This article first appeared on The War Horse, an award-winning nonprofit news organization educating the public on military service. Subscribe to their newsletter.
Some of the U.S. military’s most defining technologies have nothing to do with missiles, tanks, guns, and other deadly weaponry. While important in war, these innovations—from duct tape and blood banks to GPS— ultimately play a far larger role on the home front, improving everyday lives.
But now scientists are worried the Trump administration’s budget cuts threaten the long and historic funding growth for Department of Defense-supported breakthrough science, risking America’s global dominance in a tech-driven economy and undermining future payoffs.
“Every single day, people engage with DOD-funded research,” said Jeff Decker, a former 2nd Ranger Battalion light infantry squad leader in the U.S. Army, deployed four times to Iraq and Afghanistan. He now serves in Stanford University’s Technology Transfer for Defense Program, which transitions new technologies from the laboratory to the market.
“The core goal is knowledge,” Decker said. “If we lose that, not only does it hollow out the ability for campuses to do research … it also hollows out the specter of what we’ll have 30 years from now.”
In a world roiled by geopolitical tensions, new pandemics, climate change, and weakening democracies, researchers point to the importance of a crucial array of DOD-funded inventions, from night vision to stealth technology, from sensor networks to vaccines for deadly diseases and treatment for traumatic brain injury.
But the stopgap budget measure that Congress passed in March reduces funding for research, development, and evaluation programs at the Defense Department by almost 5% to $141 billion for the remainder of the fiscal year—about $7 billion less than the department received for those activities in fiscal 2024.
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To be sure, U.S. government and businesses remain the world’s top investor in basic research and development, with China close behind. And the DOD is the largest beneficiary of taxpayer-supported research, receiving about half of total funds.
But the cuts illustrate a growing shift in the nation’s landscape of research and development. In recent years, a larger share of America’s overall scientific spending is coming from businesses, especially in the fields of applied research, according to a 2021 Congressional Research Service report.
To maintain technical superiority, the U.S. military increasingly relies on commercially developed technologies, such as pilot simulation training, rapid detection of virus exposure, and Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite internet technology.
American dominance of innovation dates back less than a century. Prior to World War II, the U.S. provided almost no federal funding for research. Europe was the leader. That changed with Vannevar Bush, a former dean of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who predicted that the devastating war would be won or lost based on advanced technology.
Almost overnight, government research funding skyrocketed—resulting in a myriad of civilian spinoffs that remain an essential part of our everyday lives.
From Weapons Guidance to Directions to Dinner
One of the most famous examples was the creation of the Global Positioning System. On Labor Day weekend in 1973, U.S. Air Force Col. Bradford Parkinson and his top engineers shuttered themselves in the dark and deserted Pentagon to hammer out the concept of a navigation system, using atomic clocks and signals transmitted by satellites that would change the world.
The goal was to design a system to help guide weapons to their targets and keep track of personnel and materials. But from the start, the GPS was designed to have an open signal that anyone could use, Parkinson said.
“Before we put up the first satellite, I promised to make available the complete specifications that would allow people to build receivers,” said Parkinson, professor emeritus of aeronautics and astronautics at Stanford University. “[It was] a signal that was going to be freely available to the civilians to use.”
By hand, he drew diagrams of eight to 10 potential nonmilitary uses for GPS, such as air traffic control, land grading, and commuter travel, saving time and money.
It took two tragedies to spur the widespread adoption of GPS in commercial aviation: the 1978 shooting of a South Korean airliner by a Soviet fighter plane and the 1996 crash of a plane carrying U.S. Commerce Secretary Ron Brown and 34 others, said John Langer of the Enterprise Design department of The Aerospace Corporation, which advances GPS development. Both events were caused by pilot navigational errors.
The widespread public use of GPS began in the early 2000s, with the release of the second iPhone and the “blue dot” on app maps that shows a precise location, said Langer. “Now everyone expects to know where they are at all times.”
GPS—with smaller, cheaper, and less powerful receivers than military-grade equipment—brings military precision to routine tasks, like finding the best route to a new restaurant.
From Blood Banks to Frozen Platelets
The carnage of combat has led to significant advances in understanding hematology, wound care, and infection control.
In World War II, massive blood loss from gaping wounds caused by shrapnel, shells, fragments, and other debris required new techniques and tools to collect and preserve blood. Combat injuries also spurred our understanding of compatible blood typing and transfusion science.
The Department of Defense ushered in the modern age of blood banking by introducing plastic bags—rather than glass bottles—for storage, said hematologist Dr. Claudia Cohn, medical director of the Association for the Advancement of Blood and Biotherapies and director of the University of Minnesota Blood Bank Laboratory. If blood is kept in glass, it is difficult to store and separate into its essential components.
