We are working to inspire a European awakening on the need to mobilize basic science for European Security. You can join our effort, and read more on: https://frontier.ngo.
The history of modern science has always been of interest to me. Especially the incredible advancements in our understanding of physics stands as a testement to human ability.
The WWII years, and the role of science in the war, led the United States of America onto a very different path, than expected. And one person had the role of connecting policy with progress, like no other. That person was Vannevar Bush, the Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) during the war years.
This is no a biography of Bush, but my learnings from reading his post-war proposal to President Roosevelt: “Science – The Endless Frontier“.
This 260 page proposal, outlines how Science played a consequential role in winning the War, and what the USA must do use Science as a source of wealth, security and welfare in the years after.
The reason I’m rereading this proposal, is due to the situation we face in Europe in 2025. We are not yet engulfed in a world-war, and I hope we never will be again, but the tectonic plates of geopolitics are shifting.
Vannevar Bush’s new scientific world order only partly materialized, but it has been wildly successful in making the USA a de-facto monopoly in applying basic research to military applications. So much so, that the rest of the world has been out of the completion for decades. While Europeans have been and are the source of many of the core discoveries of nature, and the education of scientists, it has been the US defense-research-industrial complex that brought the capital and scale to operationalize these breakthroughs.
From a simple economic argument, it may be reasonable for European countries to “let” their largest and most essential ally conduct the research, under the assumption that it is to be shared (in time). Now, with an increasingly isolationist US, we Europeans are revealed to be naked, when it comes to generating technological strategic advantages in the theater of war.
The knock-on effects of the US system, is that their industries has had picking-rights for the breakthroughs coming out of the national laboratories and military funded research projects. Reading Bush, it is not a surprise, as it was part of the design to begin with. We may not feel richer by buying cannons and having standing armies. But investing in improving the effectiveness of these, through basic scientific research and their applications, has shown to be a core economic driver – turning an insurance cost into an investment scheme.
And now to the endless frontier.
I will provide verbatim quotes from the 70th anniversary edition of the proposal, published by the National Science Foundation in 2020 – you can find it here (download pdf).
A letter from the President
In 1944, the USA was winning the war, the European “theater” was closing the curtains, on a horrific war that by the advancement of airborne radar, sonar, and the industrial buildup of the remote US, being won by the allies, against the most technological advanced nation in the world, Germany.
Roosevelt, aware of the pivotal role of radar, (analog) computers and the then-secret Manhattan Project constructing the atomic bomb – asks his closest scientific advisor, Vannevar Bush four questions:
The questions are part of a broader strategy to advance welfare, health and industrial capabilities as well as national security.
Now, 81 years later, I feel comfortable that Europe by and large, have a functioning welfare system overall, and we are leading health.
Where we lack power is in the connection between basic research and european security. I studied the economic “spillovers” from military-scientific discovery to commercial industries as by of my MBA dissertation, and found a clear link between the post-war investments in such research, and its spread to civilian applications. The link fades as we see the Cold War end. It take this as evidence, that within the basic research for military applications is a scale dependent (or mission dependent) threshold, where we don’t see spillover when the investments fall below. The computer, the Internet, laser, transistor, nuclear power, satellites, space access, GPS navigation, materials such as teflon, and much else can trace its existence to military research funding. The same goes for a myriad of medical and biological applications, that I have no qualifications talking about.
Bush’s reply
In the summary of the report, Bush highlights the premise that scientific progress is the basic driver for future prosperity. While some may see this as implicit today, I also expect that the stagnation of science-driven progress may lead some to a different conclusion. We call the application of technology “tech”, (as if selling advertising to consumers, using a network of computers invented for bomb design, together with software invented for scientific dissemination within national labs, – technology).
True scientific advancement turned into technology, looks like the difference between whale oil for lighting and electricity in every home. Like the difference between courier and the telephone. Rarely, does a new fundamental realization, like the unification of the laws of electricity and magnetism, lead to an explosion of industry, but when it does, the wheel of time turns. We saw another turn with atomic, nuclear and particle physics, but these discoveries have all come so fast, that we are still decades away from their full economic potential.
