Did you know that Truthout is a nonprofit and independently funded by readers like you? If you value what we do, please support our work with a donation.

See an insect crawling in the corner of the room? It might be a surveillance robot, thanks to research at Carnegie Mellon University to develop cockroach-like robots with, and for, the Israeli military.

Robot cockroaches, “terror-network” mapping, and rapid missile guidance are just three examples of at least 70 research projects U.S. universities have conducted on behalf of the Israeli Ministry of Defense (IMoD). Over a thousand pages of internal university and U.S./Israeli military documents reveal a sweeping, decades-long program to sponsor military research collaborations with at least 30 U.S. universities, from Cornell to the University of California at San Diego, since at least 2009.

Projects are conducted in collaboration with the Israeli military and sometimes explicitly incorporate environmental conditions in Palestine into the work. One project designed fuel cells for “distributed sensor networks” tailored to the temperature and soil conditions of an Israeli border that could monitor “potential terrorist activity” for “border security.”

Recent reports from Dropsite News, The Nation, and the Anti-War Initiative found millions of Israeli military dollars flowing into U.S. schools. Public records obtained from 13 U.S. universities reveal this money was directed via a U.S. arms export program to fund collaborations with Israeli scientists and military officials.

These projects are not funded by traditional academic grants. Instead, they are procured as “defense articles and services,” paid for with U.S. taxpayer dollars via the Foreign Military Financing (FMF) program — the same mechanism Israel uses to purchase F-35 fighter jets and other U.S. defense exports.

The UN and Red Cross Are Calling for Restrictions on AI Drones and Killer Robots

At least 11 contracts sent U.S. scientists to Israel to work face to face with their counterparts at an Israeli university and/or the IMoD, earmarking funds for U.S. professors to attend meetings and present their research to the IMoD.

Though research subjects span the breadth of Israel’s military interests, including drone swarms, missile guidance, fuel cells, and quantum sensing, we highlight just a few threads to illustrate how U.S. universities support Israel’s military.

Alongside robotic cockroaches, Prof. Sarah Bergbreiter built “inchworm-like” crawlers with an IMoD scientist at the University of Maryland. Profs. Indejrit Chopra, also at Maryland, and Kenneth Breuer at Brown University were inspired by hummingbirds and bats to develop micro-drones that can search caves and demolished buildings. Columbia Prof. Hod Lipson built the Flexipod, a “soft quadrupedal robot” agile enough to........

© Truthout