citizens of a democracy, we are used to not only knowing where our tax dollars are going but having something of a say in those decisions. The Pentagon’s black budget and DARPA’s obliquely named secret projects have been an expanding gap in the democratic process in recent years and, with a central role to play in Obama’s recovery plan, will only continue to grow. There is no magic technological bullet for fixing the down economy, and government officials should not be wasting precious fiscal resources searching for one. If President Obama is truly committed to the ideals of an open society, then he should live up to those ideals by letting the American people participate in the decisions over what technologies will shape our future.