ARPA's "small staff, no empire" management model is usually credited to Roy Johnson, but was designed by Secretary of Defense Neil McElroy before Johnson was even hired

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Richard J. Barber Associates' 1975 institutional history of ARPA — commissioned by the agency itself, built on direct interviews with founding participants — explicitly corrects what it calls "the usual impression" of the agency's founding philosophy: "Roy Johnson is commonly associated with establishing a set of management principles for ARPA — particularly the idea of a very small staff, contracting through the Services and using existing laboratories rather than ARPA facilities. The usual impression is that Johnson arrived on the scene with this model in hand and promptly acted on it. Actually... it was McElroy who laid out these basic ARPA attributes, as early as November 1957" — before Roy Johnson was even selected as director. The report adds that "Undoubtedly Johnson was sympathetic with this approach, but it was also soon clear that he was stuck with it."

What the report does credit to Johnson personally is tone rather than structure. One of the first Institute for Defense Analyses professionals to join the new agency's staff summarized "the Johnson style" as three founding statements: "we'll hang together or we'll hang separately, so there will be no barriers in exchange of information," "my door is always open, no problem is too trivial," and "I know nothing about science, but I do know management." Johnson is remembered in the report's interviews with "genuine affection" despite having no scientific background for the job.

This is a historiographical correction, made by ARPA's own commissioned historian, about which founding figure actually designed the management philosophy everyone associates with the more visible one, closely related to claim-arpa-opened-1958-no-staff-ida-became-hiring-hall's account of the agency's improvised early staffing.