From the Federation of American Scientists:
Basic scientific research sponsored by the Department of Defense has suffered a precipitous decline in recent years, according to a newly disclosed 2009 report (pdf) from the JASON defense advisory panel.
“Basic research” refers to the investigation of fundamental phenomena, and contrasts with “applied research” that aims to meet a specific mission requirement or to solve a specified problem.
“Over the past decade, there has been an exodus of scientific and technical expertise from the U.S. government and, in particular, from the DoD [basic] research enterprise,” the JASONs said.
“Gone are many of the technically literate program officers who plied the streets of the scientific community to find those remarkable people who could help shape the future. Gone too are many of the scientists and engineers in the academic community [who were supported by DoD basic research contracts] and who contributed to revolutionary advances that changed the landscape of modern war fighting. And most importantly, lost is the opportunity to develop the next generation of scientific talent who would otherwise have been trained and capable of carrying the research enterprise forward.”
“Despite the importance of DoD Basic Research, we believe that important aspects of the DoD basic research programs are ‘broken’ to an extent that neither throwing more money at these problems nor simple changes in procedures and definitions will fix them,” the report said.
Anyone know more about this?
Joseph Nobles
To find the money for this stuff, see Iraq and Afghanistan. We’ve been selling the seed corn.
Michael G
Maybe it’s because instead of making a tangible contribution to society, America’s best and brightest all went to work for Goldman-Sachs.
Or maybe it’s that nobody can think past the next quarterly report or election anymore, and any investment that pays off in five years might as well be a million years away.
Or maybe it’s because 50% of America has gone beyond mere scientific ignorance and dived full force into actually being anti-science.
sukabi
not funding and silencing the scientific community will have that kind of effect… and that was one of the goals of the BUSH / CHENEY administration. They were busy pushing “faith based” bullshit over actual science or intellectual inquiry.
and not because they actually believed any of their “programs” were better, but because without folks who would question them, they could get away with what they wanted.
Drew
This is the ultimate result of policies that were put in place by the republican congress of the mid ’90s. In particular they mandated that all research projects had to have a direct and tangible benefit to the mission of the sponsoring agency. For example, all research sponsored by the USDA had to have a tangible benefit to agriculture. Most federal agencies used to sponsor at least some basic research. But after this rule was passed, the vast majority of the research that they funded was applied research. The only agencies that still fund significant amounts of basic research are the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.
frankdawg
As an engineer I can tell you that people with a science education get no respect, little money and are generally outsourced for cheaper Indian help.
When I was a kid people who were engineers & scientists were considered to have good jobs & made very good money. Today, If you are ‘smart’ and aggressive and you want power & money you will go into law, medicine or get an MBA.
Quick, give me a description of a successful lawyer or CEO. Now give me one for an engineer. Which one is more flattering? Movies & TV have done their part to make us all pencil-necked geeks. And of course any politician can tell you that their gut is smarter than all those brainiacs put together.
Now give me my Brawndo & go away – I’m ‘batein’
Loneoak
My first guess is that the glory and money is now in biology, especially biotech. And also in high-energy physics. There might be some now-imaginary weapons to be made out of nano-biotech, but no one is making biological weapons at this point, at least not legally. We already have nuclear weapons, and you have to do high-energy physics in huge international labs.
I’m a little worried about the effort they are putting into psychological research, though.
EDIT: Lets not forget that there’s a whole generation of young scientists that associate all military endeavors with the Bush/Cheney agenda. And possibly a generation of military leadership that grew up under the anti-research Bush regime.
Brandon
Declining funding for basic scientific research and investigation has been an issue for a long time across the entire Federal government. I suggest you read this 2008 report from the NAS.
Some key points:
JGabriel
John Cole:
Very little. It’s seems like a mixed bag. I’m certainly no proponent of weapons research, but, if I remember correctly, ARPA, which was the program that evolved into the internet, was funded by the DoD’s research division.
I’m not sure what to make of it either.
.
