Como a Academia Reforça a Segurança Nacional
Sarah Kreps
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| Universidade Columbia em Nova York, abril de 2025 Ryan Murphy / Reuters |
Na primavera de 1943, Hans Bethe, físico teórico e professor da Universidade Cornell, deixou Ithaca, Nova York, para um local secreto do governo em Los Alamos, Novo México. Uma vez lá, ele liderou a divisão teórica do Projeto Manhattan, que desenvolveu a bomba atômica. Bethe foi apenas um entre dezenas de acadêmicos recrutados de universidades de pesquisa de elite americanas para o serviço em tempos de guerra, aplicando sua formação intelectual para resolver desafios críticos de segurança nacional. Com o fim da guerra, Bethe retornou a Cornell, onde ajudou a transformar a universidade em um centro de pesquisas da época da Guerra Fria, trabalhando para inventar — entre outras inovações — o síncrotron, um dos primeiros aceleradores de partículas do mundo. Esse desenvolvimento, por sua vez, abriu caminho para a criação de sistemas avançados de radar e semicondutores.
A carreira de Bethe simbolizou a parceria duradoura e mutuamente benéfica entre as universidades americanas e o governo. Antes de 1940, o apoio federal dos EUA à pesquisa científica era mínimo e se limitava principalmente à agricultura e à saúde pública. Mas, durante a Segunda Guerra Mundial, o governo turbinou seu financiamento para pesquisa e desenvolvimento e o intensificou novamente durante a Guerra Fria. O governo concedeu subsídios a uma variedade caleidoscópica de iniciativas acadêmicas, que incluíam a realização de experimentos básicos de física, o desenvolvimento de materiais para permitir voos hipersônicos e a invenção de algoritmos de inteligência artificial. Esse financiamento frequentemente constituía o único suporte confiável para projetos de alto risco e longo prazo que a indústria privada, focada em lucros de curto prazo, normalmente negligencia.
Agora, o governo do presidente Donald Trump está se mobilizando para romper o vínculo entre a academia e o governo, congelando bilhões de dólares em verbas federais para as principais instituições de pesquisa. Essa medida pode marcar pontos políticos entre aqueles acostumados a entender a academia como uma "torre de marfim" de esquerda, isolada dos americanos comuns e da iniciativa privada. Mas reflete um perigoso mal-entendido sobre como os Estados Unidos se tornaram militar e comercialmente dominantes. As universidades de pesquisa há muito tempo sustentam, em particular, a segurança nacional do país por meio da pesquisa em defesa, e continuam a treinar o pipeline de talentos que impulsiona o governo e a indústria. Na prática, cortar seu apoio não representa uma postura política baseada em princípios — é um ataque de fogo amigo à segurança nacional dos EUA.
BETTER TOGETHER
The defense partnership that developed between universities and the federal government during World War II marked a turning point in the relationship between science and state in America. Before the war, most American scientific research was funded by foundations, university endowments, and private donations. In 1945, Vannevar Bush—the Raytheon founder who became vice president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and then directed the government’s Office of Scientific Research and Development, which sponsored wartime military R & D—prepared a report called Science, the Endless Frontier. Federal funding for research had already ballooned from $69 million in 1940 to $720 million in 1944. Bush, who had overseen much of the United States’ wartime scientific mobilization, argued that the United States must not stop boosting universities’ funding. In his report, he emphasized the importance of basic science research to the United States’ prosperity and security. Because modern war required “the use of the most advanced scientific techniques,” he wrote, “colleges, universities, and research institutes” would have to “meet the rapidly increasing demands of industry and government for new scientific knowledge,” and so “their basic research should be strengthened by use of public funds.”
This report became a blueprint for maintaining and expanding federal support for university research in peacetime. Institutions such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the California Institute of Technology, and Stanford University quickly secured new federal grants and transformed themselves into hubs of scientific innovation, many with a direct connection to defense. MIT, for example, created the Research Laboratory of Electronics, which—supported by $1.5 million in annual funding from the Defense Department—expanded the university’s wartime research into microwave, atomic, and solid-state physics into engineering applications. By the late 1940s, grants from the Defense Department and the Atomic Energy Commission accounted for 85 percent of MIT’s research budget. This model—in which universities received federal funding for defense-oriented research—quickly spread, and by 1949 such grants made up 96 percent of all the public funding for university research in the physical sciences.
Federally funded university research became the backbone of U.S. global leadership.
The experiment in federally funding university research proved so successful that it became a permanent feature of U.S. government strategy. After the Soviet Union launched the Sputnik satellite in 1957, the United States responded by creating the Advanced Research Projects Agency to fund high-risk, high-reward scientific research—much of it conducted at universities. One early ARPA project, a collaboration with Stanford and UCLA, led to the development of ARPANET, the direct precursor to today’s internet. What began as a government investment in secure communication technology revolutionized the way the whole world exchanged information.
Universities, for their part, converted U.S. taxpayers’ dollars into innovations that made the country prosper. Nowhere was this more evident than at Stanford, where federal defense contracts and research funding supported a culture of innovation that helped create Silicon Valley. Faculty members such as Frederick Terman, who aggressively expanded the university’s statistics and engineering departments to win more Defense Department grants, encouraged students to commercialize their research, enabling the founding of companies such as Hewlett-Packard and Fairchild Semiconductor that would become cornerstones of the computing revolution.
