The Pentagon Goes to School

By William D. Hartung, a TomDispatch regular and a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and the author of that institute’s forthcoming issue brief, “Inside the ICBM Lobby: Special Interests or the Public Interest?” He is also the author of Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex. Originally published at TomDispatch.

The divestment campaigns launched last spring by students protesting Israel’s mass slaughter in Gaza brought the issue of the militarization of American higher education back into the spotlight.

Of course, financial ties between the Pentagon and American universities are nothing new. As Stuart Leslie has pointed out in his seminal book on the topic, The Cold War and American Science, “In the decade following World War II, the Department of Defense (DOD) became the biggest patron of American science.” Admittedly, as civilian institutions like the National Institutes of Health grew larger, the Pentagon’s share of federal research and development did decline, but it still remained a source of billions of dollars in funding for university research.

And now, Pentagon-funded research is once again on the rise, driven by the DOD’s recent focus on developing new technologies like weapons driven by artificial intelligence (AI). Combine that with an intensifying drive to recruit engineering graduates and the forging of partnerships between professors and weapons firms and you have a situation in which many talented technical types could spend their entire careers serving the needs of the warfare state. The only way to head off such a Brave New World would be greater public pushback against the military conquest (so to speak) of America’s research and security agendas, in part through resistance by scientists and engineers whose skills are so essential to building the next generation of high-tech weaponry.

The Pentagon Goes to School

Yes, the Pentagon’s funding of universities is indeed rising once again and it goes well beyond the usual suspects like MIT or Johns Hopkins University. In 2022, the most recent year for which full data is available, 14 universities received at least — and brace yourself for this — $100 million in Pentagon funding, from Johns Hopkins’s astonishing $1.4 billion (no, that is not a typo!) to Colorado State’s impressive $100 million. And here’s a surprise: two of the universities with the most extensive connections to our weaponry of the future are in Texas: the University of Texas at Austin (UT-Austin) and Texas A&M.

In 2020, Texas Governor Greg Abbott and former Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy appeared onstage at a UT-Austin ceremony to commemorate the creation of a robotics lab there, part of a new partnership between the Army Futures Command and the school. “This is ground zero for us in our research for the weapons systems we’re going to develop for decades to come,” said McCarthy.

Not to be outdone, Texas A&M is quietly becoming the Pentagon’s base for research on hypersonics — weapons expected to travel five times the speed of sound. Equipped with a kilometer-long tunnel for testing hypersonic missiles, that school’s University Consortium for Applied Hypersonics is explicitly dedicated to outpacing America’s global rivals in the development of that next generation military technology. Texas A&M is also part of the team that runs the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the (in)famous New Mexico facility where the first nuclear weapons were developed and tested as part of the Manhattan Project under the direction of Robert Oppenheimer.

Other major players include Carnegie Mellon University, a center for Army research on the applications of AI, and Stanford University, which serves as a feeder to California’s Silicon Valley firms of all types. That school also runs the Technology Transfer for Defense (TT4D) Program aimed at transitioning academic technologies from the lab to the marketplace and exploring the potential military applications of emerging technology products.

In addition, the Pentagon is working aggressively to bring new universities into the fold. In January 2023, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin announced the creation of a defense-funded research center at Howard University, the first of its kind at a historically black college.

Given the campus Gaza demonstrations of last spring, perhaps you also won’t be surprised to learn that the recent surge in Pentagon spending faces increasing criticism from students and faculty alike. Targets of protest include the Lavender program, which has used AI to multiply the number of targets the Israeli armed forces can hit in a given time frame. But beyond focusing on companies enabling Israel’s war effort, current activists are also looking at the broader role of their universities in the all-American war system.

For example, at Indiana University research on ties to companies fueling the killings in Gaza grew into a study of the larger role of universities in supporting the military system as a whole. Student activists found that the most important connection involved that university’s ties to the Naval Surface Warfare Center, Crane Division, whose mission is “to provide acquisition, engineering… and technical support for sensors, electronics, electronic warfare, and special warfare weapons.” In response, student activists have launched a “Keep Crane Off Campus” campaign.

A Science of Death or for Life?

Graduating science and engineering students increasingly face a moral dilemma about whether they want to put their skills to work developing instruments of death. Journalist Indigo Olivier captured that conflict in a series of interviews with graduating engineering students. She quotes one at the University of West Florida who strongly opposes doing weapons work this way: “When it comes to engineering, we do have a responsibility… Every tool can be a weapon… I don’t really feel like I need to be putting my gifts to make more bombs.” By contrast, Cameron Davis, a 2021 computer engineering graduate from Georgia Tech, told Olivier about the dilemma faced by so many graduating engineers: “A lot of people that I talk to aren’t 100% comfortable working on defense contracts, working on things that are basically going to kill people.” But he went on to say that the high pay at weapons firms “drives a lot of your moral disagreements with defense away.”