Starfish
This has been a long-term trend. Government realized that doing basic research is expensive so they began to rely on industry to do this works. It seems really obvious in electronics. If you look at 1940s military electronics and 1970s military electronics, you see absolutely no similarity because ICs were invented, and everything changed. However, if you look at the stuff we are using now, in some cases, we are maintaining stuff from the 1970s instead of moving technology forward. Relying on industry for innovation is increasingly dumb when most public corporations are not looking for technology that will be developed over the next generation. Most public corporations are looking to satisfy shareholders by developing products quickly.
…
Some paper was written a very long time ago determined that it was optimal to spend about 3% of either a corporate or government budget on basic research. A lot of people run with this number without really questioning it despite the fact that it was decided such a long time ago. It is very hard to justify because it is unclear how things move from basic research to applied research or commercial applications and which investments in basic research are worth it.
PeakVT
If true, it’s worrying that the amount of basic research the government sponsors is going down. But it’s a bit sad that so much had/has to be hidden in the DoD budget in order to get done.
robertdsc
Even worse, these people have friends on Capitol Hill. Makes for some disgusting obstruction.
smiley
As someone whose graduate training was partly supported by a DoD grant, I think this is a real shame. OTOH, for all we were paid for looking into the effects of potential nerve agents, we didn’t find much that wasn’t expected or already known (yeah, I know, replication is vital). And yeah, the grant was renewed right before I graduated. I guess I’m saying that it’s a shame that science continues to be diminished but there are “excesses” in federal funding that should be addressed.
jl
I do not know specifically about defense, since it has been almost twenty years since I had anything to do with that field, but I agree with some of the commenters above. I see the same issues in applied social science, public health, and public health medicine.
Much less funding for basic research, or developing promising new methodologies. Very hard to get funding for unglamorous projects, like developing data bases with reliable data.
I’ve seen a lot of what I consider to be MBA and marketing buzzwords enter into funding process, like Return on Investment, Translational Research, Payoff. To some extent this is healthy. But not the way it has happened, since IMO it has substituted for subject and methodological expertise on the part of funders rather than complemented.
Most of my experience with for profit private funders is that they try to rip researchers off. Most of the time they are stingy as Scrooge from the get go, they try to gobble up your unfunded preliminary research for zero compensation. Funding from them is very unreliable, and as soon as you stop producing results that they can use immediately, you are in trouble with them. There are however very notable and shining and blessed exceptions, so I am talking about the modal behavior here.
Even private non-profit funders seem interested in sexy buzzword stuff, tie their funding to getting their names on buildings, etc. They are uninterested in unglamorous long term or risky projects.
Grant administraters seem to know less and less about the subject areas and are more and more process type people.
It has not been a pretty picture, from my point of view. And I am one of the lucky ones who has scraped along, so far (knock on wood). I imagine there are a lot of bitter and frustrated researchers out there.
cleek
screw the DoD.
i’d never take a job designing ways to kill people.
Turbulence
I was at MIT circa 2004 and my thesis was actually funded by DARPA grants. Basically, this is more less right. Over the long term, there has been a decline in the amount of pure research funding that research universities like MIT have gotten from the feds; they’ve had to make up the difference by raising tuition, being more aggressive about patenting and licensing technology, and seeking private grants. For example, students taking the microcomputer lab relied heavily on equipment purchased with donations from the Granger foundation. At the end of the semester, we were even invited to a reception at the MIT faculty club to celebrate them.
During the Bush years, DOD funding became even more focused: the money that was coming in was redirected from more basic researchy things to more applied work. Basically, there was a push to get the research universities to start acting more like Mitre or BBN or that other DOD consulting firm whose name I can’t remember. That kind of makes sense because that allows the DOD to pay grad students to develop technology much cheaper than real engineers. Grad students pull down maybe 25K in stipends plus the cost of their classes (say 20-30K per year). Equivalent engineers probably pull down $100K with overhead being another 50-150%.
