In the spring of 1943, Hans Bethe, a theoretical physicist and professor at Cornell University, left Ithaca, New York, and sent a confidential government site in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Once there, he led the theoretical partition of the Manhattan project, which developed the atomic bomb. Bethe is just one of dozens of scholars who have learned wartime services from the Elite American Research Insuert, applying their knowledge training to solve critical national security challenges. After the war, Bet returned to Cornell, where he helped the university transform into a hub of the Cold War - working to invent other innovations (other innovations), one of the world's first particle accelerators. This development, in turn, paves the way for the creation of advanced radar systems and semiconductors.
Bett’s career path represents a lasting and mutually beneficial partnership between American universities and government. Before 1940, the U.S. federal support for scientific research was minimal, mainly limited to agriculture and public health. But during World War II, the government turbocharged its funds for research and development and raised funds again during the Cold War. The government has expanded grants to a variety of academic work that includes conducting basic physics experiments, developing materials to enable hypersonic flights and inventing artificial intelligence algorithms. This funding usually forms the only reliable support for long-term high-risk projects in the private sector, which focus on near-term profits (usually neglected).
Now, President Donald Trump’s administration is moving to cut off the link between academia and the government by freezing billions of dollars in federal grants to top research institutions. The bill may gain political views among those accustomed to understanding academia because it is a left-leaning "ivory tower" isolated from ordinary Americans and private businesses. But this reflects a dangerous misunderstanding of how the United States dominated military and commercially at the outset. Research universities have long experienced the country’s national security through defense research, and they continue to train talent channels that power governments and industries. In fact, reducing support does not represent a principled political stance, a friendly attack on U.S. national security.
The defence partnership developed between universities and the federal government during World War II marked a turning point in the relationship between science and state in the United States. Before the war, most American scientific research was funded by foundations, university donations and private donations. In 1945, Vannevar Bush - founder of Raytheon, who became vice president of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, then directed the government's Office of Scientific Research and Development, which sponsored wartime military research and development and prepared a report called "A". Science, endless boundaries. Funding for federal research has surged from $69 million in 1940 to $720 million in 1944. Bush, who oversees most of the US wartime science mobilization, believes that the United States must not stop promoting university funding. In his report, he emphasized the importance of basic scientific research to the prosperity and security of the United States. Because modern warfare requires “the use of state-of-the-art science and technology”, “colleges, universities and research institutions” will have to “meet the rapidly growing demand for new scientific knowledge industries and governments”, he wrote, “their basic research should be strengthened by the use of public funds.”
The report serves as a blueprint for research support and expansion of federal support from federal universities during peacekeeping. Institutions like Massachusetts Tech, California Tech and Stanford University quickly received new federal grants and turned themselves into a hub for scientific innovation, with many directly linked to defense. For example, MIT created the Electronics Research Laboratory, which (backed by the Department of Defense's $1.5 million annual funding) extends the university's wartime research for microwave ovens, atomic and solid-state physics. By the late 1940s, grants from the Ministry of Defense and the IAEA Committee accounted for 85% of the MIT research budget. The model (where universities received federal funding for defense-oriented research) was spreading in quality, and by 1949, these grants accounted for 96% of all public funding for university research at Sport Science University.
Federally funded university research has become the backbone of global leadership in the United States.
Experiments in federally funded university research have proved to be so successful that they become a permanent feature of U.S. government strategy. After the Soviet Union launched the Sputnik satellite in 1957, the United States responded by establishing the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) to fund advanced risk, high-reward scientific research, including those conducted at universities. An early ARPA project in collaboration with Stanford and UCLA and UCLA led to the development of Arpanet, a direct pioneer of the internet today. The purpose of starting with government investment in secure communications technology was to revolutionize the way information is exchanged around the world.
For its part, universities turn U.S. taxpayers’ dollar into innovations that make the country thriving. There is nothing more obvious than at Stanford, where federal defense contracts and research funds support an innovative culture that helps create Silicon Valley. Faculty, such as Frederick Terman, have actively expanded the university’s statistics and engineering divisions, won more Department of Defense grants to encourage students to commercialize their research, allowing them to set up companies such as Hewlett-Packard and Fairchild Semiconductor that will be the foundation of the computer revolution.
