Whistleblower EXPOSES Shocking University Research | Dylan Cawthorne

## How military funding hijacked academia The conversation exposes a rapid and unsettling shift in European universities: centers of education and inquiry are being reshaped by military priorities. What began as modest, decentralized engagements between researchers and defense actors has become a coordinated push — new funding streams, national research centers linking academia, industry and the armed forces, and political rhetoric that frames research as a matter of national security. That shift does not happen in a vacuum. It arrives bundled with incentives that determine who keeps their labs, who publishes, and ultimately who retains a position in the academy. The mechanics are stark: universities operate as businesses. Teaching revenues are rarely sufficient to sustain research programs; external grants and industry contracts pay salaries, equipment, and students. When governments direct large sums toward defense-related projects, departments and individual academics face a practical binary: accept military-aligned funding or see research programs atrophy. The people who raised objections in the conversation point to this economic squeeze as a central lever by which research agendas are redirected — not through brute force so much as through the quiet calculus of survival. That dynamic also changes institutional culture. The creation of national research consortia that formally bring together universities, corporations and defense bodies reconfigures accepted norms about what topics are legitimate. The narrative shifts from “research for public good” to “research for national preparedness.” As one participant explained, this normalization was accelerated by geopolitical shocks. The war in Ukraine became the pivot: sudden political urgency met academic institutions that needed money, and the result was a fast-tracked embrace of militarized projects that, only years earlier, would have been taboo. ## The "Dual-Use" dilemma: Can technology remain civilian? Dual-use technologies, like drones, sit at the heart of the ethical impasse. They are versatile by design: the same airframe that carries a blood sample can carry an explosive. The conversation underlines two core problems with relying on design intent as a safeguard. First, publication and open research mean that once technical knowledge is public, downstream actors can repurpose it in ways the original designers did not intend. Second, when military clients sit inside the research ecosystem — evaluating projects, directing collaborations, or simply holding funding power — the boundary between civilian and military uses blurs not just in theory but in practice. Practical responses have been attempted. Some engineers design with constraints: minimizing payload capacity, adding visibility and privacy-preserving features, or deliberately limiting endurance to make violent repurposing harder. These “design-for-civility” strategies reduce some risks but cannot eliminate them. The conversation raised the sobering insight that the inherent affordances of remotely piloted or autonomous systems — distance, persistence, and the ability to operate in contested spaces — make complete decoupling from weaponization virtually impossible. In other words, dual use is not merely a policy problem; it is embedded in the physical and technical character of the systems themselves. The economic argument compounds the dilemma. Defense investments are often framed as simultaneously strengthening industrial capacity and delivering civilian benefits. Governments promise a double dividend: jobs, exports and “dual-use” spin-offs. But as the discussion highlighted, this calculus can be misleading. What looks like civilian innovation can quickly become a subsidy for military development, with public money underwriting capabilities that feed conflict dynamics and geopolitical competition. ## The psychological horror of drone warfare 00:21: 20 Technological reality: Civil constraints vs. military efficiency Beyond policy and economics lies the human cost. The conversation returned repeatedly to a visceral moral problem: drone warfare creates a particular kind of intimacy between operator and target. First-person camera feeds and remotely observed last moments fracture any neat story that remote killing is somehow anesthetized. Those images — a face in a drone’s crosshairs, the seconds before impact — produce trauma for both the observed and the observer. That trauma undermines claims that distancing operators from the battlefield absolves them of moral consequence. At the same time, military requirements push technology toward robustness, stealth and survivability — features that civilian regulation typically eschews. Civil aviation stresses visibility, fail-safes and privacy safeguards; military systems prioritize jam-resistant links, hardened autonomy and extended reach. The result is a friction between civil constraints and military efficiency that is not merely semantic. Technologies designed for rapid, survivable deployment in hostile environments are optimized for harm in ways that civilian regulators cannot easily mitigate. The conversation also noted a paradox of responsibility: drone pilots, despite operating far from battlefields, report high rates of PTSD and moral injury. Observing the act of lethal force via a camera can produce deep psychological wounds. This challenges the simplistic narrative that technological mediation reduces human costs. If anything, the mediated experience multiplies ethical burdens across different sets of actors: designers, operators, policymakers and civilians in contested zones. ## Lessons from Ukraine: Kamikaze drones and AI integration The conflict in Ukraine surfaced lessons that drove much of the acceleration discussed in the video. Small, inexpensive “kamikaze” drones and swarm tactics have demonstrated how low-cost systems can generate outsized battlefield effects. These platforms are not exotic: they are modular, readily adaptable, and often manufactured by a lively commercial ecosystem. Ukraine’s battlefield experiments have shown that such technologies can be decisive in asymmetric operations, prompting other states to urgently scale up their domestic capabilities. AI integration amplifies this trend. When autonomy, target recognition, and coordinated swarm behaviors are layered onto airframes, the line between surveillance, logistics and lethal action becomes even thinner. The conversation emphasized that this is precisely why states and defense-industrial coalitions are funding rapid development: the strategic