[mattkrause]

I'm fairly certain this is not true. Marconi and Hülsmeyer had some early ideas about using radar to find ships, but they weren't really developed and didn't use the pulsed approach that subsequent systems used.

This wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_radar) suggests a huge military involvement from the 1930s onwards

[SiempreViernes]

If you count nothing but the earliest version of military radars, then of course nothing but the military has funded it.

I will, however, not count pulsing as more than an improvement to the basic invention of distant object detection with radio waves.

As you can read on the page you linked Hülsmeyer made a working system, clunky as it was, for detecting ships in mist. Taking a system from prototype to mass produced, worthy as this investment might be, is not inventing it.