“Commercial Applications of Military R&D: U.S. and EU Programs Compared”

Braddon, Derek. (1999) “Commercial Applications of Military R&D: U.S. and EU Programs Compared”. In: UNSPECIFIED, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. (Unpublished)

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Abstract

In the peak years of defence spending, towards the end of the Cold War, global military R&D exceeded $120 billion annually with the U.S. at the forefront of the Western nations’ efforts in this field. Indeed, the U.S. contributed some 35% of the global total, creating a situation at the end of the Cold War where, for example, military R&D in the U.S. was approximately five times that devoted to health expenditure and twenty times that targeted on the environment. At the same time, the U.S. devoted 14% of its defense budget to R&D while, in Europe, France committed almost 15%; Sweden just over 12% and the U.K. over 10%. However, such official estimates rarely capture the true scale and scope of military R&D expenditure, even in those nations that chose to release reasonably accurate data. In the U.S., for example, during President Reagan’s terms of office, it has been estimated that over 20% of the aggregate defence R&D budget was categorized as “black” (under which classification no data is revealed publicly) while, for the U.S. airforce R&D budget, the estimate was as much as 40%. Given the complexities and sometimes deliberate obfuscation by governments in defining terms such as “military,” “research,” and “development,” and the variation in such definitions between countries and over time, the reality of this global resource commitment and its distribution remains a matter for conjecture.

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