The choice faced by today’s science and engineering graduates is nothing new. The use of science for military ends has a long history in the United States. But there have also been numerous examples of scientists who resisted dangerous or seemingly unworkable military schemes. When President Ronald Reagan announced his “Star Wars” missile defense plan in 1986, for instance, he promised, all too improbably, to develop an impenetrable shield that would protect the United States from any and all incoming nuclear-armed missiles. In response, physicists David Wright and Lisbeth Gronlund circulated a pledge to refuse to work on that program. It would, in the end, be signed by more than 7,000 scientists. And that document actually helped puncture the mystique of the Star Wars plan, a reminder that protest against the militarization of education isn’t always in vain.

Scientists have also played a leading role in pressing for nuclear arms control and disarmament, founding organizations like the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (1945), the Federation of American Scientists (1945), the global Pugwash movement (1957), the Council for a Livable World (1962), and the Union of Concerned Scientists (1969). To this day, all of them continue to work to curb the threat of a nuclear war that could destroy this planet as a livable place for humanity.

A central figure in this movement was Joseph Rotblat, the only scientist to resign from the Manhattan Project over moral qualms about the potential impact of the atomic bomb. In 1957, he helped organize the founding meeting of the Pugwash Conference, an international organization devoted to the control and ultimate elimination of nuclear weapons. In some respects Pugwash was a forerunner of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), which successfully pressed for the U.N. Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which entered into force in January 2021.

Enabling Endless War and Widespread Torture

The social sciences also have a long, conflicted history of ties to the Pentagon and the military services. Two prominent examples from earlier in this century were the Pentagon’s Human Terrain Program (HTS) and the role of psychologists in crafting torture programs associated with the Global War on Terror, launched after the 9/11 attacks with the invasion of Afghanistan.

The HTS was initially intended to reduce the “cultural knowledge gap” suffered by U.S. troops involved in counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan and Iraq early in this century. The theory was that military personnel with a better sense of local norms and practices would be more effective in winning “hearts and minds” and so defeating determined enemies on their home turf. The plan included the deployment of psychologists, anthropologists, and other social scientists in Human Terrain Teams alongside American troops in the field.

Launched in 2007, the program sparked intense protests in the academic community, with a particularly acrimonious debate within the American Anthropological Association. Ed Liebow, the executive director of the association, argued that its debate “convinced a very large majority of our members that it was just not a responsible way for professional anthropologists to conduct themselves.” After a distinctly grim history that included “reports of racism, sexual harassment, and payroll padding,” as well as a belief by many commanders that Human Terrain Teams were simply ineffective, the Army quietly abandoned the program in 2014.

An even more controversial use of social scientists in the service of the war machine was the role of psychologists as advisors to the CIA’s torture programs at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, the Guantánamo Bay detention center in Cuba, and other of that agency’s “black sites.” James E. Mitchell, a psychologist under contract to U.S. intelligence, helped develop the “enhanced interrogation techniques” used by the U.S during its post-9/11 “war on terror,” even sitting in on a session in which a prisoner was waterboarded. That interrogation program, developed by Mitchell with psychologist John Bruce Jessom, included resorting to “violence, sleep deprivation, and humiliation.”

The role of psychologists in crafting the CIA’s torture program drew harsh criticism within the profession. A 2015 report by independent critics revealed that the leaders of the American Psychological Association had “secretly collaborated with the administration of President George W. Bush to bolster a legal and ethical justification for the torture of prisoners swept up in the post-Sept. 11 war on terror.” Over time, it became ever clearer that the torture program was not only immoral but remarkably ineffective, since the victims of such torture often told interrogators what they wanted to hear, whether or not their admissions squared with reality.

That was then, of course. But today, resistance to the militarization of science has extended to the growing use of artificial intelligence and other emerging military technologies. For example, in 2018, there was a huge protest movement at Google when employees learned that the company was working on Project Maven, a communications network designed to enable more accurate drone strikes. More than 4,000 Google scientists and engineers signed a letter to company leadership calling for them to steer clear of military work, dozens resigned over the issue, and the protests had a distinct effect on the company. That year, Google announced that it would not renew its Project Maven contract, and pledged that it “will not design or deploy AI” for weapons.

