By RENATO DAGNINO*
What would be the importance of military personnel willing to engage in R&D projects within the corporation?
The current situation in our society is marked by the impact of the testimonies about the attempted coups d'état by the military, the assassination of public officials, etc., which have been made known since the end of November 2024.
And also because of something that, as a scholar of Research and Development (R&D) and military production activities, concerns me: the idea that the reproduction of these events can be avoided by attributing these activities to the military.
Statements along these lines from left-wing figures and highly influential journalists have increasingly taken up space in the media. This is from Luís Nassif this paragraph published on November 22, 2024: “The reformulation of the Armed Forces must take place based on the… pressing need to strengthen the technological sectors, especially the Army… [it] involves the search for technological autonomy, … to focus on the greater objective of technological equipment… [given that] what the three forces have best are their engineers, their technology institutes, the possibility of technological agreements with universities and civilian research institutes…”.
Your immediate reference is work of Manuel Domingos Neto, one of the most important Brazilian experts in defense studies, who has revived the idea that directing the attention of the military (with a profoundly antidemocratic culture and organizational practices that are known to be inadequate) towards Research and Development and military production activities would lead to a reduction in their interventionist propensity.
Beginning by highlighting that the capacity of this idea to take on the character of a policy advocacy and significantly influence public policy, benefits from the narratives disseminated by the military-industrial-academic complex and from the literature mainstream of the central countries. Its purpose is to show that the military budgetary burden arising from its geopolitical objectives can be offset by economic and techno-scientific developments (spin-offs) of R&D activities and military production to the civilian world has remained unchanged for many decades.
These narratives, although systematically questioned by studies based on solid analytical-conceptual frameworks and empirical evidence carefully analyzed by Defense Economics scholars from central countries since the 1970s, appear to have been systematically ignored here.
One of the arguments of that policy advocacy alleged to justify the proposal of the Brazilian Defense Industry Revitalization Network (IDB) that gave rise to the 2008 National Defense Strategy (END) was the possibility of reproducing the success it had achieved. This argument, which still encourages those who defend that idea, disregards the numerous works based on this critical literature showing that, even in its golden years, between 1982 and 1988, when the end of the Iran-Iraq War caused the Brazilian Defense Industry to practically cease to exist, developments of that nature never occurred.
Among the evidence that has never been questioned, it is worth mentioning that (i) although it was a kind of export enclave, its exports were never more than 0,5% of the total; (ii) the exports promoted by the civic-military elite of the dictatorship, which went so far as to announce them as being 5 billion dollars per year, reached a peak value in 1987 of 570 million dollars, with its annual average in the period 1975-1988, when it actually existed, being 186 million dollars; (iii) its economic size was also much smaller than advertised: its share in industrial production never exceeded 0,9%; and its share in GDP never reached 0,15%.
Nor was the argument questioned regarding the possibility that the unlikely technological and scientific successes of the Brazilian Defense Industry could have a positive impact on our peripheral company, which is already considerably transnationalized and has always been an importer of technology. This argument became more relevant due to the subsequent shrinkage and reduction in the technological intensity of our manufacturing industry. As its ability to absorb potential technological and scientific developments in the Brazilian Defense Industry weakened upstream and, downstream, its ability to provide material and human inputs for its consolidation, the fallacy of these narratives became even more evident.
Num article posted on the website the earth is round, where he denounces the “macabre journey” with a mastery that, as a citizen, I praise and appreciate, Manuel Domingos Neto records in a normative tone (and I quote without intending to take it out of context) that: “to rebuild its image, the barracks will have to hold accountable those who, for decades, incited the entrails of ultraconservatism and exalted the dictatorship” and that “it is necessary to debate the construction of the legitimacy of the barracks because, without a respected instrument of force, the sovereign and democratic State is a chimera”.
And, resuming what he has been defending, he writes in a propositional tone and alluding to the subject discussed here, that: “we need hypersonic missiles, aircraft, boats, drones and satellites entirely manufactured here, with Brazilian know-how. External dependence on weapons and equipment attests to the failure of National Defense”.
Reiterating its importance, exactly the same phrase appears in a article published with the same content on 9/12/2024.
And it is here that, as a scholar of military R&D and production activities, I feel compelled to criticize the idea that in order to avoid “macabre journeys” we should once again try to attribute these activities to the military.
