Military research at UOW
At the end of 2007, the University of Wollongong signed up to be part of a seven-year, $85 million military research program, the Defence Materials Technology Centre. It did this along with four other Australian universities: Melbourne, RMIT, Swinburne and Queensland. The Centre was officially launched in February 2009.
The DMTC is what is known as a Defence Future Capability Technology Centre. These are essentially partnerships between universities, corporations and the government, where the latter two pool an amount of money and give it to one or several universities to perform military research. The universities then perform the military research that they have been instructed to perform over the designated timeframe, and the companies involved get to benefit from the results that this research produces. The DMTC is the first ever Defence Future Capability Technology Centre, and depending on its success DFCTCs may be expanded so that most or even all Australian universities will be involved in performing military research.
The stated purpose of the DMTC is to design armour for warships, planes and tanks, including the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and the Bushmaster Armoured Fighting Vehicle. It is also intended to increase the efficiency of military production techniques and help create a domestic arms industry in Australia.
UOW’s arm of the Defence Materials Technology Centre can be found in Building 2, room 2G09
Why SAW opposes the Defence Materials Technology Centre
Killing for a profit – at its most basic, the components that are being designed at UOW will go into weapons. And the sole purpose of these weapons is, fairly obviously, killing people. And, since the research is going to private, profit-making commercial enterprises, this killing is being done for an extraordinary profit. The invasions in Iraq and Afghanistan might be seen by most as war crimes and huge tragedies that have killed hundreds of thousands and forced millions to flee their homes, but for the arms companies UOW is researching for they’re a great commercial opportunity. If UOW considers it unethical to do work with tobacco companies because they market deadly products, then why is it somehow Ok to do work with arms dealers?
Dodgy companies – the arms dealers UOW is performing research for aren’t just a concern because they profit from death and destruction - companies like BAE Systems and Thales, some of the biggest arms companies in the world, are so obsessed with this goal that they aren’t even willing to let things like the law or the brutal nature of the regimes they sell to stand in their way, selling torture equipment, engaging in massive scale fraud and bribery, producing weapons containing depleted uranium, illegally spying on peace activists, selling weapons used to slaughter protestors, even paying out millions of dollars to former dictators. UOW should not be lending its reputation and academic credibility to legitimise these companies’ murderous activities.
Imperialism abroad, repression at home - the Defence Materials Technology Centre has nothing to do with defending Australia from invasion. This much is clear from the Australian military’s own Defence 2000 White Paper, which acknowledges that “a full scale invasion of Australia… is the least likely military contingency Australia might face. No country has either the intent or the ability to undertake such a massive task.” Rather, Australian troops are being used to occupy foreign countries halfway across the world, propping up corrupt regimes like that of Hamid Kharzai in Afghanistan, which has legalised rape within marriage, is despised by most of the population, and is stacked full warlords and Islamic extremists.
Indeed, far from protecting Australia, the military is more often used to attack any Australians that threaten government or business interests. In 1949, when coalminers across the country went on strike for a 30 shilling wage increase, long service leave and a 35-hour working week, thousands of soldiers were sent in to shoot miners, break apart picket lines and work in the mines themselves. Similarly, when airline pilots went on strike for higher wages in 1989, the government used the Royal Australian Airforce to work for the airline companies and break the strike. This is not to mention the original use of the army in annihilating the indigenous population of Australia to make way for British colonisation.
The privatisation of the university – universities are public facilities, paid for by the public through taxes, and intended to produce work that belongs to the public for the benefit of the public. When private companies (in the case of the DMTC, arms manufacturers) come in and are allowed to set the research agenda and benefit from the results, this ideal is destroyed. At the University of Wollongong, public offices, facilities and staff are not only being diverted from doing research that is in the public interest, but are being paid for by the public to do research whose results benefit private companies, a huge transfer of funds straight from the taxpayer to corporate coffers.
Corporate curricula – as Clive Hamilton and Christian Downie noted in their paper “University Capture“, when corporate money starts influencing on a particularly large scale the research that a university undertakes, soon enough the curriculum that is taught gets shaped by this money too. Some universities, Hamilton and Downie observe, receive so much money from the fossil fuel industry that what they teach is largely determined by the needs of fossil fuel companies, and is oriented to producing graduates for their purposes. Courses which aren’t immediately ‘profitable’ or ‘useful’ – creative arts and humanities – become increasingly marginalised. A similar process could also occur at UOW with arms companies, and already we’ve seen the entire music course cut and all staff sacked.
Endangering academic freedom – when universities are dependent upon private companies for substantial amounts of their funding, freedom of academic enquiry is gravely endangered. As Naomi Klein describes in her widely acclaimed work No Logo, academics in the US have lost their jobs for criticising companies funding their departments, and similar incidents are beginning to occur in Australia. Will academics at UOW be afraid to criticise the Defence Materials Technology Centre or the companies involved in it – or war-profiteering in general, the arms trade, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – for fear of their careers when the university depends on the millions of dollars provided by the DMTC?
Misallocation of funding – when the University of Wollongong intends to completely eliminate its music course next year and refuses to purchase more renewable energy – citing lack of funds in both cases – it’s highly inappropriate that, at exactly the same time, millions of dollars can be found to perform research into designing components for weapons of war. Something is radically wrong with a university and a society which has such priorities.
