Yes and no. Both DARPA and IARPA fund research with significant academic applications, even if their ultimate goal is national security. I stopped working for those funding sources because I was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the potential applications of the work, but my work itself didn’t significantly change when NIH and FDA started funding it. They’ve funded a significant amount of work in chaos and complexity theory, for example, as well as linguistics, and obviously medicine and psychology. A lot of the work they fund is applied sciences, it’s true, but a surprising amount is theoretical. I can’t remember all of the resources off the top of my head at the moment, but if you look at the requests for proposals for DARPA and IARPA, as well as from the DoD, DoE, and service branches, you can get a feel for what they’re prioritizing over the next couple of decades.
Yes and no. Both DARPA and IARPA fund research with significant academic applications, even if their ultimate goal is national security. I stopped working for those funding sources because I was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the potential applications of the work, but my work itself didn’t significantly change when NIH and FDA started funding it. They’ve funded a significant amount of work in chaos and complexity theory, for example, as well as linguistics, and obviously medicine and psychology. A lot of the work they fund is applied sciences, it’s true, but a surprising amount is theoretical. I can’t remember all of the resources off the top of my head at the moment, but if you look at the requests for proposals for DARPA and IARPA, as well as from the DoD, DoE, and service branches, you can get a feel for what they’re prioritizing over the next couple of decades.