Pentagon's Secretive Tech Agency

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n 1957, the Soviet Union changed the night sky. Sputnik, the first satellite, was in orbit for just 22 days, but its arrival brought a tremendous set of new implications for nations down on Earth, especially the United States. The USSR was ahead in orbit, and the rocket that launched Sputnik meant that the USSR would likely be able to launch atomic or thermonuclear warheads through space and back down to nations below.

In the defense policy of the United States, Sputnik became an example of “technological surprise,” or when a rival country demonstrates a new and startling tool. To ensure that the United States is always the nation making the surprises, rather than being surprised, in 1958 president Dwight D. Eisenhower created what we now know as DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Originally called the Advanced Research Projects Agency, or ARPA, ARPA/DARPA has had a tremendous impact on technological development, both for the US military and well beyond it. (Its name became DARPA in 1972, then ARPA again from 1993 to 1996, and it’s been DARPA ever since.) 

The most monumental achievement of DARPA is the precursor to the service that makes reading this article possible. That would be ARPANET, the immediate predecessor to the internet as we know it, which started as a way to guarantee continuous lines of communication over a distributed network.

Other projects include the more explicitly military ones, like work on what became the MQ-1 Predator drone, and endeavors that exist in the space between the civilian and military world, like research into self-driving cars.

What is the main purpose of DARPA?
The specific military services have offices that can conduct their own research, designed to bring service-specific technological improvements. Some of these are the Office of Naval Research, the Air Force Research Laboratory, and the Army’s Combat Capabilities Development Command (DEVCOM). DARPA’s mission, from its founding, is to tackle research and development of technologies that do not fall cleanly into any of the services, that are considered worth pursuing on their own merits, and that may end up in the hands of the services later.

How did DARPA start?
Sputnik is foundational to the story of DARPA and ARPA. It’s the event that motivated President Eisenhower to create the agency by executive order. Missiles and rockets at the time were not new, but they were largely secret. During World War II, Nazi Germany had launched rockets carrying explosives against the United Kingdom. These V-2 rockets, complete with some of the engineers who designed and built them, were captured by the United States and the USSR, and each country set to work developing weapons programs from this knowledge.

Rockets on their own are a devastatingly effective way to attack another country, because they can travel beyond the front lines and hit military targets, like ammunition depots, or civilian targets, like neighborhoods and churches, causing disruption and terror and devastation beyond the front lines. What so frightened the United States about Sputnik was that, instead of a rocket that could travel hundred of miles within Earth’s atmosphere, this was a rocket that could go into space, demonstrating that the USSR had a rocket that could serve as the basis for an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile, or ICBM.  READ MORE...

Best Places in Russia to Visit

MOSCOW

Russia, once the largest and most powerful member of the former USSR, nonetheless remains a fascinating country to visit. It is a country of contrasts, from great subtropical beaches to bitterly cold winter regions in the north. The east may have fewer people, but its lovely cities are among the most popular places to visit in Russia and can hold their own against the west.

Russia is steeped in history everywhere a traveler goes, from vicious battles to great classical music and literature. And almost everywhere visitors can see examples of magnificent art, not only in museums but also in its churches.

10. Yekaterinburg

9. Sochi

8. Veliky Novgorod

7. Vladivostok

6. Nizhny Novgorod

5. Irkutsk

4. Kazan

3. Golden Ring

2. Saint Petersburg

1. Moscow

READ MORE...

China/America In A Second Cold War

During Donald Trump’s presidency, the term “Cold War 2.0” was popularized in the context of U.S.-China rivalry, which has been spurned by China’s economic rise. By becoming the fastest growing economy around the globe, China is challenging the U.S.-led economic system and laying the foundation to become a military superpower. 

As the second-largest military spender after the United States with a speculated military expenditure of nearly $250 billion, China is using its military might to assert its territorial claims in the South China Sea (SCS). China is constructing artificial islands across the SCS while also establishing its first-ever foreign military base in Djibouti at the strategic chokepoint of Bab el-Mandeb. 

These actions are influencing U.S. perceptions that China’s rise is a threat and, hence, a new global competition between the United States and China for hegemonic status has begun.

