US Department of Defense reduces research on emerging threats: a worrying step for national security

US Department of Defense reduces research on emerging threats: a worrying step for national security

What effects does it have to leave artificial intelligence (AI) critical decisions about life and death in combat? This question arose Nicholas Evans, a social scientist at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, in the hope that his research could answer-until this month the funds for his scholarships were shortened by the US Department of Defense (DOD).

The scholarships belonged to 91 social science studies that were discontinued by the DOD, including many that were part of the Minerva Research Initiative. This initiative supports basic social science research in order to better understand new threats to national security.

"A remarkable aspect" by Minerva is that the security term is "broad", says Leonardo Villalón, political scientist at the University of Florida in Gainesville, which is studying the Sahel region in Africa. Minerva grants finance research on global dynamics such as violence, instability, natural disasters, human displacement and migration, he explains.

The Ministry of Defense said in a press release that it "stops" its social science research portfolio as part of a more comprehensive initiative to ensure financial responsibility and to prioritize missionary activities. The letters of termination that were viewed by Nature state that the scholarships no longer met the "program goals or agency priorities" of the DOD.

"The big challenge," says Evans, "is that there is almost no other place in the United States where you can get two and a half million dollars for social science research, and this limits our possibilities for gathering." In 2021 and 2024, he and his colleagues received a total of $ 5.3 million in research grants as part of Minerva. With the reduction of funds, it will lose $ 4.3 million.

national interest

The Minerva initiative was launched in 2008, and the scholarships are managed by research offices that are operated by the army, the Air Force and the Navy. Part of the funds flows into the training of students at US military schools and academies in central areas of social sciences, and many of these scholarships were also discontinued.

Neil Johnson, physicist at George Washington University in Washington, DC, received letters of termination for two scholarships, each worth around $ 2.5 million. One of them, shortly before the end of his five-year term, supported research, such as threats, hatred and extremism via online and offline networks. The other focused on security threats along national borders.

"The reason was really strange," says Johnson. For years he had been participating in calls and briefings in DOD agencies. Among other things, he had informed intelligence officers at military bases about his research results on the subject of weapons and the use of weapons in the healthcare system. Now the end, he explains.

money for military preparation - for example for armor and technology - but not for understanding nature and causes of possible military conflicts, is incredibly short -sighted, says Kathy Baylis, development economist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. "It is almost incomprehensible," she adds. The Minerva Research Initiative is only a fraction of the DOD budget. In its budget application for 2024, the Ministry applied for $ 64.3 million for Minerva of a total of $ 842 billion.

Baylis has also lost her Minerva scholarship. It was awarded in 2023 and enabled her to examine the effects of climate socks on nutritional security in Africa south of the Sahara. It was initially guaranteed for three years, with the option to two more years. After the losses of Minerva and cuts in the scholarships of the U.S. Agency for International Development, Baylis has lost about $ 5 million in the past few weeks. Since then she has been looking for means to pay salaries and to find paths to share the limited data that you and her team have collected. "You simply wasted a lot of money that was spent on research that can no longer be carried out," she says.

Villalón, which examined the effects of climate events on societies in the Sahel and whose reactions for changes, had already issued the majority of $ 1.6 million, which were awarded to him in 2022 as a three -year scholarship. He and his team had only about $ 200,000 left to support data analysis and publication.