To give you a sense of what that transition meant in practice, when I joined the research group, they were working on some novel algorithms for solving problems with sensor networks. There was some experimenting and paper writing, standard academia stuff. Then we were instructed to implement our algorithms on crappy hardware and ship out to Ft Benning to demonstrate the technology for the Army brass. The tech was a joke; everyone knew that. Specifically, the hardware platforms were decades away from being useful for the work we were doing. But DARPA was putting the screws on people to demonstrate practical results, and demos are more practical than papers even when they make no sense. So we spent a bunch of time writing and debugging code for these demos. Kind of a waste.
Funny story: my boss’ boss at the time used to be a DARPA program manager and he was very concerned about this. Apparently, he had a meeting with some other program managers where they suggested that MIT fly down a team of his grad students to Columbia to work on sensor networks for securing pipelines from “narcoterrorists.” He said fuck no. He sure as hell didn’t want to send his students into some godforsaken jungle to get shot up by FARK or some right-wing death squad.
I have no idea how much this has changed since I left circa 2004.
gwangung
We saw this in the stem cell debate. Cant tell you how many assholes kept on saying ” well, it’s not proven you can do anything with embryonic stem cells?” Hello? HEY FUCKWIT!!!! THAT’S WHY WE’RE DOING THE RESEARCH!!!!!
smiley
@cleek: Our research was intended to save lives. Or at least to save normal function. You have a problem with that?
cleek
@smiley:
i have a problem with the whole fucking, money-sucking, bomb-dropping, war-baiting, child-maiming, corrupting defense industry, which the DoD cultures and on which it feasts.
if it does some ancillary good … well … yay.
Cat
A) the retiring scientists aren’t being replaced by new recruits so they are having outside contractors do it.
B) They can’t recruit because of A since you make more as a contractor and get the same benefits. They phased defined pension in favor of 401(k)s for civil servants, except for congress of course.
mikey
I’m not convinced that DoD ever did a great deal of basic research. Basic fundamental research has always been the province of academia and the big government funded research institutes. The military was always there to grab the pieces they could weaponize or otherwise apply. The Manhattan Project wasn’t done by the military, combat medicine developed out of civilian trauma surgery and everything from the helicopter to the Higgins boat were developed by industry.
But the larger picture is truly bleak. Basic research doesn’t boost shareholder value quarter-to-quarter, so it is starved for funding. Even the big research institutes (think SRI) are gone, unable to contribute short term profits. Some industry research centers are still working, from IBM to Bell Labs, but you see them working more on research that can be applied or productized rather than the kind of wide ranging work that leads to breakthroughs like Wilson and Penzias….
mikey
Martin
@Joseph Nobles: This.
NSF dollars only recently picked up. DOD dollars are really damn rare compared to a decade ago. I would be happy with dollars shifting from DOD to NSF, but that’s not what’s been happening in the broader sense.
At the same time, I have to pick at Clinton a bit on this point. Clinton administration shifted a lot of the focus of grant funding from more pure efforts into things that had a demonstrable application. Bush continued this. That forced a lot of research away from long-horizon stuff and into short-horizon stuff, that, frankly put the educational community into competition with industry. Not only because industry primarily focuses on near-term R&D because they need to recover those costs and so they were putting their own money in the pot, but it also meant that grant proposals from industry looked a LOT more attractive to the feds relative to what was coming out of academia. That SERIOUSLY harmed a lot of scientific and engineering fields that were very long horizon (but would yield near term gains as they tackled problems on the path) and forced a lot of the better talent out of government and academia into industry because, well, that’s where all the action was.
The other problem we’ve seen with DOD funding is that they strongly favor specific institutions (in part over security and whatnot) which makes it hard for talented individuals outside the top 10 or so programs to do much of anything. That has a magnifying effect because all of the PhD students at all of those other institutions are largely shut out of defense R&D, and don’t consider it worth their effort to chase those grants, so they’re looking in more productive areas. They’re killing the training program for future defense oriented scientists and engineers.
We see similar things with other government agencies which is really quite discouraging. We’ve got a very competitive proposal in for a large green energy grant which we’re about 99% sure will pass right by us because we just don’t have the name they want. We’ve got massive buy-in from industry and local and state government – realistically more than any other university could put together, but we’re almost certain it’ll go to one of the top 5 schools.
