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In his State of the Union address, President Obama lauded two fruits that fell from the tree of government support for the basic research of “cutting-edge scientists and inventors”: the Internet and GPS. Though he didn’t mention it, that wasn’t just any old “government support” and they weren’t just any old “cutting-edge scientists and inventors.” We’re talking about government-supported work for the U.S. military and for the scientists in its employ.
As it happens, both came from work done by the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and both have definitely embedded themselves in our lives. Here’s a third glorious invention that’s just now coming home to roost: the unmanned aerial drone presently fighting a much-boasted-about “covert” war of escalating ferocity in the Pakistani borderlands. The initial work for the earliest of these, the Predator, also came out of DARPA’s intellectual chop shop, and now, Peter Finn of the Washington Post tells us, one of its children, “a bird-size device called the Wasp” (another DARPA project), could soon be flying over your home in Anytown USA, beaming live video to law enforcement agents on the ground.
As it happens, both came from work done by the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and both have definitely embedded themselves in our lives. Here’s a third glorious invention that’s just now coming home to roost: the unmanned aerial drone presently fighting a much-boasted-about “covert” war of escalating ferocity in the Pakistani borderlands. The initial work for the earliest of these, the Predator, also came out of DARPA’s intellectual chop shop, and now, Peter Finn of the Washington Post tells us, one of its children, “a bird-size device called the Wasp” (another DARPA project), could soon be flying over your home in Anytown USA, beaming live video to law enforcement agents on the ground.
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