I could very well be wrong, but my guess is because they have innovative project proposals, and when funded they might be giving some rights to the investors as well, so it's like an investment?
Would be nice if someone knowledgeable explained what's going on and if there are precautions taken against usage of the funds and funded tech in military applications.
I work in the EU. Horizon Europe and other EU research and innovation programmes are 100% civil, in the sense that they do not find any military, defence or even dual use technologies. They're used for things like researching cures against diseases, fighting climate change, medical and materials sciences, etc.
There are different programs which fund defence and military research, but only EU member states can participate in these. The EU also provides far less funding for these, as defence is still primarily considered a national prerogative.
All participants (even non-EU) to these R&D programs need to pay into the common pot of funding. The participants agree how big they want the funding pot to be, and costs are shared equally (as a % of GDP typically, but there are different formulas used). Many programs include a basic minimum to pay in as well as optional programmes that individual countries can opt to fund, and how much. So for example for a programme funding space research, there could be an optional programmes to find launch vehicles, and any country who thinks this is worth investing in can put extra money specifically to be used for rockets.
Some funding programs have what is called a "geographic return" principle, meaning that if you invest say €100 into the pot, you are guaranteed to win about €100 worth of projects / contracts. This is fairer but the downside is that you sometimes get suboptimal results (the best project doesn't necessarily win). The vast majority of EU R&D programmes don't have this principle, meaning that all proposals are judged based on merit. As such, some countries with better science or research institutes naturally win more than they put in. Israel happens to punch way above its weight.
Hope that helps! I can answer more questions if needed.
Thank you - i'll have to take your credentials for granted, as i can't be arsed to skim through thousands of pages that all EU programs inevitably produce.
My general question is: to what extent separation from military/dual-use is enforced?
Are research institutes (both as specific institutes aswell as the universities they may be part of) allowed to work on military or dual-use tech, when receiving funding from that program or during any sensible grace period after?
Are military personnel allowed to work on these programs?
Are researchers working on these programs allowed to work at the same time or during any sensible grace period on military or dual-use programs?
Are any/all of these safeguards actually enforced and validated to sufficient degree, or is largely declaration of recipient state taken for granted with token supervision only?
Are programs that are/can be employed by illegal settlement or counter-insurgent actions by Israel considered military or dual-use?
Not OP, but I wrote a few proposals for Horizon (mostly comp-sci) for a public university and worked on some as well.
The idea for these projects is that the proposal doesn't just say "Am scientist, need funds". You need to have a clear plan of what you want to achieve, what kinda research is necessary to get there, and who will participate in the project. And, since this is the EU, you have to document everything, from ownership declarations of your organization to disclosing who you plan to share your work with. This is both before, during, and after the funding period.
I have yet to see (or hear of) any EU supervisor coming down to our lab and wanting to look around - as long as the documentation is formally correct and believable, noone will call it into question.
But regarding the specifics of military/dual-use/civilian research: Our rule-of-thumb when hashing out the details of a project was always to simply not work with military industrial partners. If we build some nice vehicle-networking framework with BMW, sure, it might be that Thales or Rheinmetall or whoever will find a use for it in tanks as well, but we know for sure that it's primarily gonna end up in BMWs production pipeline, so in the civilian market.
If there is a military application for something we build, those interested in that use-case will have to get the results of our research from the publications, like everyone else that's not involved in the project. From memory, a project becomes classified as dual-use when a military organization sits at the table and gets to give input and voice expectations... but in our day-to-day, that has just never been something worth looking up in detail, and the EU never followed up on our "100% civilian, no military uses" claims.
But it makes a lot of sense to me while typing this out: In my experience, civilian/public-funding researchers simply don't interact with military organizations when doing any kind of project. Instead, you have two almost completely air-gapped scientific communities, because they work very, very differently.
Militaries want their research to be secret by nature, whereas public institutions need their research to be published as a proof-of-work (since payroll bureaucrats are by definition NOT rocket engineers, they will trust the peer review process to tell them if the investment into an institute was good or not). Where military research often needs security clearances and non-disclosure assurances and all that, public research (read: a university) runs on hiring students for busy work, avoiding any kind of bureaucracy, and letting their staff work independently (as long as noone gets hurt). This makes the overlap between the two pretty small.
