Public funding strategies need to adapt to an increasingly belligerent world.
If you want peace, prepare for war. The lukewarm war we’re engaged in with Russia and China is getting colder as we speak. Russia is accelerating its disinformation campaign, intimidation at sea and over land and acts of physical sabotage in Europe. It does this with implicit and explicit backing from China. European countries are allowing Ukraine to use their weaponry on Russian territory. Some are (considering) re-activating conscription for mandatory military service.
European governments are also increasingly concerned about the strong economic linkages with China. They see that China is intent on destabilizing Europe as part of its strategy toward becoming the dominant world power. As the case of Russia has shown, economic (inter)dependence isn’t a sufficient condition for peaceful cooperation. Stiff tariff walls are telltale signs of adversaries holing up.
These growing security concerns will have a major impact on the direction of future R&D, also in developed countries. To understand where this is heading, the exploration of Science and Technology Trends 2020-2040 by NATO is a good starting point. It expects future military capabilities to hinge strongly on the following combination of technologies: data, AI and autonomy; data, AI and biotechnology; data, AI and materials, data and quantum, space and quantum, and space, hypersonics and materials.
We can compare these priorities to the direction the Dutch government intends to give to public R&D in the Netherlands. It recently published its National Technology Strategy (NTS), which details this direction. It concludes that focus is needed on the following ten priority areas: optical systems and integrated photonics, quantum technologies, process technology (including process intensification), biomolecular and cell technologies, imaging technologies, mechatronics and optomechatronics, artificial intelligence and data science, energy materials, semiconductor technologies, and cybersecurity technologies.
Apart from process technology, there’s a good match between both sets. The work done in these areas is of high level. However, the NTS acknowledges that the Netherlands is a laggard in terms of the R&D in these areas as a percentage of total R&D, so some catch-up is called for.
The NTS does have national security as the highest priority in terms of application areas, followed by commerce and societal challenges. But it considers national security from a defensive and protective perspective. Espionage, cyber-attacks and knowledge and technology theft are mentioned explicitly. Application in warfare and active combat operations aren’t at the forefront yet. A significant update of the NTS may thus be needed as the worldwide security situation further escalates.
Public R&D funding may move predominantly toward national security, leaving commerce and societal challenges to be covered by private R&D. This isn’t a bad thing per se since markets are more efficient in allocating resources within the boundary conditions set by the government. Also, the increasingly massive use of commercial technologies like drones or simple vision systems in present warfare is blurring the boundaries between commercial goods and weapon systems.
Because of the required scale, the development of advanced weapon systems can’t be carried out anymore by single countries. It needs to be done within the European context. That puts systems engineering and modularity, the well-known drivers of the deep-tech industry, also at the forefront of R&D focused on security. These aspects must be defined and tackled uniformly at a European level, so that weapon systems can be made efficiently at scale, have full interoperability and can be used anywhere in Europe by anyone.
It will be interesting to see how the new Dutch government will deal with these developments. It professes an aversion to Europe. But it may help that the intended prime minister has a background in national security.
