4 ms·

America’s entire research and academic industry is rooted in military.

• jpcom 2y ago
  >academic industry How do you mean?
  • dataviz1000 2y ago
    Classic example of academic research funded by the military. > In 1985, the wreck was finally located by a joint French–American expedition led by Jean-Louis Michel of IFREMER and Robert Ballard of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, originally on a mission to find two nuclear Cold War submarines.
    • fastball 2y ago
      This is referencing the Titanic, for anyone confused.
  • fuzztester 2y ago
    see: the secret history of silicon valley, by steve blank. I think there is both an article and a video.
    • jpcom 2y ago
      thanks a TON for this recommendation it was really eye-opening listening to his presentation and the detailed history, as well as the cat-and-mouse game escapades. Very well put-together presentation and yeah, really makes me reflect on the specialness of Silicon Valley and those relationships.
      • fuzztester 2y ago
        most welcome. i found it interesting too. I had an uncle, an electrical engineer, who went there for higher studies, to stanford, got his PhD (typical common route for many talented Indians, at least up to MS, doctorate is less common), was mentioned in who's who in electrical engineering, worked there, married an American woman, and became a US citizen, and a hardware entrepreneur, in Sunnyvale, California, but I didn't hear about this from him, i just read it on the net. cheers.
• ekianjo 2y ago
  Yes. SV included.
• tsimionescu 2y ago
  The story is more complex than that. On the one hand you are right, there are military money and people involved in essentially every high-tech firm and university project in the USA. On the other hand, a lot of the time this is done as an easy way of subsidizing a potentially useful civil technology without going into the weeds of Congress and public discussions about how to allocate grants and so on. The military budget acts partly as a discretionary fund that the US government can use to fund (civil) R&D as it sees fit without as much red tape. Noam Chomsky wrote about this from his experience at MIT. Especially in the 70s and 80s, MIT was getting lots of grant money from defense spending, and every professor could access it by simply putting some fictitious "possible military applications" on their research into shortest-path algorithms or what have you. Of course, this plays it both ways, because providing the money, even as a thinly veiled subsidy, also allows you to come back later and assert some control if it does turn out it could be beneficial for "defense" purposes.
• ryukoposting 2y ago
  Yeah, more or less. The US uses the DoD as its private-sector R&D funding firehose. They aren't writing Raytheon a $800B check and saying "make us some missiles." They might write a $4B check for some missiles, but that leaves $876B left over based on 2023's defense spending numbers. Most of the money goes to stuff you wouldn't even think of as "military equipment." Stuff like medical devices, security, communications, networking, search-and-rescue, and so on. Morally neutral-to-good things that the military needs, but so does everyone else. As a business, the difference between the DoD and the rest of the market is that the DoD is a single institution with the budget and willingness to bankroll your R&D. Sometimes it's the only feasible way to fund development of a genuine, morally good product.