I don't think that the US cut military-oriented R&D expenses significantly. Does anyone have and idea how did the direction change?
OTOH, AFAIK, a few of the most pervasive technology changes, like the GUI or mobile networks, were not military-driven, but were purely commercial R&D (Bell labs, Xerox PARC, etc).
And consider that "private sector" labs like SRI and MIT are essentially government research facilities. Education is only 16% of MIT's expenditures (and 14% of revenues) and where do you think those revenues come from? Hint: most of it is not corporate grants.
Through the 70s the boundaries between corporate and government R&D were often fuzzy. True, Bell Labs wasn't "miliary-driven" but there were close formal and informal ties and remember that they were under a tight consent decree up into the 1980s. It wasn't today's "revolving door" -- think of it as a permeable membrane. This was thought to enable corruption and in the wake of the Viet Nam war some separation was put into place. Of course the resulting separation hasn't cleaned things up as expected; in many ways it's worse by shifting out of the technical and into the political domains.
Did we win the battle but lose the war? It's not like the USA has the world's best telecommunications.
Combined with privatization that hasn't yielded any clear benefit, pork-barreling that cripple organizations, and general mismanagement, the falling budgets have probably had a very negative impact on US R&D capabilities, offset only slightly by modest increases in NSF and NIH grants for academia.
[1] https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/search/pagedetails.action?granuleI...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_fiscal_cliff
When organizations 'need stuff badly' - everything moves much, much faster and things get done.
In the Canadian Army, we could not move our troops around effectively, and 'procurement' for troop transports was taking decades. As soon as the engagement started in Afghanistan, we dropped our 'special needs' and just bought Chinooks from the US, off the shelf. Done. It's not exactly R&D, but it highlights the bureaucracy of such organizations.
I think 'necessity' will drive outcomes far greater than small variations in budget.
Consider this: 'good ideas' should be the result of 'problem analysis' - that is to say, they should be 'solutions' to existing problems. In academia in particular, they're doing a lot of 'pure' research, not so much focused on pragmatic things.
Facebook, for all of it's rubbish, is still a 'very useful thing' to a very large number of people. I don't think the very concept of Facebook lends itself well to academic ideals. Nobody would have considered such a thing a 'viable good idea' from an intellectual perspective. And yet, it really is useful.
The best ideas come from understanding where 'pain points' are and solving them, ergo, an understanding of 'the system to improve' is essential.
I wonder if the typical "towers + backbone + terminals" setup is relevant for battlefield communication. I'd expect mesh setups to be more viable and more resilient.
Motorola was (is?) a serious player in VHF and HF, so the first cell phone probably wasn't directly DARPA but the overall company had a lot of background with that sort of thing.
2014 GDP in current$: just under 17,000,000,000,000
Amount as a percent has dropped - but dollars spent has skyrocketed.
A lot of the GDP growth over that period was fueled by technological capabilities. Which means a lot of the new research funding ended up going toward applied research supporting industries build around those new capabilities.
Given these trends, measuring against GDP is a far more reasonable metric than absolute dollar values.
Basically, research in the past made new industries possible while providing a bit of subsidy to existing industries, whereas research today is mostly government subsidy for product improvements in existing industries with a little bit of basic research on the side...
US GDP in 1970 was 1.0759T. 2% of that is 21.5B in 1970 dollars. This is $132.91B in 2014 dollars.
US GDP in 2014 was 17.348T. 0.78% of that is 135B in 2014 dollars.
https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&...
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GDPC1
1970 GDP was 4.7T in Chained 2009 Dollars. 2% of 4.7T is 94B.
2014 GDP was 15.7T in Chained 2009 Dollars. 0.78% of 15.7T is 122B.
Percentage of GDP spent on research has declined. The US was 200M people in 1970. We're 320M now. Per capita research spending in constant dollars has declined as well.
This is a bad thing.
I think that in an increasingly specialized workforce, the management team has less bandwidth to apply to R&D. One stump hit and it's done for. Successfully leading R&D has little payback in the larger economy; leading M&A is better understood. This is a corollary of the general "tower of Babel" problem.
Remember that Amazon is slightly a tribe of madmen to most business types in large companies.
According to the "best and brightest", R&D is now nothing more than patent pursuit. If the systems used for production are old and buggy, fixing that ( including significant new development ) is not considered "R&D", no matter how proprietary said systems may be.
So it's seems to have been a set amount just adjusted for inflation the whole time.
https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&...
[1] http://www.bu.edu/research/articles/funding-for-scientific-r...