Per Antonio Uricchio, the National Security Science & Technology Strategy (NSSTS) unveiled by Washington this week defines scientific and technological leadership not merely as an instrument of national security, but as a national security objective in its own right.
Uricchio, a professor and member of the governing board of the Holy See’s Agency for the Evaluation and Promotion of Quality in Ecclesiastical Universities and Faculties, as well as former rector of the University of Bari and former president of Italy’s National Agency for the Evaluation of Universities and Research Institutes (ANVUR), argues that “the entire architecture follows from this premise and rests on four pillars: concentrating technological competition in areas where the United States already holds an advantage, reducing vulnerabilities in critical supply chains, shortening the time between research and operational deployment, and protecting the research system from theft, diversion and exploitation.”
This conversation with Prof. Uricchio is part of a broader series by Formiche.net and Decode39 — covering dimensions ranging from the military to biotechnology — on what is one of the most strategically consequential documents produced by the Trump administration. Washington sees economic and technological preeminence as the surest way to prevent large-scale conflict over the long term, Uricchio explains, “which is another way of saying that deterrence no longer rests solely on arsenals, but on the ability to generate knowledge at a pace that an adversary cannot match.”
Q: Where does this strategy come from?
A: The underlying approach is not new. In July 1945, Vannevar Bush, who during the war had headed the Office of Scientific Research and Development, the body responsible for coordinating the American scientific effort, submitted his report Science, the Endless Frontier to President Truman. Five years later, that report would lead to the creation of the National Science Foundation. In his letter transmitting the report, Bush wrote that scientific progress was one of the essential keys to a nation’s security.
- In the same document, he argued that without scientific progress, freedoms could not be defended against tyranny. That gives a sense of how far this vision was from a purely instrumental understanding of research. What has changed is the object that must be protected: in 1945, it was armaments; today, it is twelve areas of critical and emerging technology, from artificial intelligence and semiconductors to post-quantum cryptography. By definition, these technologies are dual-use, and they mature in university laboratories even before they reach industrial facilities.
Q: How does this change the way a country like Italy should view its own system, as universities, research and innovation become increasingly embedded in competition among major powers?
A: For Italy, the question is not whether this security-oriented grammar of knowledge concerns us. It already does. We crossed that threshold without the issue receiving the public attention it deserved with Legislative Decree No. 138 of September 4, 2024, which transposed the NIS 2 Directive.
- The decree brings research organizations and public research institutions within its scope, as well as universities conducting research activities, identified on a case-by-case basis by Italy’s National Cybersecurity Agency (ACN) upon the recommendation of the Ministry of Universities and Research, which has become the relevant sectoral authority.
- Rectors, directors-general and heads of research institutions may therefore face managerial, disciplinary and administrative-accounting liability in the event of breaches of their obligations. Security is no longer simply a budget item that can be delegated to the IT department.
Q: What does that mean, and what does it entail in practice?
A: Urgency should not translate into restrictions on freedom of research. The Italian Constitution entrusts the Republic with the task of promoting scientific research while also guaranteeing the freedom of science. Those two provisions must be read together, because research that is supported but not free ultimately produces administrative machinery rather than discoveries.
- President Eisenhower offered perhaps the most effective warning on this point in his January 1961 farewell address, when he observed that government funding through contracts could displace the researcher’s own curiosity, while also warning of the opposite danger: public decision-makers surrendering entirely to the judgment of experts. These are mirror-image risks, and they can be prevented in the same way: through independent evaluation and a plurality of funding channels.
- As pro tempore president of ANVUR, I signed an agreement with ACN that led to the mapping of cybersecurity research in Italy. It stemmed from a very simple observation: nobody was able to say precisely how much research the country was conducting in this field, or where. Conoscere per deliberare — know in order to decide — as Einaudi recommended.
Q: The NSSTS seeks to balance the openness of the research ecosystem with the need to protect it from interference, appropriation of knowledge and strategic dependencies. How can Italian universities and research centers reconcile international openness with research security without weakening scientific cooperation?
A: We should first dispense with the misconception that the United States is closing its research system. What the document criticizes in certain countries is not so much the theft of a result that has already been achieved, but the exploitation of access to other countries’ laboratories to reach that result without bearing its cost — effectively saving the years of work and resources that somebody else invested.
- This is closer to parasitism than espionage, and the distinction matters because it leads to a different remedy. The proposed response is not secrecy, but transparency. The measures envisaged include standardized disclosure of conflicts of interest and commitment affecting individual researchers, risk-based review of funding proposals, and cybersecurity guidelines for researchers and institutions. Outright prohibitions remain limited to a defined list of high-risk entities.
- There is another passage that is often overlooked in Italy: the strategy commits to protecting institutions and personnel, safeguarding students and professors against recruitment, espionage and undue influence. Research security is not merely an obligation imposed on researchers; it is also a form of protection owed to them.
- A researcher left alone to deal with an opaque collaboration proposal may unknowingly give away ownership of his or her results, become involved in a technology transfer subject to export controls, or later be held accountable for a conflict of interest that nobody had ever asked them to disclose.
Q: Does Europe already have its own answer to this challenge?
A: The European Council’s May 2024 recommendation on research security establishes a clear principle: openness remains the rule, while closure is an exception permitted only where the risk justifies it and only to the extent that it does. At the European level, this is summarized by the formula “as open as possible, as closed as necessary.”
- Alongside proportionality and non-discrimination, its guiding principles include academic freedom and institutional autonomy, and it warns against protectionism and the political use of security measures.
