As the nation’s first research institution, Johns Hopkins has topped the National Science Foundation’s list of academic institutions for Research & Development spending for 45 years. This year, Hopkins spent $3.8 billion across the university. More than half of this was sunk into one division — the Applied Physics Laboratory (APL).
In December, the Department of Defense (DoD) awarded an indefinite quantity contract with a maximum of $3 billion to the APL for a ten-year research and development contract with the Missile Defense Agency. To do what? It is difficult to glean because many pages are classified or purposely vague. Public records show that JHU has received at least $16.01 billion from the DoD since 2007. This is more than twice what it brought in from tuition.
Located 40 minutes away in Laurel, Maryland, midway between Homewood and the Pentagon, the APL seamlessly hides its destructive projects behind the University’s education mission while supplying the American defense industry. This lab was established during World War II to develop anti-aircraft missile technology for the Navy and was later classified in 1996 as a University Affiliated Research Center (UARC). As a UARC, the Laboratory’s explicit raison d'etre is to meet “the long-term needs” of the DoD. As a nonacademic division of the University, the APL is also the sole exception to JHU’s ban on classified research. This exception is prohibited because it contradicts the principles of freedom of information and research and excludes researchers with international citizenship.
The APL makes it clear that JHU is a military research institution first, and a university second. Instead of paying for improvements in education, the hospital system, your paycheck, or even the taxes proportional to what Johns Hopkins owes to the city of Baltimore, these billions of dollars have been funneled into blackboxed military research.
While proponents of university-military partnerships claim that the APL provides valuable science with everyday uses, its declassified projects show us the opposite; this lab of engineering innovations deals in making the tools of war and imperialism. During the Cold War, the APL accelerated the nuclear arms race by providing testing for several world “firsts” in nuclear missile capabilities, including the notorious Tomahawk missile system that later bombed civilians in Operation Desert Storm during the Gulf War.
Despite widespread calls on Hopkins’ campus during the Vietnam War to divert APL’s funding to “socially benevolent” research (e.g. housing, pollution, public transportation), JHU administrators doubled down on maintaining defense contracts, even as peer institutions including Princeton, Stanford, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology moved away from this work. Consequently, Hopkins proudly ranks in category 1 on the list of "Schools of Mass Destruction" by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons" (page 20).
Today, the APL’s “mission areas” are still arms-racing, reflecting the US military’s paranoia of losing its absolute hegemony in science and technology. The APL supplies artificial intelligence, autonomous missile systems, warfare information technology, and robotics, exemplifying their dedication to perfecting high-tech warfare performed at a distance.
As Hopkins’ various boards and administrators are desperate to avoid the “perception that there are approved or endorsed ‘institutional’ views on political or social issues”— particularly when it comes to international conflict— the APL is Hopkins’ institutional hypocrisy manifested. The APL is the University’s innately socio-political commitment to global militarization, and its deep financial co-dependence with the American war industry. Note — the APL does not produce tools for respectful dialogue or marshalling evidence to resolve disagreement. Instead, they have had a hand in developing:
- The Harpoon missile system, which the Israeli state has used in their illegal blockade on Gaza for over 17 years, imposing collective punishment on 2.1 million Palestinians in violation of the Geneva Conventions
- Software updates for the F-35 Fighter Jets to better detect targets for the hundreds of mega-bombs that the state of Israel has used to carpet bomb the Gaza Strip and Lebanon
- The AEGIS missile defense system that has enabled Israel to escalate bombing campaigns against Gaza, Syria, Iran and Lebanon by buying time to “end the threat by other means” (as one military think-tanker euphemized).
The APL’s reliance on DoD funding means that its research terms are set by the needs of the military, a total antithesis to the mission of the university space. While inflating tuition, slashing graduate programs, and misinterpreting union contracts, Hopkins has spent $1.3 million over the last five years lobbying for defense industry interests. Clearly, Hopkins will not hesitate to protect its lucrative role in weapons production, even at the expense of its own affiliates.
For students and faculty, the best the APL has to offer is a chance to join the inner circle — you can also produce weapons of mass destruction! Despite its nonacademic classification, the APL’s value to the military comes in large part from its university association, which not only affords the DoD and private defense corporations access to faculty expertise, but more importantly, the recruitment of young graduate talent
As a nexus of exchange between the university, the military, and the corporate defense sector, the APL often finds its way into the JHU classroom — and vice versa — manifest through internship programs like RISE@APL, where JHU undergraduates are granted the opportunity to research areas including ballistic missile systems; or SPUR@APL, which allows JHU teaching faculty to co-lead courses with the Laboratory.
Sure, maybe students join for the chance to work on prosthetic limbs; but in an environment saturated with prioritizing “national security”, the APL serves as a pipeline bringing young scientists and engineers in touch with military contracts that amputate limbs faster than they can create them.
The ethical and moral objection to the APL goes far beyond the physical weapons systems it manufactures. As a division, the APL’s very existence incentivizes and validates the creation of science for war, and even genocide. The Laboratory’s underlying ideology, grounded in the priorities of the security state, is pervasive. Why else would its climate research exist only under the umbrella of “Climate Security”, with impact areas focused on “how climate pressures may impact future missions” and maintaining a “climate-ready force”? Rather than scale down the US military, which has historically been one of the largest culprits of global emissions accelerating climate change, the APL works to adapt them to the very damage that they have facilitated.
Decades of local resistance have demystified the idea that any work done at the APL constitutes apolitical, altruistic research. As a community of public health researchers, doctors, aspiring diplomats, and scholars committed to public service in times of increasing need, it is our obligation to call out blatant war profiteering and demand its end. It is our obligation to withhold our labor and refuse to produce, with our own hands and minds, the tools of American imperialism. We cannot bring “care to the world” with one hand, and $165 million in Sentinel ICBM nuclear weapons development with the other.
