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As a former director of DARPA's Microsystems Technology Office, I could easily be accused of being biased. And to some extent maybe I am. But I found this book infuriating, on many levels. Weinberger is the champion of cherrypicking, for starters. Big successes, she pays lip service to; big failures, she describes in detail, as though she agrees that DARPA should be taking massive risks but that those risks ought to all pay off. What she never seems to grasp is that failures, other than those stemming from incompetence or malfeasance, are inevitable, and often teach more than successes do. Looked at one way, DARPA spends a lot of the taxpayers' money, to achieve these learnings. But compared to the alternatives of never learning at all, or having the DoD err on its considerably more massive scale, it's a highly efficient machine. Weinberger ignores thousands of technology contributions that DARPA has provided (I counted 17 such technologies in every smartphone without even trying very hard), presumably because she believes that DARPA should be striving to get back to its "essential to national security" status from the good old days that she spends most of this book describing. In her interview with Arati Prabhakar, which I found superficial and annoyingly dismissive, Dr. Prabhakar pointed out that the world Weinberger remembers has changed, an observation of much greater profundity than Weinberger appreciates. Finally, Weinberger makes no attempts whatsoever to cover DARPA's program managers, the heart and soul of the agency. What motivates people to go to Arlington VA and spend a few years, knowing there's no chance for long term employment there and that whatever programs they initiate, they won't be around to take credit for? Many of them take significant pay cuts at considerable personal sacrifice. Would you sell your house and move your family, knowing that no matter how effective you are, you'll be out of a job in 3 years? But if you don't move, you'll only see your spouse and kids on weekends, and you may have to drive long distances even then. Weinberger only even discusses PMs when she finds a particularly colorful one. This is unfair to the PMs, unfair to the agency, it's critical to understanding why DARPA has never become just another Washington bureaucracy, and essential to the agency's nimbleness and ability to infuse new ideas continuously. If this book had been intended to be an objective, comprehensive look at an agency well worth analyzing, the role of the PM would have been front and center. Instead, Weinberger ended up with an uneven quasi-history, slanted to the "good old days", which evaluates cherrypicked examples of DARPA programs against an implicit writer's bias of what Weinberger believes DARPA ought to be doing. Finally, it isn't DARPA's job to prevent war, Ms. Weinberger. If that's what you really want, write a book about politicians and the people who voted them into office.