As Pentagon leaders look to shift money to new priorities—$50 billion in each of the next five years—they should take care to preserve a longstanding area of investment that pays off: defense-related research and development at America’s universities.
Although it’s important to crack down on waste and curb inefficiencies, significant cuts would endanger national security. Since World War II, such funding has produced technological breakthroughs that have made our military the strongest, most technologically dominant fighting force in the world. It also plays a crucial role in cultivating a robust workforce for the broader defense sector and spurring the greater U.S. economy that arms and equips the U.S. military.
And it does this at a bargain price. In recent years, DOD has invested about one percent of its budget—$9 billion in 2023, including nearly half of its basic-research funding—in American universities’ efforts to advance the state of the art in fields from quantum physics to engineering to information sciences. This figure represents the immense value that lawmakers and DoD see in research universities’ ability to bridge theoretical and technological expertise gaps in national security.
Examples of current efforts to fill such gaps include a first-of-its-kind hypersonic wind tunnel built by the University of Notre Dame to fill a key gap in the Pentagon’s pursuit of advanced strike weapons and countermeasures.
Another is the innovative combustion system, under development with Office of Naval Research funds at Marquette University, that aims to improve energy efficiency, increase battlefield resilience, and expand the types of fuel that maritime vessels can use—including traditional jet fuel, sustainable aviation fuel, hydrogen, ammonia, methanol, and other biofuels—enabling several classes of ships to shed the vulnerability of requiring a single type of fuel.
And at Northeastern University, supported by U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command funds, researchers are combining advanced materials, additive manufacturing, and machine learning to rapidly create shelters for troops operating in extreme environments, chem-bio contaminated regions, or simply in field medical hospitals.
Beyond any particular projects, federal funding is indispensable [BP1] [DJ2] for cultivating a robust defense-sector workforce, including the next generation of scientific leaders and technology innovators.
Finally, research funding drives the broader U.S. economy that underpins the defense sector. Numerous studies have shown that federal investment in R&D nets between 30 percent and 100 percent returns on investment, as measured by private-sector productivity and growth. A recent MIT study found that defense R&D drives similar investment by the private sector. Reductions in basic scientific research could ultimately slow the entire American economy, including the defense-industrial base.
American higher-education research institutions are envied around the world for delivering critical scientific breakthroughs and discoveries that help our nation’s military stay one step ahead of peer and near-peer adversaries. In today’s tumultuous geopolitical environment, the U.S. Department of Defense must maintain its robust investments in scientific research to ensure that our armed forces can continue keeping us safe. No other nation can bring to bear the research infrastructure and ecosystem that our colleges and universities can provide. Let’s keep it that way.
Abigail Robbins serves as president of The Science Coalition, a nonprofit and nonpartisan organization comprised of more than 50 leading public and private research universities.