Unfortunately, the lure of military funding was simply too strong. Just a few years after those Project Maven protests, Google again began doing work for the Pentagon, as noted in a 2021 New York Times report by Daisuke Wakabayashi and Kate Conger. Their article pointed to Google’s “aggressive pursuit” of the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability project, which will attempt to “modernize the Pentagon’s cloud technology and support the use of artificial intelligence to gain an advantage on the battlefield.” (Cloud technology is the term for the delivery of computing services over the internet.)

Meanwhile, a cohort of Google workers has continued to resist such military projects. An October 2021 letter in the British Guardian from “Google and Amazon workers of conscience” called on the companies to “pull out of Project Nimbus [a $1.2 billion contract to provide cloud computing services to the Israeli military and government] and cut all ties with the Israeli military.” As they wrote then, “This contract was signed the same week that the Israeli military attacked Palestinians in the Gaza Strip — killing nearly 250 people, including more than 60 children. The technology our companies have contracted to build will make the systematic discrimination and displacement carried out by the Israeli military and government even crueler and deadlier for Palestinians.”

Of course, their demand seems even more relevant today in the context of the war on Gaza that had then not officially begun.

The Future of American Science

Obviously, many scientists do deeply useful research on everything from preventing disease to creating green-energy options that has nothing to do with the military. But the current increases in weapons research could set back such efforts by soaking up an ever larger share of available funds, while also drawing ever more top talent into the military sphere.

The stakes are particularly high now, given the ongoing rush to develop AI-driven weaponry and other emerging technologies that pose the risk of everything from unintended slaughter due to system malfunctions to making war more likely, given the (at least theoretical) ability to limit casualties for the attacking side. In short, turning back the flood of funding for military research and weaponry from the Pentagon and key venture capital firms will be a difficult undertaking. After all, AI is already performing a wide range of military and civilian tasks. Banning it altogether may no longer be a realistic goal, but putting guardrails around its military use might still be.

Such efforts are, in fact, already underway. The International Committee for Robot Arms Control (ICRAC) has called for an international dialogue on “the pressing dangers that these systems pose to peace and international security and to civilians.” ICRAC elaborates on precisely what these risks are: “Autonomous systems have the potential to accelerate the pace and tempo of warfare, to undermine existing arms controls and regulations, to exacerbate the dangers of asymmetric warfare, and to destabilize regional and global security, [as well as to] further the indiscriminate and disproportionate use of force and obscure the moral and legal responsibility for war crimes.”

The Future of Life Institute has underscored the severity of the risk, noting that “more than half of AI experts believe there is a one in ten chance this technology will cause our extinction.”

Instead of listening almost exclusively to happy talk about the military value of AI by individuals and organizations that stand to profit from its adoption, isn’t it time to begin paying attention to the skeptics, while holding back on the deployment of emerging military technologies until there is a national conversation about what they can and can’t accomplish, with scientists playing a central role in bringing the debate back to earth?

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

13 comments

  1. Randall Flagg

    >Not to be outdone, Texas A&M is quietly becoming the Pentagon’s base for research on hypersonics — weapons expected to travel five times the speed of sound. Equipped with a kilometer-long tunnel for testing hypersonic missiles, that school’s University Consortium for Applied Hypersonics is explicitly dedicated to outpacing America’s global rivals in the development of that next generation military technology. Texas A&M is also part of the team that runs the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the (in)famous New Mexico facility where the first nuclear weapons were developed and tested as part of the Manhattan Project under the direction of Robert Oppenheimer.

    Mr. Hartung, wouldn’t it more accurate to say “try to keep up with America’s global rivals?’… Somebody has already been there and done that.
    A quick search and first hit.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kh-47M2_Kinzhal#:~:text=The Kh-47M2 Kinzhal (Russian,top speed of Mach 10.

    But, I could be wrong.

    Hmm, wouldn’t it more accurate to say “try to keep up with America’s global rivals?’…

    Reply
    1. Joker

      hypersonics — weapons expected to travel five times the speed of sound.

      This text must have been written back in the day when hypersonic weapons were still theoretical.

      Reply
    2. Jams O'Donnell

      According to Andrei Martyanov, the US is at least ten and possibly twenty years behind Russia in hypersonic weapons, and by the time it catches up, Russia will have advanced in turn. Also to bear in mind – Russian planes, tanks etc. have shown themselves in the Ukraine to be much more robust, effective, cheaper and more easily and quickly produced than equivalent western products. This has been largely the case since the Korean War, where the Mig-15 met and outperformed the US ‘Sabre’.

