To the folks reaching immediately for the “revolving door” observations: DARPA is one instance where churn is a feature, not a bug. Or if not a feature, at lea

To the folks reaching immediately for the “revolving door” observations: DARPA is one instance where churn is a feature, not a bug. Or if not a feature, at least an intentional design choice rather than an accident of corruption. Various rules about the way the USG works make it really challenging to innovate in the way private industry can. DARPA isn’t perfect, but it’s a pretty good effort to engineer an ecosystem within the USG that optimizes for “wild idea pursuit” rather than “Spec’ed hourly labor” (which governs the rest of the defense complex). Part of that ecosystem is regular rotation of leadership to bring in fresh ideas and agendas. Another part of that ecosystem is the acknowledgement that you have to spend money on 99 bad ideas before you find the one nugget of gold. Basically, the same observation that governs VC portfolio math but the DARPA is interested in capability unicorns rather than economic unicorns. When I worked in DC, the joke was that DARPA was the only agency in town that would pull your funding for SUCCEEDING. The reason being that if you succeeded, it obviously meant they had set their ambitions too low and needed to re-frame the work to be impossible before funding it any further.