Analysts, including myself, are of the opinion that after the project to revitalize the Brazilian Defense Industry, ratified by the National Defense Strategy and which symptomatically was not implemented, the seventy-year-old balance of power between those who "stirred up the entrails of ultraconservatism and exalted the dictatorship" and those who, even before it, sought to "build the legitimacy of the barracks" through the path defended by the idea that I criticize here, changed significantly.
The first carried out the well-known strategy that is now exposed and that I refrain from commenting on. The others exchanged the national-developmentalist proposal for a supposedly utilitarian behavior, of acquiring foreign equipment without taking very seriously what they are buying.
Just to mention one of the forces, I will mention the case of the FAB, the force in which supporters of that proposal considered virtuous were able, by coexisting and negotiating with the former, to differentiate themselves from the generally unsuccessful national trajectory of linking research and production.
In doing so, I note, among other events, that the FAB abandoned the development of a national UAV, in favor of acquiring one from Israel through an association with a company that, as raised by the Public Prosecutor's Office, is run by first-degree relatives of its commanders. Abandoning the ancestral INPE national satellite project, it purchased a foreign satellite.
Due to the ever-alleged budget restrictions (perhaps due to the fact that the Armed Forces' personnel expenses consume almost 80% of the budget, while in the US it is 22%), other projects with a relatively high technological and scientific intensity were shelved. The same restrictions surrounded the purchase of the Gripens, whose technology transfer package was completely dismantled. The attempted sale of Embraer, which only failed because Boeing backed out, is yet another example of this supposedly utilitarian behavior, but which is notorious in central countries where the military is censured for liking increasingly expensive toys.
If we were to look at the other two forces, which were far less engaged in activities that could justify the idea that is being questioned here than the FAB, perhaps even more harmful events would appear. This would lead us to doubt the existence of a sector of the Armed Forces interested in responding to the call that, with the best of good intentions, some scholars in the field, and the left-wing personalities and journalists that I mentioned at the beginning, make.
By way of conclusion, but to clarify a possible controversy and start a public debate, I draw attention to what the formulators of the New Brazilian Industry (NIB) seem to think about the matter, intended to guide the actions of the federal government over the next ten years.
Its 6th mission, the “defense mission”, unlike what happens throughout the world when it comes to it, does not highlight the equipment needs of the Armed Forces arising from conflict scenarios or opportunities in the external market, etc.
Although the expression critical technologies for defense is emphasized, the formulators of the New Industry Brazil do not seem inclined to promote activities related to “hypersonic missiles, aircraft, boats, drones and satellites entirely manufactured here, with Brazilian know-how” in order to reduce “external dependence on weapons and equipment [that] attest to the failure of National Defense”.
The apparently most important element of the 6th mission are two large programs that have little to do with R&D and military production. Understood as Specific Instruments for the Achievement of the Mission, they are the Biological Containment Laboratory, oriented towards the health area, which will lead to the construction of the NB4 Maximum Biological Containment Laboratory, hosted at the National Center for Research in Energy and Materials, and the Multipurpose Nuclear Reactor, which is associated with the expression Model Project of Nuclear Technology in the Service of Life, oriented towards the areas of health, industry, agriculture, environment and energy.
Observation of the global environment and its comparison with what is happening in our country seems to have led those formulators to realize how unrealistic and costly it would be to continue insisting, with the expectation of socioeconomic benefits arising from economic and techno-scientific spillovers from the military to the civilian sector promised by proposals such as the revitalization network and the National Defense Strategy.
Another conception of defense seems to be leading them to believe that the materialization of this expectation of socioeconomic benefits must be achieved through policy measures aimed at carrying out activities such as those they suggest.
It also seems that the civil technocracy (which includes these policymakers) is becoming increasingly convinced of the idea that is being criticized here, stemming from a reading that mixes political and moral judgments about the behavior of the military. Thus, directing the country's defense policy toward civilian objectives and placing proposals that aim to direct the military toward R&D and military production on a secondary level would be a more republican way of implementing that idea.
The question that remains is similar to the previous one. Who would be and what importance do the military personnel within the corporation have who are willing to engage in the Biological Containment Laboratory and Multipurpose Nuclear Reactor projects, activities so far removed from those that, as what is coming to light shows, benefit them so much?
To conclude, I invite those who have read this far to continue with this inquiry into the best way in which we, citizens interested in building another future, should participate in this debate.
* Renato Dagnino He is a professor at the Department of Scientific and Technological Policy at Unicamp. Author, among other books, of The defense industry in the Lula government (Popular Expression). [https://amzn.to/4gmxKTr]
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