imperative to field these capabilities before rivals do. That rush, however, risks skipping rigorous ethical, legal and safety evaluations in favor of expediency. The wartime learning cycle also has global spillover effects. Open-source designs, battlefield footage and commercial supply chains mean that innovations diffuse rapidly. What one side prototypes in a theater of war can be reproduced, modified and deployed by others — including non-state actors. This creates a security multiplier that policies and export controls struggle to contain, transforming local combat innovation into global proliferation. ## Campus culture, student reactions, and "Drones for Peace" Universities are not monoliths; campus responses to militarization are diverse and often conflicted. The video captured a spectrum of reactions: students and faculty who resent the co-optation of academic missions, academics who accept defense work as pragmatic, and managers who reframe military grants as opportunities for national contribution and economic growth. These competing perspectives produce frictions in curricula, recruitment, and public trust. A recurring concern voiced in the conversation was the ethical preparedness of students. Engineers trained in systems and optimization often lack structured education in ethical reasoning, international law, or the social consequences of

Whistleblower EXPOSES Shocking University Research Europe is gearing up for war. The militarization drive is undeniable and has by now also reached the universities. But, not everybody is ok with that. My guest today, in fact, quite his job as an Associate Professor at the University of Souther Denmark to protest the militarization of research projects. Dr. Dylan Cawthorne is a specialist in drone design and ethics and he’s here to explain to us what’s going on in European academia. Links: Dylan's website: https://www.dylancawthorne.com/ Neutrality Studies substack: https://pascallottaz.substack.com (Opt in for Academic Section from your profile settings: https://pascallottaz.substack.com/s/academic) Goods Store: https://neutralitystudies-shop.fourthwall.com Timestamps: 00:00:00 Quitting the University: The militarization of research 00:02:32 How military funding hijacked academia 00:10:07 The "Dual-Use" dilemma: Can technology remain civilian? 00:17:44 The psychological horror of drone warfare 00:21: 20 Technological reality: Civil constraints vs. military efficiency 00:25:45 Lessons from Ukraine: Kamikaze drones and AI integration 00:29:26 Campus culture, student reactions, and "Drones for Peace" 00:32:10 Defensive tech, spy drones, and paranoia 00:41:36 Advice for engineers: Resistance and saying no #Pascal Europe is gearing up for war. The militarization drive is undeniable and has by now also reached the universities. But not everybody is okay with that. My guest today, in fact, quit his job as an associate professor at the University of Southern Denmark to protest the militarization of research projects. Dr. Dylan Cawthorne is a specialist in drone design and ethics, and he's here to explain to us what is going on in European academia. Dylan, welcome. #Dylan Cawthorne Thanks for having me, Pascal. #Pascal Thanks for saying yes to this. I told you already before, but I really respect that you made the personal decision to quit the university once you realized your drone research would be, well, militarized and used for military purposes. Could you explain a little bit what was going on, what happened, and why you had to make that decision? #Dylan Cawthorne -- 1 of 17 -- Yeah, absolutely. Over the last couple of years, the university has really changed. I was an associate professor at the University of Southern Denmark, here in the middle part of the country. And basically, I experienced in real time this militarization that's going on in Denmark. Drone technology is really important to Denmark, and they see it as a kind of high-tech weapon that can be developed in the future, so there’s quite a lot of funding going toward it. I felt like I couldn’t, morally, go to work every day. I felt like I was becoming part of the problem rather than part of the solution. My aim with technology has always been to try to make the world a better place. I know that’s a very broad ideal and maybe difficult to do in practice, but over the last eight years or so, I’ve been studying ethics as well, trying to figure out how to incorporate ethics into technological design. #Pascal I mean, drones. Drones are this typical dual-use technology now, right? As it’s called in the jargon, it can either be a wonderful thing to deliver packages and help make society better, or it can be used to kill people from high up—especially in the Ukraine war, we’ve seen how important drones have become. It’s something people had thought about before, but it had never been tested on that level. How should I imagine what that did to the university you were at, and to the funding schemes? I mean, how did you experience militarization at the university? #Dylan Cawthorne Yeah, it was really in the use cases of the drones, as you said. Six or eight years ago, there was this whole green transition thing—everywhere it was about the green transition and investing in a sustainable future. A lot of our drones were tailored toward those kinds of applications: monitoring wildlife or biodiversity, healthcare. I developed a drone that was supposed to be used for transporting medical samples. So, yeah, it was these, I would say, more benign or hopefully even good uses of drones. And then over these last couple of years, especially in 2022, that’s when the huge shift was really felt—when we started to militarize. A lot of my colleagues who had previously been uninterested or even actively against making weapons changed their minds. And also, I mean, the rhetoric from the prime minister has been very pro-military—like, we support Ukraine, we build up, and we put this 5% of GDP into developing weapons. That process had just begun at the university when I left, because there was huge money coming in to make weapons. #Pascal Did they also incentivize you to work on such projects, or did they talk to the faculty? Was this a topic—was it discussed? Like, “Okay, we now have more military projects,” or was it just something that happened silently? Yeah. #Dylan Cawthorne -- 2 of 17 -- It had been a discussion for many years, especially in the drone research area, because, as you said, it’s always been a thing. I think about six years ago, my colleagues and I wrote a letter. We never actually sent it to our management, but we told them about it. We said that in Denmark we’re