A hidden cost of military research: less national security - science and politics

By any pertinent measure -- money, percentage of gross national product, or relative numbers of scientists and en- giners devoted to military research and development -- the United States allo- cates far more resources to this area than any of its industrial competitors. And that disparity will grow if the Strate- gic Defense Initiative accelerates from preliminary planning to big spending.

Of the estimated $125 billion that will be devoted to civilian and military R&D in the U.S. this year, $61 billion will be spent by the federal government; almost all the rest will be spent by industrial firms paying for their own research. Because it comes in big chunks and is unaffected by business's impatience for profits, Washington's bundle is especially potent in setting the direction of science and technology.

And that direction has been toward security-related activities, not only in the Defense Department but also in the CIA, NASA, and the Energy Department. In President Carter's last year in office the federal government's military and civilian research and development budgets stood at about $15 billion each, reflecting the long postwar practice of keeping them about neck and neck. Then, accelerating a military buildup that had been planned under Carter, the Reagan administration greatly enlarged the Pentagon's R&D budget.

Meanwhile, when inflation is taken into account, there has been a reduction in federal support for civilian research, particularly in applied fields, which yield commercially important advances in energy, health, and industry. There has also been a radical shift in the government's civilian research priorities; the balance of spending has shifted toward basic research, mainly in universities. This research is needed, but by definition it's remote from the market place and, because virtually all of it is openly published, the whole world can make use of it -- and does.

The spending by America's main industrial rivals is markedly different. Besides Japan's aforementioned two per cent R&D allocation for the military, there's West Germany's ten per cent and the Southeast Asian nations' virtual zero. The latest figures show the U.S. spending 1.9 per cent of its GNP on civilian research. For Japan the number is 2.6 per cent, and for West Germany, 2.4 per cent. The congressional Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) sums up the situation as follows: ''In the Japanese economy, R&D directed at commercial applications is given a high priority; in the United States, commercial R&D suffers by comparison.''

The National Academy of Engineering recently compared the American and Japanese electronics industries and found that ''Japan's semiconductor industry is made up of at least ten major entities [corporate or government research centers] that pursue long-range research and development on a scale matched by only a few American companies.''

Laboratories are today's gold mines, and scientists and engineers are the producers of the precious ore -- new knowledge and techniques for employing it. Oddly enough, the Pentagon's share of this manpower has never been measured accurately, though it's obviously substantial. The National Academy of Engineering and the OTA both estimate that defense industries absorb about 20 per cent of the nation's engineers. But some observers think the true figure is far higher. Lloyd Dumas is a professor of political economy and economics at the University of Texas at Dallas and the author of The Overburdened Economy, a critique of American industrial performance. He estimates that 30 per cent of U.S. engineers do military work, and notes that Japan not only undertakes a negligible amount of defense research but also, with a population only half that of America, trains more engineers. Deduct the engineers going into military work in the U.S., Dumas says, and it turns out that Japan's civilian industries are employing more than half again as many engineers as their American counterparts.