While many other countries, such as France and the United Kingdom, continued to direct government funding for scientific research mainly toward government labs, the United States built a decentralized research system anchored in its universities. This decentralized system not only accelerated technological progress but also helped defense-related innovations flow into private commerce, giving U.S. industry a clear edge that the Soviet Union struggled to match, despite its extensive investments in technical education. By the end of the twentieth century, this system of federally funded university research had become the backbone of the United States’ global leadership.
LONG-TERM RELATIONSHIP
The same alliance that propelled Cold War–era breakthroughs continued to propel innovation after the Cold War—and to underwrite U.S. national security. But since the early 1990s, the stakes have become even more complex. Rapidly advancing technologies such as artificial intelligence, hypersonics, space systems, and quantum computing are creating new national security challenges as well as potential solutions. Although private companies such as OpenAI and Google are popularizing new AI models, the core technologies that power these systems were developed by researchers trained in university labs sustained by decades of publicly funded research. Without substantial U.S. government investment into universities, there would be no AI revolution to commercialize.
Indeed, academic research rarely stays confined to university labs. The flow of knowledge and expertise from academia into industry is what transforms abstract scientific insights into deployable technologies with strategic and economic value. Many universities have so-called technology transfer offices that work to patent inventions, license new technologies, and support startups. Through these initiatives, discoveries made on campuses migrate into the commercial sector and startup ecosystem, preserving the United States’ dominance in advanced technology. Today’s driverless vehicles, for instance, rely on a Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) system that originated from federally funded missile-tracking research at MIT.
This migration of ideas is accompanied by a migration of people. American graduate programs in engineering, applied physics, and computer science are among the most respected in the world, attracting top-tier talent and serving as engines of innovation. These programs function as incubators for the workforce that goes on to power the defense sector, the tech industry, and government research agencies. For example, Jensen Huang came to the United States to study electrical engineering at Oregon State University and earned his master’s in engineering at Stanford. The year after he graduated from Stanford, he founded the semiconductor company Nvidia, which has enabled the AI revolution.
Students trained in federally supported labs often move fluidly between academia, national laboratories, and private industry. Ashlee Vance’s biography of Elon Musk depicts the university-to-SpaceX pipeline: “Musk would personally reach out to the aerospace departments of top colleges and inquire about the students who had finished with the best marks on their exams.” Poaching from top aerospace departments allowed SpaceX to go from a risky startup to the world’s premier launch provider at a time when the United States’ dependence on Russian launch systems posed serious national security risks.
Yet the advantage conferred by the United States’ decentralized research funding system is no longer assured. Rivals have studied the U.S. model closely and are moving aggressively to replicate it. China, in particular, is racing to close the gap by pouring state investment into its universities. The People’s Liberation Army now collaborates with leading Chinese technical institutes to accelerate the development of dual-use technologies, particularly in AI, space systems, and cyberwarfare. But there is one advantage China cannot easily replicate: the openness of U.S. universities. Authoritarian states can flood labs with money, but they cannot manufacture the academic freedom and economic dynamism that make the U.S. university system a magnet for global talent.
IDENTIDADE ERRORADA
As recentes medidas do governo Trump estão retirando o financiamento de laboratórios universitários, congelando bolsas de pesquisa do Departamento de Defesa para instituições que considera ideologicamente incompatíveis — visando, na prática, os próprios canais de pesquisa que sustentam a inovação em segurança nacional. Enfraquecer a parceria entre universidade e defesa é um erro de cálculo estratégico com consequências de longo alcance. As universidades são os canais pelos quais as descobertas científicas geram aplicações reais e jovens talentosos se tornam empreendedores transformadores e defensores inovadores da segurança nacional. O governo Trump pode argumentar que está disposto a continuar financiando se as universidades se alinharem às suas demandas ideológicas. Mas ceder a independência em troca de financiamento científico minaria o rigor e a abertura que deram ao sistema universitário americano sua vantagem por décadas.
Se o governo permitir que o desconforto ideológico interrompa sua aliança com as universidades de pesquisa, sacrificará sua vantagem em inovação e competitividade. Cortar o financiamento do Departamento de Defesa para as universidades não interromperá a inovação em defesa. Mas ajudará a garantir que ela se desloque para outros lugares. Alguns talentos migrarão para empresas privadas, onde a pressão por lucro a curto prazo muitas vezes impede o foco em projetos alinhados às prioridades de segurança nacional de longo prazo. Outros talentos e recursos podem migrar para instituições estrangeiras ávidas por capitalizar a retração dos EUA. Permitir essas mudanças por interesse político não é uma questão de princípios — é contraproducente.
SARAH KREPS é Professora John L. Wetherill e Diretora do Instituto de Política Tecnológica da Universidade Cornell, além de Pesquisadora Sênior Não Residente da Brookings Institution. De 1999 a 2007, serviu na Força Aérea dos EUA, onde ajudou a desenvolver sistemas avançados de vigilância e reconhecimento aéreo.
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