Robert Cooper's own account states Strategic Computing's final allocation of emphasis and resources diverged substantially from Robert Kahn's original plan, attributing the divergence to his own application-driven judgment rather than a Japan-threat calculus

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Asked whether any of Robert Kahn's original ideas were dropped as the Strategic Computing proposal developed, Robert Cooper said, in his own 1993 Charles Babbage Institute oral history: "I don't think there was anything that was dropped, but I do believe that the allocation of emphasis and resources in the program were substantially different than what Bob had in mind" — a recollection he immediately hedges, noting he "would have to go back and look at the plan" to reconstruct exactly what changed and why.

Elsewhere in the same interview Cooper is more specific about the direction of that divergence. He describes personally pushing multiprocessor/VLSI investment based on his own prior experience managing a parallel-processing machine at NASA Goddard — "I emphasized that in Bob's program, perhaps more than he would have" — and personally "demand[ing]" that Kahn's office build visible, military-application-tied flagship projects such as the Pilot's Associate for the F-22 program. On Cooper's own account, Kahn's original, more knowledge-based/symbolic-computing conception was not simply implemented: it was redirected by Cooper's application-first engineering judgment and by his insistence on visible, fundable deliverables.

This bears directly on the funding-versus-technical-assessment question this research thread has been tracking (see claim-kahn-1982-proposal-cited-japan-quintuple-spending-as-sci-rationale, claim-darpa-1983-strategic-computing-plan-omits-japan-fifth-generation): Cooper's own words confirm that the program's actual shape tracked something other than Kahn's technical baseline, but what it tracked, in his telling, is Cooper's own engineering philosophy and the political need for visible wins — not an articulated Japan-threat calculus. Feeds the funding branch of moc-1980s-us-japan-tech-panic.