Platonicspoof
Reasons above sound more realistic, but my fantasy is that some decided over the last eight+ years that they wanted more distance from an immoral and illegal war of aggression.
srv
Heh, just wait until all those Texas HS kids go to college for their faith-based engineering degrees.
DoD can’t handle any kind of project. FCS, F-35, DDX – they’re all complete disasters. It’s pretty apparent the gravy train to the contract world is not about asking questions or holding the prime accountable. Boeing & LM have nothing to learn from Goldman Sachs.
Right now, they’re building the next generation aircraft carrier, and it is unlikely it will be able to launch aircraft – you can’t make this shit up. The catapult system doesn’t work, and the carrier can’t be retrofitted with the old steam-based designs.
Zerodivisor
@cleek:
As a member of the defense industry who has never sucked money, dropped bombs, baited war (?), maimed children, or corrupted anyone, I cordially invite you to stick your self-righteousness in your tailpipe.
Addressing John’s question, in my personal experience, sometimes “basic research” means “stuff that I think is cool” instead of “stuff that could turn out to be useful”. Uncle Sugar needs some way to make sure his money isn’t being just pissed away. If business-type metrics aren’t the right way to look at things, perhaps scientists should do a better job articulating just how their work should be evaluated.
Dr. Squid
It means that now that I’m out of a job, I’m not going to get a new one.
Martin
@Zerodivisor:
That’s a problem because oftentimes nobody knows how useful something is until later. Those guys working on fusion reactors did quite a lot of good work on electromagnetics, which we later found lots of good use for, but the fusion guys were trying to solve entirely different problems. That’s just how the game works.
I think one of the biggest problems right now is that we’ve still got a lot of pretty good theoretical research going on and a lot solving practical problems, but we really lack a training ground for people with the skills to implement this stuff. We’re training a lot of thinkers and not many builders. When you’re trying to build wind turbines with a blade diameter that of a 45 story building, you can’t just yank a bunch of machinists off the John Deere line to do it. Who is going to build these new nuclear plants? We’re really starving that gap between the big R&D guys and the trades.
sgrAstar
@Drew: Don’t forget NASA, without whom the entire enterprise of US astrophysics would cease to exist.
Dr. Squid
@srv: Why pick on Texas? Everyone has to use the textbooks that Texas chooses.
@Starfish: Now that the figure for basic research is about 0.5% of the budget, someone should ask if we shouldn’t get back up to that 3%. I was told that back in the late ’50’s, that figure was more like 6%. Space program and all that.
Say what you will about Ronnie, his advisors pointed at the basic research part of the budget and said, “Do not cut.” Unfortunately, the GOP took control of Congress at the beginning of my career and decided that panty sniffing had a higher priority.
JCT
I’m married to a theoretical physical chemist who was supported by ONR (Office of Naval Research) for many years for pure basic chemistry research — he used to rave about how smart his program officer was. He felt that they had a real appreciation for creative work.
As noted by some folks above, these programs started to go away in the late 90’s as the “mission” changed. A shame really.
I think some of my colleagues still get Army funding for infectious disease research.
But NSF/NIH is basically it for now — and it’s an endless, painful struggle to get funding with pay lines hovering around 10% for many institutes (including mine) — basically random. The terrible part is that the grad students are tuned in to this and “dropping out” — one of the most talented students I have ever had just told me she’s turning down a stellar post-doc fellowship to go to industry. Makes me want to pound my head on my desk.
Funny coincidence as I’m reviewing NIH grants right now… torment.
Brandon
@Dr. Squid: Uh… Ronnie’s advisor’s said that about every part of the Federal budget, except those that one would assume helped the “strapping young bucks” and “welfare queens”. What a fucking douche bag.