The Cold War 2.0 shares similarities with the original Cold War (1945-1991) in many aspects. First, during the Cold War, the United States and Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) were the prime contenders for superpower status, however, the threat of an active military conflict between the two was largely defused due to the nuclear deterrence. 

Hence, this allowed both the United States and USSR to collaborate on major global challenges, like resolving the 1956 Suez Canal Crisis. Although nuclear deterrence is still viable today, the context of the U.S.-China rivalry is far more beholden to economic interdependence—trade relations amounted to $660 billion in 2018—whereas U.S. trade with the USSR remained low throughout the Cold War. 

Nevertheless, the ongoing U.S.-China “trade war” has somewhat reduced their mutual dependency, providing space for more divergent foreign policy behavior. China has also sought to exclude the United States from its ambitious Belt and Road Initiative which is aimed at enhancing its economic presence through the multi-channel yet interconnected global framework.  READ MORE...

What is Putin's ENDGAME?

Russian President Vladimir Putin, in a long speech full of heavy sighs and dark grievances, made clear today that he has chosen war. He went to war against Ukraine in 2014; now he has declared war against the international order of the past 30 years.

Putin’s slumped posture and deadened affect led me to suspect that he is not as stable as we would hope. He had the presence not of a confident president, but of a surly adolescent caught in a misadventure, rolling his eyes at the stupid adults who do not understand how cruel the world has been to him. Teenagers, of course, do not have hundreds of thousands of troops and nuclear weapons.

Even discounting Putin’s delivery, the speech was, in many places, simply unhinged. Putin began with a history lesson about how and why Ukraine even exists. For all his Soviet nostalgia, the Russian president is right that his Soviet predecessors intentionally created a demographic nightmare when drawing the internal borders of the U.S.S.R., a subject I’ve explained at length here.

But Putin’s point wasn’t that the former subjects of the Soviet Union needed to iron out their differences. Rather, he was suggesting that none of the new states that emerged from the Soviet collapse—except for Russia—were real countries. “As a result of Bolshevik policy,” Putin intoned, “Soviet Ukraine arose, which even today can with good reason be called ‘Vladimir Ilyich Lenin’s Ukraine’. He is its author and architect.”

It is true that Soviet leaders created the 1991 borders. That is also true of what we now call the Russian Federation. Putin, however, went even further back in history: “Ukraine never had a tradition of genuine statehood.”

By that kind of historical reasoning, few nations in Europe, or anywhere else, are safe. Putin’s foray into history was nothing less than a demand that only Moscow—and only the Kremlin’s supreme leader—has the right to judge what is or is not a sovereign state (as I recently discussed here). Putin’s claims are hardly different from Saddam Hussein’s rewriting of Middle East history when Iraq tried to erase Kuwait from the map.  READ MORE...

About the author: Tom Nichols is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and the author of its newsletter Peacefield.

Back in the USSR

 

In the decades after it was established, the Russian-dominated Soviet Union grew into one of the world’s most powerful and influential states and eventually encompassed 15 republics:

1. Russia
2.  Ukraine
3.  Georgia
4.  Belorussia
5.  Uzbekistan
6.  Armenia
7.  Azerbaijan
8.  Kazakhstan
9.  Kyrgyzstan
10.  Moldova
11.  Turkmenistan
12.  Tajikistan
13.  Latvia
14.  Lithuania
15.  Estonia

In 1991, the Soviet Union was dissolved following the collapse of its communist government. 

The post-Soviet states, also known as the former Soviet Union,  the former Soviet Republics and in Russia as the near abroad , are the 15 sovereign states that emerged and re-emerged from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics following its breakup in 1991, with Russia being the primary de facto internationally recognized successor state to the Soviet Union after the Cold War while Ukraine, by law, proclaimed that it is a state-successor of both the Ukrainian SSR and the Soviet Union which remained under dispute over formerly Soviet-owned properties. 

The three Baltic states were the first to declare their independence, between March and May 1990, claiming continuity from the original states that existed prior to their annexation by the Soviet Union in 1940.The remaining 12 republics all subsequently seceded. 12 of the 15 states, excluding the Baltic states, initially formed the CIS and most joined CSTO, while the Baltic states focused on European Union and NATO membership.