Science, Innovation and Defense

This paper explores the role of defense innovation in the geopolitical landscape of conflicts, focusing on the development of new military or aerospace technologies. The pursuit of technological superiority is often motivated by the desire to dominate potential adversaries or to establish a deterrent mechanism. We use networks of patent and scientific articles citations to study the link between the production and dissemination of defenserelated knowledge and the prospects for conflict faced by each nation since the end of the Cold War. Our approach draws on economic dominance theory to measure the strategic autonomy of nations through innovation and to study the hierarchical evolutions at work in scientific and technological knowledge networks. Our findings reveal that, following a period of relative stability during the 1990s, the balance of intellectual dominance underwent a lasting change from the 2000s onwards, driven mainly by a trio of emerging players: China, Russia, and South Korea. These actors have acquired a central position in knowledge networks to the point of dethroning the historical powers of NATO in the second half of the 2010s. These actors combine three characteristics already identified in the literature as favoring the growth of defense innovation capabilities: (i) a strong political motivation, (ii) significant investment capabilities, and (iii) the prospect of cross-border conflicts. Nevertheless, China appears to be the only nation capable of challenging American hegemony in the short term. In a second step, we investigate the role of science in the development of defense innovations. Our results show a strong focus on physical sciences such as chemistry, materials, and aerospace engineering. Our econometric analysis indicates that strategic autonomy in these scientific fields is also a vector for increasing defense innovation capabilities in the short term. It also describes science-technology interactions as co-evolving, making defense a science-intensive innovation area.