Svensker
@Martin:
A friend of ours who is a research scientist said that at the end of the Clinton years things looked very worrying for research. He thought that the bureaucracy had grown so huge that anyone who was outside the mainstream was not getting funding and that oddballs were frowned upon. And that, simultaneously, money was drying up and students were opting out of research and either into industry or Wall Street. He was very worried about the trend and predicted that if it continued, innovation and leadership in science would leave the U.S. Can’t imagine things improved under Dubya.
The Moar You Know
Four or five commentors who know what they’re talking about, the rest are so wildly off the mark, or reflexively anti-defense, they might as well be talking about Martian geology.
Yes, I work in the field under discussion. The DoD isn’t funding a lot of basic research right now, but given what a hash that they’ve made of the rest of their operations over the last decade that could be for the best (I am being snarky, it’s not good no matter what).
The problem remains; we need to be doing basic research in this country, long-term research that is not tied to next quarter’s results. Someone above mentioned the electromagnetic work that has come out of fusion research; that is a perfect example of the benefits that come out of basic research, if unintended. Most of the ROI for basic research is unintended.
We aren’t doing basic research, certainly not enough to keep our nation competitive in the long run. Not via DoD, or private industry, or pharma, academia, or anything. And that is a real problem for the future of America.
RSA
I wonder if there’s a connection to the dot com boom? (I’m in computer science, and my experience and opinions are doubtless biased by this.) Certainly a lot of bad business ideas were floated, but there was also an enormous amount of innovation in my field, produced at a very fast pace. It might be that decision makers (my impression is that strategies in DoD research are set at a high level and trickle down with some influence) saw this and tried to encourage a faster pace and nearer-term results in their projects and funding. So, for example, my colleagues who have DoD funding can generally count on a steadier stream of funding than NSF, where it used to be common to get five-year grants but now three-year grants are the norm. That consistency is good for them. On the downside, their projects are generally on a larger scale and require a great deal more infrastructure support, and they seem to have to produce demos and host site visits every six months or so. Those expectations are not so good for them.
Randy P
DARPA, DoD’s research agency, still has an enormous budget. In fact, if I read the summary pages here correctly, it’s growing. $2.67B in Fiscal Year 2008, $3.13B in FY2009, and $3.25B in FY2010. But I don’t know how much of this, if any, is considered “basic research”.
I know that DoD has these categories of technology funding that are called 6.1, 6.2, up to something like 6.5 or 6.6 as I recall. 6.1 is Basic Research, and the farther up you go, the more practical and applied it is.
DARPA funds some pretty far out stuff but their basic mission is to try to find technologies that could transition into reality within a few years, so it probably is considered mostly 6.2.
Oh, and @cleek: That’s kind of a simplistic view of the enormous machinery that makes up the armed services. If I build a communications satellite, an infrared sensor, a telephone, or a logistics support computer program, I’m not “killing people”.
ruemara
It’s official. I hate everyone in a brooks brothers suit.
Bill Murray
Also, during the GW Bush years, quite a bit of DoD research money was moved to the Missile Defense Agency. Remember GW was big on Star Wars. IIRC much of this money was not 6.1 research, although the Army, AF and Navy could access some of this money as MDA had trouble finding enough to do on their own, at least initially. Then the wars strapped the overall DoD budget, and cutting DoD lab research was thought to be a good way to make ends meet. Appropriations were used to paper over some of this shortfall, but basic research research was generally not supposed to be done through appropriations, although some basic research was funded.
My small midwestern engineering school had around half a dozen undergraduate and graduate students get involved in research at DoD labs through Palace/Acquire (an AF program) over the last 8 years or so. Most of the students I knew worked at least a few years after graduation for the AF.
DougJ
I don’t know what to make of this. DARPA has a stellar record of funding basic research and I had heard complaints that it was going away a bit, but for math, it’s great now. Tons of money and it’s on problems that I think are important. Wish the problems I work on are among them but the focus is pretty narrow. I don’t know how they chose which problems to fund, but the problems they’re funding are good, if narrow.
DougJ
@The Moar You Know:
Bingo.
That’s the big issue here, and it’s not just DoD. NIH has been very near-term focused as well.
