This was an excellent read and I would highly recommend it to any and all readers out there looking for a truly fascinating non-fiction read. The author's research was impeccable and comprehensive (and it helped tremendously that her thoughts came across very readable). The science was undeniable and presented in a fashion where virtually any layman could easily understand and interpret the book's contents. With so many fascinating facts dating back to the Jasons' invention and detonation of the hydrogen bomb in the 1950's, leading all the way up to our current state of affairs in its publication date (e.g., artificial intelligence placed inside autonomous drones), the author's depiction of DARPA and the geniuses within was simply fantastic. It leaves readers thinking... "If that's what DARPA was doing 15-25 years ago, what sort of crazy gadgetry is hidden from prying eyes right now?" Just get your Q Clearance and find out :). Five stars!

Really enjoyed this author's other work Area 51. Was looking forward to this one but it's honestly not as good. This may just be due to the nature of the subject matter but it gets bogged down by details of projecta like data mining and privacy acts which are hardly engrossing topics but are good to know about. Worth a read but not a page turner.

A very well researched book on DARPA, as the reader will see the by-products that are sort of common place today. Surprised that the author did not go into the newer agency called IARPA and AI research.

Glad I read this book. The curtain dividing the public from the military is orders of magnitude greater than the divide between the public and academia. There is one anecdote in the book about bees which were trained through pavlovian conditioning to identify explosives. Anne states that the behavior the bees performed to indicate detection of an explosive was that the bees would "purr". What Anne is almost certainly referring to is what bee and drosophila scientists call the PER, or the proboscis extension reflex. When we say it, we typically will say "per", so I expect this is the root of this humorous oversight. Anyway, in conclusions, bees can not in fact "purr".

The author knows her history of DARPA. I learned a lot about the people who started what is our premier intelligence agency and how it evolved.

In many ways, this book is not for the faint of heart. This history of DARPA, or what can be revealed, is the history of modern warfare. It is not pretty, nor is it moral. It's about making better killing machines and how much human thought or emotion goes into them. But this history needs to be known so we can better prepare for our immediate future as war has not ceased. The research here can only go so far, what with the wall of secrecy around it, but what's on display in these pages is fascinating. This book will leave you with many questions about America's history and its future, but these are subjects worth contemplating as this book does an excellent job of revealing a story rarely touched upon despite being 60+ years in the making.

Very interesting read about DARPA/ Arpa history - a goldmine of information, much of it from 1st person interviews. Only 4 stars because sometimes it bounces too much between subjects, and at times there is a conspiratorial undertone when discussing “possible” programs that are still classified. Area 51 is also a great book by this author

I really enjoyed reading the Pentagon's Brain. Ms. Jacobsen tells a great story about the founding and evolution of DARPA. She provides a lot of historical detail and included a lot of information taken from interviews. I didn't know much about DARPA before reading this book, but it is apparent that she did her homework. The stories and information contained within is incredibly interesting, and reveals a lot about the DOD's thought processes during and after WW2, the Cold War, Vietnam, and into the modern era. It was fascinating to read about the creation and infancy of a lot of the technologies that we take for granted today, from the AR-15 to the Internet. I would definitely recommend this book to anyone interested in the history of DARPA, or of the US DOD in general.