- This represents a difference of emphasis compared with the American approach. In our legal order, university autonomy is not an obstacle that security must work around; it is one of the principles upon which security itself must be built. Italy’s National Plan for Open Science was developed at a time when the priority was removing barriers to access, and it does not yet contain that safeguard clause. This does not diminish its value, but it does suggest that an update would be appropriate — as an integration, rather than a rethink.
Q: Is the threat concrete?
A: The ACN’s figures for 2025 show that it is. The agency handled 2,729 cyber events, an increase of around 38%, alongside 615 incidents with confirmed impact, up 7%. The gap between those two figures suggests that, overall, defenses are holding.
- Universities and research rank among the fifteen most affected sectors, with 165 events. The main attack vectors remain email, accounting for 40%, and the use of stolen legitimate credentials, at 24%, while the sophistication of campaigns is increasingly being amplified by artificial intelligence.
- AI, moreover, sits on both sides of the equation: it amplifies attacks while also becoming a target itself. A model trained on manipulated data produces false results without making the underlying error visible, and in a laboratory this is not simply a service disruption — it is an alteration of the chain of knowledge.
- We should also consider what specialists call “store now, decrypt later”: data exfiltrated today may be decrypted once quantum computers become operational, perhaps within ten or fifteen years, while Europe’s roadmap sets 2030 as the target for migrating high-risk use cases to post-quantum cryptography. Decisions about what to make open must therefore be taken with a time horizon that extends beyond the lifespan of an individual project.
- The underlying principle remains the one formulated by Robert Merton in 1942, when European science was under pressure from totalitarian regimes: research results are the product of collaboration and belong to the community, while secrecy represents their opposite.
- That principle still holds — provided that the community to which those results are entrusted is genuinely a scientific community. Determining that cannot be reduced to lists of countries. It requires deep knowledge of partners, proportionate procedures and adequately trained personnel.
Q: Washington describes the scientific and technological capabilities of allies as a “force multiplier.” If research itself becomes part of the transatlantic strategic architecture, what strengths can Italy bring to the table, and what weaknesses could limit its weight?
A: The formula needs to be read in full, because alongside the concept of a force multiplier, the strategy also commits the United States to leading allies and partners toward equally rigorous research-security practices. In other words, the multiplier comes with a price of admission: alignment of standards.
- Italy does not lack credentials. The 2026 ANVUR Report records a field-normalized citation impact of 1.37, higher than that of the United States, Germany and France and well above the European average. Italy accounts for 3.8% of global scientific output, growing at 3.6% per year — the fastest rate among the major European countries.
- Under Horizon Europe, Italian universities receive 39.3% of the country’s funding, above both the European average and Germany’s share, while Italy’s share of ERC Starting Grants has risen from 5.7% to 9.1%, suggesting that the younger generation remains competitive.
- Two fields also map directly onto the American list of critical technologies. The first is space, to which Italy allocates 13.8% of public research spending — the highest share among major European countries and more than three times Germany’s. The second is cybersecurity, where TeamItaly won the 2025 European Cyber Security Challenge and the CINI national laboratory brings together almost 600 professors and researchers from 57 universities and institutes.
Q: What are the weaknesses?
A: They should not be ignored. Research and development spending remains stuck at 1.37% of GDP and is declining, placing Italy 25th out of 34 OECD countries, level with Turkey, against an average of 2.69%.
- Even more significant is the fact that only 1.9% of public spending finances non-oriented research, the lowest figure among all the countries considered, compared with an OECD average of 17.6% and 26.3% in France. This comes precisely as the American strategy calls on its own government to support fundamental research where commercial incentives are lacking.
- That is where paradigm shifts originate. Without that kind of investment, we risk being regarded as providers of applications rather than frontier partners.
Q: Is the ability to retain talent another weakness?
A: In the latest Advanced Grant round, Italy ranks third by nationality of winners, with 39 researchers, but seventh by host institutions, with only 19. The gap between those two figures captures the problem precisely: we do not lack scientists; what we lack is the system’s ability to host them.
- The same problem is reflected in the share of international doctoral students, which stands at 13.8%, compared with an OECD average of 28.3%, and in the fact that more than 60% of research fellows from the 2018 cohort had left the system by 2024.
- This is not only an Italian problem. The Draghi Report remains the clearest diagnosis when it describes a talent pool depleted by brain drain, notes that Europe produces around 850 STEM graduates per million inhabitants compared with more than 1,100 in the United States, and points out that the European Pathfinder has €256 million at its disposal compared with DARPA’s $4.1 billion.
- This is where the middle technology trap comes in: a continent that remains strong in mature sectors but absent from disruptive ones. And there is an additional factor — the flow of talent now has a third destination: Beijing.
Q: So what should be done?
A: It may be worth considering an explicit specialization in three or four domains where Italy has genuine critical mass rather than mere ambition. The natural candidates are space, quantum technologies, biomedicine and advanced components.
- Italy also needs a national computing and data infrastructure that is both open and certified, because without infrastructural sovereignty, cooperation becomes dependence. And it needs a proportionate and uniform research-security system, with dedicated offices within universities, partner screening and training for those who manage research projects.
- Then there is the question of academic leadership at strategic decision-making tables. The work initiated by the Center for Higher Defence Studies with the university system is valuable for more than the training it provides: it creates a common language between those who produce knowledge and those responsible for the security of the state.
- In his speech at the University of Zurich on September 19, 1946, Winston Churchill called on Europeans to build a kind of United States of Europe and observed that the continent was then living under the protection of the atomic bomb, which was in the hands of a single nation. But he warned that within a few years that instrument of destruction would spread.
- His prediction came true in August 1949, with the Soviet Union’s first nuclear test. Technological monopolies, in other words, are short-lived. Security cannot be built on the advantage of the moment, but on the ability to generate new advantages — and that requires scientific institutions that are free, adequately funded and connected to one another.