LD50
@Michael G:
Fucking magnets, how do they work?
matoko_chan
Dude, the real scientists got purged under Bush.
Look at the bio-luddite council…..got paid big $ to write shit full of Bible quotes about why we shouldn’t do eSCR and genetic engineering.
DARPA the same thing.
Bush shut down Strong AI and robotics so we could do bunker bomb research and daisy cutters and predator drones.
You think the econopalypse was bad?
Bush set American science back 20 years.
He’ll be right up there with Trofim Lysenko in the history books….except in Texas.
;)
Felanius Kootea (formerly Salt and freshly ground black people)
@cleek: My PhD work was sponsored by both DARPA and the NIH – it involved using 3D modeling to *save* lives. There is DoD research that doesn’t involve figuring out better ways to kill people. In fact, some interesting breast and prostate cancer research has been funded by the DoD (because soldiers get these diseases).
Joseph Nobles
Faith-based engineering degrees – flying buttresses are enough for Man.
DougJ
@matoko_chan:
That’s bullshit. He screwed with the federal bureaucracy to an unusual degree but there was no purge of scientists at NIH or NSF.
Total nonsense. You have no idea what you are talking about.
I hate Bush, but nothing like this ever happened.
Twenty years, my ass. I’ll grant you maybe two or three. He wasn’t great.
Turbulence
@matoko_chan: Bush shut down Strong AI and robotics so we could do bunker bomb research and daisy cutters and predator drones.
Which specific strong AI programs are you thinking of? I used to work at a place that had the words “Artificial Intelligence Laboratory” in its name and I don’t recall anything like what you describe happening. So…what specific programs are you talking about?
mikey
@RSA: Ain’t it the truth. I was just working on updating my resume and a lot of the innovations I worked on just five or six years ago sound totally ho-hum today. The pace of innovation is just out and out fast. But that’s innovation driven by the marketing and advertising space.
What about the energy storage space? That’s the one breakthrough that’s most needed, and who’s doing the research? Duracell?
mikey
Walker
DoD was always a bad place for basic research. You can get some good 6.1 sponsorship out of the Air Force through AFOSR, but the Army is all 6.3 (for those of you who know what these numbers mean). DARPA has always been about deliverables.
If you want basic research, that is what NSF and NIH are for. The NSF is woefully underfunded. Put the money there.
DougJ
@Walker:
Obviously, I agree. But DARPA has been decent, recently, on funding basic research in math, at least.
mclaren
America’s contempt for and neglect of basic scientific research long predates the ascension of the drunk-driving C student to the Oval Office.
Bruce Sterling wrote about the collapse of basic scientific research during the last 10 years in his article “Suicide by Pseudoscience,” but America’s essential abandonment of rationality has been going on since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Now, 60% of Americans disbelieve in Darwinian macroeveolution; more than 60% of Americans believe in the literal physical existence of the devil. 15% of Americans currently believe that the sun rotates around the earth.
What seems to have happened is that Americans recognized the need to emphasize science and rationality and social justice and make sure that our capitalist economic system exhibited some semblance of fairness and workability back during the Cold War, when we needed to defend ourselves from the Soviet Union. Vast amounts of our GDP went into basic scientific R&D during the 50s and 60s and 70s. Then, when the Soviet Union fell apart, America decided that it didn’t need rationality or science or social justice or a fair economic system anymore and jettisoned them. Ronald Reagan’s decision to cancel the Superconducting Super Collider in retrospect marks the beginning of America’s self-decerebration.
We observe similar behavior in other chordates, particularly in tunicates of the genus Didemnun:
Dennett, Daniel C., Consciousness Explained, Little, Brown and Company: Boston, 1991.
LosGatosCA
@Michael G:
You managed to cover all my points, so I will vote instead.
1) Anti-science – there’s no wingnuttery cachet in math, science, or logic,
2) The payoffs were immediate (this quarter) in Iraq and Afghanistan no-bid contracts, and that;s where your Bush-era military funding was going,
3) The people with ethics went to work for Goldman Sacks where they were handsomely rewarded for their superior understanding of the Michael Millken risk reward model of market financing.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
Sorry to be late to the party, but —
You don’t need scientific training if you have God.
