Abstract
Since the Second World War the US defense has been a major participant in the development of radical innovations in information and communication technologies (ICT’s), most famously probably the digital computer and the internet. A regularly present, but less known creator of R&D innovations is the intelligence community. To understand the role and impact of defense and intelligence-related research for driving ICT innovations, we analyzed which technological paradigms were promoted by US defense and intelligence agencies and the development of these research trajectories over time. Using bibliographic analysis, we clustered 82,239 scientific papers funded by the US national security system, published between 2009–2017, in research fronts, and after that aggregated the research fronts into technological paradigms. Our analysis identified main technological paradigms promoted by the US defense’s sectoral system of innovation, such as quantum science and graphene as fields that could generate high impact in the new generation of radical technologies. The efforts of intelligence agencies was highly concentrated on quantum science, social forecasting, computer cognition and signal processing. Our research highlights the role of US security players in shaping research fields.
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Notes
Even though the US Department of Energy fits these criteria, we decided to not include it in the analysis. Only the US Department of Energy has around hundred of thousands of documents. This high volume denotes that energy issues could be a system by itself, and its relationship with the US NSS deserves a closer consideration in a future research.
available at https://www.iarpa.gov/index.php/research-programs.
The current director of IARPA gives an account of the role of the agency in promoting research in neuromorphic computing, in order to understand how the brain processes information so efficiently and with less energy compared to that needed by supercomputers. According to him, the objective, more than the development of a new computer, is to discover “a new approach to measuring neural structure and activity. In many cases, the most successful scientific leaps come from the development of new approaches to measurement that enable multiple discoveries” (Matheny 2016, 37).
We ran other time lags and 5 years resulted in the highest correlation. Furthermore, it is important to highlight that the intelligence budget is only publicly available as topline figures, i.e., the global spending without any detailed information concerning the budget of individual agencies’ R&D. Thus, we used the information about defense R&D provided by OECD (2018) as a proxy.
The growth rate was calculated dividing the year range by number of documents in the RF. After that, the growth rate was normalized using the Z-score grouping the RF’s according to the TP. We considered as fast growing only the RF’s with Z-score higher than 2.0.
As stated by Ruttan (2006), it was primarily military and defense-related demand that drove down rapidly the learning curves of general-purpose ICT technologies, however, concerning computers, there would be some constraints imposed by basic physical principles which could interrupt the trajectory development.
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Acknowledgements
Author R. Fileto Maciel has received research grants from Federal Police of Brazil (Polícia Federal do Brasil - Grant Number 08350.014739/2016-14). The findings and observations contained in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Federal Police of Brazil. We thank Vladmir Brito and Mark van der Giessen for comments on a previous version.
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Maciel, R.F., Bayerl, P.S. & Kerr Pinheiro, M.M. Technical research innovations of the US national security system. Scientometrics 120, 539–565 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-019-03148-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-019-03148-2
Keywords
- Innovation
- Technological paradigm
- Technological trajectory
- National security
- Intelligence
- Bibliographic analysis