Since the outset of the Palestine Solidarity encampments at universities across the country in 2024, student demands have been relatively similar on two accounts: divest from weapons manufacturing companies and Zionist institutions; and disclose institutional assets and investments. Less frequent demands point to universities’ ties to the military industry by means of research funding. Incoming research funding from the likes of the Department of Defense and private weapons companies complicates the morality of institutional complicity with genocide and, therefore, the concept of divestment. At universities across the U.S., many student researchers are implicated in the civilianization and technologization of warfare starting at the very foundation of their careers. That is to say, the current push for demilitarization, Palestinian liberation, and the fight against imperialism is inextricably linked to student labor.
The entire UC system received military-tied funding in the amount of $5.6 billion from 2005 to 2022 from various arms of the Department of Defense and private sponsors like Lockheed Martin, General Atomics, Raytheon, Boeing and the Israeli Ministry of Defense, amongst countless others.
However, without a methodological model for understanding the breadth of military-funded research for the entirety of American universities, our grasp of its pervasiveness is easily lost. For the purposes of broader application, let’s use the University of California system as a case study. According to data from the University of California’s Award Explorer website, the entire UC system received military-tied funding in the amount of $400 million in the 2022-2023 fiscal year; $2.3 billion from 2017 to 2022; and $5.6 billion from 2005 to 2022 from various arms of the Department of Defense and private sponsors like Lockheed Martin, General Atomics, Raytheon, Boeing and the Israeli Ministry of Defense, amongst countless others. From 2017 to 2022, UC San Diego, which is world-renowned for its scientific research, took in $548 million, while UCLA took in $309 million and UCSB took in $224 million. According to Award Explorer, in that same time frame, there were 1,428 total military-funded research grants, with 243 to UC San Diego, 205 to UCLA, 174 to UC Santa Barbara, 151 to UC Berkeley, 99 to Lawrence Berkeley, and so on.
One recent boost to UC defense-tied research and manufacturing is due to the CHIPS (Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors) and Science Act of 2022, which authorized $52.7 billion in semiconductor research and chip manufacturing. This funding helped form the Defense Ready Electronics and Microdevices (DREAMS) Superhub consisting of UCSB, UCLA, UCR, UCI, and USC. Together, they are accelerating the development, prototyping, and adoption of Electromagnetic Warfare (EW), which describes the use of semiconductors that utilize electromagnetic waves to deter and attack adversaries. These types of federal and private research funding exemplify not only the historic move away from manpower to the hyper-technologization and atomization of warfare at the microchip level but also the move from enlisted servicemen to the civilian, in this case, the non-combatant student researcher.
The militarization of the university
From a historical standpoint, we can track the growth of technological research and the militarization of the university back to the beginnings of the Cold War. In the early 1950s, the United States’ desire to balance terror associated with Soviet Russia’s nuclear stockpiles and Sputnik was escalated by reducing manpower and non-technological systems while increasing military expenditures toward scientific research and tech innovation, thus creating a defense system far superior than the opponent. Increased military expenditures were exemplified in; Truman’s Mutual security act of 1951, which brought a 20% increase in scientists and engineers and a 135% increase in DoD research and development toward arming the Korean War; and at the university level with The National Defense Education Act of 1958, which was intended to “ensure the security of the Nation through the furthest development of mental resources and technical skills of its young men and women.” This resulted in $450 billion from 1959 to 1964 in total institutional allocations through loans, fellowships, counseling, and instruction.
These transformations in the nature of warfare, particularly its employment of a civilian workforce, obscured the moral corruption of the academic institution, perhaps explaining the delegitimizing effects on the current-day demands for divestment from genocide. In the Merchant Warrior Pacified, George Wilnius states, “As the civilian role in warfare has become greatly heightened, it is increasingly difficult to draw a precise line between military and non-military operations.” That is to say, institutional ties to warfare production appear uncertain, while the outsourcing of warfare production from private weapons companies like Lockheed Martin is increasingly less discernible from the outsourcing of research from a public university.
Academic corruption might also be easily obscured by military funding of nascent technologies. While many research projects clearly support naval, aerospace, and on-land mission systems, a great majority as represented in their abstracts, might appear at first glance to have no direct association with weapons production. For example, a project titled “Anion Redox in Amorphous Transition Metal Sulfides,” which was awarded $2,400,000 in 2023 by The U.S. Department of the Navy, intended “to help guide the development of next-generation Li-ion battery materials.” To an engineering researcher whose research appears unthreatening and even beneficial to society, DoD funding might appear indispensable given the breadth of their support.
Less discrete complicity with genocide can be found in a number of UC research collaborations with U.S. allies like Israel.
However, less discrete complicity with genocide can be found in a number of UC research collaborations with U.S. allies like Israel. According to Award Explorer, projects like “Deterrence With Proxies” from UCSD’s Department of Economics were awarded $964,916 in 2016 by the United States Department of the Navy. The project’s abstract states that it investigates “Israel’s relationship with Hamas in suppressing terrorism from Gaza” as well as “relationships in counterterrorism and counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Philippines.” A book later published on this research titled, “Suppressing Violence Through Local Agents” examines methods of improving foreign policy strategies for “indirect control” through proxy allies. Other project titles “Detecting Malicious Code in Embedded Devices Using Static Analysis and Machine-Learning” and “A Practical Approach for Underwater Navigation towards Localizing Underwater Objects” were directly contracted to provide research to the Israeli Ministry of Defense.
Furthermore, DoD-funded research has historically been the initial seed funding for nascent technologies that eventually get used for military applications even before venture capital ever steps in. In an interview with Mason McClay, a graduate Psychology student at UCLA, he states, “In a way, one can think of DoD funding agencies as the military’s pre-venture capital seed investment firm. As a case study, take Orbital Insight, who, through a partnership with UC Berkeley and approximately $1B in funding, developed geospatial intelligence for “training object detection models in electro-optical imagery,” which they promised would be instrumental for the defense intelligence community. They also partnered with an Israeli startup to monitor infrastructure. In Orbital Insight’s earliest stages, the UC provided critical DoD-funded research and once the company matured and started developing military systems, the venture capital firm Sequoia Capital, also invested in by the UC, jumped in to raise capital. Orbital Insight ultimately failed as a startup, and now all its technologies are part of a company called “Privateer,” whose goal, according to their website, is to “make space data and Earth insights more powerful and accessible than ever.”
From the perspective of the market, these fluctuations from military to commercial production fill the gap in the war industry’s natural proclivity toward a boom-or-bust economy. DoD non-weapons funding keeps military personnel and university researchers afloat, where they’d otherwise be unemployed during post-war funding gaps. In a report by the United States Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, Geoffrey Faux states the need for personal and institutional flexibility to “permit scientists and engineers to move with shifts in demand- from say, missiles to TV sets or artificial hearts and back again – much more rapidly.”
This unique position of the student researcher as engaged in private market mechanisms contributing to war and peace, places the ordinary civilian in a position of power through their labor.
In a previous collaboratively written article titled, The War Industry Extracts Cheap Labor From UC San Diego Students, Mason McClay, myself, and others lay out how UC research labor serves as a much cheaper alternative to dedicated personnel for the DoD or weapons companies. Although the formal UAW 4811 student worker strike that ended last June distanced itself from the demands of the Palestine solidarity encampments, labor withdrawal still stands as a prospective tool for divestment. This could include amending the union’s contract demands to allow students to make a choice on where their funding comes from. The student union could work toward decreasing military-tied funding over time or put a cap on DoD-sponsored research projects. Transition funding for student researchers opting to withdraw their labor from research projects tied to weapons production, the DoD, or private defense contractors should be guaranteed.
