The cult of professional administration is the single most destructive thing in America today, in my opinion.
Professional sports has overwhelmed real amateur leagues. The Music Industry has displaced a lot of just getting together and singing badly. Wedding planners, summer gap year planners, even professional Christmas tree decorators. There are few roadside restaurants that don’t basically reheat something delivered frozen by CISCO. Random roadside motels and amateurish amusement park attractions have vanished in the face of chains. Even tinkering happens at a high level.
Sure, all the non-professional things still exist, but are a miniscule fraction of how they used to be.
I think you mean Sysco. CISCO sell routers, Sysco sells food
Their collective delusion is that a business or other effort can be administered without actually understanding what it is and does. This is lethal to the business.
That said, an actually good, down-to-earth professional administrator is worth their weight in platinum. These types are very, very rare.
My impression is that, despite some problems, DARPA is outstanding compared to what we have across the pond. Obviously, that is not a reason to ignore issues or try to fix them.
In fact, new initiatives are often trying to mimic DARPA. For example, Wellcome LEAP: https://wellcomeleap.org/leap-innovation-model/
Wrt. original post - interesting how the catechism is different from the today's dominating approach of "we don't really know what we want, just have a very vague set of desires, lets try to achieve that small goal for that sprint which hopefully will move us in some desired direction, and we'll see after the sprint where it would lead us, and where we can make the next step from there."
It helped Stan reach maturity, and also led to things like Pyro.
But we need to wait a bit more to see where this goes. The program only finished 5 years ago.
If you're interested in how the modern Agency functions, I'd suggest reading The DARPA Model for Transformative Technologies.
It describes some of the typical trends in our time: contracts too often go to entrenched players and primes, rather than startups as primes due to technical merit rather than past performance and relationships. DARPA personnel reaching out from anonymous mailboxes post-RFI submission, asking if your team has TS/Sci clearance. (No answer if it's not a complete 100% yes.) And landlordism: extracting value from an existing system rather than seeding many new technologies.
However, there is still nothing like DARPA, despite its many problems. DIU is more for near-term innovation, and had its budget cut 20% just now. AFRL, AFWERX, Army SBIR/STTR, and so on, are all critical but not built to prevent technological surprise. Thank your lucky stars we have DARPA still up and running after so many decades.