US still outspending the world in defense R and D- no risk of other countries catching up

Department of Political Science, University of Notre Dame; Department of Political Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; The defense innovation machine: Why the U.S. will remain on the cutting edge; ND International Security Center; https://ndisc.nd.edu/news-media/news/the-defense-innovation-machine-why-the-u-s-will-remain-on-the-cutting-edge/

The United States invests heavily in defense-related research and development (R&D) activities. Figure 1 shows the past 40 years of history of U.S. inputs to defense research and development. Currently the United States invests more than 75 billion USD each year in defense R&D plus billions more in Department of Energy R&D investment for nuclear weapons. That is about two-thirds of what all other countries in the world, American friend or foe, spend on defense R&D.Footnote9 China is the only great power that spends more on its entire defense effort than the United States spends on just defense R&D. Seventy-five billion dollars is more than Russia, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, or Japan spends on defense.Footnote10

Moreover, the United States has invested at very high levels for more than 70 years. The United States substantially ramped up its defense R&D investment in the 1950s to levels comparable to today’s spending. While it is true that in inflation-adjusted terms, defense R&D totals in the 1950s were lower than today’s, that is mainly because of the lower complexity of that era’s technological frontier, not because of some subsequent policy shift to greater emphasis on defense R&D investment.Footnote11 The continuing drive to push the military-technological frontier has kept R&D spending high all along, and the overall spending trend has increased in parallel with the increasing complexity rather than lagging behind. While R&D budget increases have not been constant, their cycle (including as shown in Figure 1) has Footnote12crested and troughed at very high levels. Annual spending has not dropped below 55 billion USD (in 2018 dollars) since 1983, and in several years, it has been very close to 100 billion USD. That high level of spending, year-in and year-out, has a cumulative effect, because it builds a foundation of tacit knowledge, experience in integrating complex systems, and human capital that understands the specialized parameters of military systems, which often differ from those of even high-end civilian systems. For comparison, the much-hyped Chinese defense budget (not the Chinese defense R&D budget) did not exceed the level of U.S. defense R&D spending until the late-2000s. Cumulative Chinese defense R&D investment is surely quite modest in comparison to cumulative U.S. defense R&D investment.Footnote12Footnote13