This page provides resources for researching military spending and related issues. Topics include the military budget, military funding of university research, the impacts military spending, and the trade-offs between military spending and government spending on other types of programs. Additional resources are provided for California and the San Francisco Bay Area.

Our goal is to help people to research the impacts of the military on their communities. Please send us ideas and links for new resources, to webmaster@wslfweb.org

RESEARCHING YOUR CAMPUS

Universities and the Military, by Fiat Pax.

This page, prepared by University of California students, has information relevant to researching military research on any campus as well.

See also the Fiat Pax publication The Militarization of America's Universities

This page has a variety of useful reports that detail military and other federal support for academic research. Several of these reports break out data by agency, allowing military research funding to be separated out. Reports include individual institutional profiles by campus.

Each UC campus (and many other universities) has an office of research administration (aka ORA, SPO, OCGA, OSP), which provide a variety of useful reports on where research funding comes from. For example, the Berkeley Sponsored Projects Office provides a Berkeley Campus Research Funding Reports page that allows you to produce custom reports on outside sponsors of University research , broken down by sponsor. Military research is broken down to department, service and agency level (e.g. Department of Energy, Navy, Air Force, DARPA). Reporting formats and amount of information provided by these campus offices varies.

You also can contact these offices and ask them to generate a report detailing their research statistics. Be specific as possible. They will ask you your name, association, and purpose of use.

UC Berkeley SPO 510-642-0120 http://www.spo.berkeley.edu
UC Los Angeles OCGA 310-794-0102 http://www.research.ucla.edu/ocga
UC San Francisco OR 415-514-1520 http://www.research.ucsf.edu
UC Davis OVCR 530-752-6374 http://www.research.ucdavis.edu
UC Riverside ORA 909-787-5535 http://www.ora.ucr.edu
UC Santa Barbara OR 805-893-3890 http://www.research.ucsb.edu
UC Irvine OGS 949-824-4959 http://www.rgs.uci.edu
UC San Diego OCGA 858-534-3330 http://ocga3.ucsd.edu/
UC Santa Cruz OSP 831-459-4989 http://www.ucsc.edu/osp

Department of Defense Procurement Statistics page

Extensive set of statistics, by fiscal year, on procurement spending. Includes lists of 100 top contractors and 100 top research and development contractors, and tables with contract spending sorted in various ways, including contractor, state, county, and place.

San Francisco Bay Area Defense Contractors by City compiled by the San Francisco Chronicle

This site also allows the contractors to be sorted by name, and includes a short description of the contract and its value.

Corporate Watch Hands-On Corporate Research Guide

A good general guide to how to research a corporation, including links to public documentation available on the web, from privately maintained investor guides to Securities and Exchange Commission filings. Also has links to a variety of nongovernmental organizations that monitor corporate behavior on a variety of issues, from the environment to labor practices.

Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom Mil-Corp ConneXion Guide

Resources for research and action suggestions for exploring the corporate-military connection. The step by step guide to researching a corporation provided on this site can be used in combination with the more extensive combination of web resources provided at the Corporate Watch site.

The Military Documentation Project

This project is developing a database of military contractors and their impacts in the South and Southwest. The project already has listings for Texas contractors.

Specific entities, such as universities and corporations, can be searched by name on several key research and contracting pages provided by the Federal Government:

Research and Development Descriptive Summaries (RDDS) Search Page

This very useful search engine provides full text search of the annual Research and Development Descriptive Summaries for all of the military services and other Department of Defense agencies. The Summaries are very detailed descriptions of research and development programs and projects, with information on budget, contractors, and related projects. This page allows searches of current and past year materials.

Google advanced search

This search engine also can be used to narrow the search for corporations or universities to particular web domains, by placing the entity (e.g., University of California, Berkeley) in the “exact phrase” slot and the domain to be searched (e.g. darpa.mil [Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency]) in the “domain” slot. You can also use it to search a university web site for military research (for example, by placing berkeley.edu in the "domain" slot, "air force" in the phrase slot, and "research" in the required words slot. Searches can then be further narrowed by searching within the results, an option provided at the bottom of the results pages.

Federal Business Opportunities Search page

This search engine covers solicitations by federal agencies, including military services and other Department of Defense agencies for work ranging from research and development to construction at military facilities. Searches can be organized a variety of ways: by agency, topic, keywords, date, and more. This page provides solicitation information, not contract awards, so it is most useful for finding out how research projects are described, in order to find useful search terms for searches involving specific organizations.

Department of Defense budget

Extensive summary and detailed information on the military budget. Materials include the Greenbook, an overview of current, past, and projected spending tabulated in a variety of useful ways (e.g. as a precentage of GDP since 1945), and detailed breakdowns of the current President's budget request to Congress (which also includes summaries of past expenditures) by program, with separate breakouts for operations and maintenance, research and development, procurement, etc. Many of the detailed budget breakouts provide information on which contractors currently are funded for work on particular programs. It also provides links to the budgets of the individual military services:

Air Force budget

Navy budget

Army budget

Other Defense agencies (e.g. the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Missile Defense Agency, and the Defense Threat Reduction Agency)

Department of Defense Contractors-- Rankings and Statistics

National Defense Budget Estimates for the FY 2005 Budget (Green Book)

An overview of the Department of Defense budget request. This document includes future spending projections and a number of useful historic tables going back to World War II ranging from military spending as a percentage of GNP/GDP to military personnel as a percentage of the labor force.

DOD Research and Development Program Element Descriptive Summaries Search Page

See description above under search engines and strategies.

Federal Business Opportunities

This page has contract solicitations from all agencies of the federal government. They can be sorted a variety of ways, and there is a built in search engine as well. There is a sub-page for the Department of Defense agencies, including the military services. Solicitations for the Department of Energy (the agency that designs and manufactures U.S. nuclear weapons) also are posted on this site.

Despite its innocuous name, the Department of Energy is responsible for the design and manufacture of all U.S. nuclear weapons. Department of Energy budget information can be found on its Budget Office page. Detailed budget tables and descriptions, including tables breaking out the budget by laboratory and state, can be found under "Budget justifications and supporting documents." Click here for fy2006 budget documents.

American Association for the Advancement of Science Budget and Policy Program

This site provides extensive analysis, regularly updated, on government science funding and on the current status of proposed research and development lines in the federal budget. Be sure to check out the Introduction for New Users to get an overview of the reports and analyses provided.

National Science Foundation Science Resource Statistics

This page provides a wide range of statistical information about research and development spending, ranging from federal support for academic research to total Federal Research Funding by Budget Function

Center for Defense Information military budget page

This page tracks current military budget issues, including cost estimates for the Iraq and Afghan wars.

The Arms Trade Resource Center at the World Policy Institute

This site provides incisive analysis and other resources on the impacts of military spending on U.S. politics and society.

National Priorities Project

The National Priorities Project has a variety of useful information on the trade-offs between military spending and other kinds of federal expenditures. These include:

--Tables showing the costs of nuclear weapons programs, missile defense, jet fighters, and the military budget as a whole vs. elementary school teachers, head start slots, childrens’ health care, and housing units. The tables are both for the nation as a whole and broken down by state.

--The cost to states and selected cities and counties for the most recent Bush Administration request ($87 billion) for war, occupation, and reconstruction in Afghanistan and Iraq; and for total spending allocated to Iraq ($141 billion), assuming the request passes Congress.

--Tax Day Fact Sheets– how the federal government spends the "typical" household's income tax dollar in each state and selected cities and counties.

U.S. Department of Justice

This site has a FOIA guide and other reference materials and a list of federal agency FOIA points of contacts and web sites.

Department of Defense

Includes links to FOIA web sites for DOD agencies and military services.

Department of Energy

Federation of American Scientists Government Secrecy Project

This page has a wide range of resources on government secrecy, ranging from classification and declassification issues both current and historic to the impact of current and pending legislation on government openness. You can subscribe here to the excellent FAS Government Secrecy Project e-mail newsletter.

National Security Archive FOIA page

This site has links to the text of the Freedom of Information Act and amendments, provides a sample FOIA request and appeal letter, and has other useful information.

Public Citizen Freedom of Information Clearinghouse

Extensive FOIA information, including links to legal resources, sample litigation materials, and more.