The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is the central research and development organization of the US Department of Defense. According to DARPA’s own history, it was created on February 7, 1958, when Secretary of Defense Neil McElroy issued DoD Directive 5105.15 establishing the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), later renamed DARPA. The agency was a response to the Soviet launch of Sputnik and the sense that the United States had been caught off guard technologically.
DARPA’s founding mandate was to prevent and create technological surprise. Its initial research focused on space technology, ballistic missile defense, and solid propellants, but the agency soon turned to computing. Through its Information Processing Techniques Office, first led by J.C.R. Licklider from 1962, DARPA funded time-sharing, computer graphics, and the ARPANET, the network that grew into the internet.
The agency has a long association with artificial intelligence. It financed early AI laboratories at MIT, Stanford, and Carnegie Mellon, backed the billion-dollar Strategic Computing program in the 1980s, and later ran the DARPA Grand Challenge and Urban Challenge that pushed self-driving cars forward. DARPA’s model is to fund high-risk, high-reward projects through program managers who serve fixed terms.
DARPA operates within the Department of Defense and works through outside performers in universities and industry rather than running large in-house labs. Many technologies now treated as civilian infrastructure, including networking and several strands of machine learning research, trace funding lines back to the agency.