The Very Reverend Battleaxe of Knowledge
@mikey:
EEStor. Of course, there’s a cottage industry of naysayers who Just won’t have it! See theeestory.com. Don’t want to put more than one link in here.
This whole situation is nothing new. About 1947, it was: “Thanks for the nukes, now go away.”
john b
as a fairly new contractor doing fundamental research (computational end of hypersonics) for the air force i actually know a little about this. but anyway, the AF at least doesn’t seem to hire all that many new civil servants, they’d rather have someone work as a contractor for twenty years basically doing the same job as a gov employee but without the gov’t benefits,etc. i know as a new employee there it’s pretty demoralizing since i have very little avenue for advancement as a contractor. my likely path will be to work here for a few years and move on somewhere else where i can advance. if they had hired me as a civil servant i might actually stick around use the knowledge that they’re imparting in these early years of my career. oh well.
Nancy Irving
Apparently all the smart Ph.D.’s moved over into financial “products.”
Hard to know where they do the most damage.
ME
This is what happens when a bunch of idealistic parents have children and want them to be doctors, lawyers and business majors.
Other than over-population, that combo alone is responsible for most of the healthcare problems.
One makes the money, one makes policy and one protects their interests. Put ’em all together and you get a mess.
Then, take their profits and invest heavily in real estate, stocks and increasing their profit margins via China (The Walmart concept) and you get an even bigger mess.
… and here we are.
bob h
I made my living in a research center, and a lot of the funding came from the DoD. There have always been complaints like this, but my impression from talking to friends still in the game is that not much has really changed.
Xboxershorts
@cleek:
The DOD and the American Military aren’t the problem. They are still staffed with some of the best and brightest America has to offer.
If I may be so bold as to suggest, what you REALLY detest, is how our sleazy American politicians have USED the DOD and the Military to further a fatally flawed policy of American Empire. Clearly, not all the DOD does is intended or designed to kill, after all, it was DOD research that enabled you to post your misdirected anger.
Focus your anger correctly and you will be much more likely to see favorable results.
Cerberus
It’s all down to the continued defunding of education, specifically higher education like universities, but really, the whole damn tree. We’ve been continually shaving off money for education because when the “budget needs to be balanced, damnitt”, it ends up being the only politically available target to cut because all of the other high-cost targets are untouchable.
As such, schools have been bleeding everywhere. Fewer scholarships bleeding into fewer even student loans means fewer and fewer people can afford higher education even if they have the drive to contribute to scientific or academic research. Labs get more and more defunded having to rely entirely on governmental grants that often get smaller and smaller by federal cuts just to remain up and running much less expand and keep up with technology. Professors get more and more overworked with larger class sizes, more classes, and lower pay with the universities feeling too much of a pinch to replace or supplement teaching or research staff in order to expand and develop. Some universities are seeing the complete loss of certain departments or fields of research just because of the continued shaving off on the margins.
In short, we’ve been bleeding off our education advantage because of right-wing budget ideas popularized in the last 30 years or so. And we’re starting to hit a breaking point.
As much as libertarians like to claim otherwise, pretty much all research and development occurs in the universities by public funding. Defund universities and university labs, you’ll see less development, less new products, less innovation, and a continued falling behind other countries in the development of new marketspaces and technological battles. I mean, we’ve already lost most of high-tech to Japan. Green energy is in the process of being monopolized by Denmark and Spain. Biotech was something we were doing well on but Korea, Japan, and China are starting to kick our asses. Etc…
And what we really need to worry about is what will happen once the rest of the world stumbles onto the fact that American universities aren’t what they once were.
Here in Denmark, the name of America in terms of universities still carries weight. They still want to come to American universities to intern and develop and to learn. The professors are still heavily honored by invitations to American science summits and presentations and the like. Overall, the idea is still potent that America is the place to go, still, for education.
