Science (“Pentagon abruptly ends all funding for social science research“):
The U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) is ending all of its funding for social science research, stopping 91 ongoing studies related to threats such as climate change, extremism, and disinformation. In a press release issued late on Friday, the department wrote that it would “focus on the most impactful technologies” and that research it funds “must address pressing needs to develop and field advanced military capabilities.”
“[DOD] does not do climate change crap,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth wrote on X on Sunday. “We do training and war fighting.”
DOD has been looking at the impact of climate change on future operations for quite some time now. To take just one example, the melting of polar ice caps will radically change the calculus in the Arctic Circle in the near future.
The cuts include the entire Minerva Research Initiative, a landmark project established in 2008 “to help DOD better understand and prepare for future challenges.” (Science Insider first reported on cuts to Minerva on 2 March.) The initiative’s website, including reports on finished and ongoing projects, has since gone dark.
Preparing for future challenges seems like it might be important. Otherwise, how would one assess which technologies will be “most impactful”? Or what “pressing needs” are?
“The Pentagon’s decision to scrap its social science research portfolio … is short-sighted and harmful to U.S. national security,” says Jason Lyall, a political scientist at Dartmouth College. Many of the canceled projects focused on how new technologies such as artificial intelligence are shaping modern battlefields, Lyall notes. “How do you know what’s ‘impactful’ if you don’t do the research? How do you anticipate countermeasures and consequences of their use?” he asks. “I’m worried that without this portfolio, we lose a critical source of impartial evidence about national security, leaving the Pentagon more susceptible to companies selling ‘revolutionary’ but unproven technologies.”
The move “suggests they don’t care about better understanding threats the U.S. faces,” says Josh Busby, a researcher at the University of Texas at Austin and a senior adviser for climate at DOD in 2021–22. Busby had a small grant to study the U.S. dependence on critical minerals from China for the clean energy transition, a project scheduled to wrap up this summer after a tabletop exercise at the U.S. Naval War College. That is now unlikely to happen, Busby says. “It’s baffling that our project was terminated early since the focus on critical minerals and dependence on China is what they say they care about.”
DOD has said cutting the research projects will save more than $30 million in the first year, but that’s “a rounding error in the Pentagon’s massive budget,” Lyall says. “Any savings will be outweighed by new gaps and blind spots in our knowledge about current and emerging threats.”
For context, the FY24 DOD budget—the most recent passed—was $842 billion. We spent $30 million—the amount saved here—on Hellfire missiles. Which is down from $116 million the year before because they’re being phased out of the inventory.
