Former CEO retires and moves to the Outer Banks.

 

The story was about five years old. Chris Ballard had founded and run Ballard

Enterprises and its successor, CB Excelon, for many years. The “CB” obviously

stood for Chris Ballard. He had subsequently turned the reins over to a new

regime. Now eighty, Ballard was retiring to a more leisurely life on the sandy

beaches of North Carolina.

 

The story went on to bullet-point some of Ballard’s successes and the work that

his firm had done in connection with DARPA, the Defense Department’s research

arm. The article also gave a thumbnail history of the agency.

 

DARPA, created in the late 1950s by President Eisenhower, had started out as the

Advanced Research Projects Agency. It had come into being in response to the

Soviets sending Sputnik I into orbit. The organization had changed its name

several times over the decades, before settling on DARPA in 1996. With its new

headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, it employed hundreds of people and managed

a budget of $3 billion. Its mission was to nurture and support gamechanging

military technologies and to create surprises for America’s enemies, although

some of its project outcomes had had significant influence in nonmilitary

applications. It funded numerous areas of development in the private sector and

was known to give long leashes, short time frames, and overly ambitious—some

would say impossible—goals to its contractors. It had had many successes but

also spectacular failures. An independent agency, DARPA reported directly to DoD