A big part of the "DARPA formula" that doesn't seem to get much treatment here is consistency. DARPA is going to spend a few billion this year, and it spent a few billion last year, and it spent a few billion twenty years ago, and you can feel confident they'll spend a few billion next year. That means that if an academic researcher or similar can position their lab in an area that DARPA likes, they have a good shot at reliable funding for the length of a career. With all the economic uncertainties around research, this is tremendously appealing and will cause a lot of smart people to re-orient their entire research programs around DARPA-friendly subjects [0]. A funding organization that might disappear in a few years, by contrast, will get plenty of grant applications, but won't attract nearly the same level of researcher devotion.
(As a side note, I want to pull out a quote I thought was really nice, hidden a ways in:
"DARPA funds wacky things that go nowhere. DARPA programs have a 5—10% success rate and have included things like jetpacks, earthworm robots, creating fusion with sound waves, spider-man wall climbing, and bomb detecting bees. You can’t cut off just one tail of a distribution.")
[0] Which may, incidentally, go a ways towards explaining why DARPA heads describe their projects as "idea-limited"
My impression is that it's not at all that consistent. The total spending is constant at a few billion per year, but what that gets spent on depends entirely on the taste of the program managers, which in turn depends on the darpa director. The program managers only serve for a few years at a time, and the director for a bit longer, so it can change drastically. I think the trends are typically last a decade: in the 1980s after the success with the F-117, they were funding all kinds of airplane projects. Also in the 1980s they funded a lot of AI research, until they suddently didn't (the "AI winter"). In the 1990s, they were into networked combat simulators and command & control systems.
Starting around 2010, DARPA suddenly began to fund a lot of computer science research on formal verification. I was a phd student at the time, and it was pretty striking, programming language theory used to be a really fringe subject, and now suddenly it was awash in cash and all the professors could hire huge herds of postdocs. But some of those professors also told me that I should not expect it to last: sooner or later there will be new people in DARPA and all the money will instantly stop.
Certainly it's up to the vagaries of fate and such, but when I was in school I worked in a lab that for several years got fairly reliable DARPA funding for NLP work, and while they never built the department around it or anything it was nice to have that consistent year over year assumption that one or two projects would be interesting to the DARPA folks.
For them (us?) it was more a matter of "well this doesn't necessarily merit or reach the requirements for quote-unquote 'real' research, but it's really interesting and you know some investigation couldn't hurt". Those got pitched to DARPA, they asked "can you do it with Arabic and Chinese too?" and we said "no" and they funded us anyway a few times out of ten. Not bad, really.
My favorite project was the MIT silicon wafer etched jet engine. Like full jet engines the size of a pencil eraser. They also made solid rocket engines etched out of silicon.
That sounds cool. I found this article[0] that I think is about the research you're describing. It must work a little differently than a conventional jet engine since I don't see how they could have bearings on the shaft for something that small. Any idea how they solved that problem?
I do think there is something to this. Not just that they spend allot of money consistently but consistently stick with a project to see it to completion. In organizations that I have seen lack of progress they jump from one fire to the next. This means that they work on A for a few months and then suddenly drop it to work on B because B is higher priority. Only to later realize that A was more important and switch back. DARPA having a large budget also allows them to see through projects to the end.
DARPA contracts are structured with a lot of milestones and go/no-go decisions. We had teleconferences with the program manager and staff every two weeks and it was very clear that the money could abruptly stop if they ever felt that we were not going to deliver. This wasn't an idle threat, either: The program-wide PI meetings definitely got smaller and smaller as time passed. As a result, there was a lot of...reprioritization to make sure that the PM stayed happy.
This is very much unlike most other funding agencies. Once an NIH or NSF grant starts, you can be confident that the money will be there for the duration.
creating fusion with sound waves (or shock waves, which is essentially what sound becomes at high enough energy) is one of the crazier ideas I've heard..
Sonofusion [0] was a neat idea, and some of the relevant experiments (at least the cavitation part) can be done on a bench top with a hobbyist level budget. Last I checked, the research had been somewhat tarnished by academic fraud. The physics of jet formation during bubble collapse near a solid boundary remains fascinating [1].
Well yeah, if your shock waves for fusion are created by nuclear fission chain reaction that technology has been quite ready and mature since the 1960s.
(As a side note, I want to pull out a quote I thought was really nice, hidden a ways in:
"DARPA funds wacky things that go nowhere. DARPA programs have a 5—10% success rate and have included things like jetpacks, earthworm robots, creating fusion with sound waves, spider-man wall climbing, and bomb detecting bees. You can’t cut off just one tail of a distribution.")
[0] Which may, incidentally, go a ways towards explaining why DARPA heads describe their projects as "idea-limited"