NYTimes.com – A Shrinking Military Budget May Take Neighbors With It
- And as the Pentagon confronts the prospect of cutting its budget by about 10 percent over the next decade
- Spending less on military research, they say, could reduce the economy’s long-term growth.
- The Pentagon spends about 12 percent of its budget in that area, about $81.4 billion during the most recent fiscal year. That is roughly 55 percent of all federal spending on research and development.
- research spending has accounted for a roughly similar share — between 9 and 13 percent — of the overall [Pentagon] budget
- the Defense Department had been more successful than other federal agencies because it is the main user of the innovations that it finances.
- The Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health, which also finance large volumes of research, are not major consumers of energy or healthcare
- Another factor is the Pentagon’s relative insulation from politics, which has allowed it to sustain a long-term research agenda in controversial areas. No matter which party is in power, the Pentagon has continued to invest in clean-energy technology, for example, in an effort to find ways to reduce one of its largest budget items, energy costs.
- On the flip side, some scientists say the military’s record of research success is unlikely to continue.
- The government is no longer the dominant source of spending on research and development.
- The Bureau of Economic Analysis estimates that private spending on research and development began to exceed government spending in 1990; other studies put the crossing point a few years earlier.
- By 2007, the private sector was spending about $2 on research for every federal dollar.