However, foreign universities are improving more and more and are offering a much more full range of diversity in offerings and are definitely much better funded than American universities and are fully covered so that anyone with the ability and the drive can pursue their calling regardless of ability to pay.
And right now, American universities have largely been relying on that reputation to lure over foreign trained scientists to run their labs and teach many of their classes and bring that expertise and creativity to American universities and thus to the American companies they sell them to. Once foreigners find staying in Europe or Asian universities more attractive (i.e. when our reputation can no longer forgive our present reality), we’ll stop seeing a brain drain to us and start seeing more and more of a brain drain away as more of our greatest minds start wondering why they are scrabbling for pennies in an institution that increasingly doesn’t care about them when they could have far more benefits and respect overseas.
I sincerely hope this trend changes, but we really need to start actually valuing education rather than just saying we do. And part of that will need to be shown in tax increases. If we love tax cuts more than we love actually doing what is necessary to educate children, make them competitive and to reign supreme in terms of technical development, we don’t really love education and we privilege temporary and minimal gain rather than long-term financial and intellectual advantage.
And sadly, I think we’re finding that there exists a certain large swath of mostly white people who’d gladly burn everything to the ground if it meant a short-term advantage they wouldn’t have to share with the filthy melaninated.
El Cid
The problem here is the existence of public education. If we would only defund the department of Education and allow local education funded by voluntary donations, businesses, and churches, we wouldn’t have all these problems.
scarshapedstar
I’d say the problem is that the Pentagon’s wet dream is to build an army of billion-dollar robots so that we can fight wars without anyone going home in a coffin. The technology (batteries?!) isn’t there yet, but we’re still throwing truckloads of cash at these stupid shitty robots, while we really ought to be spending more time working on the kind of tech you NEED to build a goddamn Droid first.
Glen Tomkins
What you’ld expect
During the Vietnma era, military research spending shifted away from more general and long-term needs, towards the specific needs of winning a guerrilla war. Just in general, if you’re interested in building the next generation of tanks, or exotic new ways to kill enemy tanks, you’re more likely to fund research in basic science, than if your focus is on beating insurgents, which tends more to soft, hearts and minds, stuff, and more narrowly applied stuff even in terms of hardware.
Without knowing if this is the same thing we’re seeing now in DoD research spending, I certainly think it’s what you’ld expect from focusing on the GWOT, rather than inherently more high-tech threats.
If this is the explanation, I wouldn’t get all worked up about the change. The real problem is that DoD should have any significant voice in research spending priorities at all, that it should be anything but a bit player in that respect. I am generally dubious about the idea that military research does good because it can spin off useful innovation. If you want innovation in high-speed rail or solar conversion, fund those things rather than military research, with some hope that maybe the latter will spin off something useful where the real needs are. Just spend where the real needs are and cut out the middleman.
Wile E. Quixote
@mikey:
The Manhattan Project wasn’t done by the military? Are you stoned or stupid? The only non-military part of the Manhattan project was the civilian scientists, all of whom were being paid by the military to develop something that only the military would want, i.e., a really big fucking bomb so they could kill lots of people. What the fuck are you babbling about?
Wile E. Quixote
@mclaren:
mclaren, I despise you. Why, because you’re too worthless, too lazy, too stupid and too fucking ignorant to spend five goddamned seconds to read the wikipedia entry on the SSSC. If you weren’t such a useless, ignorant, braindead shit golem, if you hadn’t proven, over and over again that you’re every bit as dumb as any Palin worshipping teabagger you’d know that the SSSC was cancelled not by Ronnie Reagan, whose administration was full on behind the SSSC because it was in Texas, the home state of George H.W. Bush, but by Bill Clinton, who decided that we should spend the money on the worthless orbiting piece of shit that is the International Space Station.
But hey, why do research mclaren? You’re just as stupid and lazy as all of those conservative morons I know who keep forwarding me e-mails chock full of bullshit conspiracy theories, theories that they could disprove with five minutes of research on the internet. The self-decerebration of America? If anyone can talk about self- decerebration mclaren it’s you.