“We cannot again rely on our allies to hold of the enemy while we struggle to catch up”.
What a lesson to have learned, dripping with irony, we Europeans are now in the reverse situation.
Another key-priority of the post-war USA was to revert to a peace-time economy.
Note the disheartening conclusion: “Moreover, we cannot any longer depend upon Europe as a major source of this scientific capital”. Europe was bombed, industrially kaput, and those able, had already fled to the US.
We can still hope that the USA and Europe will remain allied, and share our knowledge, but reading these lessons, in reverse, redundancy is essential to retain “scientific capital” for our own interests.
Instructions?
Reading the outlines of what Bush proposes to stimulate basic science, we may feel wiser today. Two decades of venture capital and co-financing schemes has restructured strategic investments into market demand-driven popularity contests. Our funding systems are largely either public government contracts with limited risk tolerance (i.e. COTS, or foreign military sales from the US), or, lack-luster attempts at market-driven R&D, where our governments imagine that a defence company somehow have other customers to share the risk of research with.
What is really needed, is healthy funding, that is structured to mitigate risk, rather than avoid it. The famed DARPA model is part of this, but many other examples exist, where risk and reward relative to investments was weighed differently, due to a sense of urgency and national security. The ICBM programmes, the hydrogen bomb problem, the electronic warfare, command and control and signals intelligence programmes that later led to the formation of “Silicon Valley”, are all examples of cost-benefit driven allocations of capital, that dried up at the end of the Cold War.
DARPA: The Heilmeier Catechism
Looking at a EU European Defence Fund set of “calls”, is like reading a shopping list for former US military programmes. What we Europeans have forgotten is that going from zero to one, requires some someone to believe that a world with “one” is worth overcoming the risks.
DARPA exists to structure programs around this problem. They use the following eight criteria to help guide project selection.
Imagine if defence acquisitions started here, rather than by specifying the color scheme of the truck:
- What are you trying to do? Articulate your objectives using absolutely no jargon.
- How is it done today, and what are the limits of current practice?
- What is new in your approach and why do you think it will be successful?
- Who cares? If you are successful, what difference will it make?
- What are the risks?
- How much will it cost?
- How long will it take?
- What are the mid-term and final “exams” to check for success?
The role of Government in Science
Apart from the mention confusion of funding mechanisms, leading to a profusion of market-driven models, rather than rewarding curiosity and competence, we have seen governments taking an active role in science over the decades, largely with the argument that higher education is key to our competitiveness.
Bush argues that Government has a particular in funding and conducting research. What really interests me, is the match between the need and the required resources to produce the solution. We as Europe may need a new compact nuclear energy source, for mission autonomy. If it existed, we would potentially buy it from the vendor as a COTS device. But nuclear technologies, due to materials, techniques and facilities involved, comes with a severe capital expenditure to even research, let alone develop technologically. The “zero to one” problem here, is that it will be commercially infeasible to treat this as a purely market-driven problem to solve.
Bush argues that there is a threshold for such considerations. In the US, we saw a system of national laboratories grow, to provide “shared resources” for such development.
Freedom vs mission
Bush and his scientific associates were yearning after freedom of inquiry, after the restraints of the secret war-time projects.
My reading is that while we could do with more “freedom of inquiry” at the Universities, he also outlines how science was institutionalized in the war programmes. The Manhattan project originally dictated the conscription of Nobel laureates and military police alike. At the end, the scientists remained civilians, but confined on the mesa of Los Alamos, yet under more discipline than they liked.
I have experienced the thrill of scientific collaboration at the scale of the Manhattan project, at CERN, when the Large Hadron Collider came together, and we started the physics program that led to the discovery of the Higgs Particle in 2012. From my personal experience, I believe that the confluence of strong missions, the right resources (and management), aligning with the interests of the scientists involved, is what it takes to get war-time science projects to work.
Chapter 3 – Relation to National Security
I will reproduce the entire section on national security here.
The Importance of Basic Research
Call to action