In short: If a research organisation does military technology, they are most likely not one that seeks funding from the EU, and the EU knows that, so the safeguards are rather lax. What happens after a project is done, and who uses the gained, publicly available knowledge afterwards is a different matter.
I appreciate your explanation, but I doubt Germany's university and research community is universally modeled in other countries. I know in Poland military institutes do cooperate with civilian sector and vice versa.
If we build some nice vehicle-networking framework with BMW, sure, it might be that Thales or Rheinmetall or whoever will find a use for it in tanks as well, but we know for sure that it's primarily gonna end up in BMWs production pipeline, so in the civilian market.
It's funny you use Thales as your example, because I worked on a Horizon 2020 project that was very much dual use technology and where Thales was our primary industry partner.
I think you've over-generalised a bit based on your own experience. I've also never heard of a Horizon project with a primarily defence use case, but dual use? Definitely, even when the defence application is stated explicitly and when defence companies are directly involved. The project just has to comply with the relevant EU and national guidelines on research on dual use technologies.
I think your picture of how universities interact with the defence sector is also a little off. In some fields (like mine - semiconductor security) people work with defence companies and governments all the time. There's no air gap, and militaries and similar fund research for publication all the time. The only difference is that they usually have a veto on publication, but I've rarely seen it exercised.
There are NDAs involved sometimes, but that's no different than with a lot of companies. Security clearance is not that big a deal, even for PhD students. It's mostly a bother for hiring (restrictions on nationality). Information is a bit more siloed but security researchers instinctively do that anyway, it's a career where a degree of paranoia is not uncommon.
Oh, that's really interesting! I can imagine that there's more overlap/cooperation in hardware security, just genuinely didn't think of it. Kinda fascinating, tbh - this civilian/military divide always seemed really, really wide to me. But I can see that I might have spent too much time in machine learning and medical engineering to talk about all other sectors.
It probably comes down a lot to your specific discipline and the research culture of the country you are working in.
And your perspective is, I think, broadly true on average. There is a fringe of stuff that is both dual use and which the EU regularly funds (advanced cryptography for example) so it is not forbidden - but it's also a very small minority in the grand scheme of things. You're correct to say most stuff like that is funded at the national level or directly by defence companies, not by the EU.
And proportionality is dependent on the context. Israel has no better means to defend itself as Hamas is hiding itself behind civilians and civilian infrastructure.
The Palestinian society support and at best tolerate Hamas as their ruler. They do not have the right to fight against Israel which is manifesting its right to eradicate Hamas.
The Palestinian society support and at best tolerate Hamas as their ruler. They do not have the right to fight against Israel which is manifesting its right to eradicate Hamas.
The Israeli society supports Netanyahu as their ruler. Does it result from it that everything inflicted on them is well deserved? I don't think so.
Imagine supporting the killing of millions innocence for the last few Hamas members. Absolute abhorent moral code.
I agree with fighting Hamas, I agree with self defense, I agree that Israël had the right to do many of the things they did. But it has become absolutely clear Israëls goal is far from destroying Hamas. Their goal clearly shifted to getting rid of any Palestine presence in the region. You're defending ethnic cleansing in the name of destroying Hamas, you're either complicit or being fooled.
Israel has no inviolate right to eradicate Hamas or anyone else. Israel is a criminal state that is violating the UN Charter and international humanitarian law. By rights it should be kicked out of the UN and sanctioned until it complies with international law and ends the illegal occupation of Palestine. It certainly shouldn't be coddled by Europeans as if it is the apple of our eye and not a genocidal Apartheid state.
Israel was brutally attacked by Hamas and Israel has an inviolable right to defend itself. If Hamas continues its genocidal terrorist attacks, then Israel has no other way to defend itself than to eradicate Hamas. We should all support them in this.
Israel has been illegally occupying and colonising Palestine since 1967, and constantly tramples the human rights of Palestinians, it's a terrorist state that we should universally condemn and sanction, not support.
Maybe blame Palestinians for a second? The bulk of their society cheered for the 2023 terrorist attack. The bulk of their society supports Hamas even until this day... Their own actions have caused this, not Israel.
So Israel is not at fault for secretly supporting Hamas behind the scenes and helping them gain ground in Gaza and supporting Quatar in giving them money.Guess Israel should be thrown into the sea for supporting terrorists.
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u/eloyend Żubrza 🌲🦬🌳 Knieja 2d ago
I understand Norway and UK - what Israel is even doing here, though?