When UCI Adjunct Professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering Robert Liebeck designed a revolutionary aircraft at UC Irvine in the late 1980s, it was seen as an engineering breakthrough. Today, the U.S. Air Force has invested over $230 million into the same aircraft, the Blended Wing Body (BWB). U.S. Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall said the BWB has the potential to “significantly reduce fuel demand and increase global reach,” adding that, “moving forces and cargo quickly, efficiently and over long distance is a critical capability to enable national security strategy.”
Boeing is just one of many defense contractors that hold current partnerships with UCI. Other corporate affiliates listed on the School of Engineering’s website include Northrop-Grumman, Meggitt Defense Systems and RTX, formerly Raytheon Technologies.
RTX Corporation is one of the world’s largest defense contractors and manufactures various types of weapons for the U.S. government. According to their website, they are using foundational weapons components to begin “developing a composable weapons architecture to reduce cycle time, lower costs and accelerate missile development.”
Newly-obtained data by New University shows that over $1.3 million was given to UCI across 13 grants tied to RTX Corporation or Raytheon BBN Technologies — a subsidiary of RTX — from 2023 to 2025. The money was divided between two schools: $980,000 went to the School of Engineering, and $350,000 to the School of Physical Sciences.
Physics and astronomy Professor Clare Yu’s research project on “Investigating Noise with Scanning Probes to Enhance the Coherence of Transmons” was sponsored by RTX BBN Technologies, the Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Research Lab and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. According to the records, Yu received $200,000 for the project, which studied quantum computers.
“Our projects are very tiny, small ones, to simply try to look at defects in the material to try to understand where the noise is coming from,” Yu told New University. “When you buy something from Amazon, you put in your credit card. You don’t want everybody in the world to see your credit card number. So it’s encrypted, right? So there’s cryptography [that] basically studies that.”
Quantum computers process information exponentially faster than traditional computers. Companies like Google, Amazon and Microsoft are investing in quantum computing, each taking different technological approaches.
“So, this is why the National Security Agency, if the government’s very interested in making, having quantum computers,” Yu said. “So you want to be able to use quantum technology to transmit secrets and to be able to, in principle, try to break other people’s code.”
As a common practice of developing everyday technology, governmental organizations like the Army Corps of Engineers, part of the Department of Defense (DOD), have invested in research across various universities for years.
“You don’t just make that technology. You have to understand the basic science behind it,” Yu said. “So that’s why the government, the army, whatever defenses, invests in basic research and not just applied research.”
Quantum computing research is only one part of a much broader group of DOD-funded projects at UCI. Contrary to previous findings — which totaled the amount of funding UCI received in the last ten years from the DOD to over $85 million — new data suggests that previous public estimates significantly understated the scale of defense-related funding at UCI.
Records show that UCI received roughly $136.8 million in DOD-related funding across more than 1,060 grants, subcontracts and cooperative agreements from 2016 to 2026. This figure includes funding connected to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Office of Naval Research, the Missile Defense Agency and the Army Combat Capabilities Development Command.
Many Pentagon agencies, like the ones mentioned above, directly funded research projects with potential military applications. Project titles have included language like “autonomous drone systems (line 15),” “unmanned underwater vehicles (line 6)” and “GPS-denied environments (line 162).”
The new data also includes approximately $35.4 million attributed to entries containing some form of redaction, including redacted Principal Investigator (PI) names and project titles. Roughly $870,000 is associated with projects where titles are completely censored.
According to an email from UCI’s Office of Research to New University, items are redacted if there is “sensitive information, unpublished research, or controlled or classified information.”
Third-year mechanical and aerospace engineering double major Haley Kay is the current project manager of UCI’s Rocket Project Solids team, which brings students together to build two rockets over a one-year period. The team is composed of 33 undergraduate students.
Companies such as Raytheon, Boeing and Rocket Lab provide feedback to the team on their designs in the fall of each academic year. The project is mainly funded by students through course fees, but is also supported by donations.
Kay described the current job market as very competitive, leading more engineering students to accept any offer they receive, even from companies who have faced criticism for developing weapons used in current wars.
“I would say a fair amount of the engineers that I work with, myself included, do take the ethics portion into consideration,” Kay said. “The projects themselves are really interesting, but the applications just in my mind don’t excuse that sort of thing. And I feel like more engineers are coming to that fact.”
Defense companies, according to Kay, have a large presence on campus, whether at career fairs or resume workshops hosted by UCI’s Division of Career Pathways (DCP).
“Just at the career fair earlier this year, the biggest booths over at the engineering career fair wasn’t like the local OC architecture, whatever group hiring engineers, it was Lockheed Martin, it was Northrop-Grumman,” Kay said. “Those are the ones that people seek out because they appear the flashiest and the largest.”
With every student simply trying to get their foot in the door, the line between supporting ethical companies and looking out for one’s own future becomes blurred.
“So even if [a student’s] end goal is space industry or I don’t know, more in like infrastructure related, to get the foot in the door, they’re applying for internships at these large defense companies, which are throwing internships at anyone, you know,” Kay said. “But I feel like for the most part, people are applying to defense just because that’s what’s readily available.”
Ennes Kahf is a Features Apprentice. He can be reached at ekahf@uci.edu.
Edited by Annia Pallares zur Nieden and Geneses Navarro.