supposed to have freedom of research as academics, and we were going to exercise that freedom— we weren’t going to work on military projects. They wouldn’t give us any guidelines about what we could or couldn’t be asked to do if we did, say, some kind of counter-drone technology or something like that. So we said, “OK, we won’t do it,” and they basically had to accept it. At least on paper, they couldn’t deny us our freedom of research. What they can do, though, is fire you when you don’t get any money to pay for your research projects. #Pascal Can you explain that? Because a lot of people think that once you're hired by a university, the university gives you the research money—because obviously, they're responsible for that. But that's not how it works, is it? #Dylan Cawthorne No. And I also thought that, because I'm not a lifelong academic. I've been in academia for about 12 years, but before that, I had a different career. So I was like, yeah, you just go and do it—you research interesting and important things and try to make the world better. But the university is a business. Its product is students, and it’s a lot of research projects. Basically, it depends on the research area you’re in. Sometimes you get a fair amount of funding through teaching, and that can be a bit more stable. But most of our money came from external research projects. So basically, you have to pay your own way to keep your job. And that was my main reason for quitting. It was a combination of this reduction in research freedom and the militarization that were happening side by side, because we were always being pressured to get money. #Pascal Do you have any information on how much of the research in that area was being funded by the military, NATO, or other security-linked organizations? #Dylan Cawthorne I'm not sure, but in the past it was really, really small or almost non-existent. I know there was a project in another area that worked with Terma Aerospace, which does F-35 Joint Strike Fighter stuff. But it was pretty small, and it was also very taboo. So when our drone research group started, our first boss was a former military person, and his leadership said, “Don’t you dare mention that. We don’t do that stuff anymore.” And he didn’t. To his credit, he switched tracks, and we did civil projects—things for education and for building up businesses and that kind of thing. But then, in -- 3 of 17 -- 2022 especially, there was a huge shift. Everyone said, “Now we do it. We have to do it to protect Europe and to protect Denmark.” #Pascal So it was the war in Ukraine that tipped the scale, also at the universities, making them more willing to go down that route. Did you notice a shift in how people talked about military research at universities? #Dylan Cawthorne The change was so fast, and I was amazed at how unquestioning people were about it. A couple of years ago—maybe three or four years ago—there was this thing created called the NFC, the National Research Center. Basically, it’s one of those triple-helix type organizations, where the aim is to integrate the military with industry and academia. #Pascal Oh. #Dylan Cawthorne And so this was created sort of unilaterally, and every university was in it. I don't remember much discussion happening around that, but it was just kind of set up. I’d say in the very beginning a few people were concerned, but it didn’t really have an impact on our day-to-day work. What did have an impact was the war and the change in the funding schemes. One of the things that made me particularly uncomfortable—there were a few moments where I thought, “OK, this is too far, I can’t do this anymore”—was when I had a colleague, a professor in another research area, who was trying to get a grant specifically to weaponize civil technologies. He was going to look over our shoulders, see what we were doing, and turn it into a weapon. A grant from who? #Pascal Who else—the military, I suppose? #Dylan Cawthorne If I remember right, it was the European Union—Jesus, the European Commission. Because they also want to make kamikaze drones that are produced within Europe, so we’re not reliant on China, for example. When you publish publicly, as we did, you can never know exactly what people will use your research for. But when the person is sitting right next to you and has inside knowledge of what you’re doing and how you’re doing it, that, to me, was too far. I didn’t want to be part of it. -- 4 of 17 -- Basically, from day to day, I just felt more and more uncomfortable, and I worried more and more about my students. I thought, the moment they leave my class, if they want to, they could literally go anywhere and start blowing people up. And I don’t think they have the ethical training they need to use their engineering skills responsibly. That was a big concern for me. #Pascal Can you explain this a bit to me? I mean, we've had this moral dilemma—or this moral issue— forever, right? The people who worked on nuclear energy were also the ones who, in the end, enabled, of course, the atomic bombs. This kind of research goes hand in hand, right? You can’t really separate it. And it’s the same in many, many areas. You told me you’re originally from the aerospace industry, and you’ve seen it there as well. Maybe speak to that first, and then about the dual-use character of the drones. But maybe start with the other areas you know that have been weaponized. #Dylan Cawthorne Yes. So a lot of my research over the last couple of years has been about ethically informed technological design. And a big, important part of that is context. If you’re making drones for health care use, and they’re probably going to be used for health care, then you can reasonably assume that the technology will be designed toward that use case. But if you’re in a context where it’s actively made as a weapon, then you can also reasonably assume that that’s how it’s going to be used. There’s always been this dual-use character of drones, and I think a lot of my research was actually trying to reduce the capabilities or the risks of dual use. For example, one of my drones was quite a bit smaller—basically as small as it could be. The reason for that was to reduce the payload capacity so it could carry only what it needed and not anything else. A lot of times, drones are developed to be maximized in their capabilities, and that makes them very easy to misuse. There were also a lot of privacy-preserving features built into that drone, and a lot of visibility features, because the requirements for a commercial drone are quite different from those for military technology. For instance, with a milit