- Estimates of military spending on scientific research
Some figures on military spend are available for different countries.
- UK [here]
Research component of military spend is estimated as £0.6B, which is about 20% of £3B GOVERD spending on research in universities.
- USA [here]
Adding together Basic Research ($2.1B), Applied Research ($4.7B), and Advanced Technology Research ($5.5B) gives a total of $12.3B. Since GOVERD in USA is $40B, this means that military research is about 31% of this total.
We also have from http://www.bu.edu/research/articles/funding-for-scientific-research/ that 60% academic research funding is federal, and from https://www.aaas.org/page/historical-trends-federal-rd about 60% of that is from defense R&D, which gives a similar 36% of research funding via the military in the USA.
The USA military funding has historically supported much basic research with DoD funding leading to 69 Nobel prizes in science [http://econ.haifa.ac.il/~dpeled/papers/ste-wp4.pdf].
It may also be possible to look at GBAORD defence vs civil (Govt appropriations for R&D in defense) which in 2010 for the USA gives defence of $78B, civil of $58B.
[https://www.aaas.org/page/historical-trends-federal-rd]
shows that defense R&D funding is ~60% of federal or 2/3 of the whole R&D funding.
- Israel [here]
Total military spending is 14% of $296B = $41B, while the research component of this is unkonwn. The Israel GOVERD is $350M. It is thus likely that military funds a larger fraction of science in Israel.
- Russia [here]
The heading ‘Applied research in the field of defence’ spends ~300BnRoubles or $4.6B/yr. The GOVERD of Russia = $10.5B, so military research is about 44% of total.
- Germany [here]
Relative spend of military R&D to total R&D is 4.8% in 1997.