In what ended up being for the Agency an extremely rare practice of direct or near-direct support of active military operations, ARPA initiated Project Agile in 1961, which grew into a large and diverse portfolio of counterinsurgency research programs in Southeast Asia.
The project ran through 1974.
Along the way, subprojects included weapons (among them flamethrowers and what became known as the M-16 assault rifle), rations, mobility and logistics in remote areas, communications, surveillance and target acquisition, defoliation, and psychological warfare.