Although many other countries, such as France and the United Kingdom, continue to fund scientific research to the government mainly in government laboratories, the United States has established a decentralized research system fixed in its universities. This decentralized system not only accelerates technological advancement, but also helps defense-related innovations into private trade, giving our industry a clear advantage, and despite extensive investments in technical education, the Soviet Union is still struggling to match. By the end of the 20th century, this federally funded university research system had become the backbone of US global leadership.
After the Cold War, breakthroughs that pushed for the Cold War also continued to drive innovation and underwrite the same alliance for the U.S. national security. But since the early 1990s, the bet has become more complicated. Rapidly developed technologies such as artificial intelligence, hyper-artificial, space systems and quantum computing are creating new national security challenges as well as potential solutions. While private companies such as OpenAI and Google are promoting new AI models, the core technologies that power these systems are developed by researchers trained in university labs maintained by decades of publicly funded research. Without a large amount of investment in universities by the U.S. government, there would not be an AI revolution that could be commercialized.
In fact, academic research is rarely limited to university laboratories. The flow of knowledge and expertise from academia into the industry is the transformation of abstract scientific insights into deployable technologies with strategic and economic value. Many universities have so-called technology transfer offices that can be used to patent inventions, license new technologies and support startups. Through these initiatives, findings proposed on campus are moved to the commercial sector and startup ecosystems, thus preserving the U.S.’s advantage in advanced technology. For example, today’s driverless cars rely on light detection and range (LIDAR) systems derived from MIT federally funded missile tracking research.
The migration of thoughts is accompanied by the migration of people. The graduate program in the fields of engineering, applied physics and computer science in the United States is the most respected graduate program in the world, attracting top talent and acting as an engine of innovation. These programs are incubators for the workforce powered by defense departments, technology industries and government research institutions. For example, Jensen Huang came to the United States to study electrical engineering at Oregon State University and received his master's degree in engineering from Stanford University. The year he graduated from Stanford University, he founded the semiconductor company NVIDIA, which made the AI revolution a reality.
Students trained in federally supported labs often move smoothly between academia, national laboratories and private enterprises. Ashlee Vance's biography of Elon Musk depicts the university's pipeline to spaces: "Musk will personally contact the aerospace departments of top universities and ask students who get the best score on the exam." Poaching from top aerospace departments has shifted SpaceX from a risky startup to the world's premier launch supplier, when the U.S. reliance on Russian launch systems posed a serious national security risk.
However, the advantages of the US decentralized research funding system are no longer guaranteed. Competitors have carefully studied the U.S. model and are actively working to replicate it. In particular, China is competing to close the gap by investing national investments in universities. Now, the People's Liberation Army is working with leading Chinese technology agencies to accelerate the development of dual-purpose technologies, especially in AI, space systems and cyber warfare. However, China is not easy to replicate one advantage: the openness of American universities. Authoritarian countries can flood labs with money, but they cannot create academic freedom and economic driving force that makes the American university system a global talent.
The Trump administration’s recent move is to deprive university labs of funding by freezing the Department of Defense research grants and to institutions it considers ideologically non-compliant, effectively targeting research pipelines that maintain national security innovation. Weakening the university’s defense research partnership is a strategic miscalculation with great impact. Universities are the channels for scientific discovery to produce real-world applications, and talented young people become world-changing entrepreneurs and innovative defenders of national security. The Trump administration may argue that it is willing to continue funding if the university meets its ideological requirements. But in exchange for scientific funding for independence will undermine the rigor and openness that has given the advantage of the American university system for decades.
If the government allows ideological discomfort to undermine its alliance with research universities, it will sacrifice its advantages in innovation and competitiveness. Cutting off the Ministry of Defense to provide funds to universities will not stop defense innovation. But this will help ensure it moves elsewhere. Some talent leans towards private companies, where the pressure to generate short-term profits often excludes focus on projects that align with long-term national security priorities. Other talent and resources may move to foreign agencies eager to take advantage of U.S. layoffs. It is not in principle to get these shifts out of political attitudes—it is self-deception.
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