Current research using databases from the Department of Defense Trauma Registry and Armed Services Blood Program is testing the potential use of cold-stored or frozen blood platelets, which last longer, are less prone to bacterial contamination, and are more practical for rural hospitals with limited supplies, Cohn said.
It is also advancing the field of transfusions administered in ambulances on the way to the hospital, pumping blood into patients as quickly as possible. “Early studies are showing that the faster you get blood into the patient, the better they do,” she said.
“Military research has a long history of creating or developing technology that is then transferred to the civilian setting and has helped humankind,” said Cohn. “These are many of the things that we just take for granted.”
From Penicillin to Cancer Treatments
Our modern understanding of antibiotics, especially penicillin, has surged due to military research funding. Seeking to protect and recover manpower during World War II combat, War Production Board scientists collaborated on penicillin mold sampling, chemical synthesis, clinical trials, and large-scale penicillin production by fermentation. While a precise number is difficult to determine, it’s estimated that penicillin has saved 200 million lives globally, including countless Americans, according to Philadelphia’s Science History Institute.
Private industry has been slow to create new vaccines because profit margins are so thin for single-use medications. It took the Department of Defense, in partnership with the Department of Health and Human Services, to support the development of mRNA technologies that produced Covid vaccines.
Radiation treatment for cancer traces its roots to World War II’s famed Manhattan Project and the development of the atomic bomb. After the war, the federal government produced radioisotopes in the same nuclear reactors that had been built to produce material for nuclear weapons—and sold them at a discount to laboratories, hospitals, and companies, where they proved their role as medical therapies and diagnostics, according to Princeton University historian Angela Creager.
From Duct Tape to Superglue
World War II also inspired something more mundane, but now ubiquitous: duct tape. Vesta Stoudt, the mother of two enlisted sons, was working at the Green River Ordnance Plant in Illinois, sealing boxes of ammunition cartridges with paper tape and dipping them wax to make them waterproof.
“But the paper tape was very thin, and the tabs often tore off, leaving soldiers frantically trying to open the box while under fire,” said Margaret Gurowitz, chief historian for Johnson & Johnson, which helped bring the tape to market.
On Feb. 10, 1943, Stoudt wrote a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt describing the problem and her solution, complete with diagrams: strong, waterproof tape made from thin “duck cloth,” coated in plastic, that could be ripped by hand reliably, every time. Hundreds of thousands of miles of this tape were used on tanks, planes, and ammunition destined for overseas—and now duct tape is the go-to solution for patching holes and sealing gaps in pipes, ductwork, and other household items that need a quick, temporary fix.
The remarkable adhesive known as superglue was also invented during World War II, when Harry Coover and his military-funded team at Eastman-Kodak sought to make a clear plastic lens for precision gunsights, called prisms, for soldiers.
A new substance, called cyanoacrylate, was quickly abandoned because it was too sticky. But Coover realized the adhesive had a unique ability to bond without heat or pressure, permanently gluing together anything. He later put it to work to make jet airplane canopies. Now superglue is used to repair shoes, dishes, broken garden hoses, or torn car upholstery. It even extends the life of frayed phone charger cords.
From Nomex and Kevlar to a New Frontier
More recently, DOD-funded scientists have designed, improved or tested fabric and textiles to counter heat, cold, chemicals, flames, lasers and other harsh military environments.
The Natick Soldier Research, Development and Engineering Center laboratories developed a new flame-resistant fabric—a blend of wool, Nomex and Kevlar—that chars, rather than melting or dripping, when exposed to intense heat.
The laboratories also helped to improve the design of uniforms with Gore-Tex, the water-resistant material used in tents, backpacks, and other camping materials.
Military funding is now used to advance the newest frontier in science: machine learning, a type of AI, which analyzes large amounts of data, learns from the insights and informs decisions, said Stanford’s Decker.
For instance, each Navy warship produces about 150 terabytes of raw sensor data each day—equivalent to tens of millions of high-quality photos or nearly a decade of videos—and machine learning can help process it.
“It’s decision making,” said Stanford’s Decker. “We live in a world right now where there is no shortage of data. ... How do we as a country respond in situations ... whether it’s a natural disaster or a war zone?”
But the shift in priorities at the Pentagon to focus on lethality is steering funding toward major projects like the next-generation F-47 aircraft and a Golden Dome missile defense system.
The change could be felt by future generations of civilians, far from the battlefield.
Over the decades, “military technologies tend to find a way, sometimes in a surprising manner, into civilian use,” said Parkinson.
“It isn’t the primary reason that the military does that research—but the spin-offs have been substantial,” he said. “They’re spread around, like peanut butter.”
This War Horse story was edited by Mike Frankel, fact-checked by Jess Rohan, and copy-edited by Mitchell Hansen-Dewar. Hrisanthi Pickett wrote the headlines.
Editors Note: This article first appeared on The War Horse, an award-winning nonprofit news organization educating the public on military service. Subscribe to their newsletter.
