DARPA helps drives technological progress in the US forward. If the EU wants to create a similar agency, key changes will be needed.
A government funded, unionwide research agency does sound like a good idea to me. But DARPA is a military r&d agency and I’d rather see an agency focused on benefitting civilian life, preserving nature, sustainability and such.
EU would clearly benefit from concentrating each nations military industries into unionwide companies and projects, too, though, but idk, I feel like we as a society could benefit from a strong, well funded civilian research effort.
I don’t know if there is such already out there, all I ever hear about is either underfunded or financed by private profit-oriented companies.EU has Horizon Europe a research and innovation program. And some smaller ones. https://research-and-innovation.ec.europa.eu/funding/funding-opportunities/funding-programmes-and-open-calls_en
EU also building the world’s biggest ground laser telescope in cooperation. https://www.eso.org/public/teles-instr/paranal-observatory/vlt/
The issue with EU is that there are so many countries involved that getting everyone on the same page is slow process and with changing local governments projects can be easily abandoned as priorities shift.
Military R&D has created good technology though, like the internet, and GPS. Both of these obviously benefit civilians.
Also maybe Europe needs to be more serious about defence and military capabilities, especially if Trump weakens NATO. Macron said yesterday that Europe needs to stop being “herbivores” and start being “omnivores”, otherwise the world’s “carnivores” will push Europe around.
You’re missing my point. I even stated that the block would benefit from a concentration of military development instead of each nation’s own industries with occasional transnational cooperative projects.
My point is that I don’t want to simply replicate the U.S. american.military industrial complex and focus more on civilian issues first. Military must stay a means of defense, not a means in andof itself as I often have the impression of the U.S. military is.
The US defence industry does pretty well though, given that it makes the world’s best military hardware. Although of course Boeing has had problems in recent years so I guess it’s not all great.
But yeah military and civilian benefits would of course both be good, I’m just saying that military research has produced stuff that also has civilian benefits.
The US defence industry does pretty well
At what cost though? What about the rest of the U.S.'s public infrastructure, i.e. healthcare, education system, social security, etc?
The U.S.'s military industrial complex does well because the U.S. defense budget was $886 billion in 2024.The U.S. drives on a fucked up system. We should be very careful about what we use as a role model.
Sure, I wouldn’t want US-style healthcare for Europe. I’m not saying Europe should copy everything that the US does, but imagine if European research (military or otherwise) came up with something as groundbreaking as the internet… that would be cool.
Having a government backed research agency might be good seeing as that has declined in recent years.
Back under Boris Johnson, Dominic Cummings was a very vocal advocate of the UK setting up something similar (though he referenced ARPA, DARPA’s predecessor, which wasn’t explicitly-military).
The result of that was ARIA being set up last year.
He was also very interested in advanced artificial intelligence work, so I kind of imagine that funding that was a goal.
I don’t know if all their work is public, but looking at that website, it looks like they’re publicly working on:
-
Genetic engineering of plants
-
Robot dexterity
-
Analysis of “tipping points” caused by climate change
-
Safeguarded AI research (how to “contain” advanced artificial intelligences)
-
Sounds like a good idea, but it would probably be better to have a military and multiple civilian agencies specialized in different fields. Like medical, physics, chemistry and so forth research agencies. Also in edge cases both agencies should be allowed to do research or cooperate on it.