      Reply
  2. Patrick Morrison

    > — and brace yourself for this — $100 million in Pentagon funding, from Johns Hopkins’s astonishing $1.4 billion (no, that is not a typo!) to Colorado State’s impressive $100 million.

    Could it be $100 billion?

    This has been going on a long, long time. Steve Blank’s talk ‘The Secret History of Silicon Valley’, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo covers how WW2 electronic warfare needs drove investment there.

    Reply
    1. Paul Jurczak

      14 universities received at least — and brace yourself for this — $100 million in Pentagon funding

      No. At least $100 million each.

      Reply
  3. The Rev Kev

    It’s not just the hard science people that the Pentagon recruit but they have also recruited from the soft sciences. During the war in Afghanistan they set up what they called the Human Terrain System. They recruited from the social science disciplines such as archaeology, anthropology, sociology, political science, historians, regional studies and linguistics and sent them out into the field attached to military patrols. Some were just grad students. The idea was that these people using their training would be able to tell the military who to concentrate on killing and who they could use to undermine the Taliban. In the end four of these people were killed with one woman being doused in gasoline and set on fire. The program was quietly wound down and kinda went away-

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Terrain_System

    https://www.counterpunch.org/2015/06/29/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-human-terrain-system/

    Reply
  4. Randall Flagg

    Failing in my first comment to mention I can also imagine that in the future when there is talk of cutting the absurd amounts of money spent on the Pentagon there will be screams of “No!!! Think of all the money that will have to be cut from University budgets if the DoD budgets are reduced!”
    To me this is another way the MIC ingrains itself into everyday American lives and budgets. No one is in favor of anything that takes away their meal ticket.
    We already have more and more retired members of the military and intelligence communities moving into Congress each election cycle so DoD cuts are less likely to happen.

    Reply
  5. upstater

    Sigh… quite a change when DoD contracts were being run off campuses along with ROTC 50 years ago. How times change.

    Syracuse University spun off Syracuse Reseach Corporation, now SRC for this reason. It has become a 1500 employee behemoth, but I can’t dig up annual revenues. It’s a 501c3, so you could make tax deductible contributions! There are many such spin-offs; I briefly worked at IIT Reseach Institute (spun off Illinois Institute of Technology) that was tied in to Griffiss Air base until they wanted me to work on statistical process control at nuclear weapons facility. I was encouraged to pursue other opportunities.

    Reply
  6. petal

    A lot of biomedical scientists around me have been applying for DOD grants for a long time. It can sometimes be an easier way to get funding than from the NIH. Some people don’t qualify for NIH grants, or it’s nearly impossible to get them because the % is so low. My own project applied for a DOD grant because it was one of the few ways for us to potentially get funding. These are all people attempting to treat and cure disease. The thought is “If NIH won’t fund, then go and try DOD, so maybe you can at least keep your job and keep your project going.” There’s a fundamental problem with research funding in this country and the Pentagon is taking advantage of that.

    Reply
  7. ilsm

    I was in the business of R&D for a while in an AF lab.

    There are seven categories of funding from basic research to design. Universities mainly do the early science, some may get into applying science to needs, then the science has to go to a big usual suspects developer.

    I did not see how the transition worked. A chance for error.

    I have been out of that since 2002.

    Reply
  8. LY

    For those who don’t know, Johns Hopkins runs Applied Physics Laboratory, and MIT runs Lincoln Labs.

    The bigger problem is that the military is one of the few well-funded institutions where it’s still fashionable to be forward looking, look at things from a global perspective, and plan long term. And it has been this way for a long time, with the key role the military has played in the rise of Silicon Valley, or the research done by Bell Labs for WWII and beyond (signal processing work done for radar, sonar, etc).

    Reply
  9. Ranger Rick

    Ha, this doesn’t even begin to cover it. The local ROTCs all require their students to wear full uniforms all day at least one day per week, so the international students (and even the domestic ones) get an eyeful of the soldiers, airmen, marines and sailors they’re rubbing shoulders with.

    DARPA also funds all kinds of not-explicitly-weapons-yet research, from computer interfaces to psychology.

    Reply
    1. scott s.

      Yes, I was one of those evil ROTC midshipmen, though it wasn’t until after Viet Nam ended that we had to wear uniform all day on drill day. I was a physics major, the department’s building (Sterling Hall) had massive cracks due to the bombing of Army Math Research Center that was located there (bombing didn’t affect the center, but killed a researcher who had nothing to do with it).

      We (USN) did a lot of work with JHU-APL which has its own campus; really only marginally connected to the actual school.

      Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *