To take your point a step further, there’s the problem of military research that it’s costlier and slower than civilian work. Where civilian research can be publicly displayed and critiqued, allowing rapid advancement through inexpensive peer review, military research tends to be classified. This means that the researchers themselves can demand more money, as there’s a limited supply of cleared researchers, and also that relatively few brains are available to critique the research, and those brains available are biased toward being military thinkers already, as not just anyone can get a clearance.

The big exception is in medical research, where civilian ethics rules slow things down and military battlefield “experiments” are instantaneous. The problem with that is that these rapid experiments are poorly controlled if at all, leading to useless “research” into products like this . (Cliff Notes for the lazy-to-click:

American military doctors in Iraq have injected more than 1,000 of the war’s wounded troops with a potent and largely experimental blood-coagulating drug despite mounting medical evidence linking it to deadly blood clots that lodge in the lungs, heart and brain…. “When it works, it’s amazing,” said Col. John Holcomb, an Army trauma surgeon and the service’s top adviser on combat medical care. “It’s one of the most useful new tools we have.”

Yet the Army’s faith in the $6,000-a-dose drug is based almost entirely on anecdotal evidence and persists despite public warnings and published research suggesting that Factor VII is not as effective or as safe as military officials say. 

Posted by hedgehog