Does the Military Dominate CS Research?

An anonymous reader asks: "It seems at my university the military has their fingers in much of the computer science research happening on campus: sensors, intelligent agents, autonomous vehicles, supercomputing. Is this the case at other schools around the US? How about outside of the US? How is the military shaping the current state of CS research? What areas of research atrophy because the funding goes to investigating military applications of new technology?"

Comments

Re:The U.S. government is becoming militarized.

[DAldredge]

Which Howard Dean?

He says so much, then comes back the next day to 'correct' himself I am not so sure.

And don't get me started on his mothers comment on how they treated their servents.

Man on the people my ass

They come out of the same budget, dipshit.

[benjamindees]

Either the researchers make a railgun to kill arabs, or they make a mass-launcher to reduce the cost of space exploration/colonization.

I'll leave it to you to guess which one *benefits* society in the end.

Re:They come out of the same budget, dipshit.

[benjamindees]

I'd say that it's with your first point that your argument falls apart. If the US were really concerned with defense, they would post their troops along the border instead of in Iraq. They would be building the missile-defense shield and researching other ways of automating defense instead of researching tactical-nuclear bunker-busters and high-speed mobile artillery units and rail-guns for battleships (battleships?). While the US military has had a few primarily defensive projects in its current incarnation, it has always been an offensive force. The Soviet-era offense=defense argument no longer holds, and probably never did.

At any rate, huge standing armies haven't been necessary since the fall of the Soviet Union; and it's beginning to become clear that they weren't really that necessary/effective before then either. The USSR could have wiped us all out with the contents of one of their germ labs alone.

It was our nuclear arsenal that deterred them, but they had one of those too: MAD. MAD should really stand for Mutually Assured Defense (Spending) since that's really what both the US and the USSR got out of it: an easy way to scare their populations into huge taxes to support a massively bloated "defense" bureaucracy.

There's a common myth that it was the huge military budget of the USSR that did them in. In reality, they spent *far* less than we did and ended up with pretty similar capabilities. It was the lack of a vibrant private sector that ended up stimulating the collapse.

Capitalism killed the USSR; the military just kept them at bay. Regan could have said "I'm going to bankrupt the USSR by building toasters" instead of tanks and the end result would have been the same. In fact, it probably would have happened sooner. The breakaway republics that began the fall of the Soviet Union were no longer interested in the "protection racket" of the USSR and were equally unafraid of the US; they just wanted the Russians off their backs.

Now that we're dealing with nation-states and groups that have little to nothing to lose by threatening us, the nuclear threat won't keep them at bay. The threat of having US soldiers in their homelands doesn't seem to deter them, either; in fact, it just pisses them off even more. Worse, it pisses off the Americans who have to pay absurd taxes to ship those troops over there and maintain them and watch them kill children or die every night on the news. The US military has been largely ineffective in deterring attacks on the US lately. Conventional military forces create more terrorists than they kill. Just ask Israel.

National defense is a negative sum game, the point is to minimize loss, not to eliminate it.

Sure, but what's the easiest way to minimize loss? How much loss has been *minimized* by spending $100 billion in Iraq? I'd argue none. In any case, it hasn't paid for itself and probably won't ever. Sometimes it's cheaper/better *not* to act than to blindly throw money at the military out of fear. Worst case is we lose access to a few oilfields on the other side of the globe that were being kept by some puppet regime that we set up anyways. Or, you know, maybe Israel has to begin to play nice with all of it's neighbors who hate it instead of trying to unilaterally dominate the politics/economy of the region. Either way, I don't care.

Wrt wealth, you'll notice that's why I used the correct term: capital.

Re:Face it

[DAldredge]

Just in case you slept thru civics, The CIVILIAN in DC make the decision to go to war, not the generals.

MORE power, MORE money, MORE leeway